The Book of Lists

DAVE EGGERS’ 4 BEST PLACES TO PUT THINGS INTO

Dave Eggers has written four books and three songs and edits McSweeney’s.

Boxes will always be No. 1. I don’t care what anyone else says — boxes are the best. I recommend square ones for most occasions except for occasions involving hats. One of the things I like about boxes is that after you put things into a box, you can close the box with tape. They’ll stay closed, all right! Boxes = No. 1.

Flowers are best, in terms of things to put into vases, but marbles can create a good look, too. The problem with vases is that a lot of things don’t fit into them. I guess vases shouldn’t be No. 2.

Cars have one advatange over most things you can put things into: once you put something into a car, you can move it to a different place. Cars can go almost anywhere. Cars should be No. 2.

This takes more effort than the first three, but it’s a good choice in some circumstances, i.e., bones. Make sure the ground you put something into is sturdy and dry. If you put something into wet ground, wrap it in plastic first. That’ll save you lots of time and headache later, if you need to get the thing you put into the ground out of the ground. The Ground = No. 4.

12 PRODIGIOUS SAVANTS

Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which people suffering from mental retardation, autism or schizophrenia nonetheless possess an unusual ability in a single field, most often relating to music, art or numbers.

Although his vocabulary was limited to fewer than 100 words, Blind Tom could play more than 5,000 pieces on the piano, an instrument he had mastered as a four-year-old slave on a Georgia plantation. At the age of 11, he performed at the White House for President James Buchanan. He learned each piece after hearing it only once; his repertoire included Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Verdi.

Clemons, who has an IQ of 40, lives in a home for the developmentally disabled in Boulder, Colorado. An exceptionally talented sculptor, he has sold hundreds of pieces, including one for $45,000. Many buyers have purchased his work unaware that it was created by a mentally handicapped artist.

Known as the Bronx Calendar Twins, they first attracted national attention when they were featured in a 1966 Life magazine article. The brothers can give the day of the week for any date over a period of 80,000 years. They can also recall, in detail, the weather for any day of their lives.

Born in Africa, Fuller was taken to Virginia as a slave in 1724. He was a calculating wonder who could easily multiply nine-digit numbers. At the age of 78, Fuller, who was never able to learn to read or write, was asked, ‘How many seconds has a man lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old?’ Ninety seconds later he gave the answer — 2,210,500,800. Informed that he was wrong, Fuller corrected his interrogator by pointing out that the man had forgotten to include leap years.

Like many prodigious savants, Leslie is blind, was born prematurely and possesses an extraordinary memory. He sings and plays the piano and has appeared on numerous television shows, including 60 Minutes and Donahue. He has also been the subject of two films, An Island of Genius and the Emmy-winning The Woman Who Willed a Miracle.

Lerman, who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 3, has a tested IQ of 53. He began drawing at 10, shortly after the death of his maternal grandfather, Burt Markowitz, who had always insisted that Jonathan had promise. His charcoal drawings, which critics have compared to the works of George Grosz and Francis Bacon, sell for $500 to $1200. A book of his artwork, Jonathan Lerman: The Drawings of a Boy with Autism, was published in 2002.

A mathematical savant, Peek, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, was the inspiration for the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 Academy Award-winning film Rain Man. His true story is told in the book The Real Rain Man (1997).

Born in Iran, Pillault is unable to talk, walk or feed himself. He discovered painting in 1993, using his hands, since he can’t use his fingers functionally. His paintings, featuring striking, ethereal figures, have been exhibited in France, Italy, Japan and the US. He is also a member of several artists’ societies.

At the age of three, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder, a condition similar to autism. Savage is a professional jazz musician, who leads his own trio, has performed at jazz festivals throughout the US and Canada, and recorded three CDs. He was described as ‘amazing’ by jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Savage is also prodigious in mathematics — he is learning advanced algebra at the age of 11 — and geography — he represented New Hampshire in the US National Geography Bee in 2004.

Wawro, who is autistic and moderately retarded, started drawing at the age of three. He held his first exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland, when he was 17. Most of his works are landscapes and seascapes based on images that he has seen just once in books or on television. Wawro can remember where and when he drew each picture. He was the subject of the documentary With Eyes Wide Open (1983).

Although Wiltshire, who lives in London, has the IQ of someone half his age, he is able to glance briefly at a building and then draw it in exquisite detail. Wiltshire has produced three books of drawings, one of which, Floating Cities, was a number-one bestseller in Great Britain.

Note: The best book on savant syndrome is Extraordinary People by Darold Treffert, MD. It is also worth noting that there exists a school — Hope University, in Anaheim, California — devoted solely to educating gifted, developmentally-challenged adults.

15 STRANGE STORIES

Selected by Paul Sieveking, co-editor of the Fortean Times.

The Fortean Times, the Journal of Strange Phenomena, is a monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on all types of unusual phenomena and experiences. It was named after philosopher Charles Fort (1874–1932), who thought that data that did not fit the scientific norm should not be excluded or ignored by the scientific community. (To subscribe, write to Fortean Times, PO Box 2409, London NW5 4NP, United Kingdom.)

Margaret Bell, who kept bees in Leintwardine, about seven miles from her home in Ludlow, Wales, died in June 1994. Soon after her funeral, mourners were astonished to see hundreds of bees settle on the corner of the street opposite the house where Mrs Bell had lived for 26 years. The bees stayed for about an hour before buzzing off over the rooftops. The local press ran a photograph of the bees, hanging on the wall in a cluster.

On December 11, 2002 two motorists called police to report seeing a car veering off the A3 trunk road with headlights blazing at Burpham in Surrey. A thorough search uncovered a car concealed in dense undergrowth and the long-dead driver nearby. It turned out that the crash had happened five months earlier when the driver, Christopher Chandler, had been reported missing by his brother.

An irregular-shaped hole, about 10 ft by 7 ft with 2 ft vertical sides, was found on remote farmland near Grand Coulee, Washington State, in October 1984. It had not been there a month earlier. ‘Dribblings’ of earth and stones led to a three-ton, grass-covered earth divot 75 ft away. It was almost as if the divot had been removed with a ‘gigantic cookie cutter’, except that roots dangled intact from the vertical sides of both hole and displaced slab. There were no clues such as vehicle tracks and a seismic cause was thought very unlikely, although there had been a mild quake 20 miles away a week before the hole’s discovery.

Laura Buxton released a helium-filled balloon during celebrations for her grandparents’ gold wedding anniversary in Blurton, Staffordshire, in June 2001. Attached to the balloon was her name and address and a note asking the finder to write back. Ten days later she received a reply. The balloon had been found by another Laura Buxton in the garden hedge of her home in Pewsey, Wiltshire, 140 miles away. Both Lauras were aged 10 and both had three-year-old black Labradors, a guinea pig and a rabbit. ‘I hope we can become best friends,’ said the Staffordshire Laura.

A noise a bit like amplifier feedback had been heard for three years coming from the right ear of a Welsh pony called Misty, according to the Veterinary Record (April 1995). It varied in intensity, but stayed at a constant pitch of 7 kHz. Hearing a buzzing in one’s ears is called subjective tinnitus; very much rarer is when other people can hear the noise, a condition called objective tinnitus, the cause of which is a matter of debate.

A nine-year-old Chinese girl was playing in Songjiang, near Shanghai, in July 1992 when she was carried off by a whirlwind and deposited unhurt in a treetop almost two miles away. According to a wire report from May 1986, a freak wind lifted up 13 children in the oasis of Hami in western China and deposited them unharmed in sand dunes and scrub 12 miles away.

Gloria Ramirez, 31, died of kidney failure at Riverside General Hospital, California, in February 1994, after being rushed there with chest pains. Emergency room staff were felled by ‘fumes’ when a blood sample was taken. A strange oily sheen on the woman’s skin and unexplained white crystals in her blood were reported. A doctor suffered liver and lung damage, and bone necrosis; at least 23 other people were affected. One hypothesis was that Ramirez, who had cervical cancer, had taken a cocktail of medicines that combined to make an insecticide (organophosphate) but exhaustive tests yielded no clues. The hospital was later demolished. The episode remains a mystery 10 years later.

In April 1997 a turkey hunter in Yellowwood State Forest, Indiana, came upon a huge sandstone boulder wedged between three branches of an oak tree about 35 ft from the ground. The arrow-shaped rock was estimated to weigh 500 lb. Subsequently, four more large boulders were found wedged high up in trees elsewhere in the forest. All were in remote areas. None of the trees was damaged and there were no signs of heavy equipment being used or of tornado damage, and no one recalled any mishaps involving dynamite anywhere nearby.

While on holiday a woman, referred to by the British Medical Journal (December 1997) as AB, heard two voices in her head telling her to return home immediately. Back in London, the voices gave her an address that turned out to be a hospital’s brain scan department. The voices told her to ask for a scan as she had a brain tumour and her brain stem was inflamed. Though she had no symptoms, a scan was eventually arranged and she did indeed have a tumour. After an operation, AB heard the voices again. ‘We are pleased to have helped you,’ they said. ‘Goodbye.’ AB made a full recovery.

A hazard unique to Venezuelan highways is a slippery goo called La Mancha Negra (the black stain), although it’s more of a sludge with the consistency of chewing gum. Although the government has spent millions of dollars in research, no one knows what the goo is, where it comes from, or how to get rid of it. It first appeared in 1987 on the road from Caracas to the airport, covering 50 yards, and spread inexorably every year. By 1992 it was a major road hazard all around the capital and it was claimed 1,800 motorists had died after losing control. The problem remains.

When Jim Wilson’s father died in Natal, South Africa, in April 1967, both Jim, living in England, and his sister Muriel, living in Holland, were informed. Muriel contacted her husband, who was on business in Portugal, and he flew to South Africa right away. Changing planes at Las Palmas airport in the Canary Islands, he bought a postcard showing holidaymakers on Margate beach, Natal, and sent it to Muriel. It was she who noticed that the photograph showed her father walking up the beach.

In October 1975 Mrs Lynn Connolly was hanging washing in her garden in The Quadrant, Hull, when she felt a sharp tap on the top of her head. It was caused by a small silver notecase, 63 mm by 36.5 mm, hinged, containing a used notepad with 13 sheets left. It was marked with the initials ‘SE’, ‘C8’, ‘TB’ (or ‘JB’) and ‘Klaipeda’, a Lithuanian seaport. No one claimed it at the police station, so it was returned to Mrs Connolly. It seems likely it fell only a short distance but from where? If it had dropped from a plane, it would have given her more than a tap.

The village of Canneto di Caronia on Sicily’s north coast has been plagued by mysterious fires. The trouble began on January 20, 2004 when a TV caught fire. Then things in neighbouring houses began to burn, including washing machines, mobile phones, mattresses, chairs and even the insulation on water pipes. The electricity company cut off all power, as did the railway company, but the fires continued. Experts of all kinds carried out tests, but no explanation was found. The village was evacuated in February, but when people began returning in March the fires resumed. Police ruled out a pyromaniac after they saw wires bursting into flames. Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, was quoted as blaming demons.

On June 28, 2002, in the middle of a spate of unexplained cattle mutilations in Argentina, something macabre was found in a field near Suco, west of Rio Cuarto in San Luis province. Nineteen cows were stuffed into a sheet metal water tank, closed with a conical cap. Nine were drowned, the rest barely alive, having endured freezing temperatures, not to mention the shock of their lives.

Three pupils of the Evangelist Primary School in the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri rushed into the headmistress’s office in March 2000 and said that a fellow pupil had been transformed into a yam after accepting a sweet from a stranger. The headmistress found the root tuber and took it to the police station for safe-keeping. Following local radio reports, hundreds of people flocked to see the yam and police were hunting for the sweet-giver. What happened next failed to reach the wire services.

11 AMAZING ATTIC EVENTS

Madame Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etoiles was known throughout Paris as one of the most beautiful and cultured women of her day. In 1745 she met King Louis XV of France. The two immediately fell in love, and Madame d’Etoiles obtained a legal separation from her husband. She was then given the title of the Marquise de Pompadour and installed in the attic apartment of Versailles as the king’s mistress. Her apartment became known as the meeting place for some of the most celebrated people of France, and her guests were assisted in the steep 100-stair ascent by an elementary lift dubbed the ‘flying chair’. But her private life with the king was less than ideal. After two blissful years together, Pompadour lost her physical passion for the king. She feared losing him and believed that a diet of vanilla, truffles and celery would stimulate her desire for sexual activity. It only worsened her already weak physical condition. After five years in the attic, the king moved her to a flat on the ground floor of the palace. It was clear he had now taken new mistresses. Pompadour, however, retained her powerful position as the king’s political and artistic adviser until her death in 1764.

As a boy, Thomas Chatterton was a prodigious poet and scholar, and early Romantic who at the age of ten wrote on a par with his adult contemporaries. His family was poor, his mother a widowed seamstress, and privacy was difficult to come by in their small Bristol home. So young Thomas set up a writing room in the attic, which he jealously guarded as his secret domain. In the attic room, among his books and papers, stood Ellinor, a life-size doll made of woven rushes, which his mother used for dress fittings. Thomas loved Ellinor and always took care to powder her face and do her hair. However, when he moved to London to pursue his literary career, he left his beloved Ellinor behind. He rented a garret reminiscent of his attic study at home, and thereafter suffering repeated personal and professional disappointments, including failure to sell a series of forgeries he claimed had been written by a fifteenth-century monk, Chatterton took arsenic and died at the age of 17.

Edmond and his brother Jules were French novelists. Both are best remembered for the detailed journals they kept on literary people of the late nineteenth-century. Jules died in 1870, and in 1885 Edmond turned the two attic rooms of the house into a salon. Each Sunday afternoon, he would entertain such notables as Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola. The following are some excerpts from Edmond’s journal on those afternoons.

February 1, 1885 On the French poet Robert de Montesquieu-Fezenac: ‘Somebody described his first love affair with a female ventriloquist who, while [he] was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp.’

May 24, 1885 Edmond comments on Zola’s reaction to the recent death of Victor Hugo: ‘He walked around the room as if relieved by his death and as if convinced he was going to inherit the literary papacy.’

April 19, 1896 A description of the removal of Paul Verlaine’s death mask: ‘The conversation turned to Verlaine’s alcoholism and the softening effect it had had on his flesh… [Stéphane] Mallarmé had said he would never forget the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death mask from his face, an operation in which his beard and mouth had come away too.’

Guglielmo Marconi was 20 years old when he began experimenting in earnest with radio waves. Because his father took a dim view of such ‘childish’ pursuits as physics and even went so far as to destroy his son’s electronic equipment, young Marconi had to set up a secret laboratory in the attic of their villa in Bologna. There, among his mother’s trays of silkworms, Marconi determined that radio waves could carry a message in Morse code across the room. In time, he proved that the effectiveness of his invention was not bound by the four attic walls, but that it could transmit messages over great distances.

In 1922, British scientist John Logie Baird rented an attic room above an artificial-flower shop at 8 Queen’s Arcade in Hastings to continue research on his primitive television sets. He used a tea chest as the base for his motor, a biscuit tin to house the projection lamp, and he held the whole contraption together with darning needles, scraps of wood, string and sealing wax. In 1924, he took his ‘working’ apparatus to London. There he rented two attic rooms at 22 Frith Street in Soho. He struggled for another two years before he gave the first demonstration of true television on January 26, 1926, for an audience of 50 scientists. The British Broadcasting Corporation inaugurated Baird’s system in 1929 and used it until 1935, when a more sophisticated system was adopted.

After the failure of his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Germany, Hitler hid in an attic bedroom at Uffing, the country estate of his follower Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstängl. Hitler tried to commit suicide by shooting himself when the police came to arrest him. A police agent managed to disarm him before he could pull the trigger.

Ruth Kühn was only 17 years old when she became the mistress of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels. But like all of his mistresses, Ruth was soon discarded. When the affair ended in 1939, Goebbels decided to send Ruth out of Germany. He arranged for her and her parents, Bernard and Friedel, to move to Hawaii and act as espionage agents for the Japanese. Ruth set up a beauty parlour in Honolulu, which became her chief source of information, since it was frequented by American military men’s wives. The next step was to figure out a way of transmitting this information to the Japanese. The Kühns devised a simple code system and sent signals from the attic window of their small house overlooking Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, towards the end of the Japanese surprise attack, their signals were noticed by two American naval officers. The US Navy Shore Patrol arrested the family and all were imprisoned for espionage.

Forced into hiding when the Nazis overran the Netherlands, Anne Frank, her parents and sister, and four other Jews, shared a musty Amsterdam attic above a warehouse and office building. They hid there for two years, obtaining food and other necessities from Gentiles on the floor below. Anne, a precocious girl in her early teens, kept a diary in which she chronicled not only the details of their imprisonment, but also her personal feelings about life, love, the future, and her budding sexual awareness. Finally, in August 1944, the Gestapo, acting on a tip by Dutch informers, raided the hiding place. All the Franks died in concentration camps (Anne of typhus), except Otto Frank, the father. He returned to the attic after the war and found his daughter’s diary, which was first published under the title The Diary of a Young Girl.

The score for a fantasy for piano by Franz Schubert was discovered in an attic in Knittlefield, Austria, in 1969. The piece is believed to have been written by the Viennese composer in 1817.

Several waltzes dedicated to Clementine de la Panouse were discovered by Vicomte Paul de la Panouse in the attic of the family château near Paris in 1978. The waltzes were stored in a heavy trunk belonging to the French aristocratic family. The waltzes were hidden — along with many other documents — in various locations prior to the German invasion of France during WWII.

When a German couple found an old grey suitcase in a loft belonging to the husband’s late parents in Hildesheim, they didn’t think much about it, until they saw the name on the handle: O. Schindler. Inside were hundreds of documents, including a list of the names of Jewish labourers that factory owner Oskar Schindler gave the Nazis during World War II. By giving Jewish workers fake jobs and otherwise manipulating the system, Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from extermination. His story inspired Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark (1982) and the movie Schindler’s List (1993). The documents had apparently been stored in the loft by friends of Schindler and then forgotten. In 1999 the suitcase and its contents were donated to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

27 THINGS THAT FELL FROM THE SKY

A great cloud of hay drifted over the town of Devizes in England at teatime on July 3, 1977. As soon as the cloud reached the centre of town, it all fell to earth in handful-size lumps. The sky was otherwise clear and cloudless, with a slight breeze. The temperature was 26°C.

When yellow-coloured globules fell over suburban Sydney, Australia, in late 1971, the ministry for health blamed it on the excreta of bees, consisting mostly of undigested pollen. However, there were no reports of vast hordes of bees in the area and no explanation as to why they would choose to excrete en masse over Sydney.

On May 5, 1786, after six months of drought, a strong east wind dropped a great quantity of black eggs on the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Some of the eggs were preserved in water and hatched the next day. The beings inside shed several layers of skin and resembled tadpoles.

The famous Kentucky meat-shower took place in southern Bath County on Friday, March 3, 1876. Mrs Allen Crouch was in her garden making soap when pieces of fresh meat the size of large snowflakes began to fall from the cloudless sky. Two gentlemen who tasted it said that it was either mutton or venison. Scientists who examined the material found the first samples similar to lung tissue from either a human infant or a horse. Other later samples were identified as cartilage and striated muscle fibres. The local explanation was that a flock of buzzards had disgorged as a group while flying overhead.

The largest meteorite fall in recorded history occurred on March 8, 1976, near the Chinese city of Kirin. Many of the 100 stones that were found weighed over 200 lb; the largest, which landed in the Haupi Commune, weighed 3,902 lb. It is, by more than 1,000 lb, the largest stony meteorite ever recovered.

On October 8, 1976, a light plane buzzed the Piazza Venezia in Rome and dropped 500-lire, 1,000-lire and 10,000-lire banknotes on the startled people below. The mad bomber was not found.

A fine blanket of soot landed on a Cranford park on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport in 1969, greatly annoying the local park keepers. The official report of the Greater London Council said the ‘soot’ was composed of spores of a black microfungus, Pithomyces chartarum, found only in New Zealand.

About 500 dead and dying blackbirds and pigeons landed in the streets of San Luis Obispo, California, over a period of several hours in late November 1977. No local spraying had occurred, and no explanation was offered.

On the evening of May 30, 1869, the horrified citizens of Greiffenberg, Germany, and neighbouring villages witnessed a fall of fire, which was followed by a tremendous peal of thunder. People who were outside reported that the fire was different in form and colour from common lightning. They said they felt wrapped in fire and deprived of air for some seconds.

Blobs of white material up to 20 ft in length descended over the San Francisco Bay area in California on October 11, 1977. Pilots in San Jose encountered them as high as 4,000 ft. Migrating spiders were blamed, although no spiders were recovered.

In April 1953 glowing green snow was encountered near Mt Shasta, California. Mr and Mrs Milton Moyer reported that their hands itched after touching it and that ‘a blistered, itching rash’ formed on their hands, arms and faces. The Atomic Energy Commission denied any connection between the snow and recent A-bomb tests in nearby Nevada.

The July 25, 1973, edition of the Albany, New York, Times Union reported the unusual case of Bob Hill. Hill, the owner of radio station WHRL of North Greenbush, New York, was taking out the station rubbish at 4:15 p.m. when he noticed ‘twirling specks’ falling from a distance higher than the station’s 300-ft transmitter. He followed two of the white objects until they landed in a hayfield. The objects turned out to be two sets of formulae and accompanying graphs, which apparently explained ‘normalised extinction’ and the ‘incomplete Davis-Greenstein orientation’. No explanation has been made public. The Davis-Greenstein mechanism is used in astrophysics.

Rancher Salvador Targino of João Pessoa, Brazil, reported a rain of small beans on his property in Paraíba State in early 1971. Local agricultural authorities speculated that a storm had swept up a pile of beans in West Africa and dropped them in northeastern Brazil. Targino boiled some of the beans, but said they were too tough to eat.

Several thousand rubles’ worth of silver coins fell in the Gorky region of the USSR on June 17, 1940. The official explanation was that a landslide had uncovered a hidden treasure, which was picked up by a tornado, which dropped it on Gorky. No explanation was given for the fact that the coins were not accompanied by any debris.

Traffic at Mexico City airport was halted temporarily on the morning of July 30, 1963, when thousands of greyish, mushroom-shaped things floated to the ground out of a cloudless sky. Hundreds of witnesses described these objects variously as ‘giant cobwebs’, ‘balls of cotton’ and ‘foam’. They disintegrated rapidly after landing

Mary C. Fuller was sitting in her parked car with her 8-month-old son on Monday morning, September 25, 1978, in San Diego, California, when a human body crashed through the windshield. The body had been thrown from a Pacific Southwest Airlines jetliner, which had exploded after being hit by a small plane in one of the worst disasters in US history. Mother and son suffered minor lacerations.

Falls of frogs and toads, though not everyday occurrences, are actually quite common, having been reported in almost every part of the world. One of the most famous toad falls happened in the summer of 1794 in the village of Lalain, France. A very hot afternoon was broken suddenly by such an intense downpour of rain that 150 French soldiers (then fighting the Austrians) were forced to abandon the trench in which they were hiding to avoid being submerged. In the middle of the storm, which lasted for 30 minutes, tiny toads, mostly in the tadpole stage, began to land on the ground and jump about in all directions. When the rain let up, the soldiers discovered toads in the folds of their three-cornered hats.

In late October of 1889 Mr Wright of the parish of Penpont, Dumfries, Scotland, was startled by the appearance of what at first seemed to be a flock of birds, which began falling to the ground. Running towards them, he discovered the objects to be oak leaves, which eventually covered an area 1 mile wide and 2 miles long. The nearest clump of oak trees was 8 miles away, and no other kind of leaf fell.

Just before sunset in August 1897 an immense number of small, blood-coloured clouds filled the sky in Macerata, Italy. About an hour later, storm clouds burst and small seeds rained from the sky, covering the ground to a depth of half an inch. Many of the seeds had already started to germinate, and all of the seeds were from the Judas tree, which is found predominantly in the Middle East and Asia. There was no accompanying debris — just the Judas tree seeds.

About 150 perch-like silver fish dropped from the sky during a tropical storm near Killarney Station in Australia’s Northern Territory in February, 1974. Fishfalls are common enough that an ‘official’ explanation has been developed to cover most of them. It is theorised that whirlwinds create a waterspout effect, sucking up water and fish, carrying them for great distances and then dropping them somewhere else.

In February of 1965, a 50-lb mass of ice plunged through the roof of the Phillips Petroleum plant in Woods Cross, Utah. In his book, Strangest of All, Frank Edwards reported the case of a carpenter working on a roof in Kempten — near Düsseldorf, Germany — who was struck and killed in 1951 by an icicle 6 ft long and 6 in. around, which shot down from the sky.

On July 12, 1961, unripe peaches were scattered over a small portion of Shreveport, Louisiana, from a cloudy sky.

On Saturday, July 10, 1976, the citizens of Seveso, Italy, were startled by a sudden loud whistling sound coming from the direction of the nearby Icmesa chemical factory. The sound was followed by a thick, grey cloud, which rolled towards the town and dropped a mist of white dust that settled on everything and smelled horrible. It was 10 days before the people of Seveso learned that the white dust contained dioxin, a deadly poison far more dangerous than arsenic or strychnine. By then it was too late. The effects of dioxin poisoning had already begun. The area was evacuated, surrounded by barbed wire and declared a contaminated zone. All exposed animals were killed, ugly black pustules formed on the skin of young children, babies were born deformed, and older people began to die of liver ailments. The full extent of the tragedy has still not been felt.

In September, 1962, a metal object about 6 in. in diameter and weighing 21 lb crashed into a street intersection in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and burrowed several inches into the ground. The object was later identified as part of Sputnik IV, which had been launched by the USSR on May 15, 1960. Since 1959 approximately 9,000 parts of spacecraft have fallen out of orbit, and many of them have reached the surface of the Earth. On July 11, 1979, Skylab, the 77-ton US space station, fell out of orbit over the South Indian Ocean and western Australia. The largest piece of debris to reach land was a one-ton tank.

The largest known iron meteorite, weighing more than 60 tons, crashed to Earth in late 1920, landing on a farm in the Hoba district west of Grootfontein in northern Namibia. It has since been declared a national monument and is visited by more than 20,000 tourists a year. A minor international incident occurred in 1989 when 36 Malaysian soldiers serving in a UN peacekeeping force tried to cut pieces from the boulder for souvenirs.

On Sunday, October 18, 1992, Gerri and Leroy Cinnamon of Woodinville, Washington, were watching a football game on TV in their den with Gerri’s parents when something crashed through the roof of their living room. ‘I expected to see Superman soar through the hole,’ said Leroy. Instead they found several baseball-sized chunks of greenish ice. As it melted, it began to smell bad. Two days later the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that the Cinnamons’ roof had been damaged by frozen human waste from a leaky United Airlines sewage system. ‘It’s a good thing none of us was killed,’ reflected Leroy. ‘What would you put on the tombstone?’

Unfortunately, falls of waste blobs are not uncommon. On April 23, 1978, for example, a 25-lb chunk landed in an unused school building in Ripley, Tennessee. Other attacks have occurred in Denver and Chicago. And then there’s the story of the unfortunate Kentucky farmer who took a big lick of a flying Popsicle before he discovered what it was.

White powder of a more innocuous kind began falling on the small town of Chester, South Carolina, in 1969 — shortly after the Borden company started production of a corn syrup-based non-dairy creamer in its local plant. Whenever the plant’s exhaust vents clogged, the creamer spewed into the air and landed on people’s homes and cars. Although basically harmless, the powder would mix with dew and rain and cause a sticky mess. Said homeowner Grace Dover, ‘It gets on your windows and you can’t see out. It looks like you haven’t washed your windows for a hundred years.’ In 1991 Borden paid a $4,000 fine for releasing Cremora beyond plant boundaries. By that time the company had already taken steps to reduce the low-fat rain.

PHILIP PULLMAN’S 10 BEST TOOLS, AND ONE MORE

Philip Pullman is one of the world’s great storytellers and his trilogy, His Dark Materials, the adventures of Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will Parry in a richly imagined alternative universe, has been widely acclaimed. The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the trilogy, was the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. A stage adaptation of the three books was an enormous success at the National Theatre in 2004.

Born in Norwich in 1946, Philip Pullman grew up to become a teacher. Unable at first to afford the tools he wanted, he turned to writing as the alternative to a life of crime. His greatest unfulfilled ambition is to present woodworking programmes on satellite TV. He is reasonably presentable and articulate, and open to offers.

It’s no good trying to use edge tools that are blunt, so you have to keep them sharp. Of all the ways I’ve tried, this is the best. An ordinary electric bench grinder spins the stone around at such a speed that the steel you’re trying to sharpen gets easily overheated and loses its power to hold an edge. The Tormek grinder overcomes that by having a large wheel revolving fairly slowly in a trough of water and an ingenious system of jigs that slip on to the tool rest and hold the chisel, or the gouge, or the scissors, or the carving knife, at exactly the right angle to the stone. It produces the sharpest, most reliable edge you can get.

It’s so obvious: a saw that cuts on the pull stroke instead of the push. The advantage is that you can have a much thinner blade, because it doesn’t have to be stiff, and that means that you can cut a much narrower kerf much more accurately. It cuts dovetails very well.

This is a little plane that you hold with one hand. I have two of them, but the one I use most often is a metal one: a Record. It’s satisfyingly heavy for such a small thing and beautifully designed: there’s a hollow in the top of the throat-adjustment knob for your forefinger so that you can press on the front end and guide it more firmly, and hollows on the sides for your thumb and middle finger, and the lever cap curls over precisely to fit the palm of your hand. You can adjust the depth of the blade and the width of the throat, and it’s ideal for planing end-grain. I found that the thing that made most difference (apart from keeping the blade razor-sharp: see ‘The Tormek grinder’, above) was grinding the sole until it was as smooth and flat as a mirror. Now it just glides over the wood.

My favourite is a little metal engineer’s try square with a 4-in. blade. If you need a long one, use a long one; but this is adequate for most jobs, and it slips very neatly into the pocket, and it feels good in the hand. I bought it from the Gloucester Green market in Oxford, where there are a couple of stalls that sell second hand tools.

This is a chisel with a blade that’s curved in cross-section. The ones I use for carving have a bevel ground on the outside so you can scoop out a hollow. Sharpening on its own isn’t enough for these delicate and high-bred creatures: you have to hone the bevel till it shines. Fortunately, the Tormek (see above) has a leather wheel especially designed for that. Once it’s so sharp that it hurts the eye to look at it, the gouge will slice through the wood with nonchalant accuracy.

‘Chop’ has the same origin as ‘chap’, which means jaw or cheek. It’s a heavy wooden vice that holds a big workpiece for carving. I made mine out of beech, following a plan by the excellent and learned Anthony Dew, founder and president of the Guild of Rocking Horse Makers.

In combination with a steel straightedge and a rubber cutting mat, this is unbeatable. Card, paper, leather, even thin plywood all succumb.

This is one of those things you don’t think of as a tool. But whenever you make something out of wood you’re going to need a pencil at some point, whether to mark a line for cutting or to jot down calculations for the measurements or to sketch a complicated joint and fix the shape in your mind. I have never found those wide so-called carpenter’s pencils with a flat lead any better than an ordinary HB. A few strokes on a piece of fine sandpaper will restore the sharpest of points.

I had to think hard about which power tool to include. Each one I have is utterly necessary, and so is the next one I’m going to buy, as soon as I decide which it is. How can you cut complex shapes without a bandsaw? How did we manage to do anything at all before they invented the router? But if you’re making a large piece of furniture, the only way to achieve a perfectly smooth surface without loathsome and back-breaking toil is to use a belt sander. It removes all the bumps and hollows and rough patches, and with progressively finer belts you can get a result that would have taken our ancestors hours, if not days. They might have turned their noses up at the biscuit jointer or the radial-arm saw, but they would have used one of these like a shot.

A hammer always looks like a hammer, a screwdriver always looks like a screwdriver. But a jig can look like anything. It’s a frame or a holding device that’s often made specifically for one job and then put away in the corner of the workshop and never used again. But you don’t throw it away, just in case. It’s used to hold a workpiece in exactly the right place relative to the cutting edge or the drill bit or whatever it might be, to ensure that you cut a perfect semicircle on the bandsaw, or drill thirty holes at exactly the right angle, or cut several mortises to exactly the right depth, or… I love jigs.

This is a beautiful and slender piece of bronze about a foot long. For half its length, it’s been beaten out into a flat blade about as wide as a finger, with an edge that’s too blunt to cut anything but paper: it’s a perfect letter-opener. The other end has been formed into a similar but shorter blade at right angles to the first; and the shorter blade has been bent half way along its length into a flat foot, at right angles to the main shaft, about as long as the middle joint of my thumb. It’s been made by hand, and it’s worn smooth with use. I guess it was made to tamp down the sand in a mould, but I really have no idea. I use it for scratching my back.

27 THINGS THAT ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

• A firefly is not a fly — it’s a beetle.

• A prairie dog is not a dog — it’s a rodent.

• India ink is not from India — it’s from China and Egypt.

• A horned toad is not a toad — it’s a lizard.

• A lead pencil contains no lead — it contains graphite.

• A Douglas fir tree is not a fir — it’s a pine.

• A silkworm is not a worm — it’s a caterpillar.

• A peanut is not a nut — it’s a legume.

• A panda bear is not a bear — it’s a raccoon relative.

• A cor anglais, or English horn, is not English and not a horn — it’s an alto oboe from France.

• A guinea pig is not from Guinea and is not a pig — it’s from South America and it’s a rodent.

• Shortbread is not a bread — it’s a thick biscuit.

• Dresden china is not made in Dresden — it’s made in Meissen.

• A shooting star is not a star — it’s a meteor.

• A funny bone is not a bone — it’s the spot where the ulnar nerve touches the humerus.

• Chop suey is not a native Chinese dish — it was invented by Chinese immigrants in California.

• A bald eagle is not bald — it’s got flat white feathers on its head and neck when mature, dark feathers when young.

• A banana tree is not a tree — it’s a herb.

• A cucumber is not a vegetable — it’s a fruit.

• A jackrabbit is not a rabbit — it’s a hare.

• A piece of catgut is not from a cat — it’s usually made from sheep intestines.

• A Mexican jumping bean is not a bean — it’s a seed with a larva inside.

• A Turkish bath is not Turkish — it’s Roman.

• A koala bear is not a bear — it’s a marsupial.

• A sweetbread is not bread — it’s from a calf’s or lamb’s pancreas or thymus.

• Bombay duck is not a duck — it’s a dried fish.

• A prairie oyster is not an oyster — it’s a calf’s testicle.

21 BAD PREDICTIONS

The development of the submarine proceeded rapidly in the early twentieth century, and by World War I submarines were a major factor in naval warfare. They played an even more important role in World War II. By the 1960s and 1970s submarines were considered among the most important of all strategic weapons.

Exactly one week later, the Wright brothers made the first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The first transatlantic commercial scheduled passenger air service was June 17 to 19, 1939, New York to England. The fare one way was $375, round trip $675 — no more than a first-class fare on an ocean liner at the time. On October 14, 1922, at Mount Clemens, Michigan, a plane was flown at 216.1 mph.

Conceived in 1906, the Bronx River Parkway, New York, when completed in 1925, was the first auto express highway system in the United States.

The first transatlantic broadcast of a human voice occurred on December 31, 1923, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Manchester, England.

The New York Times printed a formal retraction of this comment some forty-nine years later, on July 17, 1969, just prior to the Apollo landing on the moon.

See newspaper headlines for December 7, 1941.

The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933. Borah was alive to see the day. He did not die until 1940.

It took 21 years.

— the day the Berlin Wall fell.

Iraq invaded Kuwait five days later.

10 FUNGUSES THAT CHANGED HISTORY

A. flavus is an innocent-looking but deadly yellowish mould also called aflatoxin. Undoubtedly the cause of countless deaths throughout history, it was not suspected of being poisonous until 1960. That year, a mysterious disease killed 100,000 young turkeys in England and medical researchers traced the ‘turkey-X disease’ to A. flavus growing on the birds’ peanut meal feed. Hardy, widespread and lethal, aflatoxin is a powerful liver cancer agent. Even so, people have long cultivated A. flavus — in small amounts — as part of the manufacturing process of soy sauce and sake. But A. flavus can get out of control easily. It thrives on warm, damp conditions and as it breeds — sometimes to lethal proportions within 24 hours — the mould produces its own heat, which spurs even faster growth. Some of A. flavus’ favourite dishes are stored peanuts, rice, corn, wheat, potatoes, peas, cocoa, cured hams and sausage.

This common black mould, most often found on rotting vegetation, played a key role in the collapse of a major industry. Until the early 1920s, Italy produced about 90% of the world’s citric acid, using low-grade lemons. Exported mainly to the US as calcium citrate, this citric acid was a costly ingredient — about a dollar a pound — used in food, pharmaceutical and industrial processing. When American chemists discovered that A. niger, the most ordinary of moulds, secreted citric acid as it grew in a culture medium, they seized the opportunity to perfect citric-acid production using the easily grown mould. Charles Pfizer & Co., of Brooklyn, New York, became known as the ‘world’s largest lemon grove’ — without a lemon in sight. Hardworking acres of A. niger were soon squirting out such quantities of citric acid that by 1923 the price was down to 25¢ per pound and the Italians were out of business.

A purplish-black, spur-shaped mass, C. purpurea is a formidable and even frightening fungus that has long plagued mankind. But in addition to its horrible effects, C. purpurea also has valuable medical uses if the greatest care is taken to use tiny amounts. The fungus is a powerful muscle contractor and can control bleeding, speed up childbirth and even induce abortion. It is also the source of the hallucinogenic LSD-25. In doses larger than microscopic, C. purpurea — commonly called ergot — produces ergotamine poisoning, a grisly condition known in the Middle Ages as St Anthony’s fire. There is still no cure for this hideous, often fatal disease caused by eating fungus-infected rye. The victim suffers convulsions and performs a frenzied ‘dance’. This is often accompanied by a burning sensation in the limbs, which turn gangrenously black and fall off. Some victims of medieval ergotism went insane and many died. In AD994 more than 40,000 people in two French provinces died of erogotism, and in 1722 the powerful fungus forced Peter the Great of Russia to abandon his plan to conquer Turkey when, on the eve of the Battle of Astrakhan, his entire cavalry and 20,000 others were stricken with ergotism. The last recorded outbreak of ergot poisoning was in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

The humble bread mould N. crassa provided the means for scientists to explore the most exciting biological discovery of the twentieth century: DNA. As anyone with an old loaf of bread in the bread box knows, N. crassa needs only a simple growing medium and it has a short life cycle. With such co-operative qualities, this reddish mould enabled George Beadle and Edward Tatum to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology in 1958 for discovering the role that genes play in passing on hereditary traits from one generation to the next. By X-raying N. crassa, the researchers produced mutations of the genes, or components of DNA, and then found which genes corresponded with which traits.

A few dots of a rather pretty bluish-green mould were Dr Alexander Fleming’s first clue to finding one of the most valuable lifesaving drugs ever developed. In 1928 he noticed that his petri dish of staphylococcus bacteria had become contaminated with symmetrically growing, circular colonies of P. notatum. Around each speck, all the bacteria were dead. Fleming further found that the mould also killed pneumonia, gonorrhea and diphtheria germs — without harming human cells. The unassuming bluish-green mould was beginning to look more interesting, but Fleming could not isolate the active element. Not until 1939 did Howard Florey and Ernst Chain identify penicillin, a secretion of the growing mould, as the bacteria-killer. The first important antibiotic, penicillin revolutionised treatment of many diseases. Fleming, Florey and Chain won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 1945 for their pioneering work with the common fruit mould that yielded the first ‘miracle drug’.

According to an old legend, a French shepherd forgot his lunch in a cave near the town of Roquefort and when he found it weeks later, the cheese had become blue-veined and was richly flavoured. No one knew why this happened until American mycologists discovered the common blue mould P. roquefortii in 1918. All blue cheeses — English stilton, Italian gorgonzola, Norwegian gammelost, Greek kopanisti and Swiss paglia — derive their tangy flavour from the energetic blue mould that grows rapidly in the cheese, partially digesting it and eventually turning the entire cheese into mould. Of course, it’s more appetising to say that P. roquefortii ripens the cheee instead of rotting it, but it’s the same process.

The political history of the world changed as a result of the unsavoury activity of P. infestans, a microscopically small fungus which reduced Ireland to desperate famine in 1845. Hot, rainy July weather provided perfect conditions for the white fungus to flourish on the green potato plants — most of Ireland’s food crop — and the bushes withered to brown, mouldy, stinking clumps within days. The entire crop was devastated, causing half a million people to starve to death, while nearly two million emigrated, mostly to the United States. P. infestans dusted a powdery white death over Ireland for six years. The fungus spread rapidly and just one bad potato could infect and ruin a barrel of sound ones. British Prime Minister Robert Peel tried to get Parliament to repeal tariffs on imported grain and while the MPs debated, Ireland starved. Relief came so slowly and inadequately that Peel’s government toppled the next year, in 1846.

A soft, downy mildew infecting American-grown grapes was responsible for nearly ruining the French wine industry. In 1872 the French unwittingly imported P. viticola on grafting stock of wine grapes grown in the United States. Within 10 years, the mild-mannered mildew had quietly decimated much of France’s finest old vineyards. But in 1882 botanist Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet discovered a miraculous cure for the ravages of P. viticola. He noticed that Médoc farmers painted their grape leaves with an ugly paste of copper sulphate, lime and water — to prevent theft. Called Bordeaux mixture, this paste was the first modern fungicide. The vineyards of France recovered as the entire world sighed with relief.

9. MERCHANT OF DEATH (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)

Ordinary brewers’ yeast, S. cerevisiae, used to leaven bread and make ale, was once employed as a wartime agent of death. During WWI, the Germans ran short of both nitroglycerin and the fat used in its manufacture. Then they discovered that the usually friendly fungus S. cerevisiae could be used to produce glycerin, a necessary ingredient in explosives. Fermenting the fungus together with sucrose, nitrates, phosphates and sodium sulphite, the Germans produced more than 1,000 tons of glycerin per month. According to some military sources, this enabled them to keep their war effort going for an additional year.

A lowly mould found in dirt and manure piles, S. griseus nevertheless had its moment of glory in 1943, when Dr Selman Waksman discovered that it yields the antibiotic streptomycin, which can cure tuberculosis. Waksman went to the United States in 1910 as a Russian refugee and by 1918 he had earned his doctorate in soil microbiology. He had worked with S. griseus before, but not until a crash programme to develop antibiotics (a word coined by Dr Waksman himself) was launched did he perceive the humble mould’s possibilities for greatness. Streptomycin was first used successfully on human beings in 1945, and in 1952 Dr Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine.

16 FAMOUS EVENTS THAT HAPPENED IN THE BATHTUB

According to Greek mythology, Medea murdered Jason’s uncle (Pelias, King of Thessaly) by showing his daughters that they could rejuvenate him if they chopped him up and bathed him in her cauldron of herbs. They believed her, and he died.

Shortly after his return from the Trojan War, the Greek hero Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, who struck him twice with an axe while he was relaxing in the tub.

While soaking in the bathtub, the Greek scientist Archimedes formulated the law of physics — known as the Archimedean principle — that a body immersed in fluid loses weight equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. He became so excited about his discovery that he rushed out stark naked into the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, shouting ‘Eureka!’ (‘I have found it!’)

When the Arabs conquered Alexandria, they were alleged to have burned the 700,000 books in the library to keep up the fires in the city’s 4,000 public baths.

Anne, Queen of Denmark, was the wife of James I of England. In 1615 gases from her mineral bath momentarily ignited, causing Her Majesty great consternation.

Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have imported the first bathtub into America. He improved its design and contemporary reports indicate that he carried on much of his reading and correspondence while soaking in the tub.

Jean-Paul Marat played an active part in the French Revolution. As editor of the journal L’Ami du Peuple, he became known as an advocate of extreme violence. The moderate Girondists were driven out of Paris and took refuge in Normandy. There, some of them met and influenced a young woman called Charlotte Corday. Convinced that Marat must die, she went to Paris and bought a butcher’s knife. When she arrived at Marat’s house on July 13, 1793, he was taking a bath. (He spent many hours in the tub because of a painful skin condition.) Overhearing Corday, he asked to see her. They discussed politics for a few minutes, then Corday drew her knife and stabbed Marat to death in the bathtub.

While Napoleon was taking a bath one morning in 1803, his brothers Joseph and Lucien rushed in, seething with rage because they had just heard of his plan to sell Louisiana to the Americans. They were furious because he refused to consult the legislature about it. Lucien had worked hard to make Spain return the colony to France and now his work would be for naught. Joseph warned Napoleon that he might end up in exile if he carried out his plan. At this, Napoleon fell back angrily in the tub, splashing water all over Joseph. Napoleon’s valet, who was standing by with hot towels over his arm, crashed to the floor in a dead faint.

Composer Richard Wagner soaked in a tub scented with vast quantities of Mild of Iris perfume for several hours every day while working on his final opera, Parsifal (1882). He insisted that the water be kept hot and heavily perfumed so that he could smell it as he sat at his desk, clad in outlandish silk and fur dressing gowns and surrounded by vials and sachets of exotic scents.

Paul Morphy of New Orleans defeated famous chess players when he was still a child. As an adult, he could play eight games simultaneously while blindfolded. Some people consider him the greatest chess player who ever lived, but from the age of 22 until his death on July 10, 1884, at 47, he played no more chess. Believing that people were trying to poison him or burn his clothes, Morphy became a virtual recluse. On one oppressively hot day he returned from a walk and took a cold bath. In the tub he died from what doctors described as ‘congestion of the brain or apoplexy, which was evidently brought on by the effects of the cold water on his overheated body’.

Edmond Rostand, French poet and playwright, hated to be interrupted while he was working, but he did not like to turn his friends away. Therefore, he took refuge in the bathtub and wrote there all day, creating such successes as Cyrano de Bergerac (1898).

George Joseph Smith of England earned his living by his almost hypnotic power over women. In 1910 he met Bessie Mundy, married her (without mentioning that he already had a wife) and disappeared with her cash and clothes. Two years later they met by chance and began living together again. After Smith persuaded Bessie to write a will in his favour, he took her to a doctor on the pretence that she suffered from fits. (Both she and the doctor took his word for it.) A few days later she was found dead in the bathtub, a cake of soap clutched in her hand. Everyone assumed she had drowned during an epileptic seizure. Smith married two more women (Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty), took out insurance policies on their lives and described mysterious ailments to their doctors. They, too, were found dead in their bathtubs. When Alice Burnham’s father read of Margaret Lofty’s death, he was struck by its similarity to his daughter’s untimely end. The police were notified and Smith was tried for murder and sentenced to be executed. His legal wife, Edith, testified at the trial that she could remember only one occasion when Smith himself took a bath.

America was shocked by reports of an orgy on February 22, 1926, at the Earl Carroll Theatre, New York, after a performance of his Vanities. To bring a midnight party to a climax onstage, a bathtub was filled with champagne and a nude model climbed in, while the men lined up and filled their glasses from the tub. This was during the Prohibition era, so a federal grand jury immediately began an inquiry into whether or not the tub really did contain liquor and, if so, who had supplied it. Earl Carroll, the producer who staged the party, was convicted of perjury for telling the grand jury that no wine had been in the bathtub. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, plus a $2,000 fine. After he suffered a nervous breakdown on the way to the penitentiary, his fellow prisoners were ordered never to mention bathtubs in his presence.

On June 29, 1955, the reign of King Haakon VII, who had ruled Norway from the time of its independence in 1905, effectively came to an end when the beloved monarch fell in the royal bathtub at his palace in Oslo. The elderly king lingered on for over two years before succumbing on September 21, 1957, to complications resulting from his fall.

The momentum of what contemporary experts considered to be an unstoppable political career was interrupted in 1964 when astronaut hero John Glenn fell in the bathtub and had to withdraw from his race for senator from Ohio. He was finally elected to the Senate in 1974.

Rock idol Jim Morrison was living in exile in an apartment in Paris. On the morning of July 3, 1971, he was found dead in his bathtub. The cause of death was ruled ‘heart failure’. He was 27 years old.

BRUCE FELTON’S WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? 11 OF THE WORST IDEAS IN RECENT HISTORY

Bruce Felton is the co-author of The Best, Worst & Most Unusual: Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind, Felton and Fowler’s Famous Americans You Never Knew Existed and the author of What Were They Thinking?: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History.

Victor Biaka-Boda, the Ivory Coast’s representative in the French Senate, returned to his home district in January 1950 to campaign for re-election. It wasn’t a smart career move. Later that month, his belongings and bones were found near the village of Bouafle. The leftovers were shipped to police labs in Paris for analysis, but it was plainly obvious that Biaka-Boda had ended his days in a tureen. However, until the facts were in, a successor could not be named and his constituents had to forego representation. It took the French Overseas Ministry another two years to acknowledge officially that Biaka-Boda had been eaten. Only then could the vacancy be filled. As The New York Times delicately put it, ‘You cannot have your senator and eat him too.’

In a study of Adolf Hitler’s health and habits during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services — forerunner of the CIA — found that the Führer was ‘close to the male-female line’, according to Stanley Lovell, wartime director of research and development for the OSS. ‘A push to the female side might make his moustache fall out and his voice become soprano’, turning Hitler into a national laughing stock and driving him from power. To make it happen, the OSS bribed Hitler’s personal gardener to inject oestrogen into the Führer’s food. Inevitably, this absurd ‘destabilization program’ failed. Lovell speculates that either Hitler’s official tasters noticed something funny about the carrots or, more likely, the gardener was a double-crosser who kept the bribe and discarded the hormones.

When residents of Seoul, South Korea, complained that police emergency phone lines were often busy, the Metropolitan Police Administration added two emergency fax lines.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission paid $1,700 for 80,000 promotional buttons with the slogan, ‘Think Toy Safety’ in the 1970s. But the buttons turned out to be more of a menace than any toy ever concocted by the most socially irresponsible toy manufacturer. The metal tags had sharp edges and metal tab fasteners that broke off easily and were a sure bet to be swallowed by small children. Also, the buttons were coated with lead paint. Eventually, the Commission recalled the buttons with an eye to recycling them or just scuttling the lot.

A movie theatre manager in Seoul, South Korea, decided that the running time of The Sound of Music was too long. He shortened it by cutting out all the songs.

Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, offers a scholarship to left-handed students with financial need. The stipend was established by alumni Frederick and Mary Francis Beckley, who were dropped from the college tennis team in 1919 solely because of their left-handedness. Other excessively specialised scholarships include:

• The International Boar Semen Scholarship, a $500 stipend earmarked for the study of swine management at the undergraduate level. IBS is a division of Universal Pig Genes, Inc.

• The $500 NAAFA-NEC Scholarship, awarded to obese college-bound high-school seniors by the New England Chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

• The Zolp Scholarship, available exclusively to Loyola University (Chicago) students named ‘Zolp’.

In 1917, more than a decade before the first talking films, inventor Charles Pidgin patented a breakthrough way to simulate speech on screen. Before filming, balloons ‘made of rubber or any other suitable material’ are concealed in each performer’s mouth. The balloons are imprinted with dialogue; characters simply blow up their balloons on cue, allowing their lines to be read just as if they were comic strip figures.

The Nevada state legislature authorised a new licence plate in 2002 depicting a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. The design symbolised the 928 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Nevada desert from 1945 through 1992. Ultimately, however, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles rejected the concept, noting that ‘any reference on a licence plate to weapons of mass destruction is inappropriate and would likely offend our citizens’.

In the fourteenth century Mansa Musa held sway over the Mali Empire, among the most powerful and far-reaching Islamic kingdoms of its time. Musa was an enlightened leader who sought peace with his neighbours, fostered the arts and built majestic structures. He also liked to have a good time. In 1324 he led 60,000 followers on a pilgrimage to Mecca; a retinue of 500 slaves bearing solid gold sceptres accompanied them. Along the way, Musa stopped off in Cairo for a few months of revels and relaxation. He spent so much gold in the Egyptian capital that the national economy collapsed. Musa and his followers continued on to Mecca and returned to Mali all but broke; it was years before Egypt recovered from the emperor’s excesses.

As a young man, composer Robert Schumann (1810–56) showed great promise as a concert pianist. Unfortunately, the middle and fourth fingers of his right hand lacked suppleness and agility. To whip some discipline into the wayward digits, he invented a device that held them in place and stretched them while the others played freely. Schumann’s homemade finger-rack turned out to be so effective that he wound up crippling his fingers. On doctor’s orders, he marinated his hand regularly in a restorative bath of warm animal guts, but the injury was permanent, and Schumann never played seriously again.

At its 1989 commencement ceremonies, Ohio’s Central State University awarded boxer Mike Tyson an honorary doctorate in humane letters.

7 LAST FACTS

Ruth hit his 714th and last major-league home run, a towering out-of-the-park drive off Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Guy Bush, on May 25, 1935. However, 11 years later the owner of the Veracruz Blues of the Mexican League hired the famous slugger for $10,000 to come and bat once in a game against the Mexico City Reds. The pitcher, Ramon Brazana, threw three balls and was removed from the game. A reliever was brought in and threw his first pitch straight down the middle. The 51-year-old Ruth hit it deep into the right-field bleachers, much to the delight of 10,000 Mexican fans.

Kelton Rena Turner, an 18-year-old Marine from Los Angeles, was killed in action on May 15, 1975, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon, in what became known as the Mayaguez incident. His body was never recovered.

On October 26, 1977, Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, became the last person to contract smallpox through natural transmission when he chose to tend an infected child. The child died but Maalin survived. In September 1978 Janet Parker, an English medical photographer, was exposed to smallpox as the result of a laboratory accident. She subsequently died. The virologist in charge of the lab felt so guilty that he committed suicide. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated. However, some samples remain in laboratories in Atlanta and Moscow.

On July 12, 1990 American’s last hand-cranked, party-line telephone system was replaced by private-line, touch-tone technology. The system had serviced the 18 year-round residents of Salmon River Canyon, near North Fork, Idaho.

In 1991 women’s groups successfully lobbied to have the Miss Canada contest cancelled, claiming that it was degrading to women. The last Miss Canada, Nicole Dunsdon, completed her reign in October 1992.

The VW Beetle, little changed since its debut in 1936, became the most popular automobile in history, with 21,529,464 cars rolling off the assembly lines. Production of the car ceased in Germany in 1978, but continued in Mexico where the Beetle was particularly popular as a taxi. After 2000, sales dropped in Mexico, due to free trade agreements that flooded the market with a variety of inexpensive cars with better gas mileage. A decision by Mexico City’s local government to grant future licences only to taxis with four doors helped seal the two-door Beetle’s fate. The last Beetles were produced at a plant in Pueblo, Mexico, on July 30, 2003. The very last car was sent to a museum at Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany.

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