The world’s shortest valid will is “Vse zene” — the Czech for “All to wife.”
It was written and dated Jan. 19, 1967, by Karl Tausch of Langen, Hessen, West Germany.
Monthly Coincidences
Unless it’s a leap year:
- January begins on the same day of the week as October.
- February begins on the same day of the week as March and November.
- April begins on the same day of the week as July.
- December begins with the same day of the week as September.
- No other month begins on the same day of the week as May or June.
First Photo
This is the world’s first successful permanent photograph, “View From the Window at Le Gras,” created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.
The exposure required eight hours, so the buildings are illuminated from both right and left.
Smarty-Pants
This year Mensa accepted a new youngest member. Three-year-old Mikhail Ali of Bramley, Leeds, England, has an IQ of 137; he’s one of only 30 members under 10.
But he’s not the all-time youngest member — that’s Ben Woods, who was 2 years and 10 months old when he joined in the mid-1990s.
Size Matters
If Wal-Mart were a country, it would have the 33rd largest economy in the world, with a GDP between Ukraine’s and Colombia’s.
Tunguska Redux
Somebody up there hates Siberia.
On June 30, 1908, something huge exploded over the Tunguska River near modern Evenkia. The blast felled 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers; it’s been estimated at between 10 and 15 megatons. Witnesses described a huge fireball moving across the sky, a flash, and a shockwave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows up to 400 miles away. Afterward, the night sky glowed for weeks.
But, strangely, there was no crater. In fact, a few trees near ground zero were still standing, their branches and bark stripped off. Stranger still, some reports said the skyglow had begun the night before the explosion, and that there had been strange weather and increased seismic activity for days beforehand. And carbon-14 dating of the soil gave a date in the future — meaning the soil had somehow become enriched with radioactive carbon-14.
What caused the explosion? A meteor? A comet? An asteroid? There’s been no conclusive explanation. But, disturbingly, a similar thing happened just three years ago. An explosion in Siberia in September 2002 that measured up to 5 kilotons was accompanied by northern lights, increased radioactivity, and an outbreak of unknown diseases nearby. An expedition the following year concluded that it was a comet, but no one knows for sure.
No Kickstand
The world record for high-speed bicycling keeps going up, of course, but the record for low-speed bicycling has remained unchallenged for 40 years. In 1965, Tsugunobu Mitsuishi of Tokyo, Japan, remained perfectly stationary for 5 hours and 25 minutes.
Unquote
“In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact.” — Marlene Dietrich
Record Reader
Kim Peek, the basis for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man, has memorized 9,600 books.
“Gruesomely Bad Taste”
Critics pan great art:
- Moby Dick: “Raving and rhapsodizing in chapter after chapter … sheer moonstruck lunacy.” (London Morning Chronicle)
- Rigoletto: “The weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody. This opera has hardly any chance of being kept in the repertoire.” (La Gazette Musicale de Paris)
- Cezanne’s paintings: “He chooses to daub paint on a canvas and spread it around with a comb or a toothbrush. This process produces landscapes, marines, still lifes, portraits … if he is lucky. The procedure somewhat recalls the designs that schoolchildren make by squeezing the heads of flies between the folds of a sheet of paper.” (Le Petit Parisien)
- Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1: “The concerto will never be played by anyone on earth. … Prokofiev wouldn’t grant an encore. The Russian heart may be a dark place, but its capacity for mercy is infinite.” (The New York Times)
- Buster Keaton’s The General: “A mixture of cast iron and jelly.” (The New York Times)
- Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “Pursues its theme of false identity with such plodding persistence that by the time the climactic cat is let out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens.” (Saturday Review)
Henry Fielding wrote, “Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.”