The Teapot Dome scandal rocked the presidency of Warren G. Harding and sent his interior secretary to prison.
And what better way to commemorate it than with this oddly cheery building, which served as a full-service gas station in 1922?
Ask the government — it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places.
This ain’t quite a mystery, but it ain’t normal either. “The Leather Man” traveled in a 365-mile circuit through Connecticut and southern New York between 1858 and 1889. Everything he wore, from hat to shoes, was hand-made of leather.
The strange vagabond orbited through 32 New England towns, stopping at each at intervals of a little more than a month. That would mean he covered 10 miles a day, on average. He slept in rock shelters and caves, building fires to keep warm, and would accept food from local townspeople, often eating on their doorsteps.
His origins and identity are unknown. It’s said that he was fluent in French, but he communicated mostly in grunts and broken English and would abruptly stop a conversation if asked about his past. He had money, and he wasn’t crazy — the Humane Society detained him briefly in 1888, but they had to let him go, declaring him “sane except for an emotional affliction.” In the end, it’s possible he chose this life.
As a newcomer to the NBA in 1974, Atlanta Hawks shooting guard Pete Maravich told a Pennsylvania reporter, “I don’t want to play 10 years and then die of a heart attack when I’m 40.”
After a pickup game in 1988, Maravich suffered a heart attack and died. He was 40 years old.
There have been travelling wagers, and one of the least singular of such was that of Mr. Whalley, an Irish gentleman (and who we believe edited Ben Johnson’s works), who, for a very considerable wager (twenty thousand pounds, it was said,) set out on Monday the 22nd of September, 1788, to walk to Constantinople and back again in one year. This wager, however whimsical, is not without a precedent. Some years ago a baronet of good fortune (Sir Henry Liddel) laid a considerable wager that he would go to Lapland, bring home two females of that country, and two rein-deer, in a given time. He performed the journey, and effected his purpose in every respect. The Lapland women lived with him about a year, but desiring to go back to their own country, the baronet furnished them with means and money.
— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860
On Dec. 1, 1948, a bather discovered a body on the beach near Adelaide, Australia. The man appeared to be European, about 45 years old, well dressed, and in excellent physical condition. Indeed, the coroner could not determine a cause of death. Still more strangely, it seemed the man had carried no money, and all identifying marks had been removed from his clothes. Apparently he had left a suitcase at the Adelaide railway station, but it contained no useful clues. Photos and fingerprints were circulated throughout the English-speaking world, but no one identified him.
And the body bore one last strange clue: In a trouser fob pocket, one of the investigators found a tiny piece of paper bearing the words “Taman Shud.” Those are the final words in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; they mean “The End.” A local doctor came forward with a copy of that book, from which the words had been clipped. He had found it tossed on the front seat of his car the day before the body was found.
But even that clue went nowhere. To this day, no one knows who the man was or how he died. He’s known only as the Somerton man.
Okay, the new shop has to promote our duck farm somehow! Everybody, think!
Martin Maurer’s painfully literal solution has graced Long Island since 1931. To this day, buildings shaped like recognizable objects are called “ducks.”
The Church of St. George in Lalibela, Ethiopia, was cut from a single block of stone in the 12th century.
See also Rock-Cut Architecture.
Johann Taberger designed this “safety coffin” in 1829, to preserve people who had been mistakenly buried alive. Strings were attached to the body’s head, hands, and feet, connected to a bell that would alert the cemetery’s nightwatchman, who could use a bellows to pump air into the coffin until it could be dug up.
Such devices were popular during the cholera epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries — European graves were rigged variously with bells, flags, ladders, and escape hatches. There’s no evidence that they ever saved anyone, and they nearly killed some of their inventors: During a demonstration in 1897, a chamberlain to the tsar of Russia buried his assistant, waited, and finally realized that the signaling system had failed. The assistant was saved, but the marketing campaign was DOA.
On St. Joseph’s Day, 1678, on the mountains called La Langhe, there fell, on the white snow, that lay there before, a great quantity of red, or if you please, of bloody snow. From which, being squeezed, there came a water of the same colour. Communicated by Sig. Sarotti, the Venetian Resident there, to Mr. Boyle.
— Philosophical Transactions, 1678
An extraordinary discovery in Natural History was made at Liverpool about a fortnight ago. As one of the stonemasons in the employ of the Dock Trustees, was dressing, on the sea wall of the Regent’s Dock, a huge stone, brought from the Western Point Quarry, and after he had broken a considerable thickness from its outside, he discovered, in a hole of small diameter, which was partially filled with clay, and a loamy sand, three bees, in a state of animation, to the inexpressible astonishment of himself and fellow-workmen, many of whom were witnesses of this strange phenomenon. The foreman of the works put them into his handkerchief, where they remained for several hours afterwards; but, while exhibiting his newly resuscitated strangers, two of them flew away, and he voluntarily gave the third its liberty.
— Liverpool Advertiser, Nov. 24, 1817
