In June 2020 the city council of Sturgis, South Dakota, mailed surveys to determine whether residents favored proceeding with or postponing the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August. Nearly 63 percent of respondents wanted the event postponed, while 37 percent voted for it to proceed. Despite the democratic results, the council went ahead with the rally, which attracted 460,000 people to the city of 7,287. The state of South Dakota confirmed 124 residents had become sick from coronavirus after attending the rally.
Archive
Miscellany
“As if I swallowed a baby,” said William Makepeace Thackeray about eating his first oyster.
“Secretary Morrice did this day in the House, when they talked of intelligence, say that he was allowed but £700 a year,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1668, “whereas, in Cromwell’s time, he did allow £70,000 a year for it; and was confirmed therein by Colonel Birch, who said that thereby Cromwell carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle.”
Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of peritonitis, having swallowed a toothpick at a party. He was sixty-four. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic eye-drop cap at a hotel in 1983. He was seventy-one.
Taiwanese regulators fined the Chang Guann Company in 2014 for selling 645 tons of so-called gutter oil—cooking oil illegally recycled from restaurant waste and animal by-products—and distributing it to more than 1,200 restaurants, schools, and food processors. The adulterated product showed up in instant noodles, cakes, dumplings, and canned pork.
Georges Cuvier, founder of the field of paleontology, wrote in 1812 that examination of the strata of the earth revealed “traces of revolutions.” He surmised, “Innumerable living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races have become extinct and have left no memorial of them, except some small fragment which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”
After witnessing a man beating his wife in rural Uttar Pradesh in 2006, Sampat Pal Devi declared, “Unless we start sending our girls to schools, we will continue having this problem.” She set up a school and wrote a song to persuade women not to send their daughters to work in the fields: “My husband has learnt English, but I only know Hindi / One day he asked for water, but I got him tomatoes. He slashed me with his belt.”
To clear his head during his martial-arts training in the 1950s, Bruce Lee went sailing. He slapped the water angrily and found it instructive about kung fu. “I struck it but it did not suffer hurt,” he later wrote. “I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible.” Lee was energized. “That was it!” he recalled. “I wanted to be like the nature of water.”
The critic Vladimir Stassov recalled that when the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky “were still young men living together in one room…The piano could be heard, and the singing would start, and with great excitement and bustle they would show me what they had composed the previous day, or the day before or the day before that—how wonderful it was."
In ancient Athens if a citizen was accused of killing another citizen, he would be brought before the Areopagus, the highest court of law, and might face the death penalty. If the citizen was accused of killing a resident alien, a slave, or a foreigner, he was tried in a lower court, the Palladion, and faced, at worst, exile.
An estimated one in ten Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed.
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.
The longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history lasted twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, a record set in 1957 by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to stall passage of the Civil Rights Act. Thurmond died in 2003, holding his same Senate seat.
A fourteenth-century Egyptian encyclopedia includes a recipe to “tighten the vagina.” One should grind “the scorched skin of a jackal, the scorched hooves of a goat, the scorched hoof of a donkey, scorched thorn apple, a scorched sea crab, scorched polypody, and Persian thyme,” then administer as a suppository. “The woman,” promises the compiler, “becomes like a virgin.”
Ancient Greek geographer Strabo believed the founder of the discipline of geography was not an explorer or a natural philosopher but Homer, for the epic poet had “reached the utmost limits of the earth, traversing it in his imagination.”