No functioning democracy has ever suffered a famine.
Shergar
Kidnappers don’t always target humans. On Feb. 8, 1983, a group of men abducted the Irish racehorse Shergar, winner of the 1981 Epsom Derby.
A local radio station received a ransom demand for £1.5 million, but the horse was never recovered, and to this day his fate is still unknown.
03/04/2018 UPDATE: In 2008, Telegraph reporter Andrew Alderson found the answer. (Thanks, Paul.)
Figure and Ground
If you’ve taken introductory psychology you know Rubin’s vase, which illustrates the principle of figure and ground: In the image on the left you can see two faces, or you can see a vase, but you can’t see both simultaneously.
A number of people have noticed the same thing in Canada’s modern flag, adopted in 1965 (below). Is this a symbol of Canada’s proud natural heritage or of two people bickering?
And what does that say about Canada?
Duck
The average American has 1 chance in 3,000 of being struck by lightning during his lifetime.
Curtain Call
“For 40 years I’ve been an actor on the American stage. My entire family is well represented in the entire field of show business. I’ve played this very city of Cincinnati for 30 or 40 years. I’ve never had a decent reception here. I’ve been waiting all this time, ladies and gentlemen, to say to you that you, the people of Cincinnati, are the greatest morons, the most unintelligent, illiterate bastards I have ever appeared before in my entire life. Take a good look at me, because you’ll never see me again.”
— Vaudeville performer Richard Bennett finally gives up
A for Effort
After a snowstorm at Cornell, inveterate prankster Hugh Troy (1906-1964) once used a wastebasket to make “rhinoceros tracks” across campus. He directed the tracks to a lake that supplied drinking water for the area and cut a hole in the ice.
The police had to drag the lake in the middle of a snowstorm, and many residents stopped drinking the water until Troy revealed the prank through an anonymous letter.
Speed Limit
Light travels about one foot per nanosecond.
Inventory
“Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s, four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !” — Lee Sallows
Rumors of My Death
Almanac writing can be a nasty business. In January 1708, someone published an anonymous letter predicting the death of writer John Partridge. That’s bad enough, but in March Partridge read that he had indeed died. A third letter even presented a eulogy:
Here five foot deep lyes on his back
A cobbler, starmonger, and quack —
Who to the stars in pure good-will,
Does to his best look upward still.
Weep all you customers that use
His pills, his almanacks or shoes.
Evidently Partridge had some trouble convincing people that he was still alive. Mourners reportedly kept him awake at night, grieving under his window. The real culprit was Jonathan Swift, who loved April Fool’s Day and had been angered by Partridge’s unbelief.
Taking a cue, in Poor Richard’s Almanac Ben Franklin predicted the death of rival almanac writer Titan Leeds on Oct. 17, 1733. When Leeds announced his survival, Franklin denounced the claim as a fraud published in the dead writer’s name. This continued for five years until Leeds really did die. Franklin congratulated the usurpers on their good sense.
Oops
Here’s a famous goof from the 1935 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary.
There’s no such word as dord — the chemistry editor had intended it to say “D or d”, but somehow his slip got misinterpreted and the mistake stayed on the books until 1939.
Editor Philip Babcock Gove later wrote that it was “probably too bad, for why shouldn’t dord mean ‘density’?”