When Silvia Morello de Palma was seven months pregnant, she flew to Antarctica to join her husband, the commander of Argentina’s Esperanza research base.
When their son, Emilio Marcos Palma, was born safely on Jan. 7, 1978, he became the world’s southernmost birth — and the only person in recorded history to be the firstborn on a continent.
From The Strand Magazine, August 1909:
The above photographs show front and side views of a fancy dress representing ‘Half-an’-‘Arf’. The costume was prepared in three evenings during spare time, and the dress suit was in no way altered or damaged, all the tramp-side garments being superstructed. There is a nine days’ beard on one side of the face, the hair being combed with isinglass to make it stand up. The face and arm are stained and made up with powders to look exactly like a natural tramp’s complexion minus the dirt. The boot is an old hand-sewn one, made up with painted and stained brown paper, with a hole in front from which a piece of tow protruded. The whole costume cost about a shilling to produce, and was a great success at more than one dance.
Room 308 of the Samudra Beach Hotel in West Java is reserved for the Indonesian goddess Nyai Loro Kidul.
The hotel stands near the cliff from which folktales say a young girl flung herself and became Queen of the South Sea. While praying beneath a nearby ketapang tree in the early 1960s, President Sukarno received the message that a hotel might be built on the spot if a room were reserved for the jealous sea goddess.
The room is decorated in green, her favorite color.
In the ‘Old India House’ may still be seen a quarto volume of Interest Tables, on the fly-leaf of which is written, in Charles Lamb’s round, clerkly hand,–
‘A book of much interest.’–Edinburgh Review
‘A work in which the interest never flags.’–Quarterly Review
‘We may say of this volume, that the interest increases from the beginning to the end.’–Monthly Review
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
levament
n. “the comfort which one hath of his wife”
(Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, 1623)
In 1863, the register of the U.S. Treasury, L.E. Chittenden, had to sign 12,500 bonds in a single weekend to stop the delivery of two British-built warships to the Confederacy. He started at noon on Friday and managed 3,700 signatures in the first seven hours, but by Saturday morning he was desperate:
[E]very muscle on the right side connected with the movement of the hand and arm became inflamed, and the pain was almost beyond endurance. … In the slight pauses which were made, rubbing, the application of hot water, and other remedies were resorted to, in order to alleviate the pain and reduce the inflammation. They were comparatively ineffectual, and the hours dragged on without bringing much relief.
He finished, exhausted, at noon on Sunday, completing a mountain of bonds more than 6 feet high. These were rushed to a waiting steamer — and only then did word come that the English warships had been sold to a different buyer. The bonds, in the end, were not needed.
The year 1818 was a kind of Annus Mirabilis. The amount of all the figures together was eighteen, which was also the sum expressed by the first two, as well as the last two, and also reckoned singly, either forwards or backwards: an arithmetical combination which can never happen again.
— The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, May 24, 1823
In 2007, hunters caught a 50-ton bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska. Lodged in its neck they found a fragment of a bomb lance that had been manufactured in New Bedford, Mass., in 1890.
This means the whale was 115 to 130 years old. It might have been born in the same year that Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president.
In 1975, firefighters were checking a Greenwich Village apartment building when they entered the flat of 58-year-old attorney Joseph Feldman and discovered more than 15,000 New York Public Library books “piled to the ceiling, covering the stove and filling the bathtub and sinks,” according to a New York Times report.
Feldman, who didn’t even have a library card, explained, “I like to read.” Twenty men removed the books in seven truckloads. A library spokesman said Feldman might be charged the standard fine of 10 cents per book per day, up to the cost of the book, but I can’t find a record of the final judgment.
“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them,” wrote Anatole France. “The only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”
In 1938, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, N.Y., decided to include sample Social Security cards in its products. The company’s vice president thought it would be clever to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Whitcher.
It wasn’t. The sample card was half-size, printed in red, and bore the word SPECIMEN in large letters, but by 1943 more than 5,000 people were using Whitcher’s number as their own. The Social Security Administration voided the card and started a publicity campaign to educate users, but over the years more than 40,000 people reported the number as their own, some as recently as 1977.
“They started using the number,” Whitcher marveled. “They thought it was their own. I can’t understand how people can be so stupid. I can’t understand that.”