David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Victor Biaka-Boda, the Ivory Coast’s representative in the French Senate, returned to his home district in January 1950 to campaign for re-election. It wasn’t a smart career move. Later that month, his belongings and bones were found near the village of Bouafle. The leftovers were shipped to police labs in Paris for analysis, but it was plainly obvious that Biaka-Boda had ended his days in a tureen. However, until the facts were in, a successor could not be named and his constituents had to forego representation. It took the French Overseas Ministry another two years to acknowledge officially that Biaka-Boda had been eaten. Only then could the vacancy be filled. As The New York Times delicately put it, ‘You cannot have your senator and eat him too.’

In a study of Adolf Hitler’s health and habits during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services — forerunner of the CIA — found that the Führer was ‘close to the male-female line’, according to Stanley Lovell, wartime director of research and development for the OSS. ‘A push to the female side might make his moustache fall out and his voice become soprano’, turning Hitler into a national laughing stock and driving him from power. To make it happen, the OSS bribed Hitler’s personal gardener to inject oestrogen into the Führer’s food. Inevitably, this absurd ‘destabilization program’ failed. Lovell speculates that either Hitler’s official tasters noticed something funny about the carrots or, more likely, the gardener was a double-crosser who kept the bribe and discarded the hormones.

When residents of Seoul, South Korea, complained that police emergency phone lines were often busy, the Metropolitan Police Administration added two emergency fax lines.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission paid $1,700 for 80,000 promotional buttons with the slogan, ‘Think Toy Safety’ in the 1970s. But the buttons turned out to be more of a menace than any toy ever concocted by the most socially irresponsible toy manufacturer. The metal tags had sharp edges and metal tab fasteners that broke off easily and were a sure bet to be swallowed by small children. Also, the buttons were coated with lead paint. Eventually, the Commission recalled the buttons with an eye to recycling them or just scuttling the lot.

A movie theatre manager in Seoul, South Korea, decided that the running time of The Sound of Music was too long. He shortened it by cutting out all the songs.

Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, offers a scholarship to left-handed students with financial need. The stipend was established by alumni Frederick and Mary Francis Beckley, who were dropped from the college tennis team in 1919 solely because of their left-handedness. Other excessively specialised scholarships include:

• The International Boar Semen Scholarship, a $500 stipend earmarked for the study of swine management at the undergraduate level. IBS is a division of Universal Pig Genes, Inc.

• The $500 NAAFA-NEC Scholarship, awarded to obese college-bound high-school seniors by the New England Chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

• The Zolp Scholarship, available exclusively to Loyola University (Chicago) students named ‘Zolp’.

In 1917, more than a decade before the first talking films, inventor Charles Pidgin patented a breakthrough way to simulate speech on screen. Before filming, balloons ‘made of rubber or any other suitable material’ are concealed in each performer’s mouth. The balloons are imprinted with dialogue; characters simply blow up their balloons on cue, allowing their lines to be read just as if they were comic strip figures.

The Nevada state legislature authorised a new licence plate in 2002 depicting a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. The design symbolised the 928 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Nevada desert from 1945 through 1992. Ultimately, however, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles rejected the concept, noting that ‘any reference on a licence plate to weapons of mass destruction is inappropriate and would likely offend our citizens’.

In the fourteenth century Mansa Musa held sway over the Mali Empire, among the most powerful and far-reaching Islamic kingdoms of its time. Musa was an enlightened leader who sought peace with his neighbours, fostered the arts and built majestic structures. He also liked to have a good time. In 1324 he led 60,000 followers on a pilgrimage to Mecca; a retinue of 500 slaves bearing solid gold sceptres accompanied them. Along the way, Musa stopped off in Cairo for a few months of revels and relaxation. He spent so much gold in the Egyptian capital that the national economy collapsed. Musa and his followers continued on to Mecca and returned to Mali all but broke; it was years before Egypt recovered from the emperor’s excesses.

As a young man, composer Robert Schumann (1810–56) showed great promise as a concert pianist. Unfortunately, the middle and fourth fingers of his right hand lacked suppleness and agility. To whip some discipline into the wayward digits, he invented a device that held them in place and stretched them while the others played freely. Schumann’s homemade finger-rack turned out to be so effective that he wound up crippling his fingers. On doctor’s orders, he marinated his hand regularly in a restorative bath of warm animal guts, but the injury was permanent, and Schumann never played seriously again.

At its 1989 commencement ceremonies, Ohio’s Central State University awarded boxer Mike Tyson an honorary doctorate in humane letters.

Ruth hit his 714th and last major-league home run, a towering out-of-the-park drive off Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Guy Bush, on May 25, 1935. However, 11 years later the owner of the Veracruz Blues of the Mexican League hired the famous slugger for $10,000 to come and bat once in a game against the Mexico City Reds. The pitcher, Ramon Brazana, threw three balls and was removed from the game. A reliever was brought in and threw his first pitch straight down the middle. The 51-year-old Ruth hit it deep into the right-field bleachers, much to the delight of 10,000 Mexican fans.

Kelton Rena Turner, an 18-year-old Marine from Los Angeles, was killed in action on May 15, 1975, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon, in what became known as the Mayaguez incident. His body was never recovered.

On October 26, 1977, Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, became the last person to contract smallpox through natural transmission when he chose to tend an infected child. The child died but Maalin survived. In September 1978 Janet Parker, an English medical photographer, was exposed to smallpox as the result of a laboratory accident. She subsequently died. The virologist in charge of the lab felt so guilty that he committed suicide. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated. However, some samples remain in laboratories in Atlanta and Moscow.

On July 12, 1990 American’s last hand-cranked, party-line telephone system was replaced by private-line, touch-tone technology. The system had serviced the 18 year-round residents of Salmon River Canyon, near North Fork, Idaho.