“It is a sign of rain,” wrote the author of the fourth-century-bc Greek treatise On Weather Signs, “if a hawk perches on a tree, flies right into it, and proceeds to search for lice. Also, when in summer a number of birds living on an island pack together, if a moderate number collect, it is a good sign for goats and flocks, while if the number is exceedingly large, it portends a severe drought.”
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Since 1840 the Oxford Electric Bell has been ringing in a laboratory at the University of Oxford. Built by a London instrument maker and powered by dry-pile batteries, the bell is said to have rung more than ten billion times. The ring is now barely audible because the charge is so low.
The Ongee of the Andaman Islands base their calendar on smell: their names for seasons derive from the flowers that are in bloom at the time.
Banished from the kingdom of Kindah, the sixth-century prince and poet Imru al-Qays spent much of his life wandering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula developing the literary genre wuquf ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins.” “The courtyards and enclosures of the old home have become desolate,” he wrote in one verse, “the dung of the wild deer lies there thick as the seeds of pepper.”
As to why he didn’t drink water, an inebriated W.C. Fields purportedly responded, “Fish fuck in it.”
For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”
In the “Those That Will Work” section of Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and London Poor, published in 1861, there is a profile of Jack Black, whose self-appointed title was “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty.” In addition to exterminating vermin royal and common, Black kept a collection of rats, which included a rare white one. Noting the white rat’s popularity with audiences, he bred it to sell the offspring; novelist Beatrix Potter is believed to have bought her albino rat Samuel Whiskers from the exterminator. It is speculated that the majority of albino rats, the variety most often used in science experiments, are descended from Black’s original pet.
According to a 2021 study published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “noninstructional spending” at universities is growing faster than “instructional spending”; between 2012 and 2018, “colleges and universities prioritized hiring less expensive and often less credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.”
Astronomers theorizing the existence of small moons orbiting larger moons have proposed calling them “moonmoons.” The planet Kepler-1625b, which has a Neptune-sized moon distantly orbiting it, was cited as “sort of the best-case scenario for a moonmoon.”
The bark of Cinchona trees (from which quinine is obtained) was first described as a remedy for malaria by Jesuit missionaries in Peru. Protestant hostility toward Jesuits, however, led to a distrust of “Peruvian bark” in England. An apothecary’s apprentice named Robert Talbor warned patients to “beware of all palliative cures and especially that known by the name of Jesuits’ powder,” instead offering his own secret remedy. His treatment was highly effective, earning him a fortune. A year after his death, his “English remedy” was revealed to be an infusion of cinchona powder mixed with opium and wine.
Fairy wren nestlings learn “passwords,” or unique single notes, from their mothers while still in their eggs; after birth they must use the passwords when calling for food, or the mothers will abandon the nest. In a 2012 study, scientists in Australia experimented with switching eggs and mothers, and found that passwords were not genetically inherited; the chicks assumed the passwords of their adopted mothers.
When Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy discovered that with radioactivity one atom can be transformed into another, Soddy recalled blurting out “Rutherford, this is transmutation: the thorium is disintegrating and transmuting itself into argon gas.” As “the words seemed to flash through” Soddy “as if from some outside force,” Rutherford replied, “For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”
Joseph Conrad recalled, “It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now, ‘When I grow up I shall go there.’”
According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.
British historian Orlando Figes admitted in 2010 to posting scathing reviews on Amazon for books by other Russian-history specialists. Using the name Historian, he called one work “dense and pretentious” and complained another was not “worth the bother of ploughing through its dreadful prose.” Of Figes’ own The Whisperers, Historian posted that it “leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted” and wrote of its author, “I hope he writes forever.”