This is the first screen kiss, shared in 1896 by May Irwin and John C. Rice in a scene from the play The Widow Jones.

Accustomed to stage dramas, many viewers were shocked at the closeup. “Neither participant is physically attractive,” wrote reviewer John Sloan, “and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life-size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

Only 30 years later, John Barrymore would bestow 127 kisses on Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor in Don Juan.

This is inspiring: In 2005 the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the cardboard box.

“I think every adult has had that disillusioning experience of picking what they think is a wonderful toy for a child, and then finding the kid playing with the box,” said chief curator Christopher Bensch. “It’s that empty box full of possibilities that the kids can sense and the adults don’t always see.”

In the same spirit, the museum honors alphabet blocks, rocking horses, teddy bears, and jump rope alongside Monopoly, Etch A Sketch, and other registered trademarks.

Among the 44 toys in the hall of fame, the most sophisticated is the Nintendo Game Boy. The simplest, charmingly, is “the stick.”

Indeed this tendency to shift the responsibility for the disease on others by giving it their name, appears all through the early references to it. The Italians called it the Spanish or the French disease; the French called it the Italian disease; the English called it the French disease; the Russians called it the Polish disease; the Turks called it the French disease; the Indians and the Japanese called it the Portuguese disease. And, as we shall see, the first Spaniards who recognized the disease called it the disease of Española, which meant at that time the disease of Haiti.

– W.A. Pusey, “The Beginning of Syphilis,” Journal of the American Medical Association, June 12, 1915

Trinity College provost John Pentland Mahaffy was arguing with a women’s rights advocate when she asked him, “What is the difference between man and woman?”

He considered and said, “Madam, I can’t conceive.”

In it, California economist Marc Reinganum notes that anyone with a time machine would have an enormous incentive to manipulate investments and futures markets, using his knowledge of the future to amass huge profits.

If this were possible at all, it would be happening on such a large scale that interest rates would be driven to zero.

So the fact that we see positive interest rates proves that time travelers don’t exist.

A gentleman sitting in one of the boxes in company with the late Lord North, not knowing his lordship, entered into conversation with him, and, seeing two ladies come into an opposite box, turned to him, and addressed him with, ‘Pray, sir, can you inform me who is that ugly woman that is just come in?’ ‘O,’ replied his lordship, with great good humor, ‘that is my wife.’ ‘Sir, I ask you ten thousand pardons; I do not mean her, I mean that shocking monster who is along with her.’ ‘That,’ replied his lordship, ‘is my daughter.’

– M. Lafayette Byrn, The Repository of Wit and Humor, 1853

• “It is a rare thing in Egypt to speak the truth.”
• “Those who wish to visit Nubia ought to go there in a boat, for there is no other pleasant way.”
• “Perhaps there is no Christian country in the world as ignorant as Abyssinia.”
• “Cruelty is the chief vice of the Caffre.”
• “Newfoundland is a dreary abode.”
• “Though Mexico is so beautiful at a distance, yet the streets are narrow and loathsome, and the poor people, walking in them, look like bundles of old rags.”

“Washington is one of the most desolate cities in the world: not because she is in ruins, but for the opposite reason — because she is unfinished. There are places marked out where houses ought to be, but where no houses seem ever likely to be.”

[A]dvertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906

“In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations — it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.” — Stuart Keate