Pavia once had an upside-down tower, the “Torre del Pizzo in giù.” According to legend, Andreotto del Maino, head of the del Maino family in the 15th century, was so fed up with his son Giasone’s unpromising academic career that he vowed to build an inverted tower if only he graduated. Giasone not only took his degree but became one of the most esteemed jurists of his age, so Andreotto fulfilled his promise.

The tower was demolished in the 18th century, “destroyed through stupid timidity,” writes the Irish historian Kenelm Henry Digby, “when it was too late discovered that it had been built with such skill that it might have stood for many ages.”

More images here.

(Thanks, Daniele.)

To show that soil can be transformed into habitable architecture, Colombian artist Octavio Mendoza made a 5,400-square-foot house entirely out of clay. Casa Terracota (known to the neighbors as “Casa de Flintstones”) contains no cement or steel — the whole building is fashioned from clay, including two floors of living space, all the furniture, and all the dishes.

After a career spent designing more conventional buildings, Mendoza spent 14 years realizing the project, to show that functional buildings can be made using the natural resources at hand. He calls it “the biggest piece of pottery in the world.”

In the 13th century, when the Earl of Chester was imprisoned by the Welsh in Rhuddlan Castle, his constable, Roger de Lacy, rescued him by mustering “a multitude of the shoemakers, fiddlers and loiterers” from the local fair. Pleasingly, in return he was given jurisdiction over all the minstrels and “disorderly characters” in Cheshire. In 1216 de Lacy handed down this privilege to his tenant, Hugh Dutton, and it remained in Dutton’s family, generally recognized as a right to license county musicians, for 500 years. From E.M. Leonard’s Early History of English Poor Relief, 1900:

It was the custom for the lord of Dutton to hold a Court at Chester on Midsummer day and in 1498 he received from the whole body of minstrels four flagons of wine and a lance with fourpence halfpenny from each of them. A Court of this kind was held as late as 1756. In nearly all the statutes concerning vagabonds until that of 1822, the rights of John Dutton’s heirs were preserved, so that in the seventeenth century the minstrels of Cheshire, license by the lord of Dutton, might wander without fear of the penalty inflicted on wanderers elsewhere, — a curious but direct consequence of an incident of border warfare in the early part of the thirteenth century.

“Few facts illustrate better both the continuity of English history and the toleration of anomalies by English law than this perpetuation of the quaint jurisdiction of the house of Dutton for more than six centuries.” (More here.)

(Thanks, Keith.)

The world’s shortest St. Patrick’s Day parade starts at 11 a.m. today in the Village of Carmangay in Alberta. It should be over by 11:02.

Mayor Kym Nichols told the Calgary Eyeopener, “About 32 years ago, the owner of the hotel, who was Irish, came over to the village office with his shillelagh stick on St. Paddy’s Day and said to the mayor at the time, ‘Why don’t you come across and have a beer with me for St. Patrick’s Day?’ And that started it.”

The Carmangay parade covers less than 100 meters, but Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas holds a 29-meter parade that starts at 7:30 tonight. Presumably there are also quantum parades that are too short to measure.

(Thanks, Dan.)

04/10/2021 UPDATE: Alas, the hotel has now burned down.

Near the village of Katashina in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, workers have cut 2,559 grooves into a 175-meter stretch of roadway so that motorists hear the tune “Memories of Summer”:

Japan has now built 30 such “melody roads,” and they’re proliferating. The Singing Road in Anyang, South Korea, plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”:

And the Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, California, plays the William Tell Overture:

A commenter on the last video wrote, “If you drive it in reverse it says Paul is dead.”

Actress Marilu Henner has hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that permits her to recall nearly every day of her life in almost perfect detail. She’s one of only six cases that have been confirmed in peer-reviewed articles.

“It’s like putting in a DVD and it cues up to a certain place,” she told CBS. “I’m there again. So, I’m looking out from my eyes and seeing things visually as I would have that day.”

Her earliest memory is of her own baptism. “My godmother was a nun, and so she’d talk about my baptism all the time,” she said. “Even as a tiny child, I could recall that event. I know people don’t believe me, but it’s really true.”

Phyllis Brienza, a waitress at Manhattan’s Bun & Burger since the day it opened on Oct. 26, 1970, became famous for a unique gift — she had “such an extraordinary memory for the niceties of appetite that regular clients do not have to speak their wishes aloud,” reported Israel Shenker in the New York Times in 1975.

She recognized a customer in a Nehru jacket as “medium with half a bun and French.” A man in a raincoat was a “well,” a well-done hamburger.

“If you order it once one way, that’ll stick in my mind,” she said. “When someone new comes in, I think to myself, ‘That’s a medium,’ or ‘that’s a rare.’ Sometimes they have this serious look and I think, ‘That must be a well.’ Usually I’m right.”

In 1974 she received a Christmas card from a customer whom she remembered at once. It was signed “Medium rare, pressed.”