In August 1911, a group of butchers discovered a 50-year-old “wild man” in their corral in Oroville, Calif. The local sheriff gave him into the keeping of a San Francisco anthropology museum, where he remained until his death five years later.
It’s believed that “Ishi” was the very last of his kind — the last of his group, the last of his people, and the last Native American in Northern California to have lived free of the encroaching European-American civilization.
The rest had been killed in encounters with the white man.
Even “Ishi” means only “man” in Yana, Ishi’s native language. When asked his actual name, Ishi had said, “I have none, because there were no people to name me.”
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Hafiz and Sadi are popular in the Europe
Hafiz was so great in Germany that the great German poet Goethe says: "O Hafiz, your word is as great as eternity for it has no begining and no end. Your word, as the canopy of Heaven, solely depends on itself. It is all signs, beauty and excellence." and Sadi was so great in France that the French named their sons Sadi, a good example is "Sadi Carnot", President of France (1887-1894).
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As many as 1 million workers died building the Great Wall of China.
It’s been called the “longest cemetery on Earth.”
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A young woman once asked Robert Peary, “But how does anyone know when he has reached the North Pole?”
“Nothing easier,” Peary said. “One step beyond the pole, you see, and the north wind becomes a south one.”
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In a 1632 version of the King James Bible, the printers omitted a “not” from Exodus 20:14, so the seventh commandment read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The printers were fined 300 pounds, a lifetime’s wages, and most of the copies were recalled. Eleven still exist
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In 1803, Australian Joseph Samuel was sentenced to hang for murder. The first attempt failed when the rope broke. A replacement rope stretched, letting Samuel’s feet touched the ground. And the third rope broke.
So they let him go.
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For a genocidal monster, Adolf Hitler was kind of a pansy:
He didn’t drink.
He largely avoided eating meat, beginning in the early 1930s. (“The world of the future will be vegetarian.”)
He slept with his dog, Blondi, a German Shepherd given to him by Martin Bormann.
He disapproved of cosmetics, since they contained animal byproducts, and he frequently teased Eva Braun about her makeup.
Hitler didn’t smoke, either, and he promoted aggressive anti-smoking campaigns throughout Germany. Witnesses reported that, upon learning of his suicide, many of his officers, aides and secretaries responded by lighting cigarettes.
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In Britain during the 1700s, pickpocketing was punishable by death … but the public hangings became prime targets for pickpockets.
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Witches weren’t the only ones in danger during the Middle Ages. In 1386, when a pig tore a French child’s face, the tribunal of Falaise put it on trial, ultimately sentencing it to be maimed and hanged in human clothing.
In 1474 the Swiss town of Basel tried a rooster for sorcery (it had allegedly produced an egg) and burned it at the stake.
Likewise wolves, snakes, crows, bats, owls, rats — even dogs and cats were put on trial. Like women, animals were considered demonic whenever men couldn’t understand their behavior.
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When Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was caught in a test tube by his son Charles.
He was convinced to do it by Henry Ford, who believed that a person’s dying breath contained his soul.
You can see it for yourself — the test tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
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Older than the pyramids, Ireland’s Newgrange lay lost for millennia until workers uncovered it while looking for building stone in the late 1600s.
No one knows who built it or why, but each year at the winter solstice the sun shines directly along a special passage into a chamber at its heart.
Oscar Wilde wrote, “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
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William Gladstone once asked Michael Faraday the practical value of electricity.
“Why, sir,” the physicist replied, “presently you will be able to tax it.”
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Insulting nicknames of U.S. presidents:
John Adams: His Rotundity
Martin Van Buren: Martin Van Ruin
William Henry Harrison: Granny Harrison
John Tyler: His Accidency
James Buchanan: Old Public Functionary
Ulysses S. Grant: Useless
Rutherford B. Hayes: His Fraudulency
Grover Cleveland: The Beast of Buffalo
Woodrow Wilson: Coiner of Weasel Words
Warren G. Harding: President Hardly
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Officially, the modern bikini was invented in Paris in 1946, but women’s two-piece athletic garments go back to 1400 B.C. This mosaic, found in a Roman villa near Sicily, dates from 300 A.D. Evidently they had fans
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The first known serial killer was actually a woman, known as Locusta, a professional poisoner who lived in Rome during the first century A.D.
In 54, she killed the Emperor Claudius with a poisoned dish of mushrooms, and the following year she was convicted of a separate poisoning. Hearing of this, Nero rescued her from execution — so she could poison Britannicus for him.
They made a good partnership, Nero guaranteeing her safety during his lifetime, but when he died the Romans took an awful revenge. According to legend, Locusta was publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, then torn apart by wild animals. Talk about cruel and unusual.publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, then torn apart by wild animals. Talk about cruel and unusual.
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Hitler thought the moon was made of ice. The idea came from an Austrian engineer named Hanns Hörbiger, who had suggested in 1913 that most objects in the solar system were icy, apparently because they’re shiny. No one took this seriously at the time, but German socialists began to support it during the ’20s, and eventually it became official Nazi policy, an alternative to “Jewish” science.
The idea was dismissed again after the war, but it had a strange holding power — as late as 1953 more than a million people in Germany, England and the United States still believed in Hörbiger’s theory.
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The Chinese practice of footbinding, popular since medieval times, was banned only in 1911. Young girls’ feet were wrapped in bandages to prevent them from growing longer than 4 inches. By age 3, four toes on each foot would break, often leading to infection, paralysis and atrophy. Some elderly Chinese women today still show disabilities.
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erican superstitions, collected by folklorist Fanny Bergen in 1896:
If you sneeze at table with the mouth full, an acquaintance will die soon. (Virginia)
If your shoe comes untied, your sweetheart is talking about you. (Alabama)
To go back into the house for something after starting on a journey is unpropitious. To have it brought out is all right. (Iowa)
To dream of bread is good luck. (Boston)
If you drop the tea-towel, it is a sign of company. (Pennsylvania)
Pass a baby through a window and it will never grow. (South Carolina)
Dimple in chin, devil within. (Maryland)
If you are a bridesmaid three times you will never stand in the middle. (New York)
Also:
Beware of that man,
Be he friend or brother,
Whose hair is one color
And moustache another.
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Some kings expire in bed. Some die gloriously in battle.
Alexander of Greece was bitten to death by monkeys.
He was walking in the royal garden in October 1920 when a monkey attacked his dog. He fought it off with a stick, suffering only a wound on the hand, but the monkey’s mate rushed in and gave him a much more severe bite. He died of blood poisoning three weeks later.
Alexander’s exiled father returned and led the nation into a bloody war with Turkey. “It is perhaps no exaggeration,” wrote Winston Churchill, “to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite.
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There are only two places on earth where diamonds can be found at their original volcanic source. The first is South Africa … and the second, improbably, is Arkansas, where visitors to Crater of Diamonds State Park unearth more than 600 diamonds each year.
More than 25,000 have been found to date — including the 40-carat “Uncle Sam,” which Wesley Bassum sold in 1924 for $150,000.
“Let us not be too particular,” wrote Mark Twain. “It is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.”
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Photos of Chang Woo Gow are deceiving because of his regular proportions: The Chinese giant was already 7 foot 9 when he came to England at age 19 — he wrote his name on a wall at a height of 10 feet at the request of the Prince of Wales.
Fourteen years later, when he appeared in Paris for the 1878 World’s Fair, Chang had grown to 8 feet and weighed 364 pounds. But he met the public clamor with consistent kindness, grace, good humor, and a quiet intelligence — he spoke six languages and, on one occasion, greeted by name several visitors whom he had encountered once 16 years earlier.
After a tour of European capitals, he retired to Bournemouth, where it is said that on evening walks he would light his cigar at gas streetlamps. When he died in 1893 at age 48 (and was buried in a coffin eight and a half feet long), his friend William Day remembered him as “a giant of giants, great of stature, but with the kindest nature and a heart as true and tender as ever beat.”
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History’s shortest-reigning king served for 20 minutes. When Charles X abdicated the French crown after the July Revolution of 1830, rule passed to his son, Louis XIX, who immediately resigned as well, over his wife’s entreaties.
The longest-reigning king is the pharaoh Pepi II, who ascended the Egyptian throne in 2278 B.C. at age 6. He ruled for 94 years.
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When Cleopatra was born, the Great Pyramid was already 2,500 years old.
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Sixteenth-century prophet Nostradamus predicted three Antichrists. The first two are thought to have been Napoleon and Hitler, but the third, known only as “Mabus,” hasn’t shown up yet. Here are the relevant quatrains:
Mabus will soon die, then will come
A horrible undoing of man and beast,
We will see vengeance at once,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when passes the comet.
His hand finally through the bloody ALUS,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea,
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black and angry one will make him repent of it.
What does this mean? Who knows? Presumably it’ll make sense at the time.
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On Aug. 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide into a plutonium bomb core at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The mass went critical, and Daghlian died of radiation sickness.
Exactly nine months later, physicist Louis Slotin was conducting an experiment on the same mass of plutonium when his screwdriver slipped and the mass again went critical. He too died of radiation sickness.
The mass became known as “the demon core.”
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Leprosy is the oldest recorded disease — it was reported as early as 1350 B.C. in Egypt.
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Croesus asked the oracle at Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. She replied that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire.
Croesus attacked, but the Persians beat him back, invaded his kingdom, and threw him into chains. He sent another message to the oracle: “Why did you deceive me?”
She replied that she had not deceived him — he had indeed destroyed a great empire.
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“Stendhal syndrome” refers to rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, and even hallucinations in the presence of great art.
It’s named for Stendhal himself, the 19th century French author, who reported experiencing it on an 1817 visit to Florence (and described it in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio).
It wasn’t formally described until 1979, when Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini documented more than 100 cases among visitors to Florence. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982.
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On several occasions, mathematician Maria Agnesi (1718-1799) arrived in her study to discover that a vexing problem had been solved for her — and, eerily, solved in her own handwriting.
Agnesi was a somnambulist. In her sleep she would walk to the study, make a light, and solve a problem that she had left incomplete.
Then she’d return to bed with no memory of what she’d done.
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Arguments against Galileo:
“Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move.” — Scipio Chiaramonti, University of Pisa, 1633
“Buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such a rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them to hold fast to the earth’s surface.” — Libertus Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, 1631
“If we concede the motion of the earth, why is it that an arrow shot into the air falls back to the same spot, while the earth and all the things on it have in the meantime moved very rapidly toward the east? Who does not see that great confusion would result from this motion?” — Polacco, Anticopernicus Catholicus, 1644
More recent:
“[Astronomers give the rate of Earth's rotation as 1,000 kilometers per hour.] An aircraft flying at this rate in the same direction as that of the rotation could not cover any ground at all. It would remain suspended in mid-air over the spot from which it took off, since both speeds are equal. There would, in addition, be no need to fly from one place to another situated on the same latitude. The aircraft could just rise and wait for the desired country to arrive in the ordinary course of the rotation, and then land; although it is difficult to see how any plane could manage to touch ground at all on an airfield which is slipping away at the rate of 1,000 kilometers per hour. It might certainly be useful to know what people who fly think of the rotation of the earth.” — Gabrielle Henriet, Heaven and Earth, 1957
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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.
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The Chevalier d’Eon (1728-1810) lived the first half of his life as a man and the second as a woman. Until age 49 d’Eon served as a diplomat and soldier in Louis XV’s France, fighting in the Seven Years’ War and spying in London for the king.
But in 1771 he claimed he was physically a woman and asked to be recognized as such. The government agreed, even financing a new wardrobe, and the chevalier spent his remaining 33 years as a woman, participating in fencing tournaments and even offering to lead a division of women soldiers against the Habsburgs.
Doctors who examined him after death discovered that his body was anatomically male.
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“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
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In 1977, a gravely ill 19-month-old Qatari girl was flown to a London hospital, where her condition continued to worsen, baffling her doctors.
On the sixth day, the observing nurse was startled to see that the girl began to lose her hair. She realized that the patient’s symptoms were strikingly similar to those in Agatha Christie’s novel The Pale Horse, which she had been reading.
In Christie’s novel, the murder victims had been killed by thallium poisoning. Tests confirmed elevated levels of thallium in the girl’s urine, and doctors treated her accordingly. Three weeks later she was well enough to go home.
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Adolf Hitler produced more than 2,000 paintings and drawings before World War I.
He once described himself as a misunderstood artist.
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“The greatest smoker in Europe died at Rotterdam, and left behind him the most curious of wills. He expresses the wish in his last testament that all the smokers of the country be invited to attend his obsequies, and that they smoke while following in the funeral cortege. He directs that his body be placed in a coffin, which shall be lined with wood taken from old Havana cigar boxes. At the foot of his bier, tobacco, cigars, and matches are to be placed. And the epitaph which he requests shall be placed upon his tombstone is as follows:
Here Lies
TOM KLAES,
The Greatest Smoker in Europe.
He Broke His Pipe
July 4, 1872.
Mourned by his family and
all tobacco merchants.
STRANGER, SMOKE FOR HIM!
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The sky isn’t blue. It’s actually violet, but a quirk of human vision makes us less sensitive to those wavelengths.
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In early 1912, writer Mayn Clew Garnett submitted a story to Popular Magazine. “The White Ghost of Disaster” told the story of the Admiral, an 800-foot ocean liner that strikes an iceberg at 22.5 knots in the North Atlantic and sinks, killing more than a thousand passengers, largely due to a scarcity of lifeboats.
On April 14, while the story was in press, the 882-foot Titanic struck an iceberg at 22.5 knots in the North Atlantic and sank, killing 1,517, largely due to a scarcity of lifeboats.
The story appeared in May.
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H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.
The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)
This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.
If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!
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The world’s first airmail stamps were issued for the Great Barrier Pigeon-Gram Service, which carried messages from New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island to the mainland between 1898 and 1908.
It was pretty good: The fastest pigeon, aptly named Velocity, made the trip to Auckland in only 50 minutes, averaging an astounding 125 kph. That’s only 40 per cent slower than modern aircraft.
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# 736 = 7 + 36
# NOOK combines two antonyms.
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ON KISS AND HANDSHAKE
Kissing began with the ancient Romans. When the warrior husband came home from his battles he would kiss hiswife to detect if she had gotten into the wine stores of the house by determining if the taste of wine was in her mouth. Just as handshaking began out of a sense of mistrust - it was to show that no weapons were in them - so too did kissing.
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