White Heat

http://www.google.com/patents?id=LoE4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Ralph R. Maerz patented this snowball maker in 1989, to produce balls with an “aesthetically pleasing and aerodynamically sound round shape.”

It would have been a doomsday weapon in Edinburgh in 1838, when a snowball fight escalated into a full-scale riot:

On the 10th January some snowballing took place in front of the College, in which the students took part. The warfare between the students and the townspeople was renewed on the 11th, and became more serious. Several shop windows were broken, the shops were closed, and the street traffic suspended. The students, believing that the constables took the side of the mob against them, appeared on the 12th armed with sticks, to defend themselves against the constables’ batons. Then a regular riot took place, sticks and batons being freely used, and matters became so serious that the magistrates found it necessary to send to the Castle for a detachment of soldiers of the 79th Highlanders, which arrived and drew up across the College quadrangle, and peace was restored. [University Snowdrop, 1838]

This may be history’s only instance of military intervention in a snowball fight. Five students were tried; all were acquitted.

| Society · Technology

Music Appreciation

“Debussy’s music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?” — New York Post, 1907

“It is probable that much, if not most, of Stravinsky’s music will enjoy brief existence.” — New York Sun, Jan. 16, 1937

“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.” — Nicolai Soloviev, Novoye Vremya, St. Petersburg, Nov. 13, 1875

“Rigoletto is the weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody.” — Gazette Musicale de Paris, May 22, 1853

“Sure-fire rubbish.” — New York Herald Tribune on Porgy and Bess, Oct. 11, 1935

| Art · Society

Got That?

There is no Pope John XX. In numbering its pontiffs, the church skipped directly from Pope John XIX to Pope John XXI because confusion in the records led Pope John XX to believe that Pope John XIV had been succeeded by a second Pope John XIV, but that Pope John XV to Pope John XIX had overlooked his existence. So Pope John XX ordered his designation changed to Pope John XXI so that Pope John XV to Pope John XIX could be renumbered Pope John XVI to Pope John XX. But there was no second Pope John XIV, so Pope John XV to Pope John XIX were correctly numbered and the new Pope John XXI should have remained Pope John XX.

Worse, Pope John XVI was a disputed claimant whose number should have been reused, moving all subsequent Popes John back a notch. That hasn’t happened either.

The bottom line is that there’s still time for you to be Pope John XX if you want to. You just need to be elected by the College of Cardinals.

| Religion

Imaginative Literature

False book-backs ordered by Charles Dickens in 1851 to fill blank spaces in his study at Tavistock House:

  • Five Minutes in China (3 volumes)
  • Forty Winks at the Pyramids (2 volumes)
  • History of the Middling Ages (6 volumes)
  • Jonah’s Account of the Whale
  • Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar
  • Kant’s Ancient Humbugs (10 volumes)
  • Bowwowdom: A Poem
  • The Quarrelly Review
  • The Art of Cutting the Teeth
  • Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing (3 volumes)
  • Heavysides Conversations With Nobody (3 volumes)
  • Growler’s Gruffiology, With Appendix (4 volumes)
  • Miss Biffin on Deportment
  • Lady Godiva on the Horse
  • Munchausen’s Modern Miracles
  • On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets

And Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep, “as many volumes as are required to fill up.”

| Literature

Editorial License

Alexander III once wrote a warrant condemning a prisoner to transportation:

PARDON IMPOSSIBLE, TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The man appealed to the czar’s wife, who transposed the comma:

PARDON, IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The prisoner was released.

The actress Minnie Maddern Fiske once found this message attached to the mirror in her dressing room:

MARGARET ANGLIN SAYS MRS. FISKE IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.

She returned it to Anglin, who found she had added two commas:

MARGARET ANGLIN, SAYS MRS. FISKE, IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.

| Language

The Pororoca

Several times a year, the Atlantic sends a tidal wave up the Amazon. It’s loud, violent, and full of debris, and it can be up to 13 feet high.

So, naturally, people surf it.

A good ocean wave might last 30 seconds, but one surfer rode the pororoca for 37 straight minutes. It carried him 7.7 miles upriver.

| Oddities

Unquote

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”

— Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925

| Quotations · Technology

Satanic Compounds

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L-Fucitol_chemical_structure.png

Here’s a sugar alcohol derived from the North Atlantic seaweed Fucus vesiculosus. It’s called fucitol.

And its optical isomers are called D-fuc-ol and L-fuc-ol.

The glycoprotein that vampire bats use to prevent their victims’ blood from clotting is called draculin.

And diethyl azodicarboxylate is explosive, shock-sensitive, carcinogenic, and an eye, skin, and respiratory irritant, which helps to justify its acronym: DEAD.

See Juvenile Chemistry.

| Science & Math