Questions asked in TV commercials aired in 1993: “Have you ever borrowed a book thousands of miles away? Or sent someone a fax from the beach? Have you ever paid a toll without slowing down? Have you ever watched a movie you wanted to, the minute you wanted to?” The answer: “You will. And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T.”
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The questions “Have you ever used Derbisol?” and “How often?” sometimes appear along with questions about alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana use on youth-risk surveys for students. Derbisol is a fictitious drug devised to test the reliability of the responder. In one survey, 163 of 894 students said that they had tried Derbisol—or 18.2 percent.
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.
“Demotic habits,” wrote the British clergyman Sydney Smith in support of the Reform Bill of 1832, “will be more common in a country where the rich are forced to court the poor for power.”
“The death of a newborn child before that of its parents may seem an unnatural, but it is strictly a probable, event,” observed Edward Gibbon in his Memoirs. He was his parents’ first child; the next six all died in infancy. Some twenty years earlier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “One half of the children who are born die before their eighth year…This is nature’s law; why contradict it?”
Country musician Garth Brooks sued an Oklahoma hospital over its handling of a $500,000 contribution he made in 2005. Brooks wanted a wing named after his late mother and claimed hospital officials showed him mock-ups with her name in neon lights; the hospital said the donation had been anonymous and that Brooks only established his conditions afterward. Brooks won the lawsuit, receiving twice the amount of his original gift.
In Japanese tradition, ghosts and spirits are more likely to appear at dusk or dawn than in the middle of the night. “In order for people to see them and be frightened by them,” wrote folklorist Kunio Yanagita, “emerging in the pitch-dark after even the plants have fallen asleep is, to say the least, just not good business practice.”
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked T.H. Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” if it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from a monkey. To which Huxley reportedly replied, “I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin; but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”
“Have you been eating candy?” President John F. Kennedy asked his daughter Caroline before a dinner during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She did not reply. He inquired again and was ignored. “Caroline,” the commander in chief said, “answer me. Have you been eating candy—yes, no, or maybe?”
A French tale from 1615 contains a rare early modern mention of a married woman considering birth control. Her method: pressing a bead of perfume on “that artery that the vulgar calls the pulse” during intercourse. The procedure fails—not due to its own inadequacies, the reader is told, but because the woman, so taken by her activity, neglects to apply the perfume.
In 1965 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke discussed a film project, then called Journey Beyond the Stars. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters or sex, so we have tried to find another term,” said Clarke. “The best we’ve been able to come up with is a space odyssey,” added Kubrick. “The far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us.”
Archaeologists found in a Utah cave as many as seventeen thousand carved sticks, canes, and bone pieces—gambling items used in the thirteenth century by ancestors of the Apache and Navajo. “Seventy to eighty percent of dice games were for women only,” one researcher said about the find, which may have been America’s first casino. “So what do we have here? Women who knew the games of other women.”
Gioachino Rossini was known to possess strong opinions about other composers. “Wagner has some fine moments,” he estimated, “but some bad quarters of an hour.” After hearing Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he remarked, “What a good thing it isn’t music.”
A British law dictates that any whale, porpoise, or sturgeon caught near the coast or cast ashore is a “royal fish” and belongs to the Crown. Specifics were refined in a 1610 parliamentary debate over the ownership of the salmon population in the Irish River Bann. “Though they are great fish,” said Lord Robert Hale, who argued these salmon should be considered part of the commons, “they are not royal fish.”
A 52-million-year-old fossilized tomatillo found in January 2017 revealed the fruit to be five times older than scientists had previously thought. “The initial discovery was a very big OMG moment,” said paleobotanist Peter Wilf. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Could it be? Could it be? Could it be? Really? Really? Really?’ Then I just went nuts.”