In a tenth-century epistle by Ismaili collective the Brethren of Purity, animals put the actions of mankind on trial. “Your judges and jurists are the basest, wickedest pharaohs and tyrants!” declares a parrot prosecutor. A human is no sooner appointed judge than he is seen “trotting along on a prancing mule or an ass out of Egypt with a saddle and a parasol trailing to the ground,” all this being “the gift of a despot” or paid for by “what he could wring from the due of orphans and divert from the charitable trusts.”
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When Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy discovered that with radioactivity one atom can be transformed into another, Soddy recalled blurting out “Rutherford, this is transmutation: the thorium is disintegrating and transmuting itself into argon gas.” As “the words seemed to flash through” Soddy “as if from some outside force,” Rutherford replied, “For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”
“I’m not leaving, and by the way I’m hungry,” President George W. Bush said on September 13, 2001, when he was told there was a credible threat to the White House. He ordered a cheeseburger.
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?”
The duke of Milan, Azzo Visconti, commissioned a clock to be built in the campanile of San Gottardo; upon its completion in 1336 his secretary, Galvano Fiamma, wrote that the “admirable” timepiece had bells that struck “twenty-four times according to the number of the twenty-four hours of the day and night.” He concluded, “This is exceedingly necessary for people of all estates.” It is the first documented hour-striking clock in a public setting. A Milanese chronicle later reported Visconti’s time of death as August 14, 1339, in the twentieth hour—the first modern reference to an hour indicator in such a context.
After he was captured by pirates, Diogenes of Sinope was sold as a slave to Xeniades, who had the Cynic philosopher educate his sons. “At home he taught them to attend to their own needs,” writes Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, “to live on plain food and water, to wear their hair short and unadorned, to go barefoot and without a tunic, and to be silent and keep their eyes lowered when walking in the streets.”
“It is truly a larger investigation than was conducted against the after-inquiry of the JFK assassination,” declared John W. Dean III to H.R. Haldeman and President Richard Nixon hours after seven men had been indicted in connection with the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. “Isn’t that ridiculous,” Haldeman said, “this silly-ass damn thing.” To which Nixon replied, “Yeah, for Christ’s sake, Goldwater put it in context when he said, ‘Well, everybody bugs everybody else. You know that.’”
One of the earliest known instances of wild carnivores being held in captivity in Mesoamerica dates to around the second century in Teotihuacán; excavations starting in the late 1990s uncovered the remains of almost two hundred animals—including wolves, eagles, and jaguars—in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The skeletons showed bone breaks, bone fusion, and abnormal growths, as well as indications of a human-controlled diet.
It is said that while campaigning in southern Louisiana, Huey Long was told that many voters were Catholic. “When I was a boy,” he began speeches, “I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist parents to church.” A colleague later said, “I didn’t know you had any Catholic grandparents.” To which he replied, “Don’t be a damned fool. We didn’t even have a horse.”
For the treatment of “delirium and mania combined with shameless behavior,” ninth-century Persian polymath al-Razi offered a remedy by medical theorist Simʿun: “Bathe the patient’s head with a decoction of elecampane and sheep’s trotters, pour milk over him, put dung upon him, make him snuff sweet violet oil and breast milk, and feed him anything that is cold, fatty, and fills and moistens the brain.”
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.”
In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.
At Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa police used cameras and biometric face-recognition software to survey fans. The system identified nineteen subjects of outstanding warrants, far more than anticipated. None were arrested. “We thought we were ready to use it,” said a detective.
When told by a doctor that he was dying in 1851, J.M.W. Turner replied, “Go downstairs, take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” The doctor followed the painter’s suggestion but returned with the same prognosis. The day Turner died he was wheeled to the window so that he could see the sunshine on the river and boats passing by.
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.