What do you get when thousands of drunken sports fans stack their beer cups into a huge chain? A beer snake, that’s what. They’re not very dangerous, as snakes go — they tend to appear at cricket matches, which take hours and sell a lot of beverages. But they get big: The largest so far measured 23 meters. Cheers.
In 1590, England sent an expedition to check on a colony of settlers on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. They found the settlement deserted: 90 men, 17 women, and nine children had disappeared without a trace. A search turned up nothing. The only clue was a single word carved into a post: CROATOAN.
There was a Croatoan Island nearby, with a tribe of that name. Had the colonists been killed or captured? No, there was no sign of a struggle. Had they assimilated peacefully? Then why had they left no clue where they’d gone? Had they moved to another base? Tried to return to England? Starved to death? To this day, no one knows.
Colorful New York gang names, 1825-1920:
Slobbery Jim of the Daybreak Boys cut Patsy the Barber’s throat in a fight over 12 cents in 1853. He later rose to the rank of captain in the Confederate army.
“Life is tough. It’s even tougher if you’re stupid.” — John Wayne
Henry Ford was a big deal in the United States, and for a time he was a big deal in Brazil, too. In the 1920s the auto tycoon bought 10,000 square kilometers of land near the mouth of the Amazon. Rubber came from the tropics, he figured, so he’d cut out the middleman and gather it himself.
That’s big thinking, but “Fordlândia” didn’t really work out. The land was rough and unfamiliar, bugs and blight ate the plants, and the natives eventually threw aside their hamburgers and drove the managers into the jungle.
Ford tried again, but by 1945 synthetic rubber had made the whole project look silly, and in the end he took a $20 million loss. That was okay with Ford, for whom active failure was better than passive dreaming. “You can’t build a reputation,” he’d say, “on what you are going to do.”
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer, once obtained the phone number 888-888-8888.
He found it was unusable — he received more than 100 calls a day from children playing with phones.
If you live near the Liverpool coast, don’t be alarmed to see human figures slowly disappearing beneath the waves. They’re part of a modern sculpture, called Another Place, designed by Antony Gormley. There are 100 cast-iron figures in all, spread over a 2-mile stretch of beach.
They’re coming to New York in November.
borborygmus
n. rumbling noise in the intestines
American superstitions, collected by folklorist Fanny Bergen in 1896:
Also:
Beware of that man,
Be he friend or brother,
Whose hair is one color
And moustache another.
(Portland, Maine)
The U.S. Supreme Court building is pretty spiffy. It has its own cafeteria, a 450,000-book library and a basketball court on the fifth floor (which staffers call “the highest court in the land”).
It’s so spiffy that when it opened in 1935, some justices were embarrassed. Harlan Fiske Stone called it “almost bombastically pretentious … wholly inappropriate for a quiet group of old boys such as the Supreme Court.” Others called it “the Temple of Karnak” and suggested that justices ought to enter the courtroom riding on elephants.
One worrying note: The building’s frieze depicts Moses delivering the Ten Commandments, but his beard obscures some of the Hebrew, so the visible text reads:
Steal
Kill
Commit Adultery
But let that pass.
