From the New York Times: “Challenged by his friend, the swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, Harry Prieste shinnied up a 15-foot flagpole at the end of the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, and stole the official flag. The Irish linen flag came home with Prieste to Los Angeles, the fruit of his athletic prank and further evidence of his presence at the seventh Summer Olympiad, where he won the bronze medal in platform diving. For 77 years the flag was stored in a suitcase during Prieste’s years in swimming and diving shows, as a vaudeville comedian, a tumbler, a banjo player, a circus juggler and an Ice Follies performer. He did not regard the flag as valuable or worth returning until a reporter told him at a United States Olympic Committee banquet three years ago that the International Olympic Committee had been unable to find the missing Antwerp flag, the first one with the five rings. ”I can help you with that,” he said. ”It’s in my suitcase.”
She fell 14,000 feet without a parachute and somehow survived
From ESPN: “Each step that Emma Carey takes is a size six miracle. She has no feeling in her legs, no sense of when her feet land or they’re in the air. That means her legs give her brain zero feedback, so she has to think about where her legs are going but never feels where they are. There’s a little bit of a hitch in her gait, where her legs are just a tad mechanical going up and down. But it’s not even noticeable until she specifically says to watch for it. Most people would have no idea that she is paralyzed from the waist down, or that she survived the unthinkable: In June 2013, Carey went skydiving for the first time and fell 14,000 feet out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.”
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How two wandering cows started a culture war in upstate New York
From the New York Times: “One summer day, a cow and a steer walked away from their farm. The cow was black and was named Blackee. The steer was golden brown, with two stubby horns and he was named Hornee. They crossed a field and a road and wandered onto a neighbor’s yard. This type of thing sometimes happens in rural New York, but Hornee and Blackee had crossed not into another farm but into an animal sanctuary. The next morning, Tracy Murphy, the sanctuary’s owner, found the cows in her yard. She herded them into a pen, she said, and immediately notified the local animal control agency. That was two years ago. Since then, the case of the wandering cows has inspired death threats, rowdy protests, shadowy figures skulking in the woods, intercessions by Fox News and Joaquin Phoenix, and a court battle featuring a rotating cast of lawyers.”
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He survived the sinking of the Titanic and then won gold at the Olympics
From Business Insider: “Richard Norris Williams was 21 when he and his father, 51, boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg, France, on April 10, 1912. To escape the sinking boat, Williams removed his shoes and swam to a lifeboat about 100 yards away, although he recalled being weighed down by a fur coat he was wearing over his life jacket. He reportedly held on to the lifeboat before climbing into it, and sat up to his knees in freezing water and waited to be rescued. Once on the Carpathia, Williams was told by a doctor that his frostbitten legs would need to be amputated. Determined to save his legs, Williams walked around Carpathia’s deck every two hours, eventually regaining sensation in his lower body. In 1920, he won a Wimbledon doubles title, and at the 1924 Paris Olympics he won a mixed-doubles gold medal with his tennis partner, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman.”
The world’s oldest map was carved on a clay tablet in the 6th century BC
From Neatorama: “What has been considered the oldest world map dated at around the 6th century BCE was a Babylonian world map called the Imago Mundi. It was first discovered by the Middle Eastern archaelogist and Assyriologist, Hormuzd Rassam in the late 19th century in what is now Iraq. Later, the British Museum acquired the clay tablets and upon further investigation, they concluded that the map had been carved around the late Babylonian period, c. 6th century BCE. It showed regions including Assyria, Urartu (Armenia) and several cities, encircled by a “bitter river” with eight outer regions surrounding it in the shape of triangles. Descriptions of some of the outer regions survived and have been translated: Number 19 is the place “where a light brighter than the sunset or stars exists”; Number 18 is the place “which is in complete darkness where one sees nothing”; and Number 22 is the one “where the morning dawns.”
If you own a book with a green cover from the 1800s it is probably poisonous
From the Washington Post: “As a graduate student in Laramie, Wyo., in the 1990s, Sarah Mentock spent many weekends hunting for bargains at neighborhood yard sales. On one of those weekends, she spotted “The Lord of the Isles,” a narrative poem set in 14th-century Scotland. Brilliant green with a flowery red and blue design, the clothbound cover of the book intrigued Mentock more than the story. For the next 30 years, it occupied a conspicuous place on Mentock’s bookshelf. Sometimes she’d handle the old book when she dusted or repainted, but mostly she didn’t think too much about it. Until she stumbled upon a news article in 2022 about the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, which aimed to identify books still in circulation that had been produced using toxic pigments common in Victorian bookbinding. Those include lead, chromium, mercury — and especially arsenic, often used in books with dazzling green covers.”
Flying down a mountain at night in a snowstorm wearing a wingsuit
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com