Is it possible for someone who has had no musical training whatsoever, and who has never learned the names of the notes, to be known by others to have absolute pitch? The answer is YES! I knew a police officer who was totally unmusical, and never knew the names of the notes, who nevertheless was known to have absolute pitch. How? Well, this was eighty-five years ago, when police stations emitted radio signals, each station having its own individual frequency. The police officer in question was the only one among his fellow officers who upon hearing the radio signal could identify the police station!

— Raymond Smullyan, Reflections, 2015

At a 1931 costume ball, seven New York architects appeared as their own buildings. Left to right: A. Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building; Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria; Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building; William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building; Ralph Walker as One Wall Street; D.E. Ward as the Metropolitan Tower; and Joseph H. Freedlander as the Museum of the City of New York.

That’s from Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, 1994. Some compromises: Freedlander had never designed a skyscraper, so he put the museum on his head. Schultze had to represent the twin-towered Waldorf Astoria with a single headdress. And “The elegant top of A. Stewart Walker’s Fuller Building has so few openings that faithfulness to its design now condemns its designer to temporary blindness.”

William Van Alen, in the center, went bananas with the Chrysler Building: The headpiece is an exact facsimile of the top of the building; the cape, puttees, and cuffs are made of flexible wood selected from trees in India, Australia, the Philippines, South America, Africa, Honduras, and North America; the cape matches the design of the first floor elevator doors, using the correct woods; the front is a replica of the elevator doors on the upper floors of the building; and the shoulder ornaments are the eagles’ heads that appear at the building’s 61st-floor setback.

One marvel I couldn’t find a photo of: Thomas Gillespie “dressed as a void to represent an unnamed subway station.”

An optical illusion — the two pieces appear to be drawn apart, but they remain engaged.

Here’s another video that’s shot clearly enough to give away what’s happening.

On Sept. 13, 1962, test pilot Bob Sowray told his neighbor, photographer Jim Meads, that he’d be flying an English Electric Lightning F1 jet bomber that day, so Meads brought his camera along when he took his kids for a walk, hoping to photograph the return approach. He found a good position on the runway overshoot and waited for the plane to arrive.

In the end it was pilot George Aird who was assigned to fly the Lightning, and as he approached the airfield a fire in the rear fuselage destroyed the tailplane control system at a height of only 100 feet.

Landscaping assistant Mick Sutterby was just telling Meads that the airfield runway was off limits when beyond him Meads saw the Lightning’s nose pitch up and Aird eject. He had just enough time to line up the shot and snap the shutter before the jet came down nose first.

Aird and his ejection seat crashed through the glass roof of a nearby greenhouse, where they landed in adjacent rows of tomatoes. Aird said later that when the water from the sprinkler system roused him, he thought he must be in heaven. He had broken both legs, but he was flying again in six months.

The Daily Mail rejected Meads’ photo as fake, but the Daily Mirror paid him £1,000 for it. It appeared in the center spread on Oct. 9, 1962.

More details at Fear of Landing.

There is no December 30, 2011, in the history of Samoa. The island nation requested that at the end of the year the international date line be redrawn to pass east of it rather than west, so that it could share the same time zone as Australia and New Zealand, now major trade partners. As a result, it jumped directly from December 29 to December 31.

Under the old arrangement, “In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we’re losing out on two working days a week,” explained prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. “While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand, and when we’re at church on Sunday, they’re already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”

The move means Samoa can no longer promote itself as the last place on Earth to see each day’s sunset, but there’s a compensating bonus: Since nearby American Samoa remains on the eastern side of the line, “You can have two birthdays, two weddings, and two wedding anniversaries on the same date — on separate days — in less than an hour’s flight across [the ocean], without leaving the Samoan chain.”

Everything evens out cosmically anyway — Samoa had crossed the line in the other direction in 1892 to promote trade with the United States, and in that year it celebrated the occasion by marking the same day twice: July 4, America’s Independence Day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EEw1TlxKx4

Balloonist Andy Collett was floating over South Gloucestershire in July 2012 when he spotted something striking: a heart-shaped meadow in the center of a stand of oaks. “This was the most amazing sight I have ever seen from the sky,” he told the Telegraph. “It was a perfect heart hidden away from view — you would not know it was there.”

It turned out that 70-year-old Winston Howes had planted the wood to commemorate his 33-year marriage to his wife, Janet, who had died 17 years earlier of heart disease. In the months after her death he filled a six-acre field with thousands of oak saplings but left a heart-shaped clearing in the center, its point aimed at her childhood home.

“I came up with the idea of creating a heart in the clearing of the field after Janet died,” Howes said. “Once it was completed we put a seat in the field, overlooking the hill near where she used to live. I sometimes go down there, just to sit and think about things. It is a lovely and lasting tribute to her which will be here for years.”

The clearing was not visible from the road and remained a family secret until Collett spotted it. “You can just imagine the love story,” he said.