Once upon a time, some artist/inventor/all around dude we have to thank for pretty much everything that has happened since the Renaissance called Da Vinci and some evil mastermind who became an adjective and fathered political science called Machiavelli decided to get together and steal the Arno river from Pisa.

Like you do.

In 1503, Florence was at war with neighbouring republic Pisa. Because Pisa was able to block Florence’s access to the sea, Florence was having internal problems on account of the Borgias wanting power, and both Florence and Pisa wanted control of the river Arno, Machiavelli and Da Vinci decided to put their heads together to figure out a way to sort out the Arno situation. Their plan? Divert the Arno away from Pisa leaving Florence as a port city.

After Da Vinci spent the summer of 1504 drawing up incredibly detailed maps of the Arno, construction began on the project that autumn.

Unfortunately, it was a massive failure. The technology of the time didn’t allow for fast, efficient digging of ditches (though apparently Da Vinci drew up plans for a machine to do the work) and the channels that were dug were too shallow for the project, so the river never followed its new course. Efforts were made to rectify the situation, but a storm caused much of it to collapse. The Pisans took care of what the storm left, and no new attempts were made at diverting the Arno.

You can read more about this here and here.

I came across a list today of the minor Roman Gods. And there are LOTS of them. The Romans had a God for everything. Like hinges.

Oh yes, they had Cardea, Goddess of Door Hinges.

Carnea fared a little better. She was the Goddess of Door Handles, but also of the Heart and Other Organs.

Other awesome minor Gods: Febris (protectress against fevers), Fornax (Goddess of the Oven and Bread), Laverna (Goddess of Trickery), Lima (Goddess of Thresholds), Mefita (Goddess of Vapours Gasses from the Earth), Penates (God of the Storeroom), Potina (Goddess of Children’s Drinks), Robigus (protector of corn from diseases), Subrincinator (God of Weeding), and Viriplacaa (Goddess of Marital Strife).

Still, those aren’t that, um, crappy…

Cloacina was the Goddess of the Sewer.

You can read more here and here.

*This is funny only if you’ve ever seen Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill.

Everyone* knows that lobsters are the same colour of red as PEI soil. Except when they’re not. There’s a genetic disorder that causes a rare few to be born bright blue. I’m talking the same flashy blue that people paint their cars.

The most recent ones caught (there seems to be a newspaper article about this every two years or so) were caught off the coasts of PEI in June and County Clare in August. The odds of catching one? One in four million. The most rare lobster is the albino. The odds of catching an albino is one in 100 million, though one was caught last year off Gloucester, Massachusetts.

*Okay, everyone who is familiar with Lester the Lobster

You have almost certainly heard that one mile in ever four (or five, depending on the source) in the US Interstate System is legally required to be straight for the purpose of landing aircraft during an emergency. It’s one of those things that gets passed around in those “fun facts” emails.

And it’s a complete lie.

My mother has a habit of sending me emails like this that show up in her inbox because she knows how much I loathe poor research and that I’ll find out the truth for her. And I think she finds my rants about the idiocy of people who pass on such emails without bothering to fact check funny.**

The interstate myth is one I consistently read in emails, but have never bothered to confirm or refute, so when I came across this article written by a DOT historian, I was highly entertained. I feel this guy’s pain. As historians, we are working with a field about which the average person knows maybe 10% of what he thinks he does. The rest? He learned in an email full of “facts” some jackass made up.

According to the DOT, “airplanes occasionally land on Interstates when no alternative is available in an emergency, not because the Interstates are designed for that purpose.”

*Honestly, it’s best not to think too hard on the conversations we have. They’re informed by the shorthand of our long friendship.

**My habit of fact checking all blurbs like this is actually something that drives my friends a little nuts. They say my schooling has completely removed my ability to accept things at face value, and that’s sort of true, but if you’re telling me the etymology of the word posh is as an acronym meaning “Port Out, Starboard Home” in reference to wealthy English people making trips to and from India, it’s a sure bet I’m going to doubt it until my source is something better than “my friend sitting next to me at the bar,” well-read though he may be.

I learned by accident from one of her friends that the traditional gift for the third anniversary is leather.

Don’t think our friends and I aren’t puerile enough to make completely inappropriate jokes about this.

That said, a very happy third anniversary to the Cheesedoodles. CHEESEDOODLES 4EVA!

*It’s really fun to play dress-up sometimes! There’s a particularly entertaining (and totally classy) picture of me in my maid of honour ensemble dancing with one of our friends/their groomsmen in which I’m holding a bottle of beer behind his back that is still one of my favourite pictures of me ever because it’s pretty much the definitive “me” photograph. The wedding was a very classy affair at a very nice private venue, but this was taken towards the end of the night when my cousin and I had given up all pretense of being classy for our (much classier) parents!

As a student of revolution, I’m a bit of a sucker for things being stuck, as it were, to The Man, so this little bit of trivia is right up my alley. Gold, it turns out, is a particularly stable element, so its dissolution is a bit tricky. But when German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) sent their medals to the Institute for safekeeping**, and the Nazis annexed Denmark (more or less) in 1940 and went searching for gold, — in this specific instance, gold that had been illegally removed from the Reich (and very obviously since the prizes bore the names of their winners) —  Bohr, with the help of Hungarian chemist Georgy de Hevesy, who won his own Nobel prize in 1943, decided that the best way to keep the Nazis from the prizes was to dissolve the pair in aqua regia, a solution that is three parts hydrochloric acid to one part nitric acid.

By some stroke of luck, when the Nazis arrived and tossed the Institute in search of gold, the aqua regia solution was left alone on some shelf, and, after the war, the gold was extracted from the aqua regia and sent off to Stockholm to be restruck for von Laue and Franck.***

Bohr’s medal (1922, Physics), incidentally, was sold at auction just prior to the Nazi occupation.****

I love stories like this — and history is replete with them. There are always people who find ingenious ways of circumventing governments and doing what is right and I love that.

*Interestingly, this story came from a book I’m waiting to get from paperbackswap.com, which is a BRILLIANT book trading site.

** von Laue was of Jewish descent and Franck was a known dissident.

***For more information see here and here.

****As a mostly unrelated aside, Bohr’s son won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975. Also, my physicist friends and I have a running joke about how when they win the prize, they’re going to demand a taco dinner because it’s impossible to eat tacos and retain one’s dignity and the image of this is funny to us. In fairness, the idea of a specific one of said friends winning a Nobel Prize is actually a completely real possibility. Not that I expect, if he won, that he’d actually demand a taco dinner.

It served me well, but my current job doesn’t really cater to a computer that shuts down every two hours or so for no reason and/or gives me the blue screen of death.

I also learned that there is such a thing as professional bridge. As in the card game. Now, not only did I learn that this exists (from one of the documents I was working on), it turns out that my supervisor’s father made quite a lot of money playing bridge in college. I found this fascinating. So rather than asking him the slew of questioned I wanted answers to (is there a federation? are there tournaments in Vegas? are there sponsors and if there are, are they card companies? can you make a living playing professional bridge? how many people do this? is this an American thing or is it global?), I decided to wait until my work day had ended before checking this out.

The first thing I learned? In 2001, some guy was suspended for 18 months with five years of probation for dealing his partner specific cards. Seriously. Do you want to know my source? The New York Times. I could not make this up.

So the answer to the federation and locality questions are yes and worldwide. There’s a World Bridge Federation. There are also Canadian and US Bridge Federations. And a European Bridge League.

There are World Championships! They have tournaments all over the place. There’s some sort of movement to have bridge included at the Olympics.**

There don’t seem to be any official sponsors of the World Bridge Federation that I could find, but given how much of the fact checkers’ work I had to do today***, I’m a bit lazy on this. Which is also a bit because I don’t really care that much.

So yeah…bridge. It’s a bigger game than you’d think.

*Guess who has never had kids?

**I’m sorry, but sitting around playing cards is not a sport. If you can simultaneously drink alcohol whilst competing in your “sport”, it’s not a sport. I’m not talking about like how I “go swimming” with my beer when I go hang out at my best friend’s because that’s actually just treading water and catching up. There is no physical way I could actually swim and drink my beer at the same time.

***I got a document today that said the client had worked for a time at a military hospital in Cairo. The fact checker who went over the document before it came to me highlighted that with a note that said “I couldn’t find any listed military hospitals in Cairo.” He couldn’t find them because he (like most of the fact checkers at my job) doesn’t know how to do research. If you google military hospital Cairo, the first results are the Wiki list of hospitals in Egypt, articles about Hosni Mubarak’s recent transfer to a hospital in Cairo and a medical journal article from 1915. If you know how to do research, that’s just a temporary problem. In under five minutes, I was able to come up with the name of three military hospitals in Cairo. The fact checkers at my job would make very poor academics.

But…the style of the job is really suited to how I work. It’s a research and editing position, so I look at three or four different projects every day. And unlike with the last editing job I had where they were all governmental audit reports, they vary hugely. Today I learned about mining gold in South Africa. And about how the financial industry is changing and growing in the face of increased globalization. And a cult. I also knew where Ardnamurchan Point is specifically because I’m wired for this kind of random new things type of work. I fact check and edit everything and then I move on to the next thing and learn something else. It’s very cool.

Between the job, the trips out to see my best friend before the summer ends and we have to give up our weekends of swimming, beer and boats, the earthquake and the hurricane, it’s been a little busy. And I just haven’t quite figured out how to process these random things I’m learning at work into lessons here.

I’ll get to it.

Some of my best friends, including my old college roommate and my closest friend from the year I spent in Eastern Europe, have been telling me for years and years that I need to read Harry Potter and for years and years I haven’t done it. This is less because I have something against the series* and more because I’ve never really been drawn to fantasy (or sci-fi, for that matter). Literally the only fantasy books I’ve ever read are Tolkien and T.H. White and I can count them on one hand.** But a friend with a copy finally wore me down and convinced me to give the first book a go.

As it happens, I’m suffering through my quarterly bout of insomnia, so the timing has been pretty good for the Harry Potter series to be given a spin. After trying, and failing, to fall asleep on Friday, I plowed through the entirety of the first book. Good stuff! And then spent the entire weekend trying to figure out where I was going to get my hands on a copy of the second. I considered just buying a copy before a friend (who lives more than halfway across the country and has never lived in the city I live in) reminded me on Sunday that “don’t you have a library four blocks from your house?” I do. I’m an idiot. In any event, I’ve proceeded to go through the second, third and fourth books in the last three days. A trip to the library to secure the fifth and sixth books is in order tomorrow. I suspect they’ll take longer to read. The books have been getting increasingly long.***

In any event, I’m really looking forward to more of the Weasley twins, whom my friends have assured me play a more prominent role in the next two books. They’re my favourites!

Between the reading and the busy weekend I’ve got coming at me — which will involve being interviewed for a friend’s psych paper, free sushi, an afternoon/evening/night out on the water with my best friend, and potentially an evening of pub quiz on Sunday — there’s not going to be a lot of time for posts. I’ll get you back to your regular programming when I get through book seven.

*Unlike Twilight which I adamantly refuse to read on the grounds that it’s atrocious writing and somehow romanticizes abusive and stalker-ish relationships. There’s a really brilliant blog about those very complaints called Reasoning With Vampires that I cannot get enough of. The author calls it a “brain orgy of snark”, which is spot on.

**The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (which you can count as one or three…doesn’t make a difference) and The Once and Future King.

***The first book was 230 pages, the second was 340, the third was 435 and the fourth was 735. I suspect the fifth will also be bordering on “Russian”. Because that’s a measurable length for a book in my world. Speaking of which, I’m still only 300 pages into War and Peace. If only it weren’t 1300 pages of tiny print…and the war parts weren’t so freaking tedious. I’m a girl who tends to like a good literary war, but this just reads like a military history text, no doubt because it kind of is. All the politics and social climbing and stuff happening in Moscow and environs is great, but as soon as I get to the parts about troop movements, I lose interest.