Earwitness

Mike and Tobye Madison of Baytown, Texas, had two odd experiences in January 1984: Their house was burglarized, and Baby, their exotic talking bird, began saying “Come here, Robert. Come here, Ronnie.”

“When the lady told me about it I almost broke up,” Baytown police detective Reggie Harper told the Associated Press. “I almost didn’t write it down.”

Apparently Baby, a female yellow-headed Amazon, was repeating the words of the intruders. This helped police identify two men and a 16-year-old boy and charge them with a series of house burglaries involving the loss of $50,000 in property.

Forty years earlier, the same thing had happened in New York.

| Crime

Set Dressing

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In 1889 Monet was midway through a landscape when a pivotal oak tree sprouted leaves.

He mulled this for a few days and then approached the landowner with an unusual proposition. On May 9 he wrote:

I am overjoyed — permission to remove the leaves of my beautiful oak has been graciously accorded! It was a huge job bringing large enough ladders into this ravine. Enfin, it is done, two men have been busy with it since yesterday. Isn’t it a feat to finish a winter landscape at this time of year?

In The Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopaedia (1984), Bill Hartston remarks, “Monet makes the leaves go aground.”

| Art

Working Late

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For twenty-five years past an oral addition to the written standing orders of the native guard at Government House, near Poona, had been communicated regularly from one guard to another, on relief, to the effect that any cat passing out of the front door after dark was to be regarded as His Excellency the Governor, and to be saluted accordingly. The meaning of this was that Sir Robert Grant, Governor of Bombay, had died there in 1838, and on the evening of the day of his death a cat was seen to leave the house by the front door and walk up and down a particular path, as had been the Governor’s habit to do, after sunset. A Hindu sentry had observed this, and he mentioned it to others of his faith, who made it a subject of superstitious conjecture, the result being that one of the priestly class explained the mystery of the dogma of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another, and interpreted the circumstance to mean that the spirit of the deceased Governor had entered into one of the house pets. It was difficult to fix on a particular one, and it was therefore decided that every cat passing out of the main entrance after dark was to be regarded as the tabernacle of Governor Grant’s soul, and to be treated with due respect and the proper honours. This decision was accepted without question by all the native attendants and others belonging to Government House. The whole guard, from sepoy to subadar, fully acquiesced in it, and an oral addition was made to the standing orders that the sentry at the front door would ‘present arms’ to any cat passing out there after dark.

— Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, A Varied Life, 1906

| Oddities

Return to Sender

On Sept. 30, 1826, a beachcomber found a bottle in the surf at Barbados. Inside was a penciled note:

The ship the Kent, Indiaman, is on fire. Elizabeth, Joanna, and myself commit our spirits into the hands of our blessed Redeemer; His grace enables us to be quite composed in the awful prospect of entering eternity. Dun. McGregor. 1st of March, 1825. Bay of Biscay.

Strangely, the note’s author arrived a short time later. Duncan MacGregor, now a lieutenant colonel in the 93rd Highlanders, had been a major bound for India when the Kent took fire. After he and his family had been rescued by a passing brig, an explosion aboard the burning vessel had cast the bottle into the sea, and it had floated across the Atlantic as if to rejoin him.

A regimental historian confirmed the story after MacGregor’s death in 1881. “[The note] is still preserved by his son, who was at the time of the loss of the Kent a child of only five weeks old, and was the first saved from the wreck.”

(Thanks, Evan.)

| Oddities

Great Men

Dr. Franklin had a party to dine with him one day at Passy, of whom one-half were Americans, the other half French, and among the last was the Abbé Raynal. During the dinner he got on his favorite theory of the degeneracy of animals, and even of man in America, and urged it with his usual eloquence. The Doctor, at length, noticing the accidental stature and position of his guests at table, ‘Come,’ says he, ‘M. l’Abbé, let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one-half Americans and one-half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated.’ It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself particularly, was a mere shrimp. He parried the appeal by a complimentary admission of exceptions, among which the Doctor himself was a conspicuous one.

— Thomas Jefferson, quoted in James Parton, Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, 1864

| Science & Math

Skyward

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In 1964, as the Apollo program prepared to land a man on the moon, it received unexpected news from Zambia. “I’ll have my first Zambian astronaut on the moon by 1965,” announced Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, a grade-school science teacher and director-general of the Zambian National Academy of Space Research.

“We are using our own system, derived from the catapult,” he explained. It would fire a 10-foot aluminum and copper rocket that would carry 10 Zambian astronauts ultimately to Mars.

“I’m getting them acclimatized to space travel by placing them in my space capsule every day. It’s a 40-gallon oil drum in which they sit, and I then roll them down a hill. This gives them the feeling of rushing through space. I also make them swing from the end of a long rope. When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope — this produces the feeling of free fall.”

Unfortunately, “I’ve had trouble with my spacemen and spacewomen,” Nkoloso complained. “They won’t concentrate on spaceflight; there’s too much lovemaking when they should be studying the moon. Matha Mwamba, the 17-year-old girl who has been chosen to be the first woman on Mars, has also to feed her 10 cats, who will be her companions on her long space flight.”

The U.N. denied the £700 million Nkoloso needed “to really get going,” but his enthusiasm remained undiminished. In 1968 he congratulated the returning Apollo 8 team but urged: “Let us make a Zambian rocket today. We shall never be content to remain behind other races. This is our heavenly destiny, our natural ambition and cultural hegemony.”

| Oddities · Science & Math

“A Tragic Calendar”

JANet was quite ill one day.
FEBrile troubles came her way.
MARtyr-like she lay in bed;
APRoned nurses softly sped.
“MAYbe,” said the leech judicial,
“JUNket would be beneficial.”
JULeps, too, though freely tried,
AUGured ill, for Janet died.
SEPulcher was sadly made;
OCTaves pealed and prayers were said.
NOVices with many a tear
DECorated Janet’s bier.

— Carolyn Wells, Folly for the Wise, 1904

| Language · Poems