Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.
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“I have just had a close escape from the Soviets, and now I’m happy to say I’m back with the fairies (Fascists to you),” Dawn Powell wrote to John Dos Passos in 1937, having attended the American Writers’ Congress along with many avowed communists. “The front part of the speeches was always good, but when the brilliant writer minds summed up, they all spelled bushwa.”
Asked whether it was night or day that first emerged when the universe came into existence, sixth-century-bc Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
“The movements of the air and water,” wrote French mathematician Joseph Fourier in 1824, “the extent of the oceans, the elevation and form of the surface, the effects of human industry, and all the accidental changes of the earth’s surface modify the temperature of each climate.”
Joseph Smith and other Mormon church leaders drew up articles for the Kirtland Safety Society Bank to provide capital to the burgeoning economy of Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. Unable to obtain a bank charter, they printed banknotes as the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. The notes were used as tender. The bank failed during the Panic of 1837; holders of the notes were unable to recover their face value, and Smith then fled to Missouri to avoid arrest.
A fourteenth-century-bc peace treaty recorded on a cuneiform tablet contains an invocation to Mithra, the Indo-Iranian god of the sun as well as of oaths and mutual obligation. In the Roman Empire, Mithras was honored as the god of loyalty to the emperor, while in Indian Vedic texts, he represents friendship and benevolence and, along with the god Varuna, is entrusted with the maintenance of the gods’ essence.
“I am his highness’s dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” reads an epigram that Alexander Pope wrote in the 1730s and had engraved on the collar of one of his puppies, whom he gave to Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Slaves in ancient China during the Zhou dynasty were sometimes buried alive with their recently departed masters in order that they might continue to serve them in the afterlife.
A group of Syrian refugees in a camp north of Athens advertised its tent on Airbnb in June 2016. It’s “the most unique neighborhood in Greece,” they wrote, touting the location’s “free parking” as well as its scorpions, dehydration, and “broken promises.” The San Francisco–based company removed the listing for violating the website’s terms of service.
A growing market for ejiao—a gelatin made from donkey hide believed by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine to increase libido and slow aging—has led to a global trade of millions of donkey skins each year. Asses are often kidnapped from rural African villages, where their labor is valued highly, then taken to markets and slaughtered for export. “The donkeys,” said a sanctuary manager while visiting a market in Tanzania, “are very stressed.”
Though described by Suetonius as having a “fat neck” and “potbelly,” Nero competed at the Olympics in 67, in the chariot race. He fell out of his vehicle and failed to finish but paid hefty bribes to the judges and secured first place.
Although the Oxford English Dictionary lists the etymology of “hooligan” as unascertained, one of the three speculations is that it derives from a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family that went by that last name.
Gioachino Rossini was known to possess strong opinions about other composers. “Wagner has some fine moments,” he estimated, “but some bad quarters of an hour.” After hearing Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he remarked, “What a good thing it isn’t music.”
In an 1850 newspaper article, Karl Marx declared that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” Ninety years later, Walter Benjamin countered with a different analogy: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history,” he wrote, “but perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”
A longtime practice of European peasants was to bring cows and sheep inside for the night. If one could ignore “the nastiness of their excrements,” a late seventeenth-century visitor to Ireland opined, “the sweetness of their breath” and “the pleasing noise they made in ruminating or chewing the cud” might lull a person to sleep. A visitor to the Hebrides noted, however, that while urine was regularly collected and discarded, the dung was removed only once a year.