World’s Largest Butterfly: Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterflies have consistently been recognized as the world’s largest butterflies, with wingspans reaching 1 foot (12 inches or 30 centimeters). The birdwings fly so fast and so high in their rainforest canopied home that Albert Meek, the English naturalist credited with first recording the species, blasted the first specimens to the ground with a shotgun. Albert was no meek collector leaping languidly through the grass with a butterfly net. His buckshot-peppered birdwings are still preserved as museum trophies — a sobering comment perhaps on how difficult it can be for a large butterfly to stay off the endangered species list when gun-toting scientists are in the neighborhood.

World’s Shortest-Reigning Pope: Pope John Paul I died on September 28, 1978 after reigning only 34 days. It should be noted, however, that ten other popes spent even less time in office. The shortest pontificate is that of Pope Urban VII, who reigned for only 13 days. Pope Urban died of malaria.

World’s First Public Smoking Ban: We must be reading from the same page. Yes, it was instituted by Pope Urban VII. During his very short time in office, Pope Urban stated unequivocally that he would excommunicate anyone who “took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in a powdered form through the nose.” I’m afraid that first no-chew-smoke-sniff-it ban was as short in effect as the pope’s reign was in length. I guess some people are just ahead of their times.

World’s Loudest Sound: In 1883, in the Sunda Strait, between the islands of Java and Sumatra, in Indonesia, the Krakatao volcanoes erupted and exploded with a gigantic KRRAAAKKK!!!! The sound was so loud and so long and so big that there are reports of the cracking from 3,000 miles away, and the shock waves were recorded on barographs around the world. That was truly a “shot heard ‘round the world,” but it was not the first. The first “shot heard ‘round the world” is the one that echoes in the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 poem “Concord Hymn” memorializing the beginning of American Revolutionary War in the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

I’m sure that shot in Concord wasn’t as loud on the sound scale as the explosion of Krakatao that rocked the world, but sometimes the strength of a sound is not in how loud the report but how many people are affected by the repercussion.

World’s Most Famous Line in English Literature: There are so many wonderful and memorable lines from the literature of so many countries, lands and cultures that many can and should be singled out. They all and each are to be enjoyed by those who read and appreciate those lines in their own settings and times. In English literature, however, perhaps the wordiest of authors was Charles Dickens. Of all those word on all those pages, there is one short novel and one short boy with a limp and a sad-happy smile that brings a tear to my eye and hope in the future for us all. Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol shared a child’s innocent and giving view – one that included each of us without any expectation of gain on his small part – when all eyes turned to the end of the table where Tim sat on his small stool where he pushed up on his crutch, looked us each in the eye and said simply,

“God bless us, everyone”

Thank you, for reading,

Grandpa Jim