Stan never quite made it onto the ballot. (Municipal law requires that candidates for public office have birth certificates.) Not that a little thing like that slowed his popularity: his campaign was endorsed by both Ellen DeGeneres and Anderson Cooper, and he attracted 17,000 followers on Facebook. After the election, the Halifax city council awarded a $40,000 grant in his name to the Halifax SPCA to fund a low-cost spay and neuter clinic for cats. “Stan was a true politician,” Dr. Chisholm told Canada’s National Post newspaper in 2013. “He lived up to his promises.”
Stan never quite made it onto the ballot. (Municipal law requires that candidates for public office have birth certificates.)
Cat-idate: Hank, a 10-year-old Maine coon cat owned by two Virginians, Matthew O’Leary and Anthony Roberts
Running For: State senate and, later, the U.S. Senate
Campaign Notes: O’Leary hated the way lawn signs clutter up the landscape during campaign season, and that gave him and Roberts the idea to have Hank run for a seat in the state senate. At least those lawn signs (and T-shirts and bumper stickers) would be fun to look at, they figured. On election day, they were shocked to see that Hank had actually received nine write-in votes—enough to encourage O’Leary and Roberts to enter Hank in the 2012 race for the U.S. Senate. “As a typical politician, what do you do when you fail? You run for the next highest seat,” O’Leary explains. Hank’s opponents: Former governor (and future vice presidential candidate) Tim Kaine, a Democrat; and former senator George Allen, a Republican. Hank ran as an independent.
…Reason: People ate lots more vegetables, because they weren’t rationed.
On election day, Tim Kaine beat Allen by more than 224,000 votes. More than 7,000 write-in votes were cast in the race, and although Virginia does not release tallies for the various names that were written in, O’Leary and Roberts believe, without evidence, that the lion’s share of the votes probably went to Hank. If true, that would have made him the third-place finisher. Even better, Hank managed to raise more than $60,000 in campaign contributions, which O’Leary and Roberts donated to animal rescue organizations.
Cat-idate: Limberbutt McCubbins, a 30-pound tabby cat living in Louisville, Kentucky
Running For: President of the United States
Campaign Notes: The U.S. Constitution requires that to be sworn in as president, a candidate must have been born in the United States and be at least 35 years of age. But it doesn’t say anything about who can run for the office. That’s what two duPont Manual High School students, Isaac Weiss and Andrew Valentine, learned in 2015 when they tried to file a “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Elections Commission for their friend Emilee McCubbins’s cat, Limberbutt. The FEC had to accept their paperwork because there is no rule prohibiting filing on behalf of a cat. (Limberbutt McCubbins was one of 459 candidates for president in 2016—no word on how many others were cats.) Limberbutt, a “Demo-cat,” ran on a platform of better veterinary care for animals—the “Affordable Cat Act”—and including cats on any future trips to the moon. His campaign slogan: “Meow Is the Time.”
Limberbutt’s name never made it onto the ballot. The hurdles for that are much higher than merely filing papers with the FEC. The fat cat lost to Donald Trump in a landslide, but Emilee McCubbins is philosophical about her candidate’s defeat. “We certainly identify with Trump’s campaign, if not his beliefs,” she told NBC’s Today Show. “A large part of the American public views us as a joke, and yet, we remain surprisingly serious.”
To see more odd candidates who filed statements of candidacy with the FEC to run as candidates for president, turn to page 415.
A plant-eating insect called the issus is born with interlocking gears on its body.
FORGET PARIS
Every city wants to be like Paris, one of the most beautiful and magical cities in the world. Here are some cities that have been nicknamed the “Paris” of their country or region, either by the consensus of visitors and residents…or (more likely) tourism bureaus.
The Paris of the Pacific:
San Francisco, California
The Paris of the West:
Cincinnati, Ohio
The Paris of the Pacific Northwest:
Port Townshend, Washington
The Paris of the East:
Warsaw, Poland; Riga, Latvia; Prague, Czech Republic; Istanbul, Turkey; Saigon, Vietnam; Hanoi, Vietnam; Kabul, Afghanistan
The Paris of the Mayan World:
Copan, Honduras
The Paris of the Middle East:
Beirut, Lebanon
The Paris of the Orient:
Shanghai, China
The Paris of the Plains:
Kansas City, Missouri
The Paris of Central America:
Granada, Nicaragua
The Paris of the Midwest:
Detroit, Michigan
The Paris of the South:
Savannah, Georgia; Asheville, North Carolina
The Paris of North America:
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
The Paris of South America:
Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Paris of Siberia:
Irkutsk, Russia (Seriously?)
The Paris of West Africa:
Dakar, Senegal
The Paris of the Prairies:
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
The Paris of the Mississippi:
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Paris of the Caribbean:
Havana, Cuba
The Paris of the North:
Newcastle, UK; Dawson City, Yukon, Canada; Aalborg, Denmark; Tromso, Norway
The Paris of Appalachia:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Weird MLB rule: If a ball gets stuck in the umpire’s mask, all baserunners move forward one base.
THE SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU
Was Lao-Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” an actual historical figure, or merely a compilation of Taoist sayings? Either way, he (or they) had a lot of interesting things to say.
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”
“He who does not trust, will not be trusted.”
“He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.”
“One cannot reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.”
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.”
“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.”
“Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.”
“Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.”
“One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.”
“Surrender your self-interest. Love others as much as you love yourself. Then you can be entrusted with all things under heaven.”
“A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.”
“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.”
“He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.”
“Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.”
“The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.”
“The wicked leader is he who the people
despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’ ”
“The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.”
“The words of truth are always paradoxical.”
“There is no greater offense than harboring desires. There is no greater disaster than discontent. There is no greater misfortune than wanting more.”
“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.”
The first color a baby can distinguish: red.
THEY DIED ONSTAGE
You don’t usually think of being a musician as a potentially fatal profession, but hey, we’ve all got to go sometime and you don’t get to decide how or where. At least these folks died doing what they loved: performing.
NICK MENZA
Nick Menza was a pretty “metal” guy. He was the drummer for the popular heavy metal band Megadeth throughout the 1990s, and played in other loud and furious bands such as Fear Assembly, Orphaned to Hatred, and Chodle’s Trunk. While sitting behind the drum kit with a band called OHM in May 2016, the 51-year-old musician’s heart stopped just three songs into a show in a club in Studio City, California. Menza was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead from congestive heart failure.
SIMON BARERE
Barere was one of the most renowned concert pianists in the world in the 1940s, so it was a big deal when the Philadelphia O rchestra booked him as a featured musician in 1951. For the first few minutes of the concerto they performed together, Barere’s playing was masterful, but then his tempo slowed, and he started playing wrong notes. Then he stopped playing altogether and slumped forward, his head smashing into the piano’s keyboard on his way to the floor. Fortunately there was “a doctor in the house,” who carried Barere backstage and tried for 30 minutes to revive him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t revive the 54-year-old pianist, who, it was later determined, had been felled by a stroke.
ONIE WHEELER
Wheeler is one of the great sidemen from the classic 1950s and 1960s era of country music. He played guitar and harmonica behind such legends as George Jones, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, and Lefty Frizzell. In the 1970s, Wheeler left the grind of touring and settled in Nashville, where he made a comfortable living as a session musician and performer at the city’s iconic Grand Ole Opry. It was there, in 1984, while recording the Reverend Jimmy Snow’s radio show Grand Ole Gospel, that Wheeler suffered a fatal heart attack at age 62 in front of the audience, both in person and listening at home.
IRMA BULE
Bule was a pop singer in her native Indonesia who had an elaborate stage act that involved dancing around the stage with a live cobra. She used a variety of different snakes over the years, trusting that the hired snake handlers were employing the use of defanged and or de-venomized cobras. They did…until they didn’t. Two songs into a show in Karawang, Indonesia, in 2016, Bule was dancing with a snake when it bit her on the thigh. She figured it was just a skin puncture, and continued on with the show. But that snake had not been neutralized. Less than an hour later, while still performing, Bule began vomiting and then had a seizure. An hour later, the 26-year-old was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Don’t eat it! The Hapalopilus mushroom causes liver and kidney failure and turns urine purple.
SIB HASHIAN
Hashian was a member of Boston, the arena rock band that sold 17 million copies of their 1976 self-titled debut album. Hashian, highly recognizable for his gigantic Afro hairstyle, played drums for the band during its heyday. After he left music in the early 1980s, he went on to own and operate a chain of tanning salons in the Boston area, but still played the occasional gig. His last was the March 2017 Legends of Rock Cruise, an entertainment extravaganza at sea that included performances by members of bands like Foreigner, Kansas, the Beach Boys, and, of course, Boston. While playing on the ship’s stage with his band, Dirty Water, 67-year-old Hashian collapsed and died from a heart attack.
BARBARA WELDENS
This 35-year-old French singer was a rising star when her life was cut short in 2017. Weldens, who sang in the traditional French pop style, was one of the headliners at the Léo Ferré Festival, in Gourdon, France. After she put on what was reportedly a tremendous show, the crowd gave her a standing ovation…and that’s when she suddenly flopped to the ground. According to news reports, Weldens, who performed barefoot, stepped on a poorly grounded electric wire, and the shock was so powerful that it stopped her heart.
BRUCE HAMPTON
The guitarist played in so many Grateful Dead–like bands from the 1960s onward (Quark Alliance, Late Bronze Age, Hampton Grease Band) that he earned the nickname “the Grandfather of the Jam Band Scene.” His many friends and musical collaborators gathered at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre in May 2017 to celebrate Hampton with an all-star 70th birthday jam session called “Hampton 70: A Celebration of Col. Bruce Hampton.” Toward the end of the night, members of the bands Widespread Panic and Blues Traveler played a song called “Turn on Your Love Light” with Hampton, unaware that the legend had fallen to his knees and braced himself against a speaker to stay upright. Banjo player Jeff Mosier noticed that Hampton was doing a “we’re not worthy” gesture to teenage guitar prodigy Taz Niederauer during his solo. He wasn’t—he’d collapsed. He died later that night in an Atlanta hospital.
It certainly feels like more: Airplane turbulence typically causes a drop of only about 10 to 20 feet.
LEONARD WARREN
Operas are almost always tragic—even when one of the performers doesn’t die in front of the audience. In March 1960, legendary American baritone Leonard Warren, 49, was singing the part of Don Carlo in Verdi’s Forza del Destino with New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. Right after he sang the aria “Urna fatale del mio destino,” or “Fatal Urn of My Destiny,” Warren suffered what was later revealed to be a massive cerebral vascular hemorrhage and immediately died right there on the stage.
JANE LITTLE
This double-bass player with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra set all kinds of records. As one of the youngest professional American symphonic musicians ever, she joined the ASO in 1945 when she was only 16 years old. And she never left. Just a few months after Guinness World Records recognized Little in February 2016 for the longest career of an orchestral musician—71 years—Little, 87 at the time, played her huge stringed instrument in a pops concert called “Broadway’s Golden Age,” an evening of show tunes. Little collapsed while playing the bass and was carried backstage, where she passed away. The song she was playing when her body gave out: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
THE MOST POPULAR AMERICAN DOG NAMES IN 2017
(ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN KENNEL CLUB)
Males: Females:
1. Max 1. Bella
2. Charlie 2. Lucy
3. Cooper 3. Daisy
4. Buddy 4. Luna
5. Jack 5. Lola
6. Rocky 6. Sadie
7. Oliver 7. Molly
8. Bear 8. Maggie
9. Duke 9. Bailey
10. Tucker 10. Sophie
Not as catchy: Vin Diesel’s real name is Mark Sinclair.
SPORTS ONE-HIT WONDERS
We often think of “one-hit wonders” as a music thing—bands or singers who score one smash hit and then disappear forever. But it’s certainly possible for people in other fields to have one big success…and only one big success.
DON LARSEN
It’s a remarkable achievement for a Major League Baseball pitcher to throw a perfect game. “Perfect” means they pitch the whole game and don’t allow the other team to get on base—no hits, no walks, no errors, no batters hit by pitches. Over 140 years and roughly 200,000 major league games, it’s only been accomplished 23 times. Of those, only one time did a pitcher throw a perfect game when it really counted. Don Larsen did it in game five of the 1956 World Series, shutting down the B
rooklyn Dodgers and getting the win for the New York Yankees, who went on to win the championship in seven games. Larsen was named World Series MVP on the strength of his performance in game five, the only game in which he played. It was also—by far—the best game of Larsen’s otherwise lackluster career. In 1954, as a member of the Baltimore Orioles, he led the American League in losses with a 3–21 record. In 1957 he racked up a decent 10–4 record for the Yankees, then floated around the major leagues, playing for eight different teams over his career until retiring in 1967, finishing with a career total of 81 wins and 91 losses.
BUSTER DOUGLAS
By 1990 Mike Tyson had been fighting professionally for just five years, but sportswriters were already comparing him to all-time greats like Muhammad Ali. “Iron Mike” had the record to back it up: He’d never lost a bout, and had won his first 19 fights by knockout—12 of them in the first round. In 1988 he knocked out heavyweight champion Michael Spinks just 91 seconds into the first round; nobody had lasted more than five rounds against Tyson since 1987. Tyson, it seemed, was unstoppable—so much so that most Las Vegas bookmakers wouldn’t even allow betting on the 1990 title fight at the Tokyo Dome between Tyson and his competitor, James “Buster” Douglas. Only one casino, the Mirage, cooked up odds, and they were ridiculously in Tyson’s favor: 42 to 1. But somehow, someway, Douglas hung in there against the champ, even overcoming a knockdown and a nine-second count at the end of the eighth round. Douglas kept pummeling Tyson and finally knocked him out in the tenth round. That wasn’t just Tyson’s first loss and his first knockout—it was the first time he’d ever been knocked down in the ring. Eight months later, Douglas defended his newly acquired title against up-and-coming boxer Evander Holyfield…and got knocked out in three rounds. Douglas retired after the fight, but came back in 1996, fought nine bouts over the next three years, and then retired again in 1999, this time for good.
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