The world’s longest diary is kept by Robert Shields of Dayton, Wash. Since 1972 he has spent four hours a day typing a record of everything that happens to him. Sample:
July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.
He stores the diary, now 38 million words long, in more than 80 cardboard boxes.
The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is decorated with 40,000 human skeletons.
“If life must not be taken too seriously,” wrote Samuel Butler, “then so neither must death.”
The Telluride Nothing Festival has been a cherished Colorado tradition since 1991. Highlights of this year’s gathering:
Festival motto: “Thank you for not participating.”
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” — George Orwell
Egypt’s Great Pyramid weighs 5,750,090 tons.
According to his transcript, George P. Burdell has been a student at Georgia Tech since 1927. How? He was invented out of thin air when student Ed Smith received two enrollment forms. With Smith’s help, “Burdell” attended all his friend’s classes and took all the same exams.
For a nonexistent person, Burdell turned out to be pretty ambitious. Smith graduated in 1930, but his invisible friend stuck around, adopted by other students. He eventually earned a master’s degree and became an official alumnus, then flew 12 bombing missions over Europe in World War II. In 1969 he signed up for a whopping 3,000 credit hours at Georgia Tech — and began a 12-year term on MAD magazine’s board of directors. In 2001 he was briefly the leading contender among voters for TIME magazine’s person of the year.
Strangely, after 79 years of school Burdell is still only a sophomore. He’s majoring in civil engineering, according to a recent report card.
In 1956, an expedition to the South Pole found a tin of Edam cheese left behind by Robert Scott’s party 44 years earlier.
It was still edible.
Contents of Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination:
… and a Confederate five-dollar bill.
In October 2003, a couple hiking in the mountains of northern Sweden came upon 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter.
No one knows who put them there, or why.
“Twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.”
That’s a typical description of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake, held each May at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester, England. The participants run downhill after a Double Gloucester cheese, which the winner gets to keep. Theoretically they’re trying to catch the cheese, but it rapidly gets up to 70 mph (knocking over a spectator in 1997) and this rarely happens.
The racers themselves get sprained ankles, broken bones and concussions, and the first-aid services are getting stretched as the race grows in popularity. Last year they ran out of ambulances.
