A few days ago was the 100th day of my self-quarantine. Your mileage may vary, depending on exactly where you live, but all of us are around the same point. At least 3 months of stay-at-home, wearing masks, Zoom calls, and gazing wistfully out windows. The current course of the pandemic makes it seem unlikely that this will change anytime soon.
How have you been spending your quarantine time? Maybe on hobbies, old or new. Maybe you are growing herbs in your kitchen, taking a Duolingo course, or learning how to sew. Especially with the racially charged protests that have been sweeping the nation, you are using the opportunity to critically self-reflect on your own attitudes and privileges, or expose yourself to the new perspectives (as you should). I’ve done a lot of this myself, because it’s important.
Time may be finite, but there sure seems to be a lot more of it than there used to be. And everyone, occasionally, needs to find some time to engage their minds in ways they are neither important nor productive. That’s what binge-watching is for, after all. Really, that’s the level of intellectual rigor you should be applying to this blogcat. Because all I really want to do right now, rather than meaningfully engaging with any of the serious and important topics of contemporary sociopolitical discourse, is to share with you one of the ways in which I have attempted to fill the void of quarantine.
Learning weird and stupid facts.
Yes, that’s all this post is. A collection of the strangest, funniest, or most random things I have learned as I’ve gone down Google and Wikipedia rabbit holes the past 100+ days. Hopefully, with your mind numb from lack of social stimulus, you will find this all as interesting and entertaining as I do.
Those Who Are About to Ball Salute You
There are a lot of hot takes these days about the increasingly high salaries given out to star players in major American sports, especially the NBA and NFL. Russell Westbrook’s recent extension is worth $205 million, the richest NBA contract ever. Russell Wilson is the highest paid NFL player right now, with a contract of $35 million. LeBron James is worth at least a half billion, between his earnings from playing plus endorsements and other business opportunities.
How much money do you think the richest athlete in history was worth? How does $15 billion sound? Because that is the estimated inflation-adjusted lifetime earnings of Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a Roman charioteer. That’s more than 3x Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant combined. In another truly modern move, despite his wealth he didn’t even amass the most wins, with only 1,462 career wins to the all-time record of 3,559 for Pompeius Musclosus, who was basically the Roman Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
(In fact, maybe LeBron is more of a scholar of history than we give him credit for. According to record, Diocles began his career with a mediocre chariot team before switching to a more historically prestigious team with better teammates to rack up some wins, then later switching again to a historically bad team for a big contract to prove he could win without help.)
Roman charioteers were not the only successful athletes. Gladiators also tended to be rich and successful; despite the depiction of them in modern popular culture, many lived out the rest of their lives in a peaceful retirement (or retired from the arena due to injury to get a plum job as a bodyguard to a wealthy Roman noble). The cost of training and equipping them to win in combat was so high there was little incentive to waste it all by letting them die (in general, they only fought maybe 2-3 times a year, with the rest of the time being training, similar to modern boxers). There isn’t a whole lot of reliable information around about how much gladiators were worth, but one account from Suetonius told of 13 gladiators being sold at auction (they were slaves) for 9 million sesterces, which some historicans have estimated would come out to be between about 1.5 and 6 million USD per gladiator.
Wacky Races
The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis were the first held in the United States (and, indeed, the first outside of Europe). Just about everything about them was bizarre. The games were supposed to be held in Chicago: it had won the bid to host, but St. Louis, essentially out of spite, started planning their own sporting event specifically to overshadow the Olympics until they gave in and just gave the hosting job to them. Due to various political tensions, only 62 of the 651 athletes in attendance were from outside the US/Canada, prompting some sports to simply roll together the national championship game with the Olympic game to save time. There was also a WHOLE lot of racist stuff I don’t have time to get into right now.
But the crowning achievement in oddity goes to the marathon event. Half the participants had never raced competitively before. Several had to be hospitalized and almost died, because the marathon started at mid-day in August with temperatures over 90 degrees (on a dirt road, with the runners inhaling the dust kicked up by passing automobiles). There were also only two sources of water, from a water tower 6 miles in and from a roadside well 12 miles in. It was, technically, the first race in Olympic history to feature black athletes, but they were tribesmen from South Africa forced to compete as a sort of sideshow attraction (one of them was chased a mile off course by angry dogs part way through the race). Several runners from Russia who were supposed to compete showed up to St. Louis a week later, because at the time Russia still used the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian one.
One competitor stopped 9-miles in due to cramps, and ended up hitching a ride on a passing car towards the finish line, waving at the other racers as he passed. He got off close to the end and ran the rest of the way. He was declared the winner and almost given the gold medal before the crowd turned on him when they realized what had happened and he was disqualified.
The eventual “winner” was literally carried twitching across the finish line by his trainers. Instead of giving him water throughout the race, they had been giving him a mixture of brandy, egg whites, and strychnine. Another racer (who ended up in third place) was a Cuban mailman who raced in dress shoes and trousers, and probably would have won the race if he hadn’t stopped at an orchard to eat some apples, which turned out to be rotten, prompting him to take an hour long nap.
Sex Sells
In 1906, German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer was presenting at a conference the results of a long-term study he had conducted on a female patient at the Frankfurt Psychiatric Hospital. Alzheimer had described in detail the symptoms and progression of her mysterious illness from her admission to the hospital until her death almost 5 years later. The illness, of course, is the one that would later bear his name. The discovery and clinical description of Alzheimer’s is, in retrospect, one of the most important moments in the history and development of neuroscience.
To Alzheimer’s disappointment, his presentation garnered little response. The audience asked no questions, and gave few signs of being attentive, and the chairman of the session offered no comments (which was unusual at the time, being the job of the chairman to encourage discussion), preferring instead to rush Alzheimer’s off the dais and move on with the session. The main reason for this? Well, the next speaker up was presenting a paper on the topic of compulsive masturbation. Everyone in the audience was so eager to hear about masturbation they just weren’t paying any attention to what Alzheimer had to say. The masturbation talk incited a lively debate and shouting match. In fact, Carl Jung was in attendance and the debate (which centered on Freudian psychoanalytic theory) likely played a role in his later developments in “Psychology of the Unconscious”.
Miscellaneous
In closing, here are a few more facts that I’ve stumbled across that aren’t worth really elaborating on in any greater detail:
- While the accuracy of this is still disputed, there was allegedly a completely bloodless war that lasted 335 years between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly. The origins lie in the complicated politics of the English Civil War, with the Dutch declaring war on Scilly in 1651, but never firing a shot. Since Scilly wasn’t particularly important, the war moved on in other directions and everyone promptly forgot, until a historian in 1986 checked the records and saw that nobody had ever officially ended the war with a peace treaty. That was rectified on April 17 1986. The whole situation was rather … Scilly.
- The average human body has approximately 5.5 quarts of blood. Blood is 90% water. A standard Kool-Aid flavor packet is good for about 2 quarts of water. So you only need 2 1/2 flavor packets to turn all of your blood into Kool-Aid.
- There are three known species of ants that can recognize themselves in a mirror.
- Sharks existed before trees. The oldest known tree fossil is dated back to around 350 million years ago, but the oldest known shark fossils date back at least 420 million years. In fact, sharks have survived five mass extinction events, including the Great Dying (or Permian-Triassic extinction event) which wiped out 96% of all marine species. Except for sharks.
- Speaking of trees, before modern trees evolved there was a species of fungus (possibly a mushroom, though little is known about them) that could grow up to 24 feet tall and 3 feet around.