In the days after a July 1917 German air raid on London that killed forty civilians, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born owner of Selfridges department store, took out ads declaring he would award $5,000 of life insurance on behalf of anyone killed by such an attack while shopping at his store. His building, he noted, was made out of concrete.
Archive
Miscellany
“Thank the good God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh,” wrote fourteen-year-old Virginia Reed, a surviving Donner Party member, in an 1847 letter. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody and never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” Reed reported being “pleased with California, particularly with the climate.”
A fifteenth-century Tunisian sex manual relates that “a big beard denotes a small mind” and tells of a long-bearded man who reads a quote to this effect on the back of a book. Afraid of being seen as a fool, he tries to trim his beard by setting it on fire but burns it off entirely. He then writes on the book below the quote, “These words are entirely true. I, who am now writing this, have proved their truth.”
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.”
In his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius tells of Socrates’ disciple Aristippus, who “derived pleasure from what was present, and did not toil to procure the enjoyment of something not present.” Such opportunism was not widely admired; Aristippus was sometimes called “the king’s poodle.”
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.
“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.
During the 1679 plague of Vienna, a drunken balladeer named Marx Augustin passed out in a gutter. Gravediggers, mistaking him for dead, carried him beyond the city walls and threw him and his bagpipes into a pit filled with the bodies of plague victims. Upon waking the next day, Augustin was unable to get out of the mass grave. He played his bagpipes and was eventually rescued. “Ach, du Lieber Augustin,” a defiant song of loss based on his misadventure, remains a favorite in Vienna today. In 1908 composer Arnold Schoenberg quoted the folk song in the second movement of his String Quartet no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, op. 10.
While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
“There is one thing at which I cannot sufficiently wonder,” wrote Pliny the Elder, “that of some trees, the very memory has perished, and even the names recorded by authors have passed out of knowledge.”
Accounts varied of the Great Famine of 1315–22, during which more than 10 percent of Europe’s population died. In Flanders: “Parents killed their children and children killed parents, and the bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows.” In France: “There was no wine in the whole kingdom.”
The title track of Van Morrison’s 1990 album Enlightenment opens with the lyrics “chop that wood, carry water,” a reference to the popular Zen Buddhist dictum that before enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water, and that after enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water. The origin is a verse by the late eighth-century Chinese poet Layman Pang, who declared that his “supernatural power and marvelous activity” was “drawing water and carrying firewood.”
Derived from the French bouder (to pout or sulk), the word boudoir once meant “a place to pout in.” “I have a boudoir, but it has one fault,” the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to a female companion in 1748. “It is so cheerful and so pleasant that there will be no such thing as pouting in it when I am alone.” Its “fault,” he added, could be remedied “by introducing those clumsy, tiresome, and disagreeable people whom I am obliged to admit now and then.”
During the fifth century, the body of a ten-year-old child was buried in the Umbrian town of Lugnano with a rock inside its mouth. The practice was part of a folk custom intended to prevent corpses from turning into vampires and infecting the living with malaria. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the lead archaeologist who uncovered the skeleton in 2018.
In 2009 a twenty-four-year-old policewoman in Long Branch, New Jersey, responded to complaints about an “eccentric-looking old man” peering into a house. She asked the man his name. “I’m Bob Dylan,” he said. “I’m on tour.” Taking him for a liar, she put him in the back of her car and drove him to his hotel, where others confirmed he really was the musician. “I think he named a couple of songs,” she later recalled. “But I wouldn’t have known any of the songs.”