“Postal Cats”

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.

| Oddities

Engaged

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_Georg_Waldm%C3%BCller_-_Die_Erwartete.jpg

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s painting The Expected is sometimes claimed as evidence of time travel — how else could a woman get an iPhone in 1860?

It’s a prayer book.

| Art · Oddities

Double Duty

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.)

| Oddities

The Broxburn Icicle

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_july-december-1896_12/page/738/mode/2up

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.)

| Oddities

Return Engagement

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vagusstoff2.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Easter Saturday 1921, pharmacologist Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment that would prove that the transmission of nerve impulses was chemical rather than electrical. He scribbled down the idea and went back to sleep, then discovered the next morning that he couldn’t read the note.

That day, he said, was the longest of his life. Fortunately, the dream returned to him that night, and this time he went immediately to the laboratory. Thirteen years later he received the Nobel Prize for discovering the role of acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Andy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andy_the_goose_and_Gene_Fleming.jpg

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.

| Oddities

The Dim Effect

In 2006, German entomologist Jochen-P. Saltin discovered a new species of rhinoceros beetle in Peru, which he dubbed Megaceras briansaltini.

Remarkably, the insect’s horn closely resembles that of Dim, the blue rhinoceros beetle in the Disney film A Bug’s Life, which was released eight years earlier.

“I know of no dynastine head horn that has ever had the shape of the one seen in M. briansaltini, and so its resemblance to a movie character seems like a case of nature mimicking art … or what could be referred to as ‘the Dim Effect,'” wrote entomologist Brett C. Ratcliffe.

“There are numerous examples of art mimicking nature (paintings, sculpture, etc.), but that cannot be the case here, because there had never been a known rhinoceros beetle in nature upon which the creators of Dim could have used as a model for the head horn. In my experience, then, Dim was the first ‘rhinoceros beetle’ to display such a horn, and the discovery of M. briansaltini, a real rhinoceros beetle, came later.”

(Brett C. Ratcliffe, “A Remarkable New Species of Megaceras From Peru [Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Oryctini]. The ‘Dim Effect’: Nature Mimicking Art,” The Coleopterists Bulletin 61:3 [2007], 463-467.)

| Oddities · Science & Math

Cameo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcus_Gheeraerts_I_-_Map_of_Bruges_-_Peeing_woman.jpg

In his Schilderboeck of 1604, Flemish artist Karel van Mander writes that his contemporary Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder is a good landscape painter who “often had the habit of including a squatting, urinating woman on a bridge or elsewhere.”

None of Gheeraerts’ landscapes are known to survive, but we have a perspective map of his native Bruges that he completed in 1562 and … there she is.

| Art · Oddities