On the evening of June 18, 1875, a fire broke out near a bonded storehouse on Ardee Street in Dublin, and by 9:30 some 5,000 hogsheads of whiskey had begun to explode in the heat. “Within an hour,” reported the Irish Examiner, “the surrounding streets resembled canals of flame.”

The “blazing stream … turned into Ardee-street, passed Watkins’ Brewery without damage, but catching the premises at the corner of Chamber-street, set fire to these, and continuing its course down into Mill-street, speedily demolished the entire of the row of small houses forming the south side of that thoroughfare.”

The evacuation was relatively rapid, and no one perished directly due to the fire. But “many of the crowd indulged to excess, drinking in some instances out of their shoes and hats, in which they had collected the whiskey.” As the undiluted spirits were much more potent than bottled retail whiskey, some 24 citizens were hospitalized due to alcohol poisoning, and 13 eventually died.

In 1876 the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat transported 37 cats from Liège to the surrounding countryside. Released at 2 p.m., the first had found its way home by 6:48, and the rest followed within a day.

“This result has greatly encouraged the society, and it is proposed to establish at an early day a regular system of cat communication between Liège and the neighboring villages,” reported the New York Times.

“Messages are to be fastened in water-proof bags around the necks of the animals, and it is believed that … the messages will be delivered with rapidity and safety.” Somehow the plan wasn’t carried through; it’s hard to imagine why.

What’s the greatest number of Fridays that can fall in February? We might say five, imagining a leap year in which February 1 falls on a Friday.

“However, it is possible to reckon double the number of Fridays in the month of February alone,” contends Soviet science writer Yakov Perelman. “Imagine a ship plying between Siberia and Alaska and leaving the Asiatic shore regularly every Friday. How many Fridays will its skipper count in a leap-year February of which the 1st is a Friday? Since he crosses the date line from west to east and does so on a Friday, he will reckon two Fridays every week, thus adding up to 10 Fridays in all.”

“On the contrary, the skipper of a ship leaving Alaska every Thursday and heading for Siberia will ‘lose’ Friday in his day reckoning, with the result that he won’t have a single Friday in the whole month.”

(From Astronomy for Entertainment, 1958.)

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Washington crosses Delaware.

During the severe frost of February 1895, a stream of water overflowing Scotland’s Almond Aqueduct began to freeze to the River Almond 120 feet below. Over the course of three nights the mass grew upward until river and bridge were connected by a continuous pillar of ice, the largest such formation on record at the time.

“When the sun shone upon the giant mass,” observed the Strand, “the iridescence was beautiful, and people came from miles around to look at it.”

(Jeremy Broome, “Freaks of Frost,” Strand 12:12 [December 1896], 738-746.)

This rock formation, formed possibly thousands of years ago, spans a chasm on Mount Tai, one of the Five Great Mountains of China.

It’s said that anyone who crosses the bridge will live forever.

When a goose without feet was hatched in Harvard, Nebraska, in 1987, local inventor Gene Fleming adopted the bird, fitted him with baby-sized shoes, and taught him to walk. In time “Andy” learned to swim and fly as well; he gave inspiration to disabled children and received a lifetime supply of shoes from Nike, but it wasn’t to last — in 1991 he was killed by an unnamed perpetrator.