Expense Account

The German Bundestag has 614 members, but its official Web site lists 615. That’s because Jakob Maria Mierscheid doesn’t exist — he was invented in the 1920s by Weimar Social Democrats to avoid paying restaurant bills.

Like George P. Burdell, another nonexistent bon vivant, Mierscheid has quite a resume. He served as deputy chairman of the Committee for Small and Medium Sized Businesses in 1981 and 1982, and in 1983 he published a demonstration of the correlation between federal election results and West German industrial production.

Presumably he also goes out to lunch a lot.

| Hoaxes · Society

Garganta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Model.village.arp.750pix.jpg

Fed on radioactive turnips, Rose Newman of Bourton-on-the-Water, England,
grew to the astonishing height of 50 feet.

Just kidding. Bourton-on-the-Water contains a 1:10 scale model of itself.

And, yes, the scale model contains a scale model.

| Oddities

Take Your Pick

Frivolous political parties around the world and their campaign promises:

  • Denmark’s Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements promised tailwinds on all cycle paths.
  • Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party promised eternal life, world peace, one work day per week, two sunsets a day, smaller gravitation, and low taxes.
  • Sweden’s Donald Duck Party promised wider sidewalks and “free alcohol to the people.”
  • England’s Death, Dungeons and Taxes Party promised the reintroduction of hanging, the annexation of France, and the reduction of the school leaving age to 9.
  • America’s Guns and Dope Party would replace one-third of Congress with ostriches.

And Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all have Beer Lovers’ Parties.

“Politicians are the same all over,” said Nikita Khrushchev. “They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”

| Quotations · Society

Could You Repeat That?

This is a grammatically valid English sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It was discovered/invented in 1972 by University of Buffalo linguist William J. Rapaport. It means “Buffalo from the city of Buffalo that are intimidated by other buffalo from the city of Buffalo themselves intimidate a third group of buffalo, also from Buffalo.”

Is that clear? Be glad you’re not in the Netherlands, where Als In Bergen, bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen means “If in Bergen, heaps of mountains salvage heaps of mountains, then heaps of mountains salvage heaps of mountains.”

| Language

The Tsavo Man-Eaters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tsavo_Maneaters_Field_Museum.jpg

If you wanted a sucky job in 1898, you couldn’t do much worse than the Tsavo River project in Kenya. The work crew was assembled to build a railway bridge, but it quickly turned into a lion smorgasbord.

Men were regularly dragged out of their tents at night and devoured. The predators evaded traps, ambushes and even thorn fences, but after 10 months engineer John Henry Patterson managed to kill these two enormous maneless lions. By that time they had killed nearly 140 men between them.

And why? Apparently the flesh of railroad workers has a particular savor. The pair had got a taste for it in raiding shallow graves; when they ran out of graves they started going after live game.

| Death · History

August Reading

A capitonym is a word that changes meaning when it’s capitalized:

A herb store owner, name of Herb,
Moved to a rainier Mount Rainier.
It would have been so nice in Nice,
And even tangier in Tangier.

| Language