The Civil War didn’t quite end with Lee’s surrender. The Confederate man-of-war CSS Shenandoah was in the Arctic Ocean at the time, and kept attacking Union ships for four more months.
By the time it stopped, the Shenandoah had carried the Confederate flag completely around the world. It sank or captured 38 ships, two-thirds of them after the war ended, and took close to a thousand prisoners. Oops.
When you kiss someone, you have to turn your head to one side to avoid mashing noses.
Psychologist Oner Güntürkün found that people favor turning to the right over the left by a 2:1 ratio.
Words dropped since the 1901 edition of the Chambers Dictionary:
The Hindenburg was the largest aircraft ever built, 10 times the size of a modern blimp and filled with 7 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen.
And it had a smoking room.
Michael Caine’s real name is Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.
He originally took the stage name Michael Scott, but his agent learned that another actor was using it and asked him to choose another one quickly.
Caine was standing in a phone booth in London’s Leicester Square. He looked around, saw The Caine Mutiny playing at the Odeon cinema, and suggested Michael Caine.
He once told an interviewer that if he had looked the other way, he would be known as “Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians.”
Two examples of “Irish bulls,” or ludicrous published statements:
It is in a Belfast paper that may be read the account of a murder, the result of which is described thus: “They fired two shots at him; the first shot killed him, but the second was not fatal.”
Connoisseurs in [Irish] bulls will probably say that this is only a blunder. Perhaps the following will please them better: “A man was run down by a passenger train and killed; he was injured in a similar way a year ago.”
— From Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders: A Chapter in the “History Of Human Error,” 1893
“Just because swans mate for life, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. First of all, if you’re a swan, you’re probably not going to find a swan that looks much better than the one you’ve got, so why not mate for life?” — Jack Handy
There once was a miser named Clarence
Who simonized both of his parents;
“The initial expense,”
He remarked, “is immense,
But it saves on the wearance and tearance.”
— Ogden Nash
Behold the Principality of Sealand, a self-declared “micronation” on an old sea fort in the North Sea.
Its population is only five, but it has its own government (“Their Royal Highnesses Prince Roy and Princess Joan of Sealand”), constitution, government bureaus, senate, postage stamps, and currency.
And, now, it has an official athlete: In 2003 Darren Blackburn of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, started representing Sealand in local marathons and off-trail races. Presumably short ones.
Last year, 2,997 Dutch students set a record for the world’s largest pillow fight.
Clemenceau said, “War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.”
