At Uyun al-Hammam, an ancient graveyard discovered in northern Jordan, the remains of foxes were found buried alongside human remains, leading to speculation that humans may have kept red foxes as pets around sixteen thousand years ago, several millennia before animals were believed to have been domesticated. At one point, a human corpse had been disinterred and relocated. “Because the link between the fox and the human had been significant,” said one archaeologist studying the site, “the fox was moved as well.”
Archive
Miscellany
Pantagruelian feasts, common at Gallo-Roman villas, followed the Gallic custom of eating around a table rather than the Roman method of doing so while lying down supported by one elbow. After one banquet, it was recorded that all “remained seated on their benches. They had drunk so much wine and had so gorged themselves that the slaves and the guests lay drunk in every corner of the house, wherever they happened to stumble.”
Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.
In a tenth-century epistle by Ismaili collective the Brethren of Purity, animals put the actions of mankind on trial. “Your judges and jurists are the basest, wickedest pharaohs and tyrants!” declares a parrot prosecutor. A human is no sooner appointed judge than he is seen “trotting along on a prancing mule or an ass out of Egypt with a saddle and a parasol trailing to the ground,” all this being “the gift of a despot” or paid for by “what he could wring from the due of orphans and divert from the charitable trusts.”
Ahead of a visit from Hannah Arendt in 1971, Mary McCarthy purchased anchovy paste, which she knew Arendt enjoyed. When McCarthy pointed out where to find it in her cupboard, Arendt looked displeased. “She had a respect for privacy, separateness,” McCarthy later wrote. “I knew I had done something wrong in my efforts to please. She did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew her—a sign of love, though not always—thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all.”
Statistician Stephen Stigler wrote in 1980, “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” He identified this as a basic law of eponymy, admitted he was an “outsider to the sociology of science” acting in “flagrant violation of the institutional norms of humility,” and named the law after himself.
Shortly before Ezra Pound was indicted for treason for his anti-American broadcasts on Benito Mussolini’s Radio Rome, Ernest Hemingway wrote to poet Archibald MacLeish, “If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto, although maybe earlier.”
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.
A Babylonian medical handbook dating to 1700 bc offers a renal diagnostic that reads, “If his urine is like ass urine, that man suffers from ‘discharge.’ ” Other alarming symptoms of discharge: if his urine is “like beer dregs,” “like wine dregs,” or “like clear paint.”
“If you’re just going to sit there and stare at me, I’m going to bed,” Elvis Presley said, breaking an awkward silence when the Beatles visited him on August 27, 1965. As midnight snacks for his guests, he requested broiled chicken-livers wrapped in bacon and sweet-and-sour meatballs.
In 1980 seven members of Congress were caught up in the Abscam bribery scandal after an FBI sting. Florida congressman Richard Kelly was caught on surveillance camera stuffing $25,000 in cash into his pockets. “Does it show?” Kelly asked an undercover FBI agent dressed as a sheikh. Only one congressman refused the proffered bribe. “Wait a minute,” said Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. “What you are suggesting may be illegal.”
In 1876 Dr. Gustav Jaeger, zoologist and physiologist at the University of Stuttgart, began advocating the wearing of rough animal fibers, particularly undyed sheep wool, close to the skin; early customers of his “Sanitary Woollen System” included Oscar Wilde and Henry Stanley, who brought them on his expedition to Africa to search for Dr. Livingstone.
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
In 2003 about one-third of American babies between six months and two years old had watched a video from the Baby Einstein series, which promised exposure to culture, poetry, music, and foreign languages. A 2007 study reported that babies who watched the videos performed “10 percent lower on language skills” than babies who didn’t. Soon afterward, Disney spent about $100 million offering refunds to anyone who bought the videos between 2004 and 2009.
The oldest known tattoos belong to Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummified corpse who suffered from heart and Lyme disease, colonic whipworms, gallbladder stones, missing ribs, and arthritic joints. His sixty-one tattoos are patches of small charcoal incisions; their proximity to acupuncture points has led researchers to believe they were created for curative purposes.