Monicks: Unleashed

Category: History

  • Fast Friends

    England and Portugal have been allies for 600 years:

    It is cordially agreed that if, in time to come, one of the kings or his heir shall need the support of the other, or his help, and in order to get such assistance applies to his ally in lawful manner, the ally shall be bound to give aid and succour to the other, so far as he is able (without any deceit, fraud, or pretence) to the extent required by the danger to his ally’s realms, lands, domains, and subjects; and he shall be firmly bound by these present alliances to do this.

    That agreement was signed in 1386. It’s the oldest surviving alliance in the world.

    via futilitycloset.com

  • The Chicken Lady

    http://books.google.com/books?id=uWkEAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Nancy Luce is remembered as a terrible poet, but her life was so sad that it’s hard to laugh. Described by one writer as “chicken mad,” Luce spent 76 years on Martha’s Vineyard, cultivating her birds as personal friends and selling poems about them to tourists. The poems reveal such misery that they can be moving despite their strangeness:

    Poor little heart, she was sick one week
    With froth in her throat,
    Then 10 days and grew worse, with dropsy in her stomach,
    I kept getting up nights to see how she was. …

    Poor little Ada Queetie’s last sickness and death
    Destroyed my health at an unknown rate,
    With my heart breaking and weeping,
    I kept the fire going night after night,
    To keep poor little dear warm.

    This was real pain, but visitors saw only an eccentric old woman. She died in 1890, unlamented — and tourists today leave plastic chickens on her grave.

    via futilitycloset.com

    Posted via web from Monicks: Unleashed

  • Free Falling

    Published in 1869, Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Brick Moon” described the launch of an artificial satellite nearly a century before Sputnik:

    If from the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get it half round the earth without touching, that pea would clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place, above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.

    Because the 200-foot brick sphere is accidentally launched with human occupants, Hale perhaps also deserves credit for anticipating the space station.

    via futilitycloset.com

    Posted via web from Monicks: Unleashed