On April 6, 1966, to celebrate 100 years of the city’s incorporation, 35 citizens of Geneva, Ohio, signed a “Declaration of Lunar Ownership”:

When in the course of human events and space-age accomplishments, the destiny of mankind becomes influenced … [by] the presence of a particular controversial Celestial Body unclaimed and unregulated … it should be advisable and honorable … to lay definitive and prior claim to the entire physical mass and any and all aura, aspect, imaginative or otherwise, of … the Moon.

Geneva assumed “full possession and complete responsibility” of the Moon, yielding “to no man or State in its sovereign right so to do.” The declaration asserted the city’s claim as “positive, supreme, permanent and sovereign,” transcending and voiding “all other claims both real and fancied … previously made for the possession of all or any part of the Moon.” It permitted all humans “to enjoy and to behold and bask” in moonlight but disclaimed responsibility for “any mental, physical, or spiritual influences … [or] for any advantages or disadvantages from tidal phenomena.” Space explorers would be charged per hour for “landings and close fly bys of the visible acreage of the Moon,” and any activities on the far side required “the express consent of the official Councils of the City of Geneva.” And the declaration provided for the sale, rent, or lease of the visible lunar face “to desirable applicants upon a two-thirds vote of the entire population of Geneva,” granting the United States government “prior option to this privilege.”

For the year 1966, the document allowed the sale of 100 deeds “for the sum of $100 describing 100 acres from Mare Imbrium”; “the possessor of this deed shall have it to hold, his heirs and assigns forever and unencumbered.” Whether any were sold I can’t tell.

(From Virgiliu Pop, Who Owns the Moon?: Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources Ownership, 2008.)

“[A] man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.” — Socrates

In 2009, in the little Swiss town of Teufen, conceptual artists Frank and Patrik Riklin converted a 1980s-era nuclear fallout shelter to the “Null Stern Hotel,” an underground facility that accommodates 14 guests in a concrete bunker fitted with blast doors nearly two feet thick.

“We kept the internal structure of the shelter intact — the concrete and the ductwork — and then we added the warmth of antique beds and furniture,” Patrik told the Guardian. “For us it’s an art installation before it’s a hotel — a place where people can think about their surroundings.” There are no windows, only a CCTV camera displaying the outside world, and they retained the institutional paint scheme of pastel blue and yellow.

The site was nominated for best innovation of the year in the 2009 Worldwide Hospitality Awards, and GEO magazine ranked it among the Top 100 hotels in Europe the following year. In 2010 the proprietors were seeking to expand the franchise, but to date no hotel has opened beyond Teufen.

I send you a photo of myself for ‘Curiosities’ studying Virgil in a peculiar position. It was taken by my brother in the country a few weeks ago. It was not a snap-shot, but a time exposure.

— Charles E. Williams of Rock Ferry, Cheshire, in Strand, September 1905

Australia’s Mount Wingen has been burning for 6,000 years. A lightning strike or brush fire ignited a coal seam there around 4000 B.C., and it’s been smoldering ever since.

“Smoldering fires, the slow, low-temperature, flameless form of combustion, are an important phenomena in the Earth system, and the most persistent type of combustion,” University of Edinburgh fire scientist Guillermo Rein told the New York Times. “The most important fuels involved in smoldering fires are coal and peat. Once ignited, these fires are particularly difficult to extinguish despite extensive rains, weather changes or firefighting attempts, and can persist for long periods of time (months, years), spreading deep (5 meters) and over extensive areas of forest subsurface. Indeed, smoldering fires are the longest continuously burning fires on Earth.”

The Mount Wingen fire holds the Guinness record for the longest-burning fire in the world.

Hui Tzu argued that a motherless colt never had a mother.

For when it had a mother, he said, it was not motherless.

And at every other moment of its life, it had no mother.