On May 31, 1886, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from railroad lines throughout the South, shifted one rail 3 inches, and spiked them in again.
No one had standardized the gauges.
“To Disappoint His Wife”
On the 20th of May, 1736, the body of Samuel Baldwin, Esq., was, in compliance with a request in his will, buried, sans ceremonie, in the sea at Lymington, Hants. His motive for this extraordinary mode and place of interment was to prevent his wife from ‘dancing on his grave,’ which she had frequently threatened to do in case she survived him.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Unquote
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” — H.M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927
Shakespeare For Lawyers
Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy rendered in jargon, from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing (1916):
To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.
See also Hamlet in Klingon.
Live and Let Die
James Bond never really explains why he likes his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” so in 1999 the University of Western Ontario’s biochemistry department decided to find out.
They discovered that a shaken gin martini has stronger antioxidant properties than a stirred one — which would help Bond avoid cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cataracts.
In their writeup for the British Medical Journal, they conclude, “007’s profound state of health may be due, at least in part, to compliant bartenders.”
See also Silly Old Bear.
Come Out, Come Out …
That hollow column on the right is a “priest-hole,” a hiding place for Catholic priests, who were hunted with Elmer-Fudd-like tenacity when Elizabeth took the English throne around 1560. A “papist” could be hanged for saying mass; converting a Protestant was high treason.
Fortunately, the priests had a Bugs Bunny in the shape of Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit laybrother who spent his life devising secret chambers and hiding places for persecuted Catholics. “Pursuivants” could spend as much as a fortnight fruitlessly tearing down paneling and tearing up floors while the priest held his breath a wall’s thickness away.
Ickily, some of these hidden priests starved to death.
A Self-Descriptive Number
In the number 6210001000:
- The digit 0 occurs 6 times
- The digit 1 occurs 2 times
- The digit 2 occurs 1 time
- The digit 3 occurs 0 times
- The digit 4 occurs 0 times
- The digit 5 occurs 0 times
- The digit 6 occurs 1 time
- The digit 7 occurs 0 times
- The digit 8 occurs 0 times
- The digit 9 occurs 0 times
See also The Quick Brown Fox …
Into the Fire
Fighter pilot William Rankin bailed out of a failing jet in 1959 and found himself inside a thunderstorm:
I saw lightning all around me in every shape imaginable. When very close, it appeared mainly as a huge, bluish sheet several feet thick, sometimes sticking close to me in pairs, like the blades of a scissors, and I had the distinct feeling that I was being sliced in two. It was raining so torrentially that I thought I would drown in midair. Several times I had held my breath, fearing that otherwise I might inhale quarts of water. How silly, I thought, they’re going to find you hanging from some tree, in your parachute harness, your lungs filled with water, wondering how on earth you drowned.
The stormcloud toyed with him for 45 minutes before it finally put him down — 65 miles from where he’d bailed out.
Or Bust
In 1909, 22-year-old housewife Alice Huyler Ramsey drove from New York to San Francisco, covering 3,800 miles in 59 days in a Maxwell touring car. She encountered Indians (hunting jackrabbits) in Nebraska, a posse (hunting a murderer) in Wyoming, bad roads, bad weather, flat tires, and breakdowns. All of this is chronicled in her memorably titled 1961 memoir, Veil, Duster and Tire Iron.
With her went two sisters-in-law and a female friend — none of whom could drive a car.
See also Annie Londonderry.
“Lizard Embedded in a Block of Coal”
Lately, in a coal-pit situated upon the outwood, near Wakefield, and belonging to Wm. Fenton, Esq. out of the lower bed or seam, at a distance of 150 yards from the surface of the earth, a block of coal was dug up, which, when broken, contained a lizard, of the species vulgarly called askers; the animal was alive, but upon being exposed to the air, it soon died. The cavity in which it was found, being the exact mould of its own form, no chasm, hole, or external crack appeared on the surface of the block.
— Monthly Magazine, 1812