The Longaberger Company of Newark, Ohio, makes, um, baskets.
Founder Dave Longaberger wanted all the company’s buildings to be basket-shaped, but his daughters vetoed this after his death. Spoilsports.
Oddities
Late Arrival
In 1933, a lifeboat was found drifting in Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island.
It was marked Valencia — the name of a passenger liner that had run aground there 27 years earlier.
It was still in good condition.
“De Groote Meid”
In June 1625, Frederick V of Bohemia, having heard tales of a “9-year-old being miraculously tall,” summoned young Trijntje Keever to the Hague. The tales, he found, were true — Trijntje was already 6 foot 6, and she would reach 8 foot 4 before dying of cancer at age 17.
She was probably the tallest woman who ever lived — judging from an anonymous portrait in her hometown of Edam, her shoes were 16 inches long.
Jumbo Jet
Say what you will about the French, they know how to build an elephant:
This one, proposed for the Champs-Élysées in 1758, had air conditioning, a spiral staircase, and a drainage system in the trunk.
The French government said no. There’s no accounting for taste.
Badlands Guardian
Natural erosion carved this image out of the soil in southeastern Alberta.
Inspired, someone gave it a counterpart on the other side of the world.
“Leapers”
People born on Leap Day, February 29:
- Pope Paul III (1468)
- Gioacchino Rossini (1792)
- Jimmy Dorsey (1904)
- Dinah Shore (1916)
- Howard Nemerov (1920)
- Dennis Farina (1944)
- Richard Ramirez (1960)
- Tony Robbins (1960)
- Eugene Volokh (1968)
- Ja Rule (1976)
Sir James Wilson (1812-1880), premier of Tasmania, both entered and left the world on Leap Day. He died on his 68th birthday — or, arguably, on his 17th.
Round Trip
Dave Kunst walked around the world. In June 1970 the county surveyor set out from Waseca, Minn., with his brother John, $1,000, and a mule with the portentous name of Willie Makeit. The brothers walked to New York, flew to Portugal, and had got as far as Afghanistan when John was shot by bandits. Dave recovered from his own wounds and resumed the journey, flying from India to Australia when the Soviet Union denied him entrance. His third mule had died when a Perth schoolteacher agreed to haul his supplies with her car while he walked alongside. He finished the trip in October 1974, having walked 20 million steps and worn out 21 pairs of shoes.
He married the schoolteacher.
Urban Planning
The city of Buenos Ayres, S. A., has received a singular proposition from two German mechanical engineers. They offer to cover the city with a huge umbrella, the base of which is to be 670 feet in diameter, the height 1500 feet, ribs of cast-iron 31 inches in circumference and 8 feet apart, and lining of wrought-iron one and a half inches thick. The great thing when raised will be one mile and a half wide. Around it will be a canal communicating with the Plate River, to carry away the water that might overflow the city. The work is estimated at the modest sum of $5,750,000.
— Albert Plympton Southwick, Handy Helps, No. 1, 1886
The Potsdam Giants
Friedrich Wilhelm I believed in stretching his military — when the Prussian king took the throne in 1713, he founded a special infantry regiment made up of taller-than-average soldiers.
“The men who stood in the first rank in this regiment were none of them less than seven feet high,” wrote Voltaire, “and he sent to purchase them from the farthest parts of Europe to the borders of Asia.” The diminutive king once told a French ambassador, “The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers — they are my weakness.”
They would have made an impressive force on the battlefield, but the “long guys” never saw action — and when Friedrich died in 1740 the crown prince dismissed the regiment.
Rock Music
A correspondent of Nature writes that, in roaming over the hills and rocks in the neighborhood of Kendal, near Lancaster, England, which are composed chiefly of limestone, he had often found what are called “musical stones.” They are generally thin, flat, weather-beaten stones, of different sizes and peculiar shapes, which, when struck with a piece of iron or another stone, produce a musical tone, instead of the dull, heavy, leaden sound of an ordinary stone. The sound of these stones is, in general, very much alike, but sets of eight stones have been collected which produce, when struck, a distinct octave.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
See also The Musical Stones of Skiddaw.