Here's our question: If there were Ten Thousand Wonderful Things in 1890, how could there be only 14,000 Things to Be Happy About a hundred years later?  We're gaining only forty new wonderful things per year?  Let's add that sad fact to 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About.

Here's a precursor to the Pez candy dispenser, from Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag à la Grande Chartreuse by Rodolphe Toepffer, 1854.

Here's a precursor to the 1927 film It, with Clara Bow as the "it girl."  Our illustration is by L. Hurley for The Echo yearbook of Greensboro College, 1921.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

Potatoes from heaven, apparently, and a precursor to this 1949 story of firefighters in the Sierra Nevada Mountains who dumbfoundedly watched as a supply plane dropped a hundred-pound sack of potatoes directly atop a full-sized iron stove that had been carried by mules to the peak.  Our heavenly potatoes illustration appears in Prodigiorvm ac Ostentorvm Chronicon, 1557.

Here's a precursor to the Aerosmith song "Love in an Elevator," from The Dove's Nest and Other Tales, 1886.  The caption reads, "Love in a lift."

Here's a precursor to the internet: "The web of uncertain quality," from Canadian Grocer July-Dec. 1896.

The phenomenon of people holding up individual letters of a word and kerfuffling goes way back, apparently. This example is from 1910, in the Hampden-Sydney College Kaleidoscope yearbook.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

Here's a precursor to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, from Twycross's Redemption by Alfred Saint Johnston, 1888.  The caption reads, "Don't let us pretend that any longer, dear."