Several times a year, the Atlantic sends a tidal wave up the Amazon. It’s loud, violent, and full of debris, and it can be up to 13 feet high.
So, naturally, people surf it.
A good ocean wave might last 30 seconds, but one surfer rode the pororoca for 37 straight minutes. It carried him 7.7 miles upriver.
Longest game of Monopoly:
“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”
— Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925
Here’s a sugar alcohol derived from the North Atlantic seaweed Fucus vesiculosus. It’s called fucitol.
And its optical isomers are called D-fuc-ol and L-fuc-ol.
The glycoprotein that vampire bats use to prevent their victims’ blood from clotting is called draculin.
And diethyl azodicarboxylate is explosive, shock-sensitive, carcinogenic, and an eye, skin, and respiratory irritant, which helps to justify its acronym: DEAD.
See Juvenile Chemistry.
(“Dedicated to the End of the Dictionary”)
A xylographer started to cross the sea
By means of a Xanthic Xebec;
But, alas! he sighed for the Zuyder Zee,
And feared he was in for a wreck.
He tried to smile, but all in vain,
Because of a Zygomatic pain;
And as for singing, his cheeriest tone
Reminded him of a Xylophone–
Or else, when the pain would sharper grow,
His notes were as keen as a Zuffolo.
And so it is likely he did not find
On board Xenodochy to his mind.
The fare was poor, and he was sure
Xerofphagy he could not endure;
Zoophagous surely he was, I aver,
This dainty and starving Xylographer.
Xylophagous truly he could not be–
No sickly vegetarian he!
He’d have blubbered like any old Zeuglodon
Had Xerophthalmia not come on.
And the end of it was he never again
In a Xanthic Xebec went sailing the main.
— Mary Mapes Dodge, Poems and Verses, 1904
P.T. Barnum conceived a novel way to advertise his American Museum: He paid a man to place a brick at each of five New York intersections and to spend the day marching industriously from one to the next, exchanging bricks at each stop.
“What is the object of this?” inquired the man.
“No matter,” said Barnum. “All you need to know is that it brings you fifteen cents wages per hour. It is a bit of my fun, and to assist me properly you must seem to be as deaf as a post; wear a serious countenance; answer no questions; pay no attention to anyone; but attend faithfully to the work, and at the end of every hour, by St. Paul’s clock, show this ticket at the Museum door; enter, walking solemnly through every hall in the building; pass out, and resume your work.”
Within an hour the sidewalks were packed, and many spectators bought tickets so they could follow the mysterious man inside. “This was continued for several days — the curious people who followed the man into the Museum considerably more than paying his wages — till, finally, the policeman, to whom I had imparted my object, complained that the obstruction of the sidewalk by crowds had become so serious that I must call in my ‘brick man.'”
“This trivial incident excited considerable talk and amusement; it advertised me; and it materially advanced my purpose of making a lively corner near the Museum.”
Robert H. Stanley of Greenfield, N.H., must have angered the rain gods — he went to bed during a terrific downpour on Aug. 2, 1966, and awoke to find it had targeted his house alone:
After finding the 5.75 in. of rain in the gage, he inquired from a neighbor 0.3 miles to the east. He found that the neighbor had but 0.50 in. in his gage. He thereupon examined the countryside for visible effects. The road washout extended for only a few hundred feet. Upon going one-half mile in either direction, no evidence of rain erosion of sand or gravel could be found. South of the house, beginning at the gage which was mounted on a pole, well distant from structures or trees, there stretches a 10-acre field. The knee-high grass therein was beaten down flat. By afternoon it began to revive. By the following noon it was erect. To the west of the house, a dry-wash brook running bankful at dawn was empty by 0800 EST. Drawing a line around the traces of erosion, one obtains an oval area about a mile north-south and about three-fourths of a mile east-west. Within this area, rain varied from the order of 1 in. on the limits to almost 6 in. in the center. Outside this limit, rain is believed to have fallen off sharply to less than one-fourth of an inch, generally within a few thousand feet.
(Monthly Weather Review, 93:164-68, 1970)
Andrea’s only timepiece is a clock that’s fixed to the wall. One day she forgets to wind it and it stops.
She travels across town to have dinner with a friend whose own clock is always correct. When she returns home, she makes a simple calculation and sets her own clock accurately.
How does she manage this without knowing the travel time between her house and her friend’s?
It’s said that when Christopher Wren completed St. Paul’s cathedral in 1708, Queen Anne told him his work was “awful, artificial, and amusing.”
He took this as a compliment — in those days these words meant awe-inspiring, artistic, and amazing.
An “infallible remedy against epilepsy,” published in Paris in 1686:
Take of common polypody dried and powdered, of moss growing from the skull of a man who died by violent means (criminals preferred), of nail-filings from human hands and feet, two drachms each; piony root half an ounce, and of fresh misletoe half an ounce. Boil them together as the moon wanes; cool, strain, and administer in small doses.
Cited in Charles White, Three Years in Constantinople, 1846.
See Well, Hey!