What’s 2.5 miles wide, perfectly circular, and warm enough to melt ice?
I don’t know either, but there are at least two of them in Russia’s Lake Baikal.
They were spotted in April from the international space station.
09/26/2013 Resolved. (Thanks, Drew.)
In 1945, Dutch designer Arnold Henske realized that his body was “invulnerable” and took to swallowing glass and razor blades as a fakir in Amsterdam.
That’s a real rapier transfixing his thorax at left.
His dream was to use his ability to spread a message of love and peace, but Dutch officials would license him only to perform his act, not to preach against materialism, as he’d hoped.
A voice told him to swallow a steel needle in 1948, and he died of an aortic rupture — a broken heart.
At a desert oasis, A and B decide independently to murder C. A poisons C’s canteen, and later B punches a hole in it. C dies of thirst. Who killed him?
A argues that C never drank the poison. B claims that he only deprived C of poisoned water. They’re both right, but still C is dead. Who’s guilty?
Distances to which objects were carried by the tornado at Mount Carmel, Ill., June 4, 1877:
A letter from Mount Carmel was found at Vincennes, Ind., twenty-five miles northeastward. A piece of tin roofing was picked up near Hazleton, Ind., seventeen miles northeastward. The spire, vane, and gilded ball of the Methodist church were found near Decker’s Station, Ind., fifteen miles northeastward. A letter from Mount Carmel was carried by the wind to Widner Township, Ind., forty-five miles north-northeastward. A discharge from the military service of the United States belonging to a Mount Carmel man was found near Edwardsport, Ind., nearly fifty miles northeastward, and a letter from Mount Carmel was found near the same place. … I was also told that a paper sack of flour from a demolished store was found nearly five miles distant in Indiana, with no further damage than a small hole in it.
From the Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1877.
In September 1931, the Irving family claimed to hear a scratching behind the walls of their farmhouse on the Isle of Man. That seemed mundane enough until the scratcher revealed itself as Gef, a 79-year-old talking mongoose from New Delhi. Over the next four years, James Irving kept a journal recording the family’s bizarre interactions with the creature, which he said threw objects, boasted about its powers, and gossiped about the neighbors.
Investigations went nowhere, as Gef appeared and spoke only to the Irvings. A hair sample and tooth impressions suggested only a dog; a set of pawprints were found not to be those of a mongoose.
It’s hard to credit such an outlandish story, but it’s equally hard to see why anyone would invent it. The Irvings profited nothing by it and were widely ridiculed in the media; when the family finally sold the house in 1937, they lost money, as it was now reputed to be haunted.
In 1947, the new owner claimed to have discovered and shot a real mongoose on the property. You don’t suppose … ?
Each year, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, someone scatters red hearts through downtown Montpelier, Vt.
When they first appeared, in 2002, they were simple photocopies, but by 2006 large banners were gracing the State House columns. Soon the decorations spread to the high school’s chimney and a tower at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
“Currently, there are no leads and no suspects,” joked police chief Dave Janawicz in 2007, when 14 inches of snow failed to stop the bandit. “But the investigation continues.”
Vermont’s capital is not alone in this — for years, the same thing has been happening in Portland, Maine, and in Boulder, Colo. No one knows who does it or why.
A similar phantom visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on the poet’s birthday.
According to mathematician Eugene Northrop, in England between 1907 and 1921 it was legal for a man to marry the sister of his deceased wife, but illegal for a woman to marry the brother of her deceased husband.
Suppose then that twin brothers marry twin sisters. One husband and the opposite wife die, and after a decent interval the surviving woman and man marry. For the man this marriage is legal; for the woman it’s illegal. Thus, if they have a son, he’s legitimate for one parent and illegitimate for the other.
Modern meteorologists might envy Patrick Murphy: In compiling his Weather Almanac for the Year 1838, Murphy had made a year’s forecasts at once, including the prediction that Jan. 20 would be “fair” with probably the “lowest degree of winter temperature.”
The weather complied in spades: On Jan. 20 the thermometer plunged 56 degrees and stood below zero for several hours, marking the coldest day of the century. Such a throng filled Murphy’s London shop that police were called in to keep order, and the forecaster was immortalized in verse:
Murphy has a weather eye,
He can tell whene’er he pleases
Whether it will be wet or dry,
When it thaws and when it freezes.
The almanac made £7,000 and went through 50 reprintings, and for many years afterward the winter of 1837-38 was remembered as Murphy’s Winter.
Somehow he never repeated the feat, though.
See Lucky Guess.
We met Erhard Schön’s anamorphic woodcuts back in 2006.
This one, Was sichst du? (What Do You See?), from 1538, seems to promise an edifying religious theme — there’s Jonah on the left being spit out of his whale. But view it edge-on and you’ll see this:
So, maybe not.
Obey this command!
