Futility Closet

From Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, 1896:

The following case illustrative of the tenacity of virulence of snake-venom was reported by Mr. Temple, Chief Justice of Honduras, and quoted by a London authority.

While working at some wood-cutting a man was struck on a heavy boot by a snake, which he killed with an axe. He imagined that he had been efficiently protected by the boot, and he thought little of the incident. Shortly afterward he began to feel ill, sank into a stupor, and succumbed.

His boots were sold after his death, as they were quite well made and a luxury in that country. In a few hours the purchaser of the boots was a corpse, and every one attributed his death to apoplexy or some similar cause.

The boots were again sold, and the next unfortunate owner died in an equally short time.

It was then thought wise to examine the boots, and in one of them was found, firmly embedded, the fang of the serpent. It was supposed that in pulling on the boots each of the subsequent owners had scratched himself and became fatally inoculated with the venom, which was unsuspected and not combated.

"The case is so strange as to appear hypothetic, but the authority seems reliable."

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do." — Jean-Paul Sartre

Every seven years, the Eiffel Tower is repainted with 5.5 tons of paint.

FREE - FREE
A TRIP TO MARS
FOR 900
EMPTY JARS
BURMA-SHAVE

The Burma-Shave folks intended that as an amusing roadside rhyme in 1955, but Arliss "Frenchy" French took it seriously.

The Wisconsin supermarket manager sponsored an elaborate "Send Frenchy to Mars" campaign and sent 900 jars to Burma-Shave headquarters in an armored car.

After some hasty thinking, the company agreed to send French on vacation to Moers — a little town in Germany that pronounced its name mars. He went.

salsipotent
adj. ruling the salt seas

Koalas sleep up to 22 hours a day.

O lovely O most charming pug
Thy graceful air and heavenly mug …
His noses cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty weoman
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was oblidged to call it weoman.

– "Sonnet," Marjory Fleming (1803-1811)

Born in 1849, "Blind Tom" Wiggins found himself with three burdens and a gift: He was blind, he was mentally challenged, he was a slave, and he was a musical prodigy.

He was playing piano by ear at age 4, before he could speak. At 5 he composed a tune and found he could reproduce perfectly any piece from memory. His vocabulary was only about 100 words, and he spoke of himself in the third person ("Tom is pleased to meet you"), but in time he learned 7,000 piano pieces, mostly classics.

At age 8 a successful concert in Columbus, Ga., led to a tour. He played for James Buchanan and Mark Twain, accepting challenges to repeat original compositions to show there was no trickery. By age 16, he was touring the world.

He retired in 1883 but returned briefly for a series of New York concerts in 1904. He died in 1908.

It's dangerous to make history. Schoolchildren learn that Oliver Cromwell overthrew the British monarchy, but they're less often told of the grisly price he paid.

Three years after his death of malaria, Cromwell's body was dug up and underwent a "posthumous execution" for treason by the restored monarchy: It was hanged, drawn and quartered, decapitated and thrown into a common pit, and the severed head was mounted on a pole and displayed outside Westminster Abbey for four years, until 1685.

Even that wasn't enough. The head passed among various owners for 275 years; it wasn't buried until 1960, on the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

And Cromwell was only the most prominent of the regicides of Charles I. Three others were also "punished" posthumously, and those still alive were imprisoned or chased out of England.

All the gold ever mined would make a cube 66 feet on a side.