Paul Newman’s character amazingly eats fifty hard-boiled eggs in one hour in Cool Hand Luke. 141 hard-boiled eggs eaten in eight minutes is the actual world record, held by Joey Chestnut.
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President Herbert Hoover once praised a group of PR professionals. “You have taken over the job of creating desire,” he said, “and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines—machines which have become the key to economic progress.” It was 1928; the Great Depression began the following year.
In 1890 Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky was commissioned to study a disease destroying tobacco plants in Crimea. Filtering the sap from affected plants, Ivanovsky discovered in 1892 the presence of a small parasitic microorganism invisible under great magnification—a virus—which he thought was a minuscule bacterium. In 1898 Dutch microbiologist Martinus W. Beijerinck became the first person to recognize viruses as reproducing entities distinct from other organisms.
Four years after the Romanovs were executed by Bolsheviks, a woman claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia surfaced. She impressed skeptics with her ability to recall various details of the royal family’s life, and after Nicholas II’s cousin Grand Duke Alexander spent two days with her, he exclaimed, “I have seen Nicky’s daughter!” The woman spent decades fighting to be the legal heir to the Romanov fortune, losing her last suit in 1970. In the 1990s DNA evidence posthumously proved she was an imposter.
Thomas Aquinas was so absorbed in solving a philosophical problem while dining with Louis IX around 1269 that he believed himself to be in his own office; when the solution came to him, he slapped the table and called to his secretary—who was not present—to get ready to write. The king, “amazed and edified that a man’s mind could be so enraptured by the spirit that none of the body’s senses could disturb it,” summoned a scribe to record the revelation.
“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.
On Halloween 1981, a Los Angeles punk band called Fear was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Comedian John Belushi, who had invited Fear to play, brought in punks to watch the performance. Chaos ensued; SNL’s stage manager was hit in the chest with a pumpkin. “The real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” Fear’s lead singer later said. The band was banned from appearing again.
There are sixty-eight indigenous languages in Mexico, one of which, Ayapaneco, as of 2011, had only two known speakers—and they prefer not to speak with one another.
The American English term wooden nutmeg, meaning “anything false or fraudulent,” dates from 1829, when Connecticut traders were known to place fake wooden nutmegs in batches of real ones to defraud customers.
In October 2021 U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo tweeted that “parents should decide what their children are taught in schools.” One user responded, “Why even have teachers?” and another, “Why send children to school at all?” A third user quipped, “I think teachers should decide what surgeries people need to have.”
In a behavior known as “transient sexual mimicry,” male giant cuttlefish can assume the behavior and coloring of female cuttlefish in order to bypass larger males and impregnate their desired mates.
“He whose meat in this world do I eat,” reads the Hindu Laws of Manu, “will in the other world me eat.” Another verse simply warns not to “behave like the flesh-eating ghouls.”
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, insomniacs both, would walk together in circles around the dining room table until they were tired enough to sleep. When Emily died and Charlotte suffered alone, her insomnia worsened; she added to her route, often wandering down neighborhood streets and into the cemetery until daybreak.
In an 1846 math textbook from the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI, one exercise considers an exchange of 450 bags of potatoes for cash, 15 chests of oranges, and 185 bushels of carrots; the remainder is nuts. The question is posed: “How many bags of nuts did I receive?”
A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.