Oh, Hooke. His spine started to curve in adolescence, and got progressively worse. This, put together with the fact that he was Always Doing Science (or rebuilding London with Wren after the Great Fire), did not make him much for the dating scene. His solution to this was to bed pretty much every maid he took in, and when those were lacking he took in his niece, waited until she was 15 or so, and then started in on her too. Yeah. It's in his diary, so it's not like some story spread by followers of Huygens or Newton or Leibniz or Hevelius or Oldenburg or any of the other Rest of the Scientific Community whom Hooke had pissed off at some point or another. So, that's an interesting biographical fact right there...

Theda Bara... When I was in college I started writing a novella in which God or the Devil (I can't recall which) hired a man to round up various entertainers from the 20s and 30s to bring them to Heaven / Hell before they died so that the other side wouldn't get them. Yeah, I'm a little sketchy on the plot details, but the lineup was I think Caruso, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Theda Bara, Buster Keaton, Fanny Brice, and Houdini. As usual, I spent a couple of months researching it all in my spare bits of time, and never wrote the full story, but nothing is wasted in life, and here Theda Bara has returned in all of her glory.

- Count Dolby von Luckner