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Who?

Identities assumed by virtuoso impostor Stanley Clifford Weyman (1890-1960):

  • U.S. consul representative to Morocco. Arrested for fraud.
  • Military attaché from Serbia and U.S. Navy lieutenant (so the two could use each other as references).
  • “Lt. Cmdr. Ethan Allen Weinberg, consul general for Romania.” He inspected the U.S.S. Wyoming and invited its officers to a dinner at the Astor Hotel. On being arrested, he was heard to complain that they should have waited until dessert.
  • “Royal St. Cyr,” a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Arrested on an inspection tour of the Brooklyn armory.
  • Company doctor in Lima, Peru. Threw parties until arrested.
  • State Department naval liaison officer. Introduced himself to Princess Fatima of Afghanistan and promised to arrange a meeting with the president. She gave him $10,000 for “presents” to State Department officials. Weyman got appointments with Secretary of State Evans Hughes and with Warren G. Harding. Indicted for impersonating a naval officer.
  • U.S. secretary of state. Interviewed Queen Marie of Romania for the Evening Graphic newspaper.
  • Personal physician to Pola Negri, Rudolph Valentino’s grieving lover. Established a faith-healing clinic and issued regular press releases.
  • Arrested during World War II for telling draft dodgers how to feign various medical conditions.
  • Journalist for the United Nations. Caught when he asked the State Department whether he could remain a U.S. citizen if he became the Thai delegation’s press officer.

Ironically, Weyman’s most honest act may have been his last: He was shot trying to stop a robbery in a New York hotel. “One man’s life is a boring thing,” he once said. “I lived many lives. I’m never bored.”

| Crime · Hoaxes

Rocket Mail

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Missilemail.jpg

In 1959, the U.S. Postal Service tried delivering mail with a cruise missile — they replaced its warhead with two mail containers and fired it from Virginia to Florida.

When it hit the target, the postmaster general announced a new era. “Before man reaches the moon,” he said, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”

But the program went no further. “The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives,” wrote Jane Austen. “When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.”

| Technology

Penthouse, Please

Record skyscrapers through history:

  • 1873 – Equitable Life Building, New York: 142 feet (6 floors)
  • 1876 – St. Pancras Chambers, London: 269 feet (9 floors)
  • 1889 – Auditorium Building, Chicago: 269 feet (17 floors)
  • 1890 – New York World Building, New York: 309 feet (20 floors)
  • 1894 – Manhattan Life Insurance Building, New York: 348 feet (18 floors)
  • 1895 – Milwaukee City Hall, Milwaukee: 350 feet (9 floors)
  • 1899 – Park Row Building, New York: 391 feet (30 floors)
  • 1908 – Singer Building, New York, 612 feet (47 floors)
  • 1909 – Met Life Tower, New York, 700 feet (50 floors)
  • 1913 – Woolworth Building, New York: 792 feet (57 floors)
  • 1930 – Chrysler Building, New York: 925 feet (77 floors)
  • 1931 – Empire State Building, New York: 1,250 feet (102 floors)
  • 1972 – World Trade Center, New York: 1,368 feet (110 floors)
  • 1974 – Sears Tower, Chicago: 1,451 feet (108 floors)
  • 2003 – Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan: 1,474 feet (101 floors)
| Technology

Blind Tom Wiggins

Born in 1849, “Blind Tom” Wiggins found himself with three burdens and a gift: He was blind, he was mentally challenged, he was a slave, and he was a musical prodigy.

He was playing piano by ear at age 4, before he could speak. At 5 he composed a tune and found he could reproduce perfectly any piece from memory. His vocabulary was only about 100 words, and he spoke of himself in the third person (“Tom is pleased to meet you”), but in time he learned 7,000 piano pieces, mostly classics.

At age 8 a successful concert in Columbus, Ga., led to a tour. He played for James Buchanan and Mark Twain, accepting challenges to repeat original compositions to show there was no trickery. By age 16, he was touring the world.

He retired in 1883 but returned briefly for a series of New York concerts in 1904. He died in 1908.

| Oddities

Clerihews

A clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. They’re named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented them, and they get pretty erudite, for some reason:

Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison’s dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

The world’s densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:

To the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker

Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noël
Coward,
Howard?

| Humor · Poems

Addresses of Fictional Characters

Addresses of fictional characters:

Dr. John Dolittle
Oxenthorpe Road
Puddleby-on-the-Marsh
Slopshire, England

Clark Kent
344 Clinton Street
Apt. 3B
Metropolis, USA

Leopold Bloom
7 Eccles Street
Dublin, Ireland

Miss Marple
Danemead
High Street
St. Mary Mead

Hercule Poirot
Apt. 56B
Whitehaven Mansions
Sandhurst Square
London W1, U.K.

Lucy Ricardo
Apartment 4A
623 East 68th Street
New York, New York

The Simpsons
742 Evergreen Terrace
Springfield, USA

| Entertainment

Erratum

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Apollo_15_launch_medium_distance.jpg

It’s important to acknowledge your mistakes. In a 1920 editorial, the New York Times attacked Robert Goddard’s claim that a rocket would work in space:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969, days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it published this correction:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.

It added: “The Times regrets the error.”

| Science & Math

An Unlikely Spy

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Velvaleedickinsonmay201942letter.jpg

Looks pretty innocuous, right? This is part of a letter composed by New York doll shop owner Velvalee Dickinson in May 1942. The FBI decoded it as follows:

I just secured information on an aircraft carrier warship. It had been damaged, that is, torpedoed in the middle. But it is now repaired. … They could not get a mate for this, so a plain ordinary warship is being converted into a second aircraft carrier. …

Probably she was referring to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Saratoga. Apparently Dickinson had been operating as a Japanese spy throughout the war — her letters to Buenos Aires, ostensibly about doll collecting, had actually contained detailed information about U.S. warships, coastal defenses, and repair operations.

She protested her innocence but got the maximum sentence, 10 years and a $10,000 fine. She died in 1980.

| Crime · History

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