In Serbian oral tradition, fate often appears written on foreheads. A typical story tells of a man on the run from a plague personified as a woman. “It is not fated that I should kill you,” she says on catching him and seeing his forehead’s inscription. “You’ll be killed by a turtle.” Later, the man mows a field. His scythe hits a turtle, ricochets off its shell, and slices his leg. He dies soon after from blood poisoning.
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Residents of North Yorkshire from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries were so afraid of the dead rising to attack the living that they would dismember, decapitate, burn, and otherwise mutilate corpses before burying them. The process was generally undertaken shortly after death, when the bones were still soft.
At the end of his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde was given money by a young man who claimed to be the son of a Wall Street banker and who invited him to then play in a game of dice. Wilde ended up losing over $1,000, writing three checks to cover the expense. “I’ve just made a damned fool of myself,” Wilde later confessed to a police captain, having stopped payment of the checks. From a series of mug shots, Wilde identified the swindler: it was notorious banco scammer Hungry Joe Lewis.
While minister to France in 1778, Benjamin Franklin met Voltaire at the Academy of the Sciences. On hand was John Adams, who wrote that “neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected” of them by the crowd. Eventually, the two embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, an act that Nicolas de Condorcet said provoked such enthusiastic approval that “it was said to be Solon who embraced Sophocles.”
Researchers working with the Tsimané of the Amazon found that tribe members could tell the difference between consonance and dissonance but took them to be equally pleasant, giving credence to the idea that Western preference for consonance is not biological. “The Greeks were really into ratios,” speculated the lead researcher. “It’s possible they started making music that way and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.”
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.
Around noon on April 27, 1932, while aboard a steamship southeast of Florida, poet Hart Crane, intoxicated and still wearing his pajamas, jumped overboard. The ship’s captain later told Crane’s companion, Peggy Cowley, “If the propellers didn’t grind him to mincemeat, then the sharks got him immediately.”
“Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves,” wrote Anne Carson in her 2019 play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. “We’re more scientific now, we know it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.”
On Halloween 1981, a Los Angeles punk band called Fear was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Comedian John Belushi, who had invited Fear to play, brought in punks to watch the performance. Chaos ensued; SNL’s stage manager was hit in the chest with a pumpkin. “The real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” Fear’s lead singer later said. The band was banned from appearing again.
Kobe beef, black truffles, seared foie gras, aged Gruyère cheese, wild mushrooms, and flakes of gold leaf, are most of the components that comprise the hamburger served at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe. Price: $175.
Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon for forty-four years—the second-longest tenure for a nonroyal elected leader. Biya won his seventh term in 2018, with 71 percent of the vote. Since taking power in November 1982, he has placed his country 148th in the world in terms of economic output per capita and 163rd in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings. The longest-serving leader is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of Equatorial Guinea since 1979.
Concluding that he and Bertrand Russell possessed irreconcilable “value judgments,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Russell on March 3, 1914, to suggest that a continued correspondence could only be achieved by “restricting our relationship to the communication of facts capable of being established objectively, with perhaps also some mention of our friendly feelings for one another.”
To combat widespread tardiness in the Ivory Coast, President Laurent Gbagbo in 2007 backed a Punctuality Night contest, which touted the slogan “African time is killing Africa, let’s fight it.” Nine prizes were awarded to the most punctual civil servants and businesspeople. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. White Man’s Time,” legal adviser Narcisse Aka won the first-place prize, a $60,000 villa.
Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.
Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern married Julia Hoyt, the novelist and actress Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment, highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one, ‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I received no acknowledgment.”