Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has employed the consulta publica, or plebiscite, on several occasions since being elected to office in 2018. Mexican voters opposed the construction of a $13 billion air terminal in Texcoco de Mora.
Archive
Miscellany
In 1982 John Candelaria, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was given $238 in per diem meal money while on a bus to Wrigley Field from the team’s hotel in Chicago. Candelaria threw his cash out the bus window, a few dollars per toss, much to the surprise of those on the street. “It just seemed like the thing to do,” Candelaria told a reporter.
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.”
Before Inuit tribes in southeastern Alaska would offer hospitality, anthropologist Franz Boas noted, a stranger would have to exchange blows to the head with a tribesman until one combatant was “vanquished.” In other areas, men would strip down and arm wrestle, sometimes to the death. The Inuit understanding: “The two men in meeting wish to know which of them is the better man.”
One of the oldest extant terrestrial globes, dating from around 1510, the Lenox, is the only map known to use the phrase “here be dragons,” designating an area in Southeast Asia near to the island of Komodo, known for its large lizards.
After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”
Most children begin forming full sentences between the ages of two and three, and recent studies have shown that around the same time they start to lie, usually to avoid anticipated punishment. By the age of three children begin telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings.
“Where were you last night?” Yvonne asks Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca. “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” Her follow-up: “Will I see you tonight?” To which he replies, “I never make plans that far ahead.”
“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1915, “and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
A 2006 University of Cambridge study found that meerkats teach pups how to hunt by first introducing them to dead prey, then to injured prey; when the pup is ready, the adults present them with live prey. “There were clear post-provisioning costs involved in feeding pups live prey,” the researchers wrote. If the prey escaped, the adults were able to recapture it only about 26 percent of the time. “On around 7 percent of occasions, helpers further modified the prey before returning it.”
“Pompeii like any other town,” Herman Melville wrote in his journal during an 1867 visit. “Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.”
Roman architect Vitruvius hated the first-century-bc design trend of walls painted with fantastic images. “On the stucco are monsters,” he wrote of a house whose walls also showed plant stalks and candelabra painted to mimic structural supports. “Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been,” he complained. “The new fashions compel bad judges to condemn good craftsmanship for dullness.”
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.
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.
Leo Tolstoy, who opened a school for peasant children on his estate and organized relief efforts during famines in 1873 and 1891, later lost his charitable spirit. In 1903, in response to a visitor describing the poor at Moscow’s Khitrov market eating rotten eggs, fish, and fruit, Tolstoy declared that drunkenness and debauchery were responsible for such conditions, not misfortune. “They always have been bosyaki,” said Tolstoy about the beggars there, “and they always will be. They drink, are lazy, and that is all there is to it.”