One of the curiosities some time since shown at a public exhibition, professed to be a skull of Oliver Cromwell. A gentleman present observed that it could not be Cromwell’s, as he had a very large head, and this was a small skull. ‘Oh, I know all that,’ said the exhibitor, undisturbed, ‘but, you see, this was his skull when he was a boy.’
— Ainsworth Rand Spofford et al., The Library of Wit and Humor, Prose and Poetry, 1894
In 1956, Cardinal Spellman forbade New York Catholics to see Elia Kazan’s film Baby Doll. Asked whether he himself had seen it, Spellman replied, “Must you have a disease to know what it is? If your water supply is poisoned, there’s no reason for you to drink the water.”
The British Board of Film Censors reported that the 1928 French surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman was “so cryptic as to be almost meaningless” … but “if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”
“Think for yourselves,” wrote Voltaire, “and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.”
Seeing the reversible word ‘chump’ among your ‘Curiosities,’ I am sending you a name, ‘W.H. Hill,’ which, when written in the style shown, reads the same when reversed. Surely this is the only name possessing so convenient a peculiarity.
— B.R. Bligh, in Strand, September 1908
kalopsia
n. the delusion that things are more beautiful than they are
Nancy Luce is remembered as a terrible poet, but her life was so sad that it’s hard to laugh. Described by one writer as “chicken mad,” Luce spent 76 years on Martha’s Vineyard, cultivating her birds as personal friends and selling poems about them to tourists. The poems reveal such misery that they can be moving despite their strangeness:
Poor little heart, she was sick one week
With froth in her throat,
Then 10 days and grew worse, with dropsy in her stomach,
I kept getting up nights to see how she was. …
Poor little Ada Queetie’s last sickness and death
Destroyed my health at an unknown rate,
With my heart breaking and weeping,
I kept the fire going night after night,
To keep poor little dear warm.
This was real pain, but visitors saw only an eccentric old woman. She died in 1890, unlamented — and tourists today leave plastic chickens on her grave.
Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theater, and for them talking from the lips of the figures on the screen destroys the illusion. Devices for projecting the film actor’s speech can be perfected, but the idea is not practical. The stage is the place for the spoken word. The reactions of the American public up to now indicate the movies will not supersede it.
— Thomas Edison, quoted in the New York Times, May 21, 1926
In his early days as a news reporter, James Thurber’s editor told him to “write dramatic, buttonholing leads to your stories.”
So, typing up a murder case, Thurber wrote:
“Dead. That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s Saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th Streets.”
The same thing can happen at the end of a news career.
Binary Arts devised this wonderful three-dimensional illusion for the third Gathering for Gardner in 1998.
You can download a dragon of your own here.
On the first of December, 1787, some fishermen fishing in the river Thames, near Poplar, with much difficulty drew into their boat a shark, yet alive, but apparently very sickly; it was taken on shore, and, being opened, in its belly were found a silver watch, a metal chain, and a cornelian seal, together with several pieces of gold-lace, supposed to have belonged to some young gentleman, who was unfortunate enough to have fallen overboard; but that the body and other parts had either been digested, or otherwise voided; but the watch and gold-lace not being able to pass through it, the fish had thereby become sickly, and would in all probability very soon have died. The watch had the name of ‘Henry Watson, London, No. 1369,’ and the works were very much impaired. On these circumstances being made public, Mr. Henry Watson, watchmaker, in Soreditch, recollected that about two years ago he sold the watch to Mr. Ephraim Thompson, of Whitechapel, as a present to his son, on going out his first voyage, on board the ship Polly, Capt. Vane, bound to Coast and Bay: about three leagues off Falmouth, by a sudden heel of the vessel, during a squall, Master Thompson fell overboard, and was no more seen.–The news of his being drowned soon after came to knowledge of his friends, who little thought of hearing any more concerning him.
— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822
See The Shark Arm Affair.
Charles Dickens slept with his head pointing north. “He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position,” noted journalist Eliza Lynn Linton.
Ben Jonson was buried upright in Westminster Abbey — it’s not clear whether this was his request or required by circumstance.
And in 1800 Maj. Peter Labelliere was buried on Box Hill head down, declaring that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last.”