A 108-year-old Message in a Bottle

    On November 30, 1906, George Bidder dropped a bottle from a boat into the North Sea. The weighted glass bottle sank almost to the sea floor, and then it move slowly for 108 years and 138 days.

    Its journey ended when Marianne Winkler found the bottle in 2015. Winkler was then on vacation on Amrum Island. She picked up the bottle when it was washed up onto the beach. She saw a piece of paper inside, but didn't break it open. She could tell that the bottle was old. So she didn't want to damage it.

    Finally she got the piece of paper out of the bottle. She found that the paper was actually a postcard. On the back of the card there was this message: The Marine Biological Association（海洋生物学协会） would pay a shilling（先令） for the bottle. A shilling was a unit of money that was used in Great Britain before the early 1970s.

    Winkler filled out the card and posted it. The association was surprised to get a postcard addressed to George Bidder, the president of the association from 1939 to 1945. The workers of the association searched on the Internet to find a shilling. They found one and sent it to Winkler as a reward.

    The message in the bottle was the oldest ever re-discovered. For this reason Marianne Winkler got a place in  “Guinness World Records”（吉尼斯世界纪录）. She broke the record for the oldest message in a bottle.

    Winkler's bottle was not the only one Bidder sent to sea. Between 1904 and 1906, he spent away more than one thousand bottles. He placed postcards inside them. The bottles were part of a research  project to map currents（洋流） in the North Sea. This was the best method at that time. But whether the association could get the bottles back depended on the people who found them. The association reported that about 55 percent of the bottles were returned. They added that the experiment was a success as it showed the east-to-west flow of the North Sea's currents.

    One night a patient went fishing in another man's boat outside Albert Smith's hospital. The owner of the boat thought he should get all the fish from the patient.

    Dr Smith said to the boat owner, "You are right because you didn't allow him to use your boat. But you are wrong because you are careless and lazy. You seldom(很少) put your boat in a safe place and fasten it with a lock. Because of your laziness you were asleep on this moonlit night instead of making use of the good time to fish. "

    He turned to the patient, "But you are wrong when you took the boat without asking the owner's permission(允许). You are right because you are not so lazy as he is, and you did not want to let the moonlit night go by without making use of it. "

    Dr Smith divided the catch(捕捉物) among the patient, the boat owner and the hospital .

    My mom only had one eye. I hated her. She was such an embarrassment.

    She ran a small shop at a flea （跳蚤） market and collected old clothes and some other things to sell for the money we needed. Once during elementary school, it was field day, and my mom came. I was so embarrassed and wondered how she could do this to me? I threw her a hateful look and ran out. The next day at school, my schoolmates laughed at me, "Your mom only has one eye!" I was so angry with my mom. So I said to my mom, "Why don't you have the other eye?" My mom said nothing.

    I hated my one-eyed mom. I told myself that I would become successful in the near future, so I studied very hard. Later, I got accepted by the Seoul University. I left my mom and came to Seoul to study. Then I got married there. Now I am living happily as a successful man. I enjoy the life in Seoul because it's a place that doesn't remind me of my mom and my past. This kind of happiness was getting bigger and bigger, until one day I saw my mom. She was still with her one eye. Even my daughter ran away, scared of my mom's eye. I screamed at her, "Who are you? I don't know you! How dare you come to my house and scare my daughter?" To this, my mom quietly answered, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I may have gotten the wrong address." Then she disappeared out of sight.

    One day, a letter about a school reunion （学校聚会） came. After the reunion, I went down to the old shack, which I used to call a house. There I found my mom fallen on the cold ground. Then a piece of paper in her hand came into my eyes. It was a letter to me.

My son,

    I'm so sorry that I only have one eye, and I was an embarrassment for you. When you were very little, you got into an accident and lost your eye. As a mom, I couldn't stand watching you having to grow up with only one eye. So I gave you mine. I was so proud of my son to see a whole new world for me with that eye. During the couple of times that you were angry with me, I thought to myself, it's because you love me. Don't cry for me because of my death. I love you so much."

    People say that George Washington, the first president of the United States, never told a lie. But it seems that the president was not without faults.

    A New York library recently found that Washington borrowed two books from the library in 1789. He would have to pay the library 300,000 dollars for being 220 years late.

    On October 5, 1789, when the first president borrowed the books form the New York Society Library, he didn't sign his name in the borrower's book. He just wrote "president" to show who had taken them out.

    The two books should have been brought back a month later but were never returned. Workers at the library realized the books were missing.

    The New York Society Library doesn't expect anyone to pay the fine. But it hopes that someone will return the books.