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The Strange Life of 'Lord' Timothy Dexter
- habosa 12y agoTimothy Dexter's Wikipedia article is probably my favorite page on the entire site (I keep a list of my favorite weird finds, such as "List of Sexually Active Popes"). I have shown this story to dozens of friends, and every one finds it incredibly entertaining. This man's life should be a movie, and Steve Martin should play the lead.
- jtolds 12y agore: great Wikipedia entries, I also enjoy the thoroughness of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
- habosa 12y agoThat one is also in my all-time greats. It's 1/2 as long as the article on Capital Punishment, which you think would be a much more divisive issue.
- zhte415 12y agoThanks. Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter
- mintplant 12y agoWould you mind sharing this list? Sounds like interesting reading?
- iamcreasy 12y agoI second this.
- habosa 12y agoHere are my top 4: 1) Timothy Dexter 2) List of Sexually Active Popes 3) List of nicknames used by George W. Bush 4) Toilet paper orientation It's just amazing what kinds of things people take the time to write about on Wikipedia. I wish I could remember some of my other favorites but my bookmarks got all messed up a while ago so I only have those 4 from memory,
- ceejayoz 12y agoThese days he'd probably wind up as a VC accidentally investing in a bunch of hot startups.
- lumberjack 12y agoTo me he resembles Kim Dotcom.
- squozzer 12y agoI was thinking more Wesley Willis.
- dmckeon 12y agoIn some ways he seems an opposite of Joshua Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton - speculator, philosopher, eccentric character.
- xacaxulu 12y agoThis is really interesting. I'm wondering if he was just sandbagging or at some point just figured out his own unique hustle with respect to his apparent intellectual deficiency. Definitely is now on my list of 'historical figures I would have liked to get drunk with'.
- Animats 12y agoDexter was a little too early. The United States, although it had dumped the nobility concept, still had the English feudal concept that big landowners ruled, almost by right. Manufacturing hadn't yet displaced landowning as the way to make money. In England, that model held on until 1880 or so. (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/books/never-has-so-few-owned-so-much.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/books/never-has-so-few-own...) In the US, it ended earlier. But it was still in full force in Dexter's day. As for the follies of the rich, we still have that. Larry Ellison has a huge, silly house in Woodside, where, through much cutting of rock, a sort of pseudo rural Japanese landscape was created, complete with fog machine. In China, where being rich is a new thing, people are still trying to figure out status symbols. The results are amusing. (http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201501/chinas-richest http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201501/chinas-richest). There are outfits selling titles of nobility on line. (http://nobility.co.uk/ http://nobility.co.uk/).
- arethuza 12y agoHere in Scotland the last vestige of feudalism (fue duties payable by "owners" of some property to the feudal superiors) was only abolished in 2000 as one of the first Acts of the Scottish Parliament: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._%28Scotland%29_Act_2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc....
- Pyret 12y agoThis is the funniest thing I read in a long time. I find Dexter admirable.
- iamcreasy 12y agoI was in aw...
- JonnieCache 12y agoThe ascii art is too much.
- keithpeter 12y agoI liked the picture reproduced from his book where he provides a supply of punctuation marks for you to 'pepper and salt' the rest of the text as you wish. Witty, and it recalls the practice of printing figures at the end of books (presumably as they were printed from wood blocks rather than type and had to be printed out of sequence). I think this chap was less illiterate than the OA supposes...
- hyp0 12y agoAs the first American eccentric, he was a hipster before it was cool. The common wisdom is a model of the world, but must be wrong in some ways, simply because the world is far more complex than any model we could comprehend. Bed pans weren't brought to the tropics because they weren't needed, therefore their other uses were not discovered. Acting on what you think is a good idea, that nobody else does, can lead to success. (Plus Luck...) In investing, contrarianism can work, because the market often over-reacts to bad news. By buying on bad news, you can come out ahead, especially if you also do some checking. For example, Warren Buffett bought American Express when it was involved in a fraudulent salad oil transaction. Because its business (of credit cards) was based on trust, it was thought this would be diastrous. But Buffett checked the local shopping center to see consumers still using it. Their daily habits weren't affected by the news. So he bought big, and made a(nother) fortune.