A temperance movement “Anti-Saloon Battle Hymn” from 1907 describes the saloon as an “awful, unspeakable monster” that “makes millions of widows and orphans, / and drunkards of millions of men” and asks that “from its shackles, O God, do thou free us, / and for freedom we ever will stand.” In 1914 the song “Emancipation” pleaded for “not one slave” of alcohol to remain in this nation of “true liberty so grand.”
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Originally known as Yellow Hook, after the color of soil found in the region, the Brooklyn neighborhood changed its name to Bay Ridge in 1853 to avoid popular association with yellow fever.
While manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon put his batting lineup in order for a July 2014 game using the field position numbers 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 in honor of the Tommy Tutone hit. The designated hitter served as the 0; the catcher (2) and second baseman (4) batted eighth and ninth. The Rays lost the game to the Detroit Tigers by a score of 1–8.
According to Thucydides, before the plague of Athens, the Athenians were divided over whether the disaster predicted by an oracle would be a limos (famine) or a loimos (plague). “In the case of unwritten prophecies,” wrote one classicist, “it would be impossible to determine which word the speaker meant to use. The ambiguity of the sound would have been its chief recommendation to the soothsayer.”
The verb ostracize derives from the Greek word ostracon, a potsherd on which each citizen wrote the name of one well-known citizen whom they wished to banish from the polis. The first published use of the word in English dates from 1649, in a poetic elegy to young Lord Hastings, a Royalist supporter of Charles I: “Therefore the Democratic stars did rise,/And all that worth from hence did ostracize.” The author was Andrew Marvell, who, not long after, served in Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth government along with the secretary for foreign tongues, John Milton.
Paul Cézanne’s father, a banker, was fond of telling his son, “Young man, young man, think of the future! With genius you die, with money you live.” At least this is according to Émile Zola, who recalled the words of admonishment in one of his letters to his friend Paul. The two had first met as teenagers at boarding school in the 1850s.
Papal indulgences were brisk business for early printers, since they were single sheets and the type did not need to be reset. Between 1498 and 1500, the Benedictine monastery in Catalonia commissioned more than 200,000 indulgences from printers in the area. A total of two thousand single-sheet items survive from the whole of the fifteenth century; over one-third are indulgences.
It is said that Anton Chekhov’s last words were, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.” He died in Badenweiler, Germany, in 1904, and his body was transported back to Moscow in a refrigerated railcar marked fresh oysters.
In order to economize while sending a telegram, people sometimes relied on code books that reduced phrases to single words. From the third version of Anglo-American Telegraphic Code, published in 1891: Babylonite (Please provide bail immediately), Titmouse (I [we] accept with pleasure your invitation for the theater tomorrow evening), Mahogany (Malaria prevails extensively), Enringed (the news causes great excitement).
“To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong,” Aldous Huxley wrote, en route to Borneo, in his travelogue Jesting Pilate. “The philosophies, the civilizations, which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect. That knowledge, which only travel can give, is worth, it seems to me, all the trouble, all the discomfort and expense of a circumnavigation.”
In 2014 Amelia Hamrick, an undergraduate at Oklahoma Christian University, noticed musical notes written across the buttocks of one of the denizens of hell depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. She transcribed it into modern notation and made a recording she posted on her blog. “So yes,” she wrote, “this is literally the 600-year-old butt song from hell.” The post went viral.
Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of peritonitis, having swallowed a toothpick at a party. He was sixty-four. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic eye-drop cap at a hotel in 1983. He was seventy-one.
In a June 2019 article published in Nature Climate Change, researchers concluded that the “northernmost spatial regime boundary” for birds in the Great Plains of North America has shifted to the north by more than 350 miles over the past forty-six years, an indication of rapid global change. “Climate change, anthropogenic pressures, wildfire trends, and woody plant invasions,” according to the researchers, “have all operated along a putatively south-to-north trajectory over the past decades.”
One out of every two million lobsters is blue. One out of every thirty million lobsters is yellow, the creature’s rarest coloration.
Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds.