While running the Vincent Astor Foundation, Brooke Astor established in 1991 an organization that provided furnishings to formerly homeless families, inspired by visits to two such families in Queens whose apartments were bare. “How can you build a new life if you don’t have any furniture?” Astor asked. “To move into a place and just sit there with a bag and not even have a teacup is terrible.”
Archive
Miscellany
“Considering how seldom people think of looking for sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a position from which it can be fully seen,” it’s rare to witness an excellent one, John Ruskin argued in 1843. Evelyn Waugh saw a radiant pink sunset behind a shadow-gray Mount Etna in 1929. “Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature,” he wrote, “was quite so revolting.”
For a 2005 British TV program, a full-size replica of the House of Lords was built in order to determine what damage would have been done had Guy Fawkes ignited the explosives during the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Everyone in the House, including King James I, and anyone within about three hundred feet, would have died.
A review of the sitcom The Hank McCune Show in a 1950 issue of Variety described the first known use of a laugh track on TV: “Although the show is lensed on film without a studio audience, there are chuckles and yucks dubbed in. Whether this induces a jovial mood in home viewers is still to be determined, but the practice may have unlimited possibilities if it’s spread to include canned peals of hilarity, thunderous ovations, and gasps of sympathy.”
According to a 2012 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, over 87 percent of global fish stocks are either “fully exploited” or “overexploited.”
A seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary to China once related a story about a Nanjing man who sued a local deity, his case being that the god had accepted his sacrifices but failed to save his ailing daughter and so must be either impotent or malicious. District officials balked but referred the case to the imperial court in Beijing, which ruled against the deity—declaring it officially useless, exiling its cult statue, and ordering its monastery be destroyed.
“Just opposite, an island of the sea, / There came enchantment with the shifting wind, / That did both drown and keep alive my ears,” wrote John Keats in Hyperion. It was published in a collection of poems in 1820; Keats died the following year. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from a visit to Lord Byron, drowned after his schooner, the Don Juan, capsized. His body washed up on the Tuscan shore a few days later. In his pocket was a copy of Keats’ poems.
John Stow records in his Survey of London that shortly after conquering England in 1066, William I decreed that “in every town and village, a bell should be nightly rung at eight o’clock, and that all people should then put out their fire and candle, and take their rest.” English speakers call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from the Anglo-Norman coeverfu, “cover fire.”
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 the “Those That Will Work” section of Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and London Poor, published in 1861, there is a profile of Jack Black, whose self-appointed title was “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty.” In addition to exterminating vermin royal and common, Black kept a collection of rats, which included a rare white one. Noting the white rat’s popularity with audiences, he bred it to sell the offspring; novelist Beatrix Potter is believed to have bought her albino rat Samuel Whiskers from the exterminator. It is speculated that the majority of albino rats, the variety most often used in science experiments, are descended from Black’s original pet.
According to the twelfth-century-bc Judicial Papyrus of Turin, Pharaoh Ramses III was assassinated in a conspiracy led by one of his wives. The trial documents state that thirty-eight people were condemned to death for the killing. The pharaoh’s body was not believed to betray any signs of violence until 2012, when a team of researchers analyzing CT scans discovered that his throat had been slit—straight through to the vertebrae.
Roman gladiators’ vegetarian diet was so full of beans and barley they were called hordearii, “barley men.” While serving as a gladiator-school physician, Galen criticized the diet; it built up bodies “not with dense and compressed flesh,” he wrote, “but instead rather more spongy.”
A section on law and justice in the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian manual of statecraft, describes an apparently coveted capital punishment. “Being gored to death by an elephant is as meritorious as having the sacred bath at the end of the ashvamedha horse sacrifice,” it reads. Anyone seeking this sentence is required to provide gifts of rice, wine, and garlands as well as “a piece of cloth to clean the tusks.”
“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.
“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.”