Saturday, June 30, 2007

A fan letter made her an empress!

Iulia Domna, the daughter of an obscure priest of Baal in faraway Syria, became a Roman empress as the result of one mushy fan note.

The eighteen-year-old girl was both plain and poor. She was a provincial in a backward part of the Roman empire. But again the power of a woman must never be underestimated.

In the year 186 A.D., Iulia sat down and wrote a curiously girlish epistle to the Roman Governor of Lugdunum (Lyons) in France. The little schemer told the forty-one-year-old Roman – who had recently become a widower – that she had heard of his bereavement. “I consulted an astrologer,” she remarked brightly, “and had a horoscope prepared which shows that I am destined to become a queen. Marry me,” she added, “and you will share my fate and be king some day.” This naïve logic appealed to the superstitious Roman whose name was Septimius Severus. He made Iulia his wife the following year.

Six years later Septimius became Emperor of Rome and Iuliabecame in fact his empress. Her son Caracalla succeeded his father on the Roman throne and two of her nephews – Alexander Severus and Elagabalus – succeeded to the imperial throne. Superstition and naivete were the two rungs on which Iulia climbed to the dizzying of a throne.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Birthday blues

An intriguing study suggests that nearly half of us die within three months of our last birthday.

Phillip Kunz, a sociologist at Brigham Young University, Utah, USA, took a random sample of 747 obituaries published in Salt Lake City, Utah, during one year, and checked the dates of death against the birthdays of all the deceased. 46 per cent of the deaths came within three months after a birthday, 31 per cent more during the next three months, but only 8 per cent during the three months preceding a birthday.

What do birthdays have to do with dying? People look forward to birthdays. But the period following a birthday can produce a let-down that leads to depression and loss of the will to live.

Knock-down restaurant

A Hong Kong based international architectural and interior-design firm is now offering to ship a fully equipped, prefabricated Chinese restaurant anywhere in the world. The company designs and provides everything from chopsticks to uniforms, ceiling decorations, floor coverings, furniture, exterior facades and, if needed, will send along a six-month supply of food ingredients and an experienced chef, as well.

A 450 square metre restaurant at a cost of about $100,000 can be set up within three months of receiving the order. The first order is reported to have come from a customer in Australia.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

He bought a sea!

Can you buy the sea?!

Well, that’s just what a Russian prince did – or almost that!

Prince Urussoff, a Russian nobleman, came from a family which believed in many superstitions – like most of us! One of his family beliefs was that the loss of a wedding ring would soon cause the loss of the bride herself. Now this would not have bothered the Prince at all, if his beautiful young bride hadn’t lost her ring soon after their marriage. And what was worse, she dropped it by mistake into the Black Sea while they were crossing it!

Prince Urussoff definitely didn’t want to lose his wife, but how could he find a ring in a huge expanse of water like the Black Sea?

So he did the only thing he could. He bought all the land that lay on all sides of the Black Sea from hundreds of owners for about the equivalent ten million dollars! He reasoned that if he owned the entire shore around the expanse of water, then he owned the sea too – and all that lay at the bottom, including the ring! And if he still owned it, he couldn’t have lost it – though he couldn’t put his finger in it!

When the Prince died, his heirs did not need to own the ring anymore. So they sold all the land around the Black Sea that Prince Urussoff had bought – for twice as much!

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The oddest sporting olympiad

The oddest sporting olympiad is the Eskimo Olympics, held every year in Alaska. The eskimos aren't satisfied with anything as dull as sprinting or jumping. They have contests like ear-pulling, fish-cutting, seal-skinning, blubber-eating, knuckle-hopping, blanket-tossing and ear-weightlifting. The winners of some of these contests have lifted 8 kg of lead weights by the ears, eaten a large steak of raw blubber (whale meat) in 15 seconds, skinned a 1.8 m long, 112 kg seal in one minute flat - and one winner was even tossed 12 m high from a blanket!

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

They actually said it! (A sampling of some of the dumbest statements ever made)

Question: "If you could live forever, would you and why?"
Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."
--Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest.

"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life…”
--Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign.

"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.“
-- Al Gore, (then) Vice President of the USA

"It's no exaggeration to say that the undecided could go one way or another”
--George Bush, US President

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.“
--Bill Clinton, Former US President

"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."
--Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina, USA

"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record."
--Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman

Kinky and bizarre?

A couple of weeks ago a gorilla at the Rotterdam zoo escaped its confines by scaling a high wall and jumping over a wide moat to severely wound a woman visitor. The 180-kg ape called Bokito jumped on the visitor - breaking her arm and wrist, and bit her repeatedly. Bokito then smashed his way into a cafetaria, where many more terrified visitors had sought refuge. The zoo was evacuated and the ape finally subdued with a sedative dart.

At first, public anger focussed on the zoo authorities and the gorilla, but the matter was not all that simple. It soon emerged that the woman attacked had been visiting the gorilla four times a week for the past several months! From her hospital bed, she declared that Bokita and she shared a "deep bond" and, despite what he had done to her, he "remains my darling".

The media proceeded to call the woman mad and sick. Some sections even theorised that he male gorilla's reaction stemmed from its natural instinct to "possess" and "dominate". The question no one asked was how the woman had become so lonely and desperate as to seek social satisfaction from a gorilla!

Monday, June 25, 2007

Crazy invention

Heneri Dupre, once a balloonist, was confined to a lunatic asylum in Pennysylvania, U.S.A. Displaying great cleverness, he secretly made a balloon - from a pair of pyjamas and other odds and ends of material he had collected with great care.

Then, when the other inmates were at prayers, Heneri Dupre climbed onto the roof of the lunatic asylum and connected a gas pipe to his pyjama balloon. Before the warders and inmates realized what was happening the pyjama balloon rose into the air, with Dupre hanging to a trapeze made of a broomstick and two ropes.

Unfortunately for Dupre, shots were fired, bringing the pyjama balloon down - and the enterprising madman was recaptured.