A striking detail from the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1860: On a wager, poet John Taylor (1578–1653) once engaged to row from London to Queenborough in a paper boat with two stockfish tied to canes for oars. He partnered with a vintner named Roger Bird, and the two

Took ship vpon the vigill of Saint Iames
And boldly ventur’d down the Riuer Thames,
Lauing and cutting through each raging billow,
(In such a Boat which neuer had a fellow)
Hauing no kinde of mettall or no wood
To helpe vs eyther in our Ebbe or Flood:
For as our boat was paper, so our Oares
Where Stock-fish, caught neere to the Island shores.

The boat began to leak and founder, and Taylor contrived to hold it up by attaching eight inflatable bullocks’ bladders to its sides. After two miserable days, he and Bird reached their goal and were feted by the mayor of Queenborough while the people tore the boat to scraps, “Wearing the reliques in their hats and caps.” They rode home on horseback.

The cover of Wolfgang Haug’s 1986 book Critique of Commodity Aesthetics bears a striking photo — when corn was strategically spread in in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, hundreds of feasting pigeons produced an impromptu advertisement for Coca-Cola.

Evidently Coke had borrowed the idea from Assicurazioni Generali, a Venetian insurance company with headquarters in the piazza. The insurers would coax the pigeons to form the letters A G.

I’m not sure when the Coke ad was made. In The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader (1995), Nigel Wheale says the ad could be seen on the walls of Italian bars and restaurants in the late 1960s, but possibly the photo had been taken earlier.

The Devil’s Table is a startling rock formation 14 meters high in Germany’s Palatine Forest. A layer of hard siliceous sandstone was deposited atop a softer sediment that then weathered away, leaving a “tabletop” that protects its pillar from further erosion. It was classified as a National Geotope in 2006.

In one variation of a popular paradox, a friend tells you that she’ll give you a present sometime next week, but that you won’t be able to predict the day on which you’ll receive it.

This is puzzling. If she waits until Saturday, the end of the week, it will be obvious that you must receive the gift on that day, as no other day remains possible. But if we exclude Saturday then the same argument could be used to exclude Friday, and so on back to Sunday. It seems that the friend’s declaration can’t be true — her gift can’t be unexpected.

David Morice offers one possibility that he called “Zeno’s solution”: Your friend, wearing a precision wristwatch, presents the gift in the moment precisely between Friday and Saturday. No reasoning has led you to expect this, so you’re surprised.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 27:2 [May 1994], 106-116.) (See the link — Morice offers three other solutions as well, “but I expect that each is logically flawed.”)

The delta of Argentina’s Paraná River contains a rotating eye. “El Ojo” is a circular floating island 118 meters wide that spins in place within a slightly larger circular lake. It’s been there, silently turning, for at least 20 years — Google Earth confirms its presence in 2003.

See “A Revolving Ice Cake.”

In Three Men in a Boat (1889), the narrator reads a medical textbook and is stricken with the certainty that he has every condition described there:

I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms — discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too … I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

This is a recognized phenomenon. In 1908, Boston neurologist George Lincoln Walton reported:

Medical instructors are continually consulted by students who fear that they have the diseases they are studying. The knowledge that pneumonia produces pain in a certain spot leads to a concentration of attention upon that region which causes any sensation there to give alarm. The mere knowledge of the location of the appendix transforms the most harmless sensations in that region into symptoms of serious menace.

In 2004 University of Toronto psychiatrist Brian Hodges noted that “medical students’ disease” is said to afflict 70 to 80 percent of students, often invading their dreams. Walton wrote, “The sensible student learns to quiet these fears, but the victim of ‘hypos’ returns again and again for examination, and perhaps finally reaches the point of imparting, instead of obtaining, information, like the patient in a recent anecdote from the Youth’s Companion:”

It seems that a man who was constantly changing physicians at last called in a young doctor who was just beginning his practice.

‘I lose my breath when I climb a hill or a steep flight of stairs,’ said the patient. ‘If I hurry, I often get a sharp pain in my side. Those are the symptoms of a serious heart trouble.’

‘Not necessarily, sir,’ began the physician, but he was interrupted.

‘I beg your pardon!’ said the patient irritably. ‘It isn’t for a young physician like you to disagree with an old and experienced invalid like me, sir!’