George Bernard Shaw is the only person who has won both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award.
He won the Nobel in 1925 and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1938 (for Pygmalion).
“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite,” he once said, “but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
In 1998, University of Iowa communications professor Kembrew McLeod trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression.” Then he sent AT&T a cease-and-desist letter because they were using his phrase in an advertising campaign.
He said he knew he was overreaching, but “I do want to register my genuine protest that a big company that really doesn’t represent freedom of expression is trying to appropriate this phrase.”
During the American Civil War, captured Union soldiers held in Libby Prison, Richmond, Va., were allowed only six lines in correspondence with their friends at home. Here’s a sample letter:
“My Dear Wife. – Yours received – no hopes of exchange – send corn starch – want socks – no money – rheumatism in left shoulder – pickles very good – send sausages – God bless you – kiss the baby – Hail Columbia! – Your devoted husband.”
Ted Hustead was kind of a nut for self-promotion. When he bought a drugstore in tiny Wall, South Dakota, in 1931, he figured he could attract customers through advertising.
Maybe he overcompensated a little. There are now 500 miles of Wall Drug billboards on Interstate 90, stretching all the way to Minnesota at an annual cost of $400,000, plus signs at the North and South Poles, the Paris Metro, and the Taj Mahal. The photo above was taken somewhere in Africa in the 1950s.
The signs may be eyesores, but they’re scaring off the competition — the little pharmacy is still the only one within 500 square miles.
The maker doesn’t need it.
The buyer doesn’t use it.
The user doesn’t know he’s using it.
What is it?
Decimal arithmetic is a contrivance of man for computing numbers, and not a property of time, space, or matter. It belongs essentially to the keeping of accounts, but is merely an incident to the transactions of trade. Nature has no partiality for the number 10; and the attempt to shackle her freedom with them [decimal gradations], will for ever prove abortive.
— John Quincy Adams, recommending against the metric system in 1821, as reported in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, May 15, 1852
Bob Marley was buried with a guitar, a soccer ball, a bud of marijuana, and a Bible.
At 54 million pounds, the Statue of Liberty is the heaviest sculpture in the world.
“Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.” — John Cleese
Warring governments can be kind of blunt. James Montgomery Flagg’s famous 1917 “I Want You” recruiting poster (left) echoed an earlier English poster featuring Lord Kitchener, and the Red Army wasn’t any subtler in the 1920s (“Did you volunteer?”).
In the long run, time and patience resolve everything. “When armies are mobilized and issues are joined,” wrote Lao-tzu, “the man who is sorry over the fact will win.”
