Oddities
Personality and Blood Type
Personality traits associated with various blood types, according to Japanese superstition:
Type A:
- Best traits: Conservative, reserved, patient, punctual, perfectionist, and good with plants.
- Worst traits: Introverted, obsessive, stubborn, and self-conscious. Anal retentive.
- Famous examples: George H.W. Bush, O.J. Simpson, Britney Spears
Type B:
- Best traits: Creative and passionate. Animal-loving. Optimistic and flexible.
- Worst traits: Forgetful, irresponsible, individualistic.
- Famous examples: Akira Kurosawa, Jack Nicholson, Luciano Pavarotti
Type AB:
- Best traits: Cool, controlled, rational. Sociable and popular. Empathic.
- Worst traits: Aloof, critical, indecisive, and unforgiving.
- Famous examples: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger
Type O:
- Best traits: Ambitious, athletic, robust, and self-confident. Natural leaders.
- Worst traits: Arrogant, vain, and insensitive. Ruthless.
- Famous examples: Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, John Lennon
Interestingly, Type A blood is the most common in Japan, while Type O is most common in the United States — and among Japanese prime ministers.
Slow Going
In 2002, charity fundraiser Lloyd Scott ran the London Marathon wearing a 120-pound deep-sea diving suit.
He finished the 26.2-mile course in five days, eight and a half hours — a record high.
Freudian Skip
The youngest confirmed mother in medical history is Lina Medina of Paurange, Peru, who gave birth to a 5.9-pound boy at age 5. The delivery was done through caesarian section; it’s not known how she conceived the child. Her son, Gerardo, was raised believing that Lina was his sister.
Wheels Within Wheels
An optical illusion. Move your nose toward the dot in the center.
Boo!
Freud would have loved San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House,” a mansion-sized emblem of its owner’s mental illness. Rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester started construction in 1884, and never stopped. A medium had told her of a family curse, and convinced her that she would die if the construction ever ceased.
So it went on, 24 hours a day, for 38 years. There was no plan; the house was just continuously rebuilt. Worse, Sarah believed that vengeful spirits of gun victims were seeking her, so she slept in a different room each night, and the layout is full of secret passages and stairways and doors that lead nowhere.
The result shows what $5.5 million worth of insanity looks like. Altogether there are 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 1,260 windows, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two ballrooms, two basements and three working elevators.
It takes 20,000 gallons to paint the place, so painting never stops. In that sense, Sarah’s weird wish lives on.
SPCSCPG
The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George” was a lighthearted association with a useful, if incidental, cause. Most railway porters were black, and many passengers called them all George, following the racist custom of naming slaves after their masters. (George Pullman ran the company that made the cars, so the porters were regarded as his servants.)
Strangely, the prevention society was founded not by the black porters, but by white railway employees who were actually named George. Apparently they were either annoyed by the tradition or thought that such a society would be a good joke.
People did think it was funny, or at least inoffensive. At its peak, the society had 31,000 members, including King George V of the United Kingdom, Babe Ruth (whose given name was George), and French politician Georges Clemenceau.
Left Turn at Albuquerque
Late last year, somewhere in the lonely New Mexico desert, someone began broadcasting a strange shortwave radio signal.
At regular intervals, on several frequencies, Yosemite Sam says, “Varmint, I’m a-gonna blow you to smithereens!”
The FCC thinks the signal is originating in the desert near Albuquerque, but no one knows who’s broadcasting it, or why.
Speak Up, Please
The appropriate word here is “Bleeaagh.” In 897, Pope Stephen VI dug up the decomposing body of his predecessor and put it on trial for violating church law. Formosus, who had been dead for nine months, was found guilty and buried again. Rome turned against Stephen, who was eventually strangled in prison. It’s known as the cadaver synod or, in Latin, the “synodus horrenda.”
Watch Your Step
Vaucanson’s Shitting Duck was one of the more unsavory products of the French Enlightenment.
When it was unveiled by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739, thousands watched the “canard digérateur” stretch its neck to eat grain from a hand. The food then dissolved, “the matter digested in the stomach being conducted by tubes, as in an animal by its bowels, into the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to be released.” These inner workings were all proudly displayed, “though some ladies preferred to see them decently covered.”
Why make fake duck shit when the world is so well supplied with the real thing? It was part of the Enlightenment’s transition from a naturalistic to a mechanical worldview. Suddenly a duck was not a God-given miracle but a machine made of meat, and complex automatons carried the promise of mechanized labor, stirring a cultural revolution.
Goethe mentioned Vaucanson’s automata in his diary, and Sir David Brewster called the duck “perhaps the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever made.” Sadly, the whole thing was a fake: The droppings were prefabricated and hidden in a separate compartment. Back to the drawing board.