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Miscellany

Miscellany Luck

When Booker T. Washington and Austrian ambassador Ladislaus Hengelmüller visited the White House on the same day in November 1905, Hengelmüller took Washington’s overcoat by mistake. According to the Washington Post, he noticed the mix-up on finding in the pocket “the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon,” which he “heroically relinquished.”

Miscellany Luck

In Serbian oral tradition, fate often appears written on foreheads. A typical story tells of a man on the run from a plague personified as a woman. “It is not fated that I should kill you,” she says on catching him and seeing his forehead’s inscription. “You’ll be killed by a turtle.” Later, the man mows a field. His scythe hits a turtle, ricochets off its shell, and slices his leg. He dies soon after from blood poisoning.

Miscellany Luck

“The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner,” wrote Harper Lee—who loved casino gambling—in a 1990 letter, “is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.”

Miscellany Luck

Legend regarding the horseshoe as a lucky symbol holds that in the tenth century, while St. Dunstan was working in England as a farrier, the devil entered the forge and demanded his hooves be reshod. During the process, the future saint caused as much pain as he could, and the devil begged him to stop. Dunstan agreed—on the condition that Satan never enter a house where a horseshoe is on display.

Miscellany Luck

Suetonius reported that Caligula often cheated when playing dice. The emperor once interrupted a game to go into the courtyard, where he spotted a group of rich knights passing. He had them arrested, stole their goods, then “resumed the game in high spirits, boasting that his luck had never been better.”

Miscellany Luck

A 2011 study found that Chinese consumers are charged more due to “superstitious manipulations” of retail prices—fives and sixes appear more often than unlucky fours, eights and nines more than unlucky sevens. “Retailers,” the study reported, “are the clear winners.”

Miscellany Luck

“The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. “How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck.”

Miscellany Luck

It’s considered bad luck in parts of Mississippi for mourners to call a coffin pretty.

Miscellany Luck

In July 2003 details leaked of a new venture from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: an online market for financial speculation on possible terrorist attacks, assassinations, and coups. “Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results,” the Defense Department argued. “They are often better than expert opinions.” DARPA—already under fire for its proposed Total Information Awareness program—was forced to abandon the idea.

Miscellany Luck

“The die,” wrote geographer Pausanias circa 150, “is the plaything of youths and maidens, who have nothing of the ugliness of old age.” 

Miscellany Luck

“Among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal,” poet John Berryman told an interviewer in 1970, two years before his death. “Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

Miscellany Luck

According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.

Miscellany Luck

Thomas Jefferson never wrote or said, “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more I seem to have.” The quip was crafted by San Francisco humorist Coleman Cox for a 1922 collection titled Listen to This.

Miscellany Luck

On Friday, January 13, 1882, thirteen men met in New York City as the Thirteen Club; they walked under a ladder, ate lobster salad sculpted into the shape of a coffin, and sat beneath a banner reading morituri te salutamus (“we who are about to die salute you”). The following year, the club’s newsletter gleefully reported that “not a single member is dead.” 

Miscellany Luck

A young nobleman in ancient Athens fell in love with a statue of Agathe Tyche, goddess of good fortune. He hugged and kissed it, then offered the local council a large sum of money to purchase it. When his request was denied, he decorated the statue extravagantly with crowns and garlands, offered a sacrifice, uttered a lengthy lamentation, and killed himself.