Great Stork Derby

When financier Charles Vance Millar died in Toronto in 1926, he willed his fortune to the woman who had the most children in the next 10 years.

And people took him up on it — in the end, four women tied at nine births apiece. Each got $125,000.

The period is known as “The Great Stork Derby.”

| History · Oddities

And 5,000 Visitors Per Day

The White House has:

  • Six stories and 55,000 square feet of floor space
  • 134 rooms, including 35 bathrooms
  • 412 doors and 147 windows
  • 28 fireplaces
  • Eight staircases
  • Three elevators
  • A tennis court
  • A bowling lane
  • A movie theater
  • A jogging track
  • A swimming pool

Harry Truman called it “the finest prison in the world.”

| Trivia

Gentle Giant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MartinVanBurenBates.jpeg

Size was no impediment to Martin Van Buren Bates, a quiet schoolteacher who found that his enormous size (7’9″) served him better on the battlefields of the Civil War. The “Kentucky Giant” rose quickly from private to captain in the Fifth Kentucky Infantry; Union soldiers told of a “Confederate giant who’s as big as five men and fights like 50.”

After the war, Bates was touring Canada with a circus when he met Anna Haining Swan, another enormously tall person (7’5″), and they married in London, where Queen Victoria gave them two extra-large diamond-studded gold watches as wedding presents.

Their 18-pound child was stillborn, and they ordered an oversize house custom-built in Ohio, with 14-foot ceilings and giant furniture. “To see our guests make use of it,” wrote Bates, “recalls most forcibly the good Dean Swift’s traveler in the land of Brobdingnag.”

The pair toured again, and lost another son, this one 28 inches tall and weighing 22 pounds. “He looked at birth like an ordinary child of six months,” Bates wrote. But “with this exception our lot has been one of almost uninterrupted joy.”

When Anna died in 1886, Martin sold the house and married a woman of normal stature, with whom he lived peacefully until he died of nephritis in Seville in 1919.

| History · Oddities

Jimmy Hoffa’s Grave

Rumored whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body:

  • Buried in northern Michigan
  • Buried under the New Jersey Turnpike
  • Buried in an abandoned coal mine near Pittston, Pa.
  • Buried in Fresh Kills landfill, Staten Island, New York
  • Buried under the end zone at Giants Stadium in New Jersey
  • Buried in PJP Landfill in Jersey City, underneath the Pulaski Skyway
  • Mechanically converted to cement
  • Dissolved in an acid tank used to rechrome car bumpers
  • Rendered into fat at a rendering plant

His body has never been found, and in 1982 he was declared legally dead.

Ironically, his middle name was Riddle.

| Crime · Death

Prescription Abbreviations

Abbreviations used in prescriptions:

  • a.c. (ante cibum) – before meals
  • ad lib. (ad libitum) – use as much as one desires; freely
  • alt. h. (alternis horis) – every other hour
  • c (cibos) – food
  • D.A.W. – dispense as written
  • dc, D/C, disc – discontinue
  • e.m.p. (ex modo prescripto) – as directed
  • ex aq – in water
  • h.s. (hora somni) – at bedtime
  • L.A.S. – label as such
  • N.K.A. – no known allergies
  • noct. (nocte) – at night
  • NPO, n.p.o. (non per os) – nothing by mouth
  • p.c. (post cibum) – after meals
  • p.o. (per os) – by mouth or orally
  • s.a. (secundum artum) – use your judgement
  • sig – write on label
  • s.o.s., si op. sit (si opus sit) – if there is a need

Napoleon Bonaparte described medicine as “a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.”

| Science & Math · Trivia

Car Company Name Etymologies

Origins of car company names:

  • Cadillac: Named after the founder of Detroit, French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. Cadillac is a small town in the South of France.
  • Daewoo: “Great Universe” in Korean.
  • Mercedes: The first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, who worked for the early Daimler company around 1900.
  • Mitsubishi: “Water chestnut,” reflected as a stylized rhombus in the company’s logo.
  • Pontiac: A Native American Ottawa war leader.
  • Subaru: From the Japanese name for the Pleiades (Subaru was formed from a merger of seven other companies).
  • Volkswagen: The “people’s car.”
  • Volvo: Latin for “I roll.”
| Trivia

Latin Proverbs

Latin proverbs:

  • Audi alteram partem – “Hear the other side.”
  • Credo quia absurdum – “I believe it because it is absurd.”
  • Errare humanum est; perseverare diabolicum – “To err is human; to repeat error is of the devil.”
  • Ex nihilo nihil fit – “Nothing comes from nothing.”
  • Festina lente – “Make haste slowly.”
  • Gutta cavat lapidem – “Constant dropping wears the stone.”
  • Mundus vult decipi – “The world wants to be deceived.”
  • Natura non contristur – “Nature isn’t sentimental.”
  • Quem di diligunt, adulescens moritur – “Whom the gods love dies young.”
  • Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor – “I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way.”

The motto of the Addams Family is Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc — “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.”

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