Americans think of the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as a patriotic anthem — which is ironic, because everyone else does, too. We stole the tune from the British, who know it as “God Save the Queen,” and the same melody has served as the national anthem of Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.
When England met Liechtenstein in a Euro 2004 qualifying football match, they had to play the same music twice.
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” — Yale economist Irving Fisher, Oct. 16, 1929
Curious how a new book was selling, Victor Hugo wired his publisher:
?
He got this reply:
!
In 1963, Peter Reyn-Bardt killed his wife and buried her in a peat bog in Cheshire County, England. Twenty years later, when a body was discovered, he assumed he’d been caught and turned himself in.
He should have waited. An investigation showed that the body was not his wife’s, but that of an Iron Age man who had died two thousand years earlier and been eerily preserved in the cold acid bog.
They convicted Reyn-Bardt anyway.
Vatican City has the highest per capita crime rate of any nation on earth.
The King and I has never been performed in Thailand.
On the morning of Feb. 8, 1855, residents of Devon, England, awoke to find a series of prints in the snow. Resembling cloven hooves, the “devil’s footprints” ran through the countryside for more than 100 miles, largely along straight lines and seemingly unimpeded by rivers, haystacks and other obstacles.
Some attribute the prints to hopping mice, whose jumps can leave hooflike marks, but they’d have to be pretty ambitious mice — the tracks covered more than 100 miles, topping houses and high walls. On the other hand, no one has offered a better explanation.
Pearl Harbor as seen from a Japanese attack plane.
“I can run wild for six months,” Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had predicted. “After that, I have no expectation of success.”
The elephant is the only animal with four knees.
Paul McCartney’s working lyrics for “Yesterday”:
Scrambled eggs
Have an omelette with some Muenster cheese
Put your dishes in the wash bin please
So I can clean the scrambled eggs
Join me do
There’s a lot of eggs for me and you
I’ve got ham and cheese and bacon too
So go get two and join me do
Fried or sunny side
Just aren’t right
The mix-bowl begs
Quick, go get a pan, and we’ll scramble up some eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs
Scrambled eggs
Good for breakfast, dinner time or brunch
Don’t buy six or twelve, buy a bunch
And we’ll have a lunch on scrambled eggs
“The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it,” John Lennon remembered. “We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit; we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
