The Chinese Communist Party requires that all published books be assigned a “book number” by the government; between 2003 and 2004 the General Administration of Press and Publication banned around fifty periodicals and dictionaries for using registration numbers illegally obtained from other books. In January 2004 the People’s Daily reported that two men had been sentenced to seven and nine years in prison by a court in Anhui Province for “unlawful operation of a business.” The men had published a book of love poetry using fraudulent book numbers.
Archive
Miscellany
Economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parodic open letter to French parliament in 1845 that imagined the national lighting industry lobbying for a law to black out all windows in response to the “ruinous competition” of the sun, which was “flooding the domestic market.” “Be logical,” the letter concludes, “for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!”
At a seance in the White House in 1862, Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium, recalled that, after losing consciousness, she, channeling Daniel Webster, spoke for over an hour, during which President Abraham Lincoln was assured that the Emancipation Proclamation he had written but not signed would be “the crowning event of his administration and life” and that he needed to “stand firm” against dissenters. Arthur Conan Doyle later speculated that it “may have been one of the most important [moments] in the history of the United States.”
For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”
A Gettysburg resident, F. W. Biesecker, won the contract in 1863 to bury the Union dead, at the rate of $1.59 per corpse, in the town’s recently dedicated national cemetery. After the war, between 1865 and 1870, there were large-scale efforts to rebury all Union soldiers in national cemeteries; to separate them from Confederate corpses, workers assessed jacket color, shoe make, and cotton-underwear quality.
A twelfth-century-bc Chinese king consulted an oracle and was told his lucky charm would not be a tiger, dragon, bear, or leopard but rather a wise counselor. He soon came upon a sagacious old man fishing in the river and conscripted him into service. It is said the man’s virtue was such that he fished not with a hook but with a straight piece of iron; acknowledging his integrity, fish impaled themselves voluntarily.
Hatches of Rocky Mountain locusts (Melanoplus spretus) in 1874 and 1875 brought swarms up to 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide across the Great Plains. Numbers were estimated in the trillions. Farmers risked starvation. The swarm is believed to have been the largest mass of living insects ever witnessed by modern man—but within thirty years the species disappeared. “I can’t believe M. spretus is extinct,” said ecologist Dan Otte in 2014. “But where to look for it?”
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.”
In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
Puréed applesauce—the first food eaten in outer space, by John Glenn in 1962. Shrimp cocktail, macaroni and cheese, candy-coated peanuts, Metamucil wafers—among what he ate thirty-six years later aboard the spaceship Discovery.
A group of scientists in Madrid in 2012 found that children inherit a fear of the dentist more from fathers than from mothers.
Abdul Kassem Ismael, a tenth-century Persian grand vizier and author of an extensive Arabic dictionary, had a library of 117,000 volumes. According to one account, the scholar declined an invitation to serve in the court of the Samanid ruler Nuh II, insisting that four hundred camels would be required to transport his library. Other accounts report that Ismael did undergo the trip, and that the camels were lined up in the alphabetical order of the volumes they carried.
In 1923 Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg declined painter Wassily Kandinsky’s offer to join the Bauhaus, having heard that other members of the school were anti-Semitic. “For I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year,” Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky, “and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew.”
According to the Talmud, “If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limit of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it.” Jeremiah, a renowned fourth-century rabbi, once asked what the outcome would be if a bird were to have one foot inside the limit and the other outside. This was one quibble too many. “It was for this question,” the text relates, “that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the House of Study.”
Among the acts advertised for a show in the Isle of Wight in 1849 by the “Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos” were the Pudding Wonder and the Pyramid Wonder. The latter, it was noted, had been bought for five thousand guineas from “a Chinese Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after parting with the secret.” The performer and author of the ad copy was Charles Dickens.