The wealhty Roman banker Agostino Chigi was famed for throwing indulgent al fresco dinner parties at his Villa Farnese, overlooking the Tiber river in Rome. After each course, he would instruct his astonished guests to jettison their dishes and cutlery into the river.
The gesture was less extravagant than it appeared, however; before each party servants would hang nets just below the river's surface, ensuring that none of Chigi's valuable tableware would be lost.

Ghostwriters?

Fred Allen once had one of his radio show scripts returned with extensive editorial notes and alterations scribbled across each page. "Where were you fellows," Allen asked, flipping through the script, "when the paper was blank?"

Prodigy

"In 1994, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on Michael Kearney, a 10-year-old college graduate and prodigy. He was ambidextrous, the newspaper said, and was talking when he was four months old, using such phrases as 'Mom. Dad. I'm hungry. Where's my breast milk?' By 10 months, he was comparison-shopping in the grocery store, his mother said, and she had to warn him to be quiet, because people in the store would 'think we were ventriloquists.'"

Kearney, Michael (1984- ) American child prodigy

[Sources: The Globe and Mail, Oct. 6, 2003]

In 2002, Republicans began redrawing (or "gerrymandering") districts across America, using various dodgy techniques to gain political advantage. In some cases, "kidnapped" incumbent Democrats found themselves in the same district as other incumbent Democrats. Pennsylvania Congressman Frank Mascara was one such Democrat.
"My district [in an industrial country south of Pittsburgh] had been more or less the same for about a hundred years," he recalled. "I still thought my district would for the most part remain intact. That didn't occur... The cars [parked on the street in front of Mascara's modest home] are in the twelfth congressional district, and my house is in the eighteenth. When they drew the new lines, they started in Allegheny County, which is north of here, and made, like, a finger out of that district, and the finger went down the middle of the street where I live. The line came down to my house and stopped."

[Mascara was forced into a primary battle with fellow Democrat John Murtha. Mascara lost, ending his Congressional career, and the Republican presence in the House was further increased. Such gerrymandering led Pennsylvania Democrats to bring a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Republican gerrymander denied them equal protection of the laws; while the State's million Republicans controlled ten seats, its million Democrats controlled just five. (More on Gerrymandering here.)]

[Trivia: Republican strategist Ben Ginsberg had a nickname for the Republican redistricting operation in 1990: "Project Ratf---."]

The French performance artist Orlan made a career out of a series of operations designed to turn her into a human compendium of art-historical "quotations" incorporating the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the lips of Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Gérôme's Psyche, and the brow of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Shortly after the turn of the millennium in an operating room in Japan, Orlan concluded her 10-year work-in-progress entitled 'The Reincarnation of St. Orlan' "by having a team of plastic surgeons construct the largest nose that her face is capable of supporting."

Under a local anesthetic, Orlan lectured on post-modern theory - reading from Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Lacan - while surgeons performed the operation.

[Her sponsor? France's Ministry of Culture.]