To combat widespread tardiness in the Ivory Coast, President Laurent Gbagbo in 2007 backed a Punctuality Night contest, which touted the slogan “African time is killing Africa, let’s fight it.” Nine prizes were awarded to the most punctual civil servants and businesspeople. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. White Man’s Time,” legal adviser Narcisse Aka won the first-place prize, a $60,000 villa.
Archive
Miscellany
Menstrual taboos persisted in nineteenth-century Europe. In the Rhine it was said that women on their periods turned fermenting wine to vinegar, in France that they were unable to whip up a successful batch of mayonnaise, in Britain that “women should not rub the legs of pork with the brine-pickle at the time they are menstruating, or the hams will go bad.”
Dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel omitted mathematics from the final list of categories his prizes would specifically recognize, claiming the prize for physics would cover it. Rumors circulated—likely helped along by the miffed Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Sweden’s leading mathematician—that this was due to a romantic rivalry between Nobel and Mittag-Leffler; the woman had chosen the mathematician, and punishing the whole field was Nobel’s revenge.
A copy of crew rules kept by eighteenth-century pirate captain Bartholomew Roberts was found after his death in 1722. These granted each man equal title to “strong liquors at any time seized,” threatened with death anyone found seducing a woman “and carrying her to sea in disguise,” and prohibited discussion of “breaking up their way of living” until each pirate had earned £1,000.
After thousands of dockworkers went on strike in the Los Angeles area in 1923 and the Industrial Workers of the World called on workers in other industries to strike in solidarity, the police announced a ban on public meetings. Upton Sinclair organized a rally in response, saying, “We’re testing the right of the police to suppress free speech and assemblage.” As soon as he took the platform, a police captain threatened, “I’m taking you in if you utter a word.” Sinclair began reciting the First Amendment and, according to a longshoreman who was present, the captain promptly “grabbed the people’s novelist by the collar” and arrested him.
In 1878 the American consul in Bangkok presented a cat to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who named it Siam. It is believed to have been the first Siamese cat to enter the U.S.
Malingering amnesia, in which a person fakes symptoms of memory loss, is often associated with attempted financial gain, typically among personal-injury claimants. According to a 2003 study, 29 percent of criminals sentenced to life imprisonment claimed at their trials that they suffered from amnesia. A visual recognition test, such as the Test of Memory Malingering, can be used to detect fraud of this kind.
“The ancient Roman class struggle was only fought out within a privileged minority,” wrote Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed a purely passive pedestal for the combatants. People forget J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s significant expression: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”
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.”
During a battle with Scythians in Macedonia on April 29, 1091, Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus noted the midday sun “shedding its rays,” reported his daughter Anna Comnena in the Alexiad. He dispatched local peasants to bring water in skins or jars to his troops, who “sipped a drop of water, then returned to the fray.” The newly hydrated Byzantines wiped out their enemies, and a chant began: “All because of one day the Scythians never saw May.”
In Moscow in 1921, a group of actors formed the Blue Blouses, a theater company that acted out scenarios from the news. Their success inspired the creation of many similar amateur troupes. One joke that emerged from the movement went: Bim and Bom were the most popular clowns in revolutionary Moscow. Bim came out with a picture of Lenin and one of Trotsky. “I’ve got two beautiful portraits,” he announced, “I’m going to take them home with me!” Bom asked, “What will you do with them when you get home?” “Oh, I’ll hang Lenin and put Trotsky against the wall.”
In the spring of 1914 the International Workers of the World formed the Unemployed Union. As a publicity stunt the group published fake extracts from first-century Roman press in The Masses magazine. One item carried the headline JESUS OF NAZARETH LEADS HOBO ARMY ON JERUSALEM. “Softhearted sympathy is misplaced,” it read, “as we are informed from reliable sources that the Judean rioters belong chiefly to the class of professional unemployed and habitual roustabouts.”
A Japanese shogun in 1615 attempted to eradicate the popular fashions of the kabuki-mono, young men from the fringes of samurai communities who favored long hair with shaved foreheads and temples, large swords with showy red scabbards, imported velvet collars, and short kimonos with lead weights sewn into the hem. “Clothing should not be confusing,” stated a new samurai dress code.
During the fifth century, the body of a ten-year-old child was buried in the Umbrian town of Lugnano with a rock inside its mouth. The practice was part of a folk custom intended to prevent corpses from turning into vampires and infecting the living with malaria. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the lead archaeologist who uncovered the skeleton in 2018.
In 2016, after saxophonist Dan Fabbio was diagnosed with a brain tumor, neuroscientists in Rochester, New York, used functional MRI scans to create a brain map indicating areas crucial for music processing. Fabbio was awake during the surgery and, once the tumor was removed, played a Korean folk song to ensure his skill on saxophone remained; the song’s short notes allowed him to take shallow breaths so his brain would not protrude from his opened skull.