I’ve spent a few nights recently getting reacquainted with Isaac Azimov’s Foundation series. It’s a classic creation that I’ve read a number of times over the years and it’s still a great read. Being a huge fan of Azimov I still read the story in absolute amazement much like I get when I read the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. How their minds work to write these amazing stories puzzles me but I still enjoy every minute spent reading them. Todays post will contain a group of unrelated facts collected by Azimov over the years and I thought you might enjoy them.
After the most recent North American glacier ended its southward advance about 11,000 years ago, it took more than 4,000 years for the mile-deep ice mass to melt from the present site of Hartford, Connecticut to that of St. John’s, Vermont, a distance of 190 miles.
The Earth receives only one-half of one-billionth of the sun’s radiant energy. But in just a few days it gets as much heat and light as could be produced by burning all of the oil, coal, and wood on this planet.
The first English settlement in what became New England was founded 13 years before the arrival of the Pilgrim’s. In 1607, a settlement was established at Popham Beach, Maine. After a year, its inhabitants found the climate too harsh, and departed.
During most of the Middle Ages, few people, including kings and emperors, were able to read or write. The clergy were virtually the only ones who possessed those skills.
Blue Laws became known as such because of the color of the paper on which they were printed. In 1665, Theophilus Eaton, governor of the New Haven Colony, and a friend, clergyman John Davenport, drew up the strict legal code regulating personal conduct that subsequently became known as the Blue Laws.
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, was sentenced to life in prison for splinting the fractured leg of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, became a hero to guards and inmates of his island prison when he stopped a yellow-fever epidemic there, in 1868, after all of the Army doctors had died. President. Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, pardoned Mudd in early 1869.
Until the “pooper-scooper law” was passed in 1978, the 500,000 dogs in New York City deposited 175 pounds of fecal matter on the streets each day. The law requires dog owners to clean up after their dogs, on penalty of fines up to $100. Most dog owners comply, and New York City is much cleaner.
President Lincoln’s only son to live to manhood – Robert Todd Lincoln – was at hand at the assassinations of three Presidents: his father’s, Garfield’s, and McKinley. He was called to the house where his father was dying; arrived only moments after Garfield was shot in the capital and McKinley was shot in Buffalo.
I’ve made it clear over the years that I’m a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I’ve tried to read as many of his writings as I could find, and his limericks are outstandingly bawdy. He also has another talent which I really appreciate and that was his ability to collect odd facts. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse his level of knowledge became over the years, and it still fascinates me. It was one of my motivations for starting this blog because there are just so many interesting odd and weird facts available and most of them never see the light of day. This blog is my way of bringing as many of those facts as possible to light so you all can enjoy them. Today’s topic of discussion will be the world of entertainment. Where else could you find the appropriate amount of weirdness that Asimov so religiously documented. Here we go.
Not until 1959 was a play by a black woman produced on Broadway. 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry’s starred in, A Raisin in the Sun, which concerned the problems (comic and serious) of a black family in modern day America. It was highly successful and eventually made into a motion picture.
The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt was obsessed with death. As a teenager, she made frequent visits to the Paris morgue to look at corpses of derelicts dragged up from the Seine, and she begged her mother to buy her a pretty rosewood coffin with white satin lining. The coffin became part of the Bernhardt legend. Occasionally, she slept in it, and eventually she was buried in it when she died at the age of 79.
A U.S. television network’s dramatic representation of the trial of Nazi judges was sponsored by the natural gas industry. The word “gas” was excised from the script, but a few “gases” slipped by the censors; those had to be blipped before the program was aired.
During the pre-Broadway tour of the 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue, Cole Porter had to do a lot of rewriting. Rather than hire a professional stenographer to take his dictations and transcribe the changes, he used the services of one of the stars of the show, Ethel Merman. Before she went into show business, Ms. Merman had been a secretary. Porter described her as “among the best stenographers I’ve ever had.”
A tambourinelike instrument used in old time minstrel shows was made from the jawbone of a horse or ass, from which the instrument got its name, “Bones.” When the bone was thoroughly dried, the teeth were so loose they rattled and produced sounds as loud as a castanet. Every minstrel troupe had a “Mr. Bones.”
Rin Tin Tin, for years the most famous dog in the world, was born to a war-dog mother in a German trench in France during World War I. Deserted when the Germans retreated, the German-shepherd puppy was found by an American officer who just happened to be a police dog-trainer from California. He trained Rin Tin Tin when they returned home. The dog was so intelligent he came to the notice of Warner Brothers Studios, which signed him up for what turned out to be a long career as one of the biggest box office draws of the silent screen era.
I just love these hidden stories and facts and envy Azimov’s ability to research and publish all of them. I’m happy to share them with you and I hope you enjoyed them.
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