There is said to be a total of 482 systems of shorthand in practical use.
Orange growers of Southern California have realized $1,850,000 for their crop.
The income of the London Daily Telegraph is said to be about $650,000 per year.
Thirty per cent of the iron made in Tennessee is sold outside the Southern States.
There are now 249,273 Indians in this country, or were at the taking of the last census.
Illinois stands third among the states in the number of its milch kine, with 1,087,886 animals.
Pomona County, California, will produce 750 tons of apricots this year, against 2,800 tons last year.
A snake alleged to be fourteen feet long, steals chickens, ducks and geese at Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.
The largest map of the world is in fifteen feet wide and 126 feet long.
Bucharest has the reputation of being the place of residence of the greatest number of swindlers in the world.
In 1889, 10,250,410 bushels of flax seed and 241,389 pounds of fiber were produced on 1,318,698 acres in this country.
Beer frozen and called “hops frappe” is very popular in the Sunday resorts of Philadelphia since the enforcement of the Sunday law.
The numbers… how precise they are. I know they came out of a table somewhere from some sort of almanac. Perhaps I’ll find it someday in the Pile o’Books.
shorthand — The most common shorthands in use in English today are Pittman and Gregg. Although I wonder if people are starting to use Graffiti in writing if they’re good at entering stuff on their Palm? And what happened to the others? There are several collections of shorthand examples in libraries. I suppose they’re most frequented by scholars of the Voynich Manuscript?
oranges — The rise of the Calfornia orange industry was probably helped by the Big Freeze in the northern Florida groves.
income — That would be about $6.5 million today. The Daily Telegraph was recently sold for about $1.33 billion. Well, sold isn’t correct. It’s the pre-lawsuit price. But still, it seems its fortunes have improved.
Tennessee iron — According to the Tennesee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Tennessee’s production in 1894 wasn’t very much:
In 1870, however, the census reported only six producers of iron ore in the state producing just over 34,600 tons of ore worth nearly $132,000. Tennessee had fallen to ninth among twenty-one states in iron ore production from its position of fourth in 1850.
census — There is no good way to verify this number, since the 1890 Census was destroyed by fire in 1921. What a loss to historians, genealogists, and others who care about the demographic changes in the United States.
milch kine — a pair of words we don’t use anymore, unless you spend a lot of time reciting 1st Samuel 6:7. Too bad.
apricots– A 1910 brochure touting southern California fruit growing indicates that one could sell apricots for $30/ton. So the Pomona farmers were getting about $22k for the bad season. But who knows? Maybe the year before was an especially good year? According to more recent apricot industry information, 69,000 tons were sold in 2001, with 20% going to the “fresh market”.
Cold Spring Harbor is also known for the Laboratory that focuses on genetics and molecular biology. But did you see this?
While eugenics was indeed popular, it was poor science and it was rejected on scientific grounds. However, the hereditarian social attitudes that supported popular eugenics remain in the public consciousness to this day.
largest map — is now about 100 feet in diameter.
Bucharest is “one of the few cities in east-central Europe with gambling.” A different type of swindling, to be sure, but a still a way to play on one’s greediness to part one from one’s money.
flax — now primarily a dietary supplement and an ironing-hater’s nightmare. Recently production has been about half a million acres in the US, and 12 million world wide. Flaxseed oil is also commonly known as linseed oil, but I suppose most people wouldn’t want to take capsules of an ingredient in varnish, would they?
beer — I’ve forgotten a bottle of wine in the freezer once or twice, but not beer. However, thawed frozen beer, while not harmful, probably doesn’t taste very good. Sunday laws which pre- and proscribed citizens behaviors were common in the US until quite recently, but now about the only remaining laws control the sale of liquor.
This is the article that was the source for the title of this blog. What a random agglomeration of information! It is so much like many blogs today, where you see a link to something that you think is interesting, but often the context just doesn’t make sense. It’s also enlightening to see that we’re not so different from our ancestors–obsessed with triva, numbers, miscellanea, context- and content-free typing… we live lives of Odd Ends.