tenth reflection

In 1931, the government of the Netherlands hired Mynheer Verhaat, a self-styled rainmaker, to scatter super-cooled ice crystals into a bank of clouds in an attempt to produce rain. A fleet of army planes was placed at Verhaat’s disposal, and the upper atmosphere duly sprinkled with ice dust. When the rainmaking was over, all that had been soaked was the taxpayer.

Perhaps Verhaat had the last laugh. The date of his rain-making fiasco? April 1—April Fool’s Day.

Cleopatra, the queen who ruled Egypt during the first century B.C., was not Egyptian. She and the other seven women who ruled under the name of Cleopatra were of Macedonian ancestry, descendants of a general who served Alexander the Great and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Cleopatra was a name assumed by all the Ptolemaic queens of Egypt, after the first queen of that name. The name of Julius Caesar’s mistress was actually Auletes.

The great cities of the ancient world probably appear larger in legend and lore than they were in actuality. Historians estimate that the cities of Babylon, Nineveh, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria at their height harbored from 250,000 to 500,000 people, while Imperial Rome had a population of less than a million. Columbus, Ohio, a moderately sized city by modern standards, has a population of over 500,000. And that’s just one of the few random facts.

A medieval superstition holds that to remove a wart, simply cut an onion in half, rub the exposed inner flesh against the wart, tie the onion back together, and bury it. When the onion has decomposed, the wart will have disappeared.