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.
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Pantagruelian feasts, common at Gallo-Roman villas, followed the Gallic custom of eating around a table rather than the Roman method of doing so while lying down supported by one elbow. After one banquet, it was recorded that all “remained seated on their benches. They had drunk so much wine and had so gorged themselves that the slaves and the guests lay drunk in every corner of the house, wherever they happened to stumble.”
William Blake’s wife reminded the poet in old age, “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and He put His head to the window and set you a-screaming.” Allen Ginsberg said that in 1948, while a senior at Columbia University, he was visited by the voice of Blake, which revealed to him the power of poetry—this was after he had read one of Blake’s poems while masturbating.
At a hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1952, a Dr. Hatcher tried to convince a Dr. Cranford to watch him perform a transorbital lobotomy. “Nothing to it,” Hatcher said. “I take a sort of medical ice pick, hold it like this, bop it through the bones just above the eyeball, push it up into the brain, swiggle it around, cut the brain fibers like this, and that’s it.” Cranford responded, “I was going to breakfast, but I’ve changed my mind.” Hatcher laughed. “You can change your mind,” he said, “but not like I can change it.”
“Waters from snow and ice are all bad,” opined Hippocrates of Cos around 400 bc. “Once frozen, water never recovers its original nature, but the clear, light, sweet part is separated out and disappears.” Such melted waters, he declared, “are the worst for all purposes.”
The world’s largest shipbreaking yard is near Alang, India, where, during the 2011–2012 season, around fifty thousand employees broke down 435 ships for scrap, which had a value of about $2 billion.
“There is one thing at which I cannot sufficiently wonder,” wrote Pliny the Elder, “that of some trees, the very memory has perished, and even the names recorded by authors have passed out of knowledge.”
The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.
The Spinhuis was founded in Amsterdam in 1597 for the purpose of detaining women arrested for adultery, fornication, prostitution, or drunkenness. In addition to being “chastised and betrayed,” inmates were put to work spinning flax and wool.
In 1906 Congress passed “An Act to Prohibit Shanghaiing in the United States.” One section made unlawful the inducing of a man “intoxicated or under the influence of any drug” to perform labor aboard a foreign or domestic ship.
At a seance in the White House in 1862, Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium, recalled that, after losing consciousness, she, channeling Daniel Webster, spoke for over an hour, during which President Abraham Lincoln was assured that the Emancipation Proclamation he had written but not signed would be “the crowning event of his administration and life” and that he needed to “stand firm” against dissenters. Arthur Conan Doyle later speculated that it “may have been one of the most important [moments] in the history of the United States.”
In July 2003 details leaked of a new venture from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: an online market for financial speculation on possible terrorist attacks, assassinations, and coups. “Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results,” the Defense Department argued. “They are often better than expert opinions.” DARPA—already under fire for its proposed Total Information Awareness program—was forced to abandon the idea.
When an “aggressive, independent woman” rejected his sermons in the fifteenth century, Heinrich Kramer prosecuted her as a witch. After she was acquitted, he and James Sprenger wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft that courts throughout Europe used to identify and prosecute witches. A century later a German eyewitness observed that “throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers…The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their goods were confiscated.”
In the days after a July 1917 German air raid on London that killed forty civilians, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born owner of Selfridges department store, took out ads declaring he would award $5,000 of life insurance on behalf of anyone killed by such an attack while shopping at his store. His building, he noted, was made out of concrete.
In 2003 about one-third of American babies between six months and two years old had watched a video from the Baby Einstein series, which promised exposure to culture, poetry, music, and foreign languages. A 2007 study reported that babies who watched the videos performed “10 percent lower on language skills” than babies who didn’t. Soon afterward, Disney spent about $100 million offering refunds to anyone who bought the videos between 2004 and 2009.