Playboy Playmate of the Month modeling payouts:
1959-1960: $500
1961-1965: $1,000
1966-1967: $2,500
1968-1969: $3,000
1970-1977: $5,000
1978-1983: $10,000
1984-1989: $15,000
1990-today: $20,000
A Double Mystery
A Navy collier during World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 16, 1918, touched at Barbados on March 3 and 4, and was never heard from again. She took 306 crew and passengers with her.
In 1968, a diver off Norfolk, Va., reported finding the wreck of an old ship in about 300 feet of water. When shown a picture of the Cyclops he said he was convinced it was the same ship. But, strangely, even that wreck disappeared — further expeditions failed to find anything.
Moving Words
Kermit the Frog spoke at ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s funeral.
Just Do It
The Nike “swoosh” logo was created by Carolyn Davidson, a freelance graphic design student, in 1971.
She was paid $35.
The Foarest City
Cleveland is misspelled. The Ohio city was named for Gen. Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the crew that surveyed the local territory. But when the town’s first newspaper, The Cleaveland Advertiser, was established in 1831, the editor found that its title was too long by one letter — so he unceremoniously dropped an A.
In a Word
pinguitude
n. fatness
Zuiyo Maru
On April 25, 1977, the Japanese trawler Zuiyo Maru was working off the coast of New Zealand when its nets caught a foul-smelling, decomposing corpse that measured about 10 meters long and weighed two tons.
To avoid spoiling the fish catch, the captain decided to dump the carcass back into the ocean, but the crew first took some photos and measurements. The creature had a neck 1.5 meters long, four large, reddish fins, and a tail about 2 meters long, and it lacked a dorsal fin.
The story made a sensation in Japan, and the shipping company belatedly ordered all its boats back to relocate the dumped corpse, without success.
Some scientists declared the creature to be a prehistoric plesiosaur; others thought it might have been an oversized basking shark. Fujiro Yasuda of Tokyo University said, “We can’t find any known species of fish that correspond with the animal caught outside New Zealand. If it is a shark, it is a species unknown to science.” We’ll never know.
Bright Idea
When Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was caught in a test tube by his son Charles.
He was convinced to do it by Henry Ford, who believed that a person’s dying breath contained his soul.
You can see it for yourself — the test tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
Dorothy Arnold
On the morning of Dec. 12, 1910, American socialite Dorothy Arnold left her parents’ home in Manhattan to go shopping for a dress for a party. She met some friends on Fifth Avenue, who later described her as cheerful. She visited Park & Tilford’s store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 27th Street and charged a pound of candy to her account, then went to Brentano’s on 26th Street, where she bought a book of epigrams and met a friend, who later reported that Dorothy had intended to walk home through Central Park.
That’s all anybody knows. She never came home that night, and her disappearance has never been explained. Friends searched hospitals, morgues and jails in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for three weeks but found nothing. Police and Pinkerton detectives fared no better. Arnold’s fiance, George Griscom Jr., spent thousands of dollars searching for her and bought ads in major newspapers, without result.
When her father died in 1922, he had spent more than $100,000 trying to find Dorothy. In his will he stated that he had come to believe his daughter was dead, but no one knows what became of her.
Missing Square Puzzle
New York magician Paul Curry invented this puzzle in 1953. When the pieces of the triangle are rearranged as shown, suddenly a square is missing. How is this possible?