Journal: News & Comment

Monday, October 03, 2005
# 2:30:00 PM:

Feeling old?

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

I wrote about the famous Harriet the Tortoise here five years ago, in one of my earliest journal entries on this site. At the time she had just turned 170, and she is now 175 years old (as far as anyone knows). Charles Darwin collected Harriet on the Galápagos Islands in 1835.

Yes, that's right. There is an animal alive and thriving right now in an Australian zoo that was (probably) born the year Faust premiered, Upper Canada College was founded, Andrew Jackson became president of the United States, the first typewriter was patented, James Smithson started the Smithsonian Institution, and the last Bounty mutineer died. If people lived that long, both pianist Anton Rubinstein and jeansmaker Levi Strauss would still be alive.

For that matter, so would my great-great-great-grandparents, whose names I do not even know. I doubt they lived long enough to meet their great-granddaughter, whom I knew as my Oma, and who died four years ago herself.

So yup, Harriet's old.

 |

Journal Archive »

Template BBEdited on 29-Apr-2010

Site problems? Gripes? Angst? - e-mail dkmiller@penmachine.com
Site contents © 1997–2007 by Derek K. Miller

You may use content from this site non-commercially if you give me credit, under the terms of my Creative Commons license.

eXTReMe Tracker