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.
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At the age of four, Robert Graves, having said his evening prayers, asked his mother if she would leave him any money when she died. “If you left me as much as five pounds, I could buy a bicycle,” he reasoned. “Surely you’d rather have me, Robby,” his mother said. “But I could ride to your grave on it,” he replied.
“In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” wrote Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City. “When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person.”
In January 1592, playwright Christopher Marlowe was arrested for counterfeiting in the Netherlands. For making coins of pewter, Marlowe was charged with the crime of petty treason, punishable by death. He was eventually sent back to London, where, a little more than a year later, he was stabbed to death in Deptford.
As a member of a Cherokee delegation to Washington, DC, Sam Houston wore traditional loincloth and blanket to an 1818 meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who was offended and chastised Houston for his dress. Twenty-two years later, between terms as president of the Republic of Texas, Houston wore such a blanket to meet Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, comte de Saligny, in Austin.
After his first wife’s suicide, Percy Bysshe Shelley applied for custody of their children. Lord Eldon denied his petition, citing the poet’s conduct and principles, which, wrote the lord, “the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious” as well as “inconsistent with the duties of persons in such relations of life.”
In the summer of 1867, Chinese laborers working on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada went on strike, demanding a pay increase and a ten-hour workday. Desperate to resume the railroad’s progress, executives considered asking the Freedmen’s Bureau to send African American laborers to take over. “A Negro labor force would keep the Chinese steady,” one executive wrote, “as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”
“When the maids are beautiful and the concubines charming, this is not a blessing,” warns Confucian master Zhu Bolu in a seventeenth-century work of household advice. “For servants,” his next maxim advises, “don’t employ handsome boys.”
Twenty-two-year-old critic Richard Goldstein savaged the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a New York Times review when the album was released in 1967, calling it “busy, hip, and cluttered.” He later admitted the stereo he’d heard it on had a busted left speaker, but he remained unapologetic: “What can I say? If you’re not embarrassed by your youth, what good are you?”
A fish seller in Kuwait began gluing googly eyes on rotting fishes’ eye sockets in August 2018 in an attempt to make his wares appear fresher; in response, a rival seller began marketing his own fresh fish as “without cosmetic surgery.” The story went viral online, bringing it to the attention of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which promptly shut the first shop down.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah may have been caused by an earthquake that occurred through the Great Rift Valley around 1900 bc. The “brimstone and fire” described in the Bible would have been due to petroleum and gases present in the area igniting the cities.
A Babylonian medical handbook dating to 1700 bc offers a renal diagnostic that reads, “If his urine is like ass urine, that man suffers from ‘discharge.’ ” Other alarming symptoms of discharge: if his urine is “like beer dregs,” “like wine dregs,” or “like clear paint.”
Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” to raise money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal fund in 1883 and soon after embarked on a ship to London to promote the cause for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Her poem was only placed on a plaque at the foot of the “Mother of Exiles” in 1903, six years after her death.
In January 1787 Catherine the Great embarked on a six-month survey of her empire, and Gregory Potemkin, former lover and governor general of Crimea, was among those in charge of the tour. Georg von Helbig, a critic of Potemkin, coined the term Potemkin villages to indict the governor general for falsifying his accomplishments, going so far as to claim that while Catherine sailed the Dnieper River, elaborate facades were set up, removed, and placed farther downriver so that she would see the same scenes five or six times.
In Britain in 60, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the occupying Romans. According to the historian Tacitus, her forces killed seventy thousand people, sacking and burning the cities later known as St. Albans, Colchester, and London. “We must conquer in the line of battle or fall,” she announced before her final charge. “That is the fate of this woman; let men live on as slaves if they wish.”