In order to halt or slow the advance of glaciers, the Tlingit tribe of the northwest coast of North America used to sacrifice dogs and slaves by throwing them into the glacier’s crevasses in the hopes of appeasing the ice spirit.
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A study of U.S. Supreme Court oral transcripts from 2004 to 2005 tabulated every instance the court reporter described a justice’s remarks provoking laughter. It found that Antonin Scalia had caused seventy-seven such episodes, while Clarence Thomas had caused zero.
A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.
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?”
“Thank the good God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh,” wrote fourteen-year-old Virginia Reed, a surviving Donner Party member, in an 1847 letter. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody and never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” Reed reported being “pleased with California, particularly with the climate.”
A twelfth-century-bc Chinese king consulted an oracle and was told his lucky charm would not be a tiger, dragon, bear, or leopard but rather a wise counselor. He soon came upon a sagacious old man fishing in the river and conscripted him into service. It is said the man’s virtue was such that he fished not with a hook but with a straight piece of iron; acknowledging his integrity, fish impaled themselves voluntarily.
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.”
During his first trip to New York City in 1964, Samuel Beckett went to a doubleheader at Shea Stadium with his friend Dick Seaver, who explained the game of baseball to the Irish writer. Halfway through the second game, Seaver asked, “Would you like to go now?” To which Beckett replied, “Is the game over, then?” “Not yet,” said Seaver. Beckett concluded, “We don’t want to go then before it’s finished.” The Mets won both games, unlike their double loss two months earlier in what had been the longest doubleheader in Major League history, clocking in at nine hours and fifty-two minutes.
In An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind, published in 1785, physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush wrote that drunkenness, an “odious disease (for by that name it should be called),” appeared with, among other symptoms, “unusual garrulity…unusual silence…a disposition to quarrel…uncommon good humor and an insipid simpering or laugh…disclosure of their own or other people’s secrets…a rude disposition to tell those persons in company whom they know, their faults…certain extravagant acts which indicate a temporary fit of madness.”
“Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal. We are time,” writes Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.
Observing Mars through his telescope in 1877, Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli saw oceans and canali, meaning channels. The latter was mistranslated into English as canals, implying Martian-made waterways, and an amateur astronomer named Percival Lowell soon began publishing books pointing to these as evidence of life on Mars. By 1910 photographic technology had advanced sufficiently to debunk his extrapolated theories.
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.
In Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara suggested that a well-prepared revolutionary should carry the following items: rifle, ammunition, food, plate, knife, fork, canteen, antibiotics, paper, a compass, nylon cloth, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, a pair of pants, a book (“biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies”), a machete, a small bottle of gasoline, kindling, matches, needles, thread, and buttons.
Valhalla, the mythical hall for slain Norse warriors, is said to cater a nightly feast of boar meat but to offer no water to wash it down. According to the chief speaker of Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning, the warriors would have received a disappointing reward for their agonizing deaths in battle if served merely water. The menu instead includes mead supplied from the udder of a she-goat named Heidrun.
Sailors’ fear of bananas may extend back to seventeenth-century Spanish ships trading in the Caribbean. Crew members would often purchase wooden crates of the fruit, and when their vessels sailed north to pick up the Gulf Stream in the Straits of Florida, hazards of the passage shipwrecked many, leaving behind stray clumps of bananas floating ominously on the water’s surface for later ships to see.