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Barbie

“Barbie is the ultimate ambassador for girls,” says Mattel. That’s a little dubious, given her bio. Does this sound like your daughter?

“Barbara Millicent Roberts” attended Willows High School in Willows, Wis., and Manhattan International High School in New York City. She has 38 pets, including cats, dogs, horses, a panda, a lion cub, and a zebra. She also owns numerous cars, including several pink convertibles, and she operates commercial airliners when she’s not serving as a stewardess.

She dated Ken Carson for 43 years before dumping him to run for president in 2004. (Platform: create world peace, help the homeless, take care of animals.) As experience, her handlers cited “serving in the military, acting as a UNICEF ambassador and being a teacher.”

They also said she was “well-rounded.” That’s for sure. At life size, Barbie would be 5 foot 9 and measure 36-18-33. But it turns out you can be too rich and too thin: According to research by the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, Barbie would have too little body fat to menstruate.

| Entertainment · Trivia

A Land-Dwelling Blue Whale

In 1878, paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope discovered the partial vertebra of a new species of dinosaur near Morrison, Colo. It was in poor condition but enormous, 7.8 feet high.

If it really existed, that would make Amphicoelias fragillimus the largest dinosaur ever discovered, up to 200 feet long and weighing as much as 185 tons, the equivalent of a land-dwelling blue whale.

Cope packed up the vertebra and sent it by train to a New York museum, but apparently it crumbled into dust on the way. All that remain are Cope’s description and a line drawing. Oh well.

| Oddities · Science & Math

“The Witch of Wall Street”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hetty-green.jpeg

If Ebenezer Scrooge were a woman, he’d look like this. Hetty Green (1834-1916) amassed more than $100 million as a shrewd businesswoman, but today she’s remembered mostly for her breathtaking stinginess.

Born into a Massachusetts whaling family, Hetty was reading financial papers to her father at age 6 and keeping the family books at 13. She inherited $7.5 million on her father’s death, and reportedly married only to keep her relatives at bay (she made her fiance sign a prenup). When her husband divorced her and then died, she moved to Hoboken and basically went nuts.

Legends say she never heated her house or used hot water; that she wore one old black dress; that she rode in an old carriage. Rather than pay rent, she sat on the floor of New York’s Seaboard National Bank and ate only oatmeal heated on the office radiator, and she would travel thousands of miles to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.

Almost no expense was worthwhile. Her son’s leg had to be amputated when she tried to treat him at home. She herself refused treatment for a hernia because it cost $150.

When she died, at age 80, she may have been the richest woman in the world. Unfortunately, you can’t take it with you.

| History · Oddities

Found Poetry

William Whewell was a giant of 19th-century science, but he may have missed his true calling. Someone pointed out that his classic Elementary Treatise on Mechanics contains the following poetic sentence:

And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.

Then again, maybe not: Whewell quietly changed the wording in the next edition.

Max Beerbohm noticed a similar happenstance in the first edition of his collected works:

‘London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.’
This plain announcement, nicely read,
Iambically runs.

| Poems · Science & Math

Matisse Inverted

In 1961, Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau was accidentally hung upside down in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 47 days. 116,000 visitors had passed through the gallery before the mistake was discovered.

| Art

High PageRanks

Web sites with a Google PageRank of 10:

And, of course, Google itself.

| Technology

Jimmy Hoffa’s Grave

Rumored whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body:

  • Buried in northern Michigan
  • Buried under the New Jersey Turnpike
  • Buried in an abandoned coal mine near Pittston, Pa.
  • Buried in Fresh Kills landfill, Staten Island, New York
  • Buried under the end zone at Giants Stadium in New Jersey
  • Buried in PJP Landfill in Jersey City, underneath the Pulaski Skyway
  • Mechanically converted to cement
  • Dissolved in an acid tank used to rechrome car bumpers
  • Rendered into fat at a rendering plant

His body has never been found, and in 1982 he was declared legally dead.

Ironically, his middle name was Riddle.

| Crime · Death

“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.”

| Art

Society of Mind

http://www.urville.com/

Urville is a city of 14 million inhabitants that exists entirely in the mind of Gilles Trehin, a French autistic savant.

Trehin began creating plans at the age of 12, using Lego blocks and model airplanes. Today, at 33, he has drawn extensive maps and landscapes of his creation, as well as inventing a culture and a detailed history going back to the 12th century B.C., when he imagines the city was founded by the Phoenicians.

Today, in Trehin’s mind, Urville is the third largest city in the developed world, behind Tokyo and New York, and boasts 87 cinemas, 42 cabarets, 174 public swimming pools and European offices of I.B.M., Sony, Citybank, Olivetti, and Siemens.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” wrote Albert Einstein. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

| Oddities

Commuting Times

Average travel time to work:

  • New York: 39.0 minutes
  • Los Angeles: 28.1 minutes
  • Chicago: 33.1 minutes
  • Houston: 25.9 minutes
  • Philadelphia: 29.2 minutes
  • Phoenix: 24.7 minutes
  • San Diego: 22.6 minutes
  • Dallas: 25.2 minutes
  • San Antonio: 21.5 minutes
  • Detroit: 24.2 minutes

The average U.S. commute is 24.3 minutes.

| Trivia