Fayum Mummy Portraits

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Fayum-42.jpg

This is Eutyches, a young boy who died in Egypt during the Roman Empire. How do we know this? Because this portrait was stuffed inside his mummy.

This was actually a common practice in the Fayum region of ancient Egypt, and it’s given us some of the best-preserved paintings from ancient times.

Artists would paint the portraits on wooden panels, using hot, pigmented wax, and they’ve survived remarkably well in the region’s dry heat.

CAT scans show that the portraits match their mummies in age and sex, and they’re strikingly naturalistic, though reportedly a little formulaic.

Many, like Eutyches, were children, a sad mark of the era’s low life expectancy.

| Art · History

A Postman’s Nightmare

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LocatieBaarle-Nassau.png

Good luck delivering a letter in Baarle-Nassau. The Dutch municipality contains 24 Belgian exclaves — “islands” of Belgium “floating” in the Netherlands.

Worse, those islands contain islands: The 24 Belgian exclaves contain seven Dutch exclaves. Bring a map.

| Oddities

Obscure Holidays

Obscure holidays:

  • Pi Day (March 14, or “3/14”)
  • Pi Approximation Day (22 July, or “22/7”)
  • No Pants Day (the first Friday in May)
  • National Talk In Elevators Day (the last Friday in July)
  • National Underwear Day (August 11)
  • International Orgy Day (September 3)
  • International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19)
  • Ask a Stupid Question Day (September 28)
  • October Fool’s Day (October 1) (the Southern Hemisphere’s version of April Fool’s Day)
  • Mole Day (6:02 on 10/23) (ask a chemist)

The first Friday the 13th of the year is “Blame Someone Else Day.”

| Humor

Chicken Hypnotism

http://books.google.com/books?id=jREEAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

One can hypnotize a chicken by holding its head against the ground and drawing a line straight outward from its beak.

“I recollect particularly a case of catalepsy produced in a cock,” writes Gaston Tissandier in Popular Scientific Recreations (1882). “We place a cock on a table of dark colour, rest its beak on the surface, where it is firmly held, and with a piece of chalk slowly draw a white line in continuation from the beak, as shown in our engraving. If the crest is thick, it is necessary to draw it back, so that the animal may follow with his eyes the tracing of the line. When the line has reached a length of about two feet the cock has become cataleptic. He is absolutely motionless, his eyes are fixed, and he will remain from thirty to sixty seconds in the same posture in which he had at first only been held by force.”

Most chickens will stand immobile and stare at the line for about 30 minutes. The record, reported by Hamilton Bertie Gibson in Hypnosis: Its Nature and Therapeutic Uses (1980), is 3 hours 47 minutes.

| Oddities · Trivia