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Overloading the Machine
Hello There
It's Overloading the Machine as in, the washing machine, primarily. The name comes from the laundromat next door. They have very large signs on each machine which say, in all-caps, "DO NOT OVERLOAD THE MACHINE". All in all, there are at least twenty of these signs posted.
Both at the laundromat and at home, I regularly overload the machine, leading to unpredictable results.
The Least Successful Collector
Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She
was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had
amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the
works of Shakespeare.
One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond
legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The
remaining three folios are now in the British Museum.
The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned
the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the
French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
This page was last modified on 2011 December 20.