“Your minds are full of all kinds of treacherous plans,” wrote Indian activist Tarabai Shinde, addressing men in an 1882 pamphlet. One plan: “Let’s bluff this moneylender and pocket a thousand rupees from him.” Another: “That woman Y, what a coquette she really is! What airs she gives herself! Must corner her one of these days and see whether some affair with her can be managed.” Such “insidious perfidies,” she concluded, “never enter a woman’s mind.”
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The Cincinnati Commercial complained in 1871 about the game of fly loo, a “detestable canker that destroys men’s souls.” Players selected sugar lumps and bet on which would attract a fly first. “Every afternoon from twenty to thirty of the very flower of our mercantile population retire to a private room and under locks and bolts give themselves up to this satanic game,” the article noted, “while the deserted ladies are languishing for a little male conversation below.”
In 1987 Nike paid both Capitol Records and Michael Jackson, owner of the publication rights to much of the Beatles’ catalog, a licensing fee of $500,000 to use “Revolution” in an advertisement. Lawyers for the Beatles filed a $15-million lawsuit, stating that the band didn’t “endorse or peddle sneakers or pantyhose.” The case was settled out of court.
According to a study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute published in 2013, there are in the U.S. around 84 million cats with owners and between 30 and 80 million feral cats, most of which are hunters. The Institute estimates that felines in the latter group kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year and around 15 billion mammals.
In ancient Indian espionage networks, a sattri was an orphan-spy trained from youth in palmistry, magic, omens, and augury.
In Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara suggested that a well-prepared revolutionary should carry the following items: rifle, ammunition, food, plate, knife, fork, canteen, antibiotics, paper, a compass, nylon cloth, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, a pair of pants, a book (“biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies”), a machete, a small bottle of gasoline, kindling, matches, needles, thread, and buttons.
By the end of the century, a report by the National Science Foundation in 1982 predicted, 40 percent of American homes will have “two videotex service”—a term describing the emergent conjunction of communications and computing. A U.S. Census report found in 2000 that 42 percent of American homes used the Internet. The first year the census started tracking U.S. computer usage was 1984.
Born on Lesbos around 700 BC, Terpander, a master of the kithara, was summoned to Sparta during a period of civil strife—an oracle had suggested bringing the “Lesbian singer” to help—and organized the city-state’s earliest civic music culture. Immensely popular there, he later returned for what was to be his last performance. While he was playing, a fig thrown by an adoring fan went directly into his mouth. Terpander choked on the fruit and died.
Samuel Johnson enlisted Tobias Smollett, author of Roderick Random, to help rescue Johnson’s “Negro servant Francis Barber” from naval service—“a state of life,” as James Boswell wrote, “of which Johnson always expressed the utmost abhorrence.” Johnson once said, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” At another time he claimed, “A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
A Hindu myth holds that the universe began as soul in the form of man, who looked around, saw nothing, and felt afraid. “Therefore,” goes the story, “one who is all alone is afraid.” The man reflected, “Since there is nothing other than me, of what am I afraid?” His fear vanished, since a being only “becomes afraid of a second.” But he felt no joy, so he created a female companion: a second being, whom he could fear.
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.”
The first ruler of a unified Chinese empire and father of the Great Wall, Emperor Shihuangdi commissioned a twenty-square-mile mausoleum, which took around 700,000 laborers more than thirty-five years to complete. Inside, there were about eight thousand terracotta soldiers, seventy burial sites, a zoo, and weapons triggered to go off in case of robbers. The chief craftsmen, it is believed, were also buried there to prevent them from betraying construction secrets.
A riot erupted in Constantinople in 532 that forced Justinian and his advisers to consider fleeing. Procopius wrote in History of the Wars that the emperor’s wife, Theodora—the only time in the work in which she speaks—told her husband, “If now it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty.” On hand, she noted, were money and boats.
“Utter damned rot!” is what William Berryman Scott, a former president of the American Philosophical Society, said in response to Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, first proposed in 1912. “Wegener is not seeking the truth,” said a doubtful geologist, “he is advocating a cause and is blind to every argument and fact that tells against it.”
The first lines spoken by the old shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale are, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”