Notable people who have had a fear of flying:
- Isaac Asimov
- Doris Day
- Aretha Franklin
- Jackie Gleason
- Kim Jong-Il
- Stanley Kubrick
- Loretta Lynn
- John Madden
- Matthew Sweet
- Billy Bob Thornton
Walkie-Talkie
The French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie.
Death of a Climbing Boy
Account of the death of a chimney sweep’s boy, taken in evidence before the Parliamentary Committee on Climbing Boys, 1817:
“On Monday morning, 29 March 1813, a chimney sweeper of the name of Griggs attended to sweep a small chimney in the brewhouse of Messrs Calvert and Co. in Upper Thames Street; he was accompanied by one of his boys, a lad of about eight years of age, of the name of Thomas Pitt.
“The fire had been lighted as early as 2 o’clock the same morning, and was burning on the arrival of Griggs and his little boy at eight. The fireplace was small, and an iron pipe projected from the grate some little way into the flue. This the master was acquainted with (having swept the chimneys in the brewhouse for some years), and therefore had a tile or two broken from the roof, in order that the boy might descend the chimney. He had no sooner extinguished the fire than he suffered the lad to go down; and the consequence, as might be expected, was his almost immediate death, in a state, no doubt, of inexpressible agony.
“The flue was of the narrowest description, and must have retained heat sufficient to have prevented the child’s return to the top, even supposing he had not approached the pipe belonging to the grate, which must have been nearly red hot; this however was not clearly ascertained on the inquest, though the appearance of the body would induce an opinion that he had been unavoidably pressed against the pipe.
“Soon after his descent, the master, who remained on the top, was apprehensive that something had happened, and therefore desired him to come up; the answer of the boy was, ‘I cannot come up, master, I must die here.’ An alarm was given in the brewhouse immediately that he had stuck in the chimney, and a bricklayer who was at work near the spot attended, and after knocking down part of the brickwork of the chimney, just above the fireplace, made a hole sufficiently large to draw him through. A surgeon attended, but all attempts to restore life were ineffectual.
“On inspecting the body, various burns appeared; the fleshy part of the legs and a great part of the feet more particularly were injured; those parts too by which climbing boys most effectually ascend or descend chimneys, viz. the elbows and knees, seemed burnt to the bone; from which it must be evident that the unhappy sufferer made some attempts to return as soon as the horrors of his situation became apparent.”
Unquote
“All great men are monsters.” — Honoré de Balzac
Number Names
The smallest number whose name is spelled with:
- 3 letters is 1 (one)
- 4 letters is 4 (four)
- 5 letters is 3 (three)
- 6 letters is 11 (eleven)
- 7 letters is 15 (fifteen)
- 8 letters is 13 (thirteen)
- 9 letters is 17 (seventeen)
- 10 letters is 24 (twenty-four)
- 15 letters is 103 (one hundred three)
- 20 letters is 124 (one hundred twenty-four)
- 25 letters is 1104 (one thousand one hundred four)
- 30 letters is 1117 (one thousand one hundred seventeen)
- 40 letters is 13,373 (thirteen thousand three hundred seventy-three)
- 50 letters is 113,373 (one hundred thirteen thousand three hundred seventy-three)
- 100 letters is 11,373,373,373 (eleven billion three hundred seventy-three million three hundred seventy-three thousand three hundred seventy-three)
Kruibeke
If you feel kind of standoffish at parties, you might want to avoid Kruibeke for a while.
The mayor of that Belgian municipality, Antoine Denert, has created a Department of Tenderness, insisting that “people don’t cuddle anymore, and that’s the reason why there are so many conflicts.”
That’s, um, nice. Denert said he hoped to inspire other governments to reconsider their own policies, which rarely even get to second base. “Why not change the Ministry of Defense into the Ministry of Tenderness?” he asked helpfully. “The war in Iraq would never have started.”
In a disturbing show of civic enthusiasm, the mayor vowed to “set an example and start in my own village by caressing, cuddling, and kissing as many people as possible.” His wife’s opinion is not recorded.
There’s Your Answer
In 1211, Emperor Frederick II of Germany raised dozens of children in silence, trying to discover the natural “language of God.” He never got an answer: The children never spoke, and all of them ultimately died in childhood.
Unquote
“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” — Aristotle
Words With Early Pedigrees
Surprisingly old words:
- SPACESHIP (first print use: 1894)
- ACID RAIN (1858)
- HAIRDRESSER (1771)
- ANTACID (1753)
- HAS-BEEN (1606)
- EARTHLING (1593)
- MILKY WAY (ca. 1384, even earlier in Latin)
Amazingly, light beer (“leoht beor”) first shows up around the year 1000.
Wilhelm Scream
The next time you see Star Wars, watch for the scene when a Death Star stormtrooper falls into a chasm before Luke and Leia swing across it. That stormtrooper’s scream is more than 50 years old — and a time-honored in-joke among Hollywood sound designers.
The “Wilhelm scream” was originally recorded for the feature Distant Drums in 1951. From there it went into the studio’s sound effects library, where it was rediscovered in 1977 by Star Wars sound editor Ben Burtt. Burtt adopted it as his personal signature, and he enlisted a group of like-minded Hollywood sound-effects people to keep it alive.
You can hear the scream in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Beauty and the Beast, Reservoir Dogs, Titanic, Spider-Man … more than 100 features, including this summer’s Revenge of the Sith.
It’s called the “Wilhelm scream” because that’s the name of the original screamer, a man who’s dragged underwater by an alligator in Distant Drums. Remember that when Buzz Lightyear is knocked out of the bedroom window in Toy Story — it’s the same sound.