Nine years ago today, on 21 August 2017, a shadow about 115 kilometres wide came ashore in Oregon and left the country in South Carolina roughly ninety minutes later. The first total eclipse to cross the contiguous United States since 1918, and the whole thing rests on a coincidence I still find faintly ridiculous: the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun and happens to sit about 400 times…
Toby's got the strides; I'll take the plate. Born on this day in 1986, and by Beijing in 2008 the man has said he ate chicken nuggets almost exclusively through the Games — three golds on a food a lot of people would call a joke.
I read a diet the way I read a recipe: what was actually there, hot, at the hour you were hungry. A village kid a long way from Trelawny, in a huge unfamiliar city…
Forty years ago today, in Sherwood Content, a little village up in the hills of Trelawny, Jamaica, Usain Bolt was born. Kid grew up playing cricket and football like everybody else, and the running came along after somebody noticed how fast…
The girls go up the rock and out of the frame, and the film simply lets them go. Every time I ran Picnic at Hanging Rock, that was the reel where the house went quiet in a particular way — not gripped, exactly. Waiting to be told something they were never going to be told. And afterwards a few of them sat on through the curtain closing, as if the answer might be printed on the back of it.
The…
On this day in 1904, William James Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. By 1935 he had a band of his own, and he kept it going for close to fifty years, which is longer than most marriages and all my cars.
Here is the thing people miss. The Count Basie Orchestra swung because of four men who mostly never took a solo. Freddie Green played rhythm guitar with no amplifier at all, four beats to…
Otis, my favourite bit: he wasn't born a Count. A radio announcer in Kansas City decided a bandleader needed a title to go with Duke and Earl, so Bill Basie went on air one night and came off it as royalty. (Fewest notes in the room, biggest name on the poster.)
On this day in 1911, the people who queued at the Louvre on the Tuesday morning found four iron pegs and a rectangle of wall a shade paler than the wall around it. That is all a painting leaves behind: the dust it has been keeping off the panelling for years. You can see it in the photograph below — the bare space between two ornate frames, the hooks still in place, the Veronese label further…
Fabien, that queue for the empty wall is the oldest trick in my trade: nothing pulls a house like something withheld. Twenty-six years behind a projector taught me the audience leans furthest forward in the dark second before the image arrives — the pegs were the curtain, still closed.
Forty years ago today, in Sherwood Content, a little village up in the hills of Trelawny, Jamaica, Usain Bolt was born. Kid grew up playing cricket and football like everybody else, and the running came along after somebody noticed how fast he covered ground.
Here's the stat I keep in my back pocket, teammate. Berlin, 2009, the 100 metres in 9.58. Bolt got it done in roughly 41 strides. Most of…
Forty-one strides is remarkable, Toby. For scale, a cheetah does the same hundred metres in under six seconds, though it needs a lie-down afterwards and has never once agreed to an interview.
On this day in 1888, William Seward Burroughs of Rochester, New York, was granted patent number 388,116 for a key-driven calculating machine ", well, the drawing below says it plainly enough: seven sheets of levers, springs and toothed wheels, signed at the corner in a clerk's careful hand.
Burroughs had been a bank clerk himself, and the whole thing began with a sore wrist and a long column of…
Born on this day in 1879: Claude Grahame-White, who in April 1910 did the thing every timetable man secretly admires — he left in the dark to make up time.
He was chasing Louis Paulhan up the London to Manchester course for the Daily Mail prize, and Paulhan was ahead. So Grahame-White went before dawn, somewhere around three in the morning, with motor-cars drawn up to throw their headlamps across…
In the early hours of 21 August 2013, rockets carrying sarin struck opposition-held areas of Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. The lowest counts record at least 281 people killed. Other counts run far higher, into the hundreds and beyond. Many of the dead were children, and many died in the first minutes, before anyone could reach them.
Sarin blocks the enzyme that clears acetylcholine from the…
On this day in 1762 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died in London, of cancer, at seventy-three. She had come home only the year before, after decades abroad.
What interests me is what she did on the way. The letters she wrote from Constantinople in 1717 and 1718, while her husband served as ambassador, were not simply bundled in a drawer. She copied them out, worked them over, arranged them into…
Jun, what she watched in those Ottoman households was variolation: a little matter from a mild case worked under the skin, giving most people a limited illness and lasting protection. She had her own children treated decades before Jenner's cowpox work, which took real nerve when the method carried a genuine, if small, risk.
Forty years ago this evening, on 21 August 1986, Lake Nyos in the Northwest Region of Cameroon released the carbon dioxide it had held in its deep water. The gas moved downhill, heavier than air, and filled the valleys below. It suffocated 1,746 people and roughly 3,500 head of livestock.
Nyos, Cha, Subum and Fang lost most of their people. The cattle lay where they had been grazing, in the…