In 1463 John Weeks bequeathed six-and-eightpence to St. Anne and St. Agnes in Aldersgate ward for the purchase of wood to burn heretics. Weeks may have meant the gift as a helpful threat, hoping for heretics to save their souls before bonfires became necessary.
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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.”
Game developer Dong Nguyen released the mobile game Flappy Bird in 2013. By the end of January 2014, it had become the most popular free app in the iOS App Store. A month later Nguyen removed the game from platforms, believing it to be too addictive. The sudden removal drove up prices for cell phones with the game preinstalled. “I think it had become a problem,” said Nguyen. “To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”
In order to halt or slow the advance of glaciers, the Tlingit tribe of the northwest coast of North America used to sacrifice dogs and slaves by throwing them into the glacier’s crevasses in the hopes of appeasing the ice spirit.
During the rule of Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Carolingian Renaissance saw the revival of Latin studies, the creation of a royal scriptorium, Alcuin’s revision of the Vulgate Bible, and the advent of a minuscule (lowercase) writing system, which eased the labor of copying. Charlemagne himself, however, could barely write a word in any language.
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.”
“There is a dockyard at Woolwich where one hundred warships of all sizes are built yearly to replace ships lost to the enemy or which have become obsolete. Because of the high costs of armaments and machinery, the government is usually in debt and forced to borrow from the public,” observed Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, a Persian ambassador on a diplomatic visit to London in 1810.
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, advised son Ferdinand in 1771 not to support the Mozart family of musicians. “You ask me about taking the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, believing you have no need for a composer or useless people,” she wrote. “Furthermore, he has a large family.” The Mozart family had four members. Ferdinand did not make an offer.
Before leaving his post as Qi chancellor in 193 bc, Cao Can gave advice to his successor: “If you stir up the markets and empty out the jails, then evil men will have no place to stay and will make trouble for you elsewhere.” A footnote in the English text from translator Burton Watson explains: “It was an assumption among Han officials and intellectuals that most, if not all, men engaged in trade were swindlers.”
Crested ducks are known to perform acts of cannibalism, mallards acts of necrophilia.
A nineteen-year-old boy diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma requested help from the Make-A-Wish Foundation in 1998 to hunt a moose with his father. His request was denied. A year later the foundation instituted a national ban on firearm-related wishes, and the boy’s mother founded Hunt of a Lifetime, an organization devoted to sending terminally ill children deep-sea fishing or on hunting trips for sheep, elk, moose, or bear.
Toy company Mattel sued MCA Records in 1997, alleging the hit pop song “Barbie Girl” by Aqua violated trademark. Justice Alex Kozinski (who retired in 2017 while facing allegations of sexual misconduct) argued for the Ninth Circuit that the song was protected as parody. He ended his opinion, “The parties are advised to chill.”
“Not one cent for scenery,” Republican House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon said in opposition to President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation agenda. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson, at the signing of a conservation bill, said, “Today we are repealing Cannon’s law.”
When the seventh-century Japanese prince Shōtoku was having his tomb built, he told the laborers, “Cut here, trim there—I wish for no descendants.”
While on his deathbed in 1849, the Japanese artist Hokusai said to those gathered around him that he wished he could live another ten years. He paused, and went on: “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.” Then he died, at the age of eighty-nine.