At the Kishi railway station in southern Japan, the stationmaster has her own litter box. Tama, a local stray cat, was named to the post in January 2007, and ridership immediately jumped 17 percent.
She’s paid in cat food and gets her own hat; as the station is unmanned, her main job is to greet passengers.
This all sounds remarkably progressive, but Tama may have mixed feelings: She’s still the only female manager in the company.
A Clergyman, in the eastern part of Sussex, a few years since, at a single discharge of his gun, killed a partridge, shot a man, a hog, and a hogsty, broke fourteen panes of glass, and knocked down six gingerbread kings and queens that were standing on the mantle-piece opposite the window. The above may be depended upon as a fact, not exaggerated, but given literally as it happened.
— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822
pogonotrophy
n. the growing of a beard
In the 1740s, workers at a stable near Cambridge noticed that a cat had taken a peculiar fancy to one of the horses there. She was always near him, they found, sitting on his back or nestling nearby in the manger.
Her attachment proved so great that when the stallion died in 1754 “she sat upon him after he was dead in the building erected for him, and followed him to the place where he was buried under a gateway near the running stable; sat upon him there till he was buried, then went away, and never was seen again, till found dead in the hayloft” — apparently of grief.
The cat’s name is not recorded, but she certainly could pick horses: The stallion was the Godolphin Arabian, now revered as the founder of modern thoroughbred racing stock. His direct descendants include both Seabiscuit and Man o’ War.
In 1912, workmen digging a tunnel for New York’s new subway discovered a carpeted room decorated with oil paintings, chandeliers, and a grandfather clock.
According to Tracy Fitzpatrick in Art and the Subway, it was the waiting room for an early prototype subway built in 1870 — a block-long tunnel in which a single car was pushed by a giant fan. Funding had failed, and the project had been forgotten.
In 1908, German novelist Ferdinand H. Grautoff published Banzai!, a curiously prescient account of a war between Japan and the United States. Japan deals a surprise defeat to unprepared American troops, who rally to repulse them:
Our splendid regiments could not be checked, so eager were they to push forward, and they succeeded in storming one of the enemy’s positions after the other along the mountainside. At last the enemy began to retreat, and the thunder of the cannon was again and again drowned in the frenzied cheers. General MacArthur was continually receiving at his headquarters reports of fresh victories in the front and on both wings.
Note the name of the American commander. Grautoff gives no clue to his inspiration, but in an introduction he writes, “All the incidents we had observed on the dusty highway of History, and passed by with indifference, had been sure signs of the coming catastrophe.”
FLESHPOT is a phonetic reversal of TOP-SHELF — it contains the same sounds in reverse order.
“Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.” — Jean de La Fontaine
Shortly before Nelson left England for the last time, he found himself sitting next to Benjamin West at an honorary dinner. The admiral complimented the painter on his Death of Wolfe and asked why he had produced no more pictures like it.
“Because, my lord,” West said, “there are no more subjects.” He said he feared that Nelson’s fearless courage might produce another such scene, and “if it should, I shall certainly avail myself of it.”
“Will you, Mr. West?” Nelson said. “Then I hope I shall die in the next battle.”
He got his wish — West found himself painting The Death of Nelson the following year.
