An optical illusion. Nothing’s moving.
Rippling Beans
Oddities
“A Poor Man’s Disneyland”
Jim Bishop’s castle is exactly that — a 160-foot baroque edifice that Bishop has constructed single-handed over the course of 40 years in the forest of southern Colorado.
It already contains a thousand tons of stone and iron, and still Bishop’s not finished. Before he dies he wants to add a moat, a roller coaster, a balcony big enough to accommodate an orchestra — and a second castle for his wife.
Mima Mounds
What are these? They appear by the hundreds throughout western North America, but no one knows what produces them. Earthquakes? Glaciers? People? Gophers? The force involved must be considerable — the mounds can reach 8 feet in height and 50 feet in diameter — but for now their origin is a mystery.
01/15/2014 UPDATE: Gophers. (Thanks, Hugh.)
The Wow! Signal
On Aug. 15, 1977, a telescope at Ohio State University detected a strong narrowband radio signal in the constellation Sagittarius — one so unusual that astronomer Jerry Ehman marked the printout with an exclamation.
The signal’s intensity rose and then fell as the beam swept past its position in the sky. That’s consistent with an extraterrestrial origin … but in 30 years and more than 100 searches, no one has been able to relocate it.
Without a recurrence, there’s no way to know what Ehman’s telescope heard that night — it’s just a frustrating splash in a large, silent sea.
08/27/2024 UPDATE: It appears there’s a natural explanation. New research suggests that the Wow! signal occurred when an interstellar cloud of cold hydrogen was stimulated by a strong transient radiation source, causing it to brighten momentarily. This phenomenon is rare but recognized, and it matches the described characteristics of the signal. This natural explanation is much preferable to the hypothesis of an alien technology — aliens may be out there, but we don’t need them to explain what Jerry Ehman saw in 1977. Thanks to podcast listener Eugene Chang for the tip.
Unquote
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” — Anatole France
Curiously, when France died in 1924, doctors found that his brain was two-thirds normal size. But, said surgeon Louis Guillaume, “It was the most beautiful brain one could dream of seeing. Its convolutions were marvelous.”
Vindicated
As a writer, W.T. Stead may have been too prescient.
In 1886 he published an article about the sinking of an ocean liner and the consequent loss of life, warning, “This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats.”
Six years later he wrote a novel, From the Old World to the New, in which a ship collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks; the survivors are picked up by the Majestic, a ship of the White Star Line.
An outspoken newspaper editor, Stead himself embarked for the New World in April 1912 when President Taft invited him to address a peace conference at Carnegie Hall.
Alas, he never arrived — he had booked his passage on the RMS Titanic.
Freak Winds
Feb. 7, 1988, was a normal day in Lancashire until 10 p.m., when an anemometer at the Hazelrigg weather station registered a single wind gust of 106 mph. Immediately afterward, the winds dropped back to 5 mph.
The squall was tiny but real — investigators discovered that it had moved a 75-kilogram sheep feeding trough a distance of 5.1 meters.
On June 15, 1960, a collapsing thunderstorm blasted Kopperl, Texas, with 75-mph gusts of superheated air that raised the temperature to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, fully 20 degrees above the state’s all-time record. It’s remembered as “Satan’s storm.”
It’s Good to Be King
Kevin Baugh looks pretty happy, doesn’t he? Well, you would be, too — Kevin is president of the independent micronation of Molossia, an acre of Nevada desert that he claimed as an independent republic in 1999.
Molossia has a population of 3; its inhabitants speak English and observe Molossian Standard Time, which is 7 hours 29 minutes behind Greenwich. The local currency is the Valora, which equals a partial tube of Pillsbury cookie dough.
The nation’s capital, Espera, surrounds the Baugh residence near Dayton, Nevada. Tourism has reached 10 visitors a year, but you have to surrender your pocket change at the border, and you can’t bring any firearms, incandescent light bulbs, catfish, onions, walruses, or “anything from Texas except Kelly Clarkson.”
Its motto is “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained.”
Indie Roc
Excerpts from Midwestern newspapers, April 1948:
BELVIDERE, Ill. – (UP) – A farmer and a truck driver reported today that they had seen a bird ‘bigger than an airplane.’ … The giant bird was reported by Robert Price and Veryl Babb. Price said he saw it while working near his barn on his farm near Caledonia, Ill. … He said it had a long neck and ‘what I suppose were its feet trailing behind it.’ … Babb, a Freeport, Ill., truck driver, reported seeing the bird at a different location on the same day. … ‘When I spotted the thing it was coasting. It was bigger than an airplane and reminded me of one of those prehistoric monsters I learned about when I was in school.’
ST. LOUIS – (UP) – A retired Air Force colonel and a 12 year-old boy last night backed up the report by two Belvidere, Ill., residents of spotting a ‘monster bird.’ … ‘At first I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight,’ [Col. W.F.] Siegmund said. ‘But it was definitely a bird, and not a glider or jet plane.’ He described the creature as about the size of a small pursuit plane and said it was flying northeast at an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,000 feet. … The Trares boy said he spotted the bird in the air one evening at sunset and ran yelling into his house to tell his mother. He said it was gray-green in color and about the size of an airplane.
ALTON, Ill. – (UP) – An ‘enormous’ bird, first reported sighted two weeks ago, was seen flying over the outskirts of Alton shortly before noon yesterday. E.M. Coleman, a former salesman, and his 5 year-old son, James, said the bird was flying at about 500 feet and ‘cast a shadow the same as that of a Piper Cub at the same height.’ Coleman said it was an ‘enormous, incredible thing with a body that looked like a naval torpedo.’
Curiously, flying monsters have been reported in that area for more than 300 years.
The Dog of Helvellyn
On April 17, 1805, artist Charles Gough set out to walk over Helvellyn, a mountain in England’s Lake District, with his dog, Foxie. He never returned. Three months later, on July 27, a shepherd heard barking high on the mountain’s flank, at about 2,300 feet, and discovered Foxie beside her master’s body.
It appeared that Gough had fallen to his death, and the dog had remained by his side for three months. How she had survived up there remains a mystery — she had even borne a puppy, which was found dead in a burrow dug into the mountainside. The episode captured the Romantic imagination, and Wordsworth, Edwin Landseer, and Walter Scott all paid tribute to Foxie’s loyalty:
How long did’st thou think that his silence was slumber!
When the wind waved his garment how oft did’st thou start!
But I can find no record of what became of her.
Bonus dog-loyalty-overtime stories: New Mexico, Montana, Tokyo.