This is almost comically American: Between 1830 and 1836, a bald eagle lived at the Philadelphia Mint. Named Peter, he would roam the city by day and roost in the mint at night. Fatally injured in a coining press, he was stuffed and mounted and is currently on display in the lobby.
He is said (uncertainly) to have been the model for the eagle on U.S. silver dollars issued between 1836 and 1839 and the Flying Eagle cents of 1856-1858.
On Saturday morning a man about 30 years of age, named Benjamin Collins, was found drowned in a small dam belonging to the Whitehall pit, at Wyke. When found he was kneeling in the water with his head down, being only up to the shoulders in the water. He had been drinking for several days, and became restless. He got up about 2 o’clock in the morning, partly dressed himself, and said he could not sleep. Soon afterwards he went out, and about 4 o’clock his uncle, Mr. Mark Collins, of Lower Car Close farm, went in search of him in the barn and stables, but not finding him there returned to the house. Mrs. Collins then desired her husband to go to the place where the body was found, as she had just dreamt her nephew was drowned there. Mr. Collins acted as his wife requested, and, to his amazement and horror, saw the literal fulfillment of her dream.
— York Herald, quoted in The Law Times, Dec. 17, 1864
The southern Yukon contains an unlikely square mile of sand dunes, the bottom of an ancient lake that’s now scoured by strong winds.
It’s often claimed to be the smallest desert in the world, but the local climate is too humid to admit that designation.
Periodically Mount Etna emits rings of steam and ash. Not much is known as to how they form — perhaps a vent has assumed a particularly circular shape, so that emitted gas forms vortex rings — but they can be hundreds of feet wide.
Naturalist filmmaker Geoff Mackley captured these in June 2000, but they’ve recurred as recently as 2013.
Every Christmas for more than 30 years, someone has decorated this 20-foot juniper tree in the median of Interstate 17 about 55 miles north of downtown Phoenix, Arizona.
The decorations, the same ones every year, go up before Thanksgiving, and they’re taken down after New Year’s Day.
“I know who started it, but I’m not going to go into that,” former transportation department employee Tom Foster told the Arizona Daily Courier in 2009. “I heard there’s some elves that got to looking at how bleak we were … and people weren’t celebrating Christmas very well. They thought [the decorations] are a good way to brighten the drive between here and Phoenix.”
“But don’t stop on the road. That’s not what Santa wants.”
In September 1914, three ships from Britain’s 7th Cruiser Squadron were on patrol in the North Sea to prevent the Imperial German Navy from entering the English Channel to interrupt supply lines between England and France.
Fifteen-year-old midshipman Wenman Wykeham-Musgrave was aboard HMS Aboukir when the German U-boat U-9 attacked. His sister recalled in 2003:
“He went overboard when the Aboukir was going down and he swam like mad to get away from the suction. He was then just getting on board the Hogue and she was torpedoed. He then went and swam to the Cressy and she was also torpedoed. He eventually found a bit of driftwood, became unconscious and was eventually picked up by a Dutch trawler.”
U-9 had sunk all three cruisers, killing 1,500 men. Wykeham-Musgrave was eventually rescued by a Dutch trawler.
In order to protect new structures from harm, or to bring good luck, some European cultures used to conceal the bodies of cats on the premises, inside hollow walls, under floorboards, or in attics. The two shown here were discovered in the Stag Inn in Hastings, East Sussex, which was built in the 16th century. Sometimes the animals have been posed with prey, as here, but happily it appears that they weren’t walled in while still alive; in some cases they’ve been found in places that they couldn’t possibly have reached on their own.
I wonder if this practice explains a couple other instances that I’ve come across over the years. The Guildhall Library has some further examples.
Tomorrow’s date will be written as an eight-digit palindrome around the world, the first time this has happened in 900 years.
The coincidence is rare because countries use differing conventions. February 2, 2020, is a palindrome whether expressed as day/month/year (02/02/2020), month/day/year (02/02/2020), or year/month/day (2020/02/02).
This happened last on November 11, 1111, and it won’t happen again until March 3, 3030.
02/01/2020 UPDATE: A number of readers have pointed out that 12/12/2121 works fine too, and it’s barely more than a century away.
In 1999, ex-Pogues banjoist Jem Finer composed a piece of music that will take 1,000 years to perform. It’s been playing continuously at Bow Creek Lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf on the north bank of the Thames since midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, and will continue until Dec. 31, 2999. (Shown here is an excerpt of 1,000 minutes performed live in 2009 at the Roundhouse in London.)
The piece is essentially a computer-administered series of variations on a core composition that’s 20 minutes and 20 seconds long; the current rendition is played on Tibetan singing bowls and gongs, but in principle it might be played on any instrument and indeed by any means; the conclusion of the piece might be mediated by technologies, and certainly will be by people, that don’t exist today.
It can be heard at various listening stations around the United Kingdom, and a mobile app is available that plays a version synchronized with the Trinity Buoy Wharf performance.
See Larghissimo.
Cecil B. DeMille’s 1959 autobiography contains an odd passage: “If a thousand years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America. The sphinxes they will find were buried when we had finished with them and dismantled our huge set of the gates of Pharaoh’s city.”
He was referring to his 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments — after shooting was finished, he’d had the massive sets buried where they’d been built, in California’s Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. It’s not clear why — possibly he lacked the funds to remove them and didn’t want other filmmakers to use them. The sets included four Pharaoh statues 35 feet tall, 21 sphinxes, and gates 110 feet high, forming an ersatz Egyptian civilization for modern archaeologists to uncover.
Their time is limited. “It was like working with a hollow chocolate rabbit,” Doug Jenzen, executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, told the Los Angeles Times of one dig in 2014. “These were built to last two months during filming in 1923, and these statues have been sitting out in the elements since then.”
