The Book of Lists

11 MUSEUMS OF LIMITED APPEAL

Founded in 1993, MOBA is located in the basement of the Dedham Community Theater eight miles south of Boston. Its motto is ‘Art too bad to be ignored’. Although the bulk of the collection has been acquired at thrift shops, many of the finest pieces were fished out of rubbish bins.

Officially titled Exotic World Burlesque Hall of Fame and Museum, it is the domain of former exotic dancer Dixie Evans, whose speciality was imitating Marilyn Monroe. Items on display include breakaway sequinned gowns, tasselled panties, and Gypsy Rose Lee’s black velvet shoulder cape.

This stunning collection of medical oddities and instruments includes the Chevalier Jackson collection of foreign bodies removed from the lungs and bronchi, the Sappey collection of mercury-filled lymphaticus, the B.C. Hirot pelvis collection and medical tools from Pompeii. Individual items include Florence Nightingale’s sewing kit; the joined liver of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins; bladder stones removed from US Chief Justice John Marshall; a piece of John Wilkes Booth’s thorax; a wax model of a six-inch horn projecting from a woman’s forehead; a cheek retractor used in a secret operation on President Grover Cleveland, as well as the cancerous tumour that was removed from his left upper jaw.

Housed in the Gate Tower of Leeds Castle, the museum features medieval and ornamental dog collars spanning four centuries. Included are numerous spiked collars designed for dogs used in hunting and bull-and bear-baiting.

Housed in a 120-room, 6-storey temple north of Pyongyang, the museum is home to 90,000 gifts that have been given to Kim Il Sung, the late dictator of Communist North Korea and to his son, Kim Jong Il, the current dictator. Included are Nicolae Ceausescu’s gift of a bear’s head mounted on a blood-red cushion, a Polish machine gun and a rubber ashtray from China’s Hwabei Tyre factory. Twenty rooms are devoted to gifts given to Kim’s son, Kim Jong Il, including an inlaid pearl and abalone box from the Ayatollah Khomeini and a pen set from the chairman of the Journalist Association of Kuwait.

The museum has collected more than 100 vibrators going back to 1869. Antique models include a hand-crafted wooden vibrator that works like an egg-beater and another that advertises ‘Health, Vigour and Beauty’ to users. The museum’s collection is displayed in Good Vibrations, a sex-toy emporium.

Devoted to the world of head and neck surgery, the museum displays special exhibits dealing with such topics as the history of the hearing aid and the evolution of tracheotomies. The diseases of famous people are examined, including Oscar Wilde’s ear infections and Johannes Brahms’s sleep apnoea. The giftshop sells holiday decorations in the shape of ear trumpets.

The Sulabh International Social Service Organization was created to bring inexpensive but environmentally safe sanitation to poor, rural areas. On the grounds of their headquarters, they have built an indoor and outdoor museum that presents the history of toilets around the world. One panel reprints poetry relating to toilets and another gives examples of toilet humour from around the world.

The museum includes 400 vintage and experimental lawnmowers, highlighting the best of British technological ingenuity. Of particular interest are the 1921 ATCO Standard 9 Blade, a solar-powered robot mower, and unusually fast or expensive mowers.

Former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos, the world’s most notorious shoe collector, donated the collection that made possible the opening of this footwear museum on February 16, 2001. The displays at the museum include several hundred of the pairs of shoes left behind at the presidential palace when Imelda and her husband Ferdinand fled the country in disgrace in 1986. Other shoes at the museum were donated by local politicians and film stars.

The world’s only museum for genitalia, the Icelandic Phallological Museum contains more than 218 preserved penises, as well as specimens that have been pressed into service as purses, walking sticks and pepper pots. The museum’s holdings represent nearly all of Iceland’s land and sea mammals, with the 47 whale specimens making for the most impressive viewing. As yet, the museum has no human specimen, but an elderly man has pledged his privates in a legally-binding letter of donation.

14 OF THE STRANGEST THINGS FOUND IN LONDON TRANSPORT’S LOST PROPERTY OFFICE

• 2½ hundredweight of sultanas/currants

• Lawn mower

• Breast implants

• Theatrical coffin

• Stuffed eagle

• 14-ft boat

• Divan bed

• Park bench

• Garden slide

• Jar of bull’s sperm

• Urn of ashes

• Dead bats in container

• Vasectomy kit

• Two human skulls in a bag

THE 7 WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Who created one of the earliest and most enduring of all lists, a list that arbitrarily named the seven most spectacular sights existing in the world 150 years before the birth of Jesus Christ? The list was created by a most respected Byzantine mathematician and traveller named Philon. In a series of arduous trips, Philon saw all of the western civilised world there was to see in his time, and then he sat down and wrote a short but widely circulated paper entitled De Septem Orbis Spectaculis (The Seven Wonders of the World).

Begun as a royal tomb in c. 2600BC, standing in splendour 2,000 years before any of the other Seven Wonders were built, this largest of Egypt’s 80-odd pyramids is the only Wonder to have survived to this day. Located outside Cairo, near Giza, the burial tomb of King Cheops was made up of 2.3 million blocks of stone, some of them 2½ tons in weight. The height is 481 ft, the width at the base 755 ft on each side, large enough to enclose London’s Westminster Abbey, Rome’s St Peter’s and Milan’s and Florence’s main cathedrals.

They were not hanging gardens, but gardens on balconies or terraces. When Nebuchadnezzar brought home his new wife, a princess from Medes, she pined for the mountains and lush growth of her native land. To please her, in 600BC the king started to build a man-made mountain with exotic growths. Actually it was a square climbing upward, each densely planted with grass, flowers and fruit trees, irrigated from below by pumps manned by slaves or oxen. Inside and beneath the gardens, the queen held court amid the vegetation and artificial rain. Due to the erosion of time and influx of conquerors, the Hanging Gardens had been levelled and reduced to wilderness when Pliny the Elder visited them before his death in AD79.

The multicoloured Temple of Zeus, in the area where the Greek Olympic Games were held every fourth year, contained the magnificent statue of Zeus, king of the gods. Sculptured by Phidias (who had done Athena for the Parthenon) some time after 432BC, the statue was 40 ft high, made of ivory and gold plates set on wood. Zeus, with jewels for eyes, sat on a golden throne, feet resting on a footstool of gold. Ancients came from afar to worship at the god’s feet. A Greek writer, Pausanias, saw the statue intact as late as second century AD. After that it disappeared from history, probably the victim of looting armies and fire.

Summing up his Seven Wonders, Philon chose his favourite: ‘But when I saw the temple at Ephesus rising to the clouds, all these other wonders were put in the shade.’ The temple, a religious shrine built after 350BC, housed a statue of Diana, goddess of hunting, symbol of fertility. The kings of many Asian states contributed to the construction. The temple, 225 ft wide and 525 ft long, was supported by 127 marble columns 60 ft high. St Paul, in the New Testament, railed against it, being quoted as saying that ‘the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth’. The craftsmen of the temple disagreed: ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”’. Ravaged and brought down by invaders, the temple was rebuilt three times before the Goths permanently destroyed it in AD262. In 1874, after 11 years of digging, the English archaeologist J.T. Wood unearthed fragments of the original columns.

King Mausolus, conqueror of Rhodes, ruled over the Persian province of Caria. His queen, Artemisia, was also his sister. When he died in 353BC, he was cremated and his grieving widow drank his ashes in wine. As a memorial to him, she determined to build the most beautiful tomb in the world at Halicarnassus, now called Bodrum. She sent to Greece for the greatest architects and sculptors, and by 350BC the memorial was complete. There was a rectangular sculptured marble tomb on a platform, then 36 golden-white Ionic columns upon which sat an architrave, which in turn held a pyramid topped by a bronzed chariot with statues of Mausolus and Artemisia. The monument survived 1,900 years, only to tumble down in an earthquake. What remains of it today is the word ‘mausoleum’.

To celebrate being saved from a Macedonian siege by Ptolemy I, the Rhodians, between 292 and 280BC, erected a mammoth statue to their heavenly protector, the sun-god Apollo. Chares, who had studied under a favourite of Alexander the Great, fashioned the statue. The nude Colossus was 120 ft tall, with its chest and back 60 ft around, built of stone blocks and iron and plated with thin bronze. It did not stand astride the harbour, with room for ships to pass between the legs, but stood with feet together on a promontory at the entrance to the harbour. In 224BC it was felled by an earthquake. It lay in ruins almost 900 years. In AD667 the Arabs, who controlled Rhodes, sold the 720,900 lb of broken statue for scrap metal to a Jewish merchant. When the merchant hauled his purchase to Alexandria, he found that it required 900 camel loads.

On orders of Ptolemy Philadelphus, in 200BC, the architect Sostratus of Cnidus constructed a pharos or lighthouse such as the world had not seen before. Built on a small island off Alexandria, the tiers of the marble tower — first square, then round, each with a balcony — rose to a height of 400 ft. At the summit a huge brazier with an eternal flame was amplified by a great glass mirror so that the fire could be seen 300 miles out at sea. Half the lighthouse was torn down by occupying Arabs, who hoped to find gold inside the structure. The rest of the structure crashed to the ground when an earthquake struck in 1375.

THE 15 LEAST POPULOUS INDEPENDENT NATIONS

Population

1. Tuvalu 11,468

2. Nauru 12,809

3. Palau 20,016

4. San Marino 28,503

5. Monaco 32,270

6. Liechtenstein 33,436

7. Saint Kitts and Nevis 38,836

8. Marshall Islands 57,738

9. Antigua and Barbuda 68,320

10. Dominica 69,278

11. Andorra 69,865

12. Seychelles 80,832

13. Grenada 89,357

14. Kiribati 100,798

15. Federated States of Micronesia 108,155

Source: US Census Bureau, International Data Base, April 30, 2004

5 PLACES WITH UNLIKELY NAMES

When the Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488, he found the seas so rough he called it the Cape of Storms. This epithet was hardly likely to encourage traffic through this new gateway to India, so Portugal’s King John II called it the Cape of Good Hope.

Known by a singularly inappropriate epithet, this great, snow-covered island is a tenth-century example of false advertising. Eric the Red hoped to attract settlers from the more clement Iceland.

A classic geographical mistake, ‘Nome’ was miscopied from a British map of Alaska on which ‘? Name’ had been written around 1850.

Magellan had the remarkable luck of crossing this ocean without encountering a storm, so he called it Mar Pacifico — ‘the calm sea’. The Pacific in fact produces some of the roughest storms in the world.

This word derives from the Sanskrit for ‘city of the lion’. Its exact origin is a mystery, since lions are not indigenous to the region.

13 POSSIBLE SITES FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Many biblical scholars believe that the Garden of Eden, the original home of Adam and Eve, was located in Sumer, at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris (or Hiddekel) rivers in present-day Iraq. They presume that the geographical references in Genesis relate to the situation from the ninth to the fifth centuries BC and that the Pison and Gihon were tributaries of the Euphrates and Tigris which have since disappeared. In fact, they may have been ancient canals.

Other students of the Bible reason that if the four major rivers flowed out of the garden, then the garden itself must have been located far north of the Tigris–Euphrates civilization. They place the site in the mysterious northland of Armenia in present-day Turkey. This theory presumes that Gihon and Pison may not have been precise geographical designations, but rather vague descriptions of faraway places.

British archeologist David Rohl claimed that Eden is a lush valley in Iran, located about 10 miles from the modern city of Tabriz. Rohl suggests that the Gihon and Pison are the Iranian rivers Araxes and Uizhun. He also identifies nearby Mt Sahand, a snow-capped extinct volcano, as the prophet Ezekiel’s Mountain of God.

There are those who say that the garden of God must have been in the Holy Land and that the original river that flowed into the garden before it split into four separate rivers must have been the Jordan, which was longer in the days of Genesis. The Gihon would be the Nile, and Havilah would be the Arabian Peninsula. Some supporters of this theory go further, stating that Mt Moriah in Jerusalem was the heart of the Garden of Eden and that the entire garden included all of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Mt Olivet.

Supporters of Egypt as the site of the Garden of Eden claim that only the Nile region meets the Genesis description of a land watered, not by rain, but by a mist rising from the ground, in that the Nile ran partially underground before surfacing in spring holes below the first cataract. The four world rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates, are explained away as beginning far, far beyond the actual site of Paradise.

Since Adam and Eve were the first humans, and since the oldest human remains have been found in East Africa, many people conclude that the Garden of Eden must have been in Africa. Likewise, when archaeologists discovered the remains of Pithecanthropus in Java in 1891, they guessed that Java was the location of the Garden of Eden.

Tse Tsan Tai, in his work The Creation, the Real Situation of Eden, and the Origin of the Chinese (1914), presents a case for the garden being in Chinese Turkestan in the plateau of eastern Asia. He claims that the river that flowed through the garden was the Tarim, which has four tributaries flowing eastwards.

In the mid-nineteenth century a theory developed that a vast continent once occupied much of what is now the Indian Ocean. The name Lemuria was created by British zoologist P.L. Sclater in honour of the lemur family of animals, which has a somewhat unusual range of distribution in Africa, southern India and Malaysia. Other scientists suggested that Lemuria was the cradle of the human race; thus it must have been the site of the Garden of Eden.

General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon supported the theory that Africa and India used to be part of one massive continent. While on a survey expedition for the British government in the Indian Ocean, he came upon Praslin Island in the Seychelles group. So enchanted was he by this island, and by its Vallée de Mai in particular, that he became convinced that this was the location of the original Garden of Eden. The clincher for Gordon was the existence on Praslin of the coco-de-mer, a rare and exotic tree, which is native to only one other island of the Seychelles and which Gordon concluded was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In his book The Sky People, Brinsley Le Poer Trench argues that not only Adam and Eve but Noah lived on Mars. He states that the biblical description of a river watering the garden and then parting into four heads is inconsistent with nature. Only canals can be made to flow that way, and Mars, supposedly, had canals. So the Garden of Eden was created on Mars as an experiment by Space People. Eventually the north polar ice cap on Mars melted, and the descendants of Adam and Eve were forced to take refuge on Earth.

In 1886 the Rev. D.O. Van Slyke published a small pamphlet that expounded his belief that Eden was the area stretching from the Allegheny Mountains to the Rocky Mountains and that the Garden of Eden was located on the east bank of the Mississippi River between La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Winona, Minnesota. When the Deluge began, Noah was living in present-day Wisconsin, and the flood carried his ark eastward until it landed on Mt Ararat.

While travelling through Davies County, Missouri, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith found a stone slab that he declared was an altar that Adam built shortly after being driven from the Garden of Eden. Declaring, ‘This is the valley of God in which Adam blessed his children’, Smith made plans to build a city called Adam-ondi-Ahram at the site. The Garden of Eden itself, Smith determined, was located 40 miles south, near the modern-day city of Independence.

23 CASES OF BIZARRE WEATHER

The sun did rise in New England on May 19, 1780, but by midday the sky had turned so dark that it was almost impossible to read or conduct business, and lunch had to be served by candlelight. The phenomenon was noted as far north as Portland, Maine, and as far south as northern New Jersey. General George Washington made mention of the spectacle in his diary. At Hartford, Connecticut, there was great fear that the Day of Judgement had arrived, and at the state legislature a motion was made to adjourn. Calmer heads prevailed and when the sky cleared the following day, it was generally concluded that the problem had been caused by smoke and ash from a fire ‘out West’.

During the night of February 13, 1853, the residents of Mt Desert Island, Maine, were frightened by the freak attack of a thunderstorm during a snowstorm. Bolts of purple lightning flashed to the ground and balls of fire entered homes, injuring several people. Fortunately, no one was killed.

Huge snowflakes, 15 in. across and 8 in. thick, fell on the Coleman ranch at Fort Keogh, Montana, on January 28, 1887. The size of the flakes, which were described as being ‘bigger than milk pans’, was verified by a mail carrier who was caught in the storm.

Included in a severe hailstorm in Mississippi on May 11, 1894, was a 6-in.-by-8-in. gopher turtle, which fell to the ground, completely encased in ice, at Bovina, east of Vicksburg.

On February 21 1918, the temperature in Granville, North Dakota, rose 83° Fahrenheit in 12 hours — from -33° Fahrenheit (-36.3° Celsius) in the early morning to 50° Fahrenheit (10° Celsius) in the late afternoon.

Patriotic celebrants were stunned in 1918 when a major blizzard swept across the western plains of the United States, disrupting Fourth of July festivities in several states. Independence Day began with the usual picnics and parties, but in the afternoon the temperature dropped suddenly and rain began to fall, followed by hail, snow and gale-force winds.

On April 5 and 6, 1969 68 in. (172.7 cm) of snow fell on Bessans, France, in only 19 hours.

On April 24, 1930, at 2:30 p.m., hail began to fall at Hinaidi, Iraq, at the remarkably slow speed of 9 mph. A clever observer was able to determine the speed by timing the fall of several specimens against the side of a building.

The most bizarre temperature changes in history occurred at Spearfish, South Dakota, on January 22, 1943. At 7.30 am the thermometer read -4° Fahrenheit. However, by 7.32 am the temperature had risen 45°, to 49° Fahrenheit. By 9.00 am the temperature had drifted up to 54° Fahrenheit. Then, suddenly, it began to plunge, 58° in 27 minutes, until, at 9.27 am, it had returned to -4° Fahrenheit.

The most rain ever recorded in one minute was 1.5 in. (2.68 cm) at Barot on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe on November 26, 1970.

While rain was falling in the street in front of the Empire State Building on November 3, 1958, guards near the top of the building were making snowballs.

An extreme case of localised rainfall occurred the night of August 2, 1966, one and a half miles northeast of Greenfield, New Hampshire. Robert H. Stanley reported that rain began to fall at 7.00 pm, reaching great intensity from 7.45 pm until 10.15 pm. When he awoke the next morning, Mr Stanley found that his rain gauge had filled to the 5.75-in. (14.6 cm) mark. However, Stanley’s neighbour three-tenths of a mile (483 m.) away had collected only one-half in. (1.27 cm) in his rain gauge. Walking around the area, Stanley discovered that the heavy rainfall was limited to no more than one half-mile (805 m.) in any direction.

Another strange case of point rainfall took place on November 11, 1958, in the backyard of Mrs R. Babington of Alexandria, Louisiana. Although there were no clouds in the sky, a misty drizzle fell over an area of 100 sq. ft (9.3 sq. m.) for two and a half hours. Mrs Babington called a local reporter, who confirmed the phenomenon. The Shreveport weather bureau suggested the moisture had been formed by condensation from a nearby air conditioner, but their theory was never proved.

At 6:10 a.m. on January 19, 1977 West Palm Beach reported its first snowfall ever. By 8:30 a.m. snow was falling in Fort Lauderdale, the farthest south that snow had ever been reported in Florida. The snow continued south to Miami, and some even fell in Homestead, 23 miles south of Miami International Airport. The cold wave was so unusual that heat lamps had to be brought out to protect the iguanas at Miami’s Crandon Park Zoo.

On September 13, 1922 the temperature in Azizia, Libya, reached 136.4° Fahrenheit (58° Celsius) — in the shade.

On July 21, 1983 the thermometer at Vostok, Antarctica, registered -128.6° Fahrenheit (-89.2° Celsius). Vostok also holds the record for consistently cold weather. To reach an optimum temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3° Celsius), Vostok would require 48,800 ‘heating degree days’ a year. By comparison, Fairbanks, Alaska, needs only 14,300.

Temperatures in Verkhoyansk, Russia, have ranged from 98° Fahrenheit (37° Celsius) down to 90.4° Fahrenheit (-68° Celsius), a variance of 188.4° Fahrenheit (105° Celsius).

Marble Bar, Western Australia, experienced 160 consecutive days of 100° Fahrenheit (37.8° Celsius) temperatures from October 31, 1923 to April 7, 1924.

On March 16, 1952 73.62 in. (187 cm) of rain — more than 6 ft — fell at Cilaos on Réunion Island east of Madagascar. Another 24 in. (60.96 cm) fell during the 24 hours surrounding March 16.

Cherrapunji, Assam, India, received 189 in. (226.06 cm) of rain between June 24 and July 8, 1931. Back in 1861, Cherrapunji received 366.14 in. (930 cm) of rain in one month and 905.12 in. (2400 cm) for the calendar year.

The driest place on Earth is Arica, Chile, in the Atacama Desert. No rain fell there for more than 14 years, between October 1903 and December 1917. Over a 59-year period, Arica averaged three-hundredths of an inch (.76 mm) of rain a year.

The largest snowfall in a 24-hour period was 75.8 in. (192.5 cm) — more than 6 ft — recorded at Silver Lake, Colorado, on April 14-15, 1921.

Paradise Ranger Station on Mt Rainier in Washington State recorded 1,122 in. (2,850 cm) of snow in 1971–72. Their average is 582 in. (1,478 cm).

Hurricane John, which flourished in August and September of 1994, was notable for two reasons. It lasted for all or part of 31 days, making it the longest-lived tropical storm on record. It also crossed over the International Date Line twice, changing its name from Hurricane John to Typhoon John and back to Hurricane John.

15 SHIPWRECK SURVIVAL TIPS

This list is from Yann Martel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi.

• Always read instructions carefully

• Do not drink urine. Or sea water. Or bird blood.

• Do not eat jellyfish. Or fish that are armed with spikes. Or that have parrot-like beaks. Or that puff up like balloons.

• Pressing the eyes of fish will paralyse them.

• The body can be a hero in battle. If a castaway is injured, beware of well-meaning but ill-founded medical treatment. Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.

• Put up your feet at least five minutes every hour.

• Unnecessary exertion should be avoided. But an idle mind tends to sink, so the mind should be kept occupied with whatever light distraction may suggest itself. Playing card games, Twenty Questions and I Spy With My Little Eye are excellent forms of simple recreation. Community singing is another sure-fire way to life the spirits. Yarn spinning is also highly recommended.

• Green water is shallower than blue water.

• Beware of far-off clouds that look like mountains. Look for green. Ultimately, a foot is the only good judge of land.

• Do not go swimming. It wastes energy. Besides, a survival craft may drift faster than you can swim. Not to mention the danger of sea life. If you are hot, wet your clothes instead.

• Do not urinate in your clothes. The momentary warmth is not worth the nappy rash.

• Shelter yourself. Exposure can kill faster than thirst or hunger.

• So long as no excessive water is lost through perspiration, the body can survive up to 14 days without water. If you feel thirsty, suck a button.

• Turtles are an easy catch and make for excellent meals. Their blood is a good, nutritious, salt-free drink; their flesh is tasty and filling; their fat has many uses; and the castaway will find turtle eggs a real treat. Mind the beak and the claws.

• Don’t let your morale flag. Be daunted, but not defeated. Remember: the spirit, above all else, counts. If you have the will to live, you will. Good luck!

(Note that urine has on occasion been found to have positive health properties in emergency situations — The Eds.)