On November 24, 1793—or what then became known as Frimaire 4, II—the revolutionary French government officially replaced the Gregorian calendar, introducing one based on the Egyptian calendar with newly named months (such as Thermidor and Brumaire) of thirty days each, comprised of three ten-day weeks (each day lasted ten hours, or one thousand minutes, or ten thousand seconds). It was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806.
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The verb ostracize derives from the Greek word ostracon, a potsherd on which each citizen wrote the name of one well-known citizen whom they wished to banish from the polis. The first published use of the word in English dates from 1649, in a poetic elegy to young Lord Hastings, a Royalist supporter of Charles I: “Therefore the Democratic stars did rise,/And all that worth from hence did ostracize.” The author was Andrew Marvell, who, not long after, served in Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth government along with the secretary for foreign tongues, John Milton.
Charles Lindbergh bought five sandwiches for his flight across the Atlantic in 1927, saying, “If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more either.” It took him thirty-three and a half hours. Amelia Earhart in 1932 flew across the Atlantic in fourteen hours and fifty-six minutes, during which she drank chicken soup from a thermos, and a can of tomato juice—opened with an ice pick.
Written in Los Angeles in 1955, the song “Memories Are Made of This” became a number-one hit for Dean Martin. It was a surprise success in Europe, spending four weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart. A German version, performed by Freddy Quinn and recast as “Heimweh” (“Homesickness”), was the most popular German song of 1956. As “Honvágy-dal” (“The Song of Homesickness”) it became the anthem of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
According to the fourth-century-bc Zhuangzi, the man who attains unity with nature “mounts on the clouds and wind, rides the sun and moon, and roams beyond the four seas. Life and death do not alter him, much less principles of gain and loss.” Such human beings “turn beginning and end around and don’t know start from finish. They carelessly loiter beyond the dust and the dirt and wander free and easy.”
Inspired by Catherine the Great’s 1767 assertion that law should promote general happiness, Jeremy Bentham brought his own massive law code with him to Russia in 1785 to present to her. But the single time Catherine visited the western district where the utilitarian philosopher had rented a cottage, Bentham remained inside—“stubbornly diffident,” according to an account—and the two never met.
At the thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967, one second was redefined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” In April of this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, unveiled a new atomic clock to act as the United States’ primary time standard; it will not gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
Of countries using the death penalty in 2012, the U.S. had the fifth-highest number of executions (43) after China (thousands), Iran (314), Iraq (129), and Saudi Arabia (79). Texas was the state with the most (15), bringing Governor Rick Perry’s total orders of execution up to 252. The figure is by far the highest of any U.S. governor and is trailed distantly by that of Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who ordered 152—although Bush was in office for just shy of six years, as opposed to Perry’s twelve.
According to Diogenes Laërtius’ third-century Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, Plato was applauded for his definition of man as a featherless biped, so Diogenes the Cynic “plucked the feathers from a cock, brought it to Plato’s school, and said, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ ” When asked about the origin of his epithet, cynic deriving from the Greek word for dog, Diogenes replied that it was given to him because he “fawns upon those who give him anything and barks at those who give him nothing.”
In his third-century Interpretation of Dreams, Artemidorus lauded the soothsaying accuracy of Aristander, to whom Alexander the Great, while besieging the city of Tyre, Tyros in Greek, reported that he had dreamed of a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander said that “satyr,” satyros in Greek, could be broken into “sa” and “Tyros,” meaning “Tyros is yours,” and encouraged Alexander to redouble his attacks. The Macedonian did, and he took the city.
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.”
During a total solar eclipse in 1919, astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington observed from Príncipe Island that gravity bent the path of light to the degree predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Eddington went on to help popularize relativity and the idea that the universe was expanding. When asked how many people really understood his theories of universal expansion, he replied, “Perhaps seven.”
In 1919 a steel storage tank burst in Boston and spilled 2.3 million gallons of molasses, creating a twenty-five-foot-high wave that killed twenty-one people and tore buildings from foundations. The tank had leaked since its installation, but the company had, in response to complaints, merely painted it a concealing brown.
In 2014 the Federal Trade Commission charged the operator of Jerk.com with improperly obtaining personal information from Facebook to create 73 million profiles that identified people as “jerk” or “not a jerk” and then offered them the option to change their profiles for $30. According to the FTC, consumers who paid the fee often got nothing in return.
Primo Levi wrote that at Auschwitz “a large amount of alcohol was put at the disposal of” members of the Special Squad, inmates of the concentration camp who were forced to work the crematoriums, “and that they were in a permanent state of complete debasement and prostration.” One such inmate said, “Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.”