Random Factoids and Tidbits about each day that will eventually converge to divulge the meaning of life.
AUGUST 25th - Unless You are the Black Sheep
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This day in 1835 was the beginning of The Great Moon Hoax. On August 25th, the first in a series of six articles was published in the N.Y. Sun and claimed that the most notable astronomer of the time, Sir John Herschel had discovered a civilization of bat people and a multitude of other strange creatures were inhabiting the lunar surface. A Dr. Andrew Grant wrote the series of articles as the traveling companion of Sir Herschel. But Grant was a fictitious creation of Richard Adams Locke (though Locke never admitted to writing the series of articles). Before you rush to judgement about what a kook Locke was, some people believe he was thumbing his nose at the stupidity of some Americans at the time. Locke was a Cambridge-educated reporter, so I’m guessing he wasn’t a complete dummy. Of course, you never know. You ever seen that Peter Sellers movie Being There? It’s from a Jerzy Kosinski novella, and Peter Sellers plays Chance, a simple gardener who doesn’t exactly have the most sophisticated inner-monologue ruminating through his brain, but people mistake his silent demeanor for wisdom, causing some powerful people to take his advice. It’s no Billy Madison, but it’s quite funny. I’m doubting Locke was playing that game though. He had just started working at The Sun that month, and his way to make a splash was to write a completely fabricated story. He obviously knew that such a sensational story would drive up sales--I still take a gander at The Inquirer to see what Bigfoot looks like each year. But more so than that, apparently people in the 1830’s were convinced there were other life forms among the stars. Rev. Thomas Dick had somehow computed that our Solar System contained 21.9 trillion inhabitants and that the moon itself had 4 million. How he supposedly determined this is lost on me. So Locke, most likely realizing that Rev. Dick was a whack-job, but that people are sheep, decided to create a race of bat-people who lived on the moon as way to say, “You people are stupid.” I mean our country was still trying to figure out how to build railroads, but they believed that we had discovered how many extraterrestrial being were floating around out there? Basically Locke tried to give the American public one giant slap across the face. But of course, people believed the story well after it was reported as a hoax. Because slapping sheep will not a wool sweater make. That makes no sense. But if you read it a certain way you might be able glean a glimmer of profoundness in the nonsense. Or you could just not be a sheep. Unless you’re the black sheep.
On this day in 1911, somebody working at the Louvre discovered that the Mona Lisa was missing. The previous day, a Monday--meaning the museum was closed to the public, Vincenzo Peruggia, a maintenance worker, brazenly walked out of the Louvre with what would eventually become the most famous painting in the world. Vincenzo basically sat on the painting for two years until he was caught trying to “return” it to his homeland of Italy in a misguided demonstration of Italian patriotism. The theft itself is quite interesting, mostly because of the lack of planning and preparation that went into it, but equally intriguing is the part it played in making the Mona Lisa so famous. Many historians feel that the painting reached new heights because it was stolen. It kind of makes sense in that whole “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone" kind of way. Not that I would suggest staging a kidnapping to allow your significant other to realize how much he/she loves you, because that’s jus
On this day in 1617, the idea of the one-way street was supposedly introduced in London in the alleys near the River Thames. I’m not sure why London was on the cutting edge of traffic direction, though Albemarle Street, which is acknowledged as the first one-way street, was designated as such because the scientific lectures given there in the early 1800s were so popular. Why wouldn't they be? I can’t really imagine why a one-way street in 1617 would be necessary, but then I can’t really imagine what London in 1617 was like at all. I’m fresh out of people to interview too. Unless the Highlander is real. Just as well. Interviews take a long time. And the person inevitably goes off on tangents. Look, I’m sure the story of how you “accidentally” ingested psychedelic mushrooms while trekking across the Pacific Northwest in your hippie days and met your first wife, Wind Lover, is an incredible story, but I merely asked if you were currently married. It’s a yes or no question. Without the
On this day in 1977, American paleontologist, Elso S. Barghoorn, announced the discovery of some algae microfossils, complete with some super-scientific name and some super-scientific qualifiers, that were 3.4 billion years old. In layman’s terms--really freaking old. Interestingly enough October 23 was also thought, for a long time, to be the day on which the Earth was created. In 1650, church leaders interpreted that the bible documents Earth’s creation on October 23, 4004 BC. Also a long time ago. Not quite the 3.4 billion years of the first life-forms, or the 4.5 billion years most scientist believe the Earth has been around for. So old Barghoorn may have been giving a little nod there, as in “I’ll take your 5700 years and raise you a few billion.” In any case, it shows that we are here but for a blink of the cosmic eye. Stuff has been around so long that if you really start to think about it, you start feeling like you are watching first 30 minutes of The Tree of Life and wonderi
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