And that same year, I got to shoot a game of pool (8 ball) with Minnesota Fats . Well, I say I got to shoot a game with him. He was doing a demo tour and would pull folks out of the audience and play a game against them. He grabbed me, told some hilarious jokes for about 10 minutes, then sank two solids on the break and proceeded to run off the table. I never got to take a shot, but I got a great lesson on how to shoot pool and hustle people!
I found a gold nugget at the site of Australia’s massive gold rush in the 1860s. I was doing contract work in Sydney and some of my Aussie friends took me camping one weekend in Hill End. I was setting a tent peg and moved a rock out of the way. After I set the peg, I picked the rock up for a second look. It was a giant chunk of quartz, about the size of my doubled fists, shot through with gold. Made a heckuva souvenier!
I would expect that it would be in poor condition considering that it was written by a man who was born in 1802, almost 300 years after the date on said copy.
Don’t recall what I took, but yeah I had a dormant version of TB so I took something that cuts the odds that it will ever go active by a good bit (probably what you linked to.)
Blew an elephant. But he was asking for it! … You know, in the nose, using my breath. And he blew back. Hot, musty, and quite unexpected. He was sniffing around me, but then blowing him was probably quite rude of me.
Met Jon Pertwee at a PBS dinner and got to sit in old Bessie.
I suppose it goes without saying that my finger slipped, and I meant 1914. I checked some references for the specific edition, but I have no clue. IMO, it looks like a readers-digest type of mass produced hardback.
I don’t know if this counts, but on July 4, 1976 (the Bicentennial) my family and I sat in George & Martha Washington’s pew in Christ Church, Philadelphia, for High Mass. It was the only place available when we entered- we had no idea it was blocked off. (A couple of later tourists joined us, which was nice since they were Episcopal and we were able to copy them.)
I’ve typed on Flannery O’Connor’s manual typewriter (only my name, but still…)
I’ve held a rosary given to “Miz Lillian” Carter by Pope John Paul I (that’s I as in “first”- the one month Pope). It’s in an archive box in a back room of a college I worked at along with the dress she wore to her son’s inauguration. (In the library itself are pictures autographed to her by Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty & Shirley MacLaine, Jimmy Stewart, and others- and they were in Wal-Mart frames just hanging above student computers.)
For 15 glorious minutes, flew a C-47 myself when I was 5. By instrument, of course. (My Dad was the pilot. On monthly family groceries shopping trips!)
Spent 8 days in the middle of the ocean on a 40 foot boat.
Took a dip in the Dead Sea (and play with the mud)
Had dinner in Bedouine tent.
Touch a live tiger, a wild dolphin.
My father was in a car accident with former president Harry Truman somewhere in Missouri (can’t remember if it was Independence, St. Louis, or where exactly- it was in the late 1950s). It was only a fender bender and no report was made. Truman never stepped out of the car or apologized, but the Secret Service men with him (one in the car and two in a car following him) basically did a drill: one said “Scoot over Mr. President”, another apologized to my father (there was no damage to either car) and asked that he not report this, and all were on their way.
When he told the story later that day to locals they laughed and said “Join the club”. Basically he was informed that Truman wasn’t a good driver when he was young, by this time he was far from young, that his family and his guards all knew this was the case but they couldn’t stop him from driving, and so basically (like Rainman) they agreed not to press the issue and go “Miss Daisy” on him if he’d only drive in broad open daylight at slow speeds and allow the SS man with him to drive home if there was an incident.
My mother once burned off John Denver’s eyelash. They were on a field trip to Vicksburg MS when he was a teenager in Montgomery AL. Per her (and my father) he was a thoroughly obnoxious spoiled brat who kept blowing out her match when she lit her cigarette. Once when he tried she moved it out of the way and in so doing caught his eyelash as he moved to get closer.
He called his father from their hotel to complain. His father (a career military officer) asked to speak to my mother and said, per her, “I’m very sorry about this. It sounds to me like he had it coming” and made his son apologize! (Obviously she just singed the lash rather than burning it to the skin, though I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe he lost control of the plane while rubbing an old irritation in his eyelash.)
