In America, when both people on a date pay for their own meals, we call it “Dutch treat.”
The Dutch have another name for it.
They call it an “American-style party.”
Oops
On March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial about the nation’s economic woes:
Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it carried the headline “Mush From the Wimp.”
In 1984 Globe editorial writer Kirk Scharfenberg admitted he’d written it. “I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication,” he wrote. “It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day.”
Walking Tall
“Man is the noblest work of God!” roared Mark Twain. “Well now, who found that out?”
Consider the case of Oliver the chimpanzee. Oliver liked to stand upright instead of knucklewalking like his peers, and his keepers noticed that his face was flatter than other chimps’, who tended to avoid him.
That’s all the impetus they needed. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s Oliver was paraded through a succession of theme parks, zoos and promotions, billed as a missing link or even a “humanzee,” or human-chimp hybrid, and confined for seven years in a cage that measured only 7 by 5 feet.
It all came to nothing. In 1996, when Oliver was old, blind, and arthritic, University of Chicago geneticist David Ledbetter checked his chromosomes and discovered he was just an ordinary ape, albeit one who preferred to walk upright.
It’s still possible that Oliver belongs to a rare subspecies of chimps who resemble humans … but after that treatment, would he take that as a compliment?
Johann Beringer
The trouble with arrogance is that you never know when to turn it off. By all accounts Johann Beringer was insufferable, so two of his colleagues on the University of Würtzburg faculty of medicine decided to teach him a lesson.
They carved lizards, frogs, and spiders from limestone, inscribed them with the Hebrew name of God, and planted them on Mount Eibelstadt, where Beringer frequently went to find fossils.
It worked — and, like Drake’s Plate of Brass, it worked a little too well. Beringer found the figures, took them seriously, and, to his colleagues’ horror, actually published a book about them. When critics pointed out visible chisel marks, he claimed they’d been left by the hand of God. When the hoaxers tried to talk him out of it, he sued them as “a pair of antagonists who tried to discredit the stones.”
When the truth came out, it ruined them all, haunting Beringer most of all. Legend tells that actually he went bankrupt trying to buy up all the books, and there was a final irony. He died in 1740 — and a second printing of his book was produced in 1767.
Unquote
“From today painting is dead.” — Portraitist Paul Delaroche, on seeing an exhibition of daguerreotypes, 1839
Puzzling Brothers
Tom and Dick were born on the same day of the same year to same mother and father. They look almost exactly alike, yet they are not twins. How can this be?
Say Good Night
Gracie Allen: On my way in, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, “Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?”
George Burns: And you said?
Gracie Allen: I said, “I’ll be busy after the show, but I’m not doing anything right now.” So I bit him.
“All I had to do was say, ‘Gracie, how’s your brother?’ and she talked for 38 years,” Burns once remembered. “And sometimes I didn’t even have to remember to say, ‘Gracie, how’s your brother?'”
Hooray
Ground zero after the first test of a nuclear weapon, July 16, 1945. Observers set up betting pools on the outcome, including these possibilities:
- It would be a dud
- It would destroy the state of New Mexico
- It would ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the planet
Physicist I.I. Rabi won — he predicted a blast equivalent to 18 kilotons of TNT.
All Clear
Lloyd’s of London does not charge higher insurance rates for ships passing through the Bermuda Triangle. It says the area is no more dangerous than any other high-traffic piece of ocean.
The U.S. Coast Guard agrees.
“Cover With the Moon”
Hobo lingo:
- accommodation car – the caboose of a train
- angelina – young inexperienced kid
- banjo – a small portable frying pan
- bindle stick – collection of belongings wrapped in cloth and tied around a stick
- bone polisher – a mean dog
- bull – a railroad officer
- cannonball – a fast train
- catch the westbound – to die
- chuck a dummy – pretend to faint
- cow crate – a railroad stock car
- crums – lice
- doggin’ it – traveling by bus
- hot shot – a train with priority freight
- jungle – an area near a railroad in which hoboes camp and congregate
- knowledge bus – a schoolbus used for shelter
- road kid – a young hobo who apprentices himself to an older hobo in order to learn the ways of the road
- rum dum – a drunkard
- soup bowl- a palce to get soup, bread and drinks
- yegg – a traveling professional thief