Astronomers theorizing the existence of small moons orbiting larger moons have proposed calling them “moonmoons.” The planet Kepler-1625b, which has a Neptune-sized moon distantly orbiting it, was cited as “sort of the best-case scenario for a moonmoon.”
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In 2014 Amelia Hamrick, an undergraduate at Oklahoma Christian University, noticed musical notes written across the buttocks of one of the denizens of hell depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. She transcribed it into modern notation and made a recording she posted on her blog. “So yes,” she wrote, “this is literally the 600-year-old butt song from hell.” The post went viral.
In 1987 Nike paid both Capitol Records and Michael Jackson, owner of the publication rights to much of the Beatles’ catalog, a licensing fee of $500,000 to use “Revolution” in an advertisement. Lawyers for the Beatles filed a $15-million lawsuit, stating that the band didn’t “endorse or peddle sneakers or pantyhose.” The case was settled out of court.
George Romero, who pioneered the modern zombie film in 1968, complained in 2010 that he’d “never had a zombie eat a brain, but it’s become this landmark thing.” The trope was introduced in 1985 by Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, in which a zombie woman explains that eating brains relieves the “pain of being dead.” Some fans have speculated this is due to the brain’s high levels of serotonin.
Japanese athletic-footwear company Onitsuka Tiger changed its name in 1977 to ASICS, an acronym of the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, “a sound soul in a sound body,” altering a line from one of Juvenal’s satires. “If you must pray for something,” wrote the poet, “then ask for a sound mind in a sound body.”
Michel de Montaigne’s father believed “it disorders the tender brains of children to awake them by surprise in the morning, and suddenly and violently to snatch them from sleep”; he preferred to rouse his son from slumber “by the sound of some instrument of music,” likely an early form of harpsichord called an epinette. Montaigne recalled later that he “was never without a musician for that purpose.”
After serving as longtime copyeditor for The New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs in the 1930s moved on to write drama criticism for the magazine and sent editor Harold Ross a document entitled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” Among his notes were: “1. Writers always use too damn many adverbs”; “20. The more ‘as a matter of facts,’ ‘howevers,’ ‘for instances,’ etc., etc., you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven”; and lastly, “31. Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”
“His method was inefficient in the extreme,” scoffed Nikola Tesla in 1931 in a New York Times obituary for his former employer and longtime scientific competitor, Thomas Edison. “In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of miracle.”
A nineteen-year-old boy diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma requested help from the Make-A-Wish Foundation in 1998 to hunt a moose with his father. His request was denied. A year later the foundation instituted a national ban on firearm-related wishes, and the boy’s mother founded Hunt of a Lifetime, an organization devoted to sending terminally ill children deep-sea fishing or on hunting trips for sheep, elk, moose, or bear.
President Herbert Hoover once praised a group of PR professionals. “You have taken over the job of creating desire,” he said, “and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines—machines which have become the key to economic progress.” It was 1928; the Great Depression began the following year.
In Natural Theology, published in 1802, William Paley posited that there was a difference between finding a stone and a watch on the ground. He wrote, “the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” Paley used the watchmaker analogy to justify the existence of God.
Punishments have been used throughout history to leave marks of shame on the body. “Perhaps the most important” one inflicted on men, writes Richard Trexler in Sex and Conquest, “was depilation, especially the burning off of anal and pubic hair. The practice was known to ancient Jews—Isaiah prophesied that they would be humiliated in this way—and to the Athenians. In both cases the insult lay in part in the fact that only women singed their pubic hair.”
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.
Suetonius, a biographer of Roman emperors, claimed that the violent ruler Tiberius had a clifftop location in Capri from which he liked to watch his victims thrown into the sea. “A party of marines were stationed below,” Suetonius wrote, “and when the bodies came hurtling down, they whacked at them with oars and boathooks, to make sure that they were completely dead.”
In a behavior known as “transient sexual mimicry,” male giant cuttlefish can assume the behavior and coloring of female cuttlefish in order to bypass larger males and impregnate their desired mates.