The Handicapper

In the 1740s, workers at a stable near Cambridge noticed that a cat had taken a peculiar fancy to one of the horses there. She was always near him, they found, sitting on his back or nestling nearby in the manger.

Her attachment proved so great that when the stallion died in 1754 “she sat upon him after he was dead in the building erected for him, and followed him to the place where he was buried under a gateway near the running stable; sat upon him there till he was buried, then went away, and never was seen again, till found dead in the hayloft” — apparently of grief.

The cat’s name is not recorded, but she certainly could pick horses: The stallion was the Godolphin Arabian, now revered as the founder of modern thoroughbred racing stock. His direct descendants include both Seabiscuit and Man o’ War.

March 8, 2009September 13, 2010 | Oddities

A Long Wait

In 1912, workmen digging a tunnel for New York’s new subway discovered a carpeted room decorated with oil paintings, chandeliers, and a grandfather clock.

According to Tracy Fitzpatrick in Art and the Subway, it was the waiting room for an early prototype subway built in 1870 — a block-long tunnel in which a single car was pushed by a giant fan. Funding had failed, and the project had been forgotten.

March 7, 2009June 29, 2010 | Oddities · Technology

Double-Take

In Britain this wouldn’t be redundant — in British English an avenue is a row of trees.

Unfortunately, that’s not so in Toronto, where Avenue Road is a major thoroughfare.

Local journalist Robert Fulford called it “an identity crisis with pavement.”

March 3, 2009September 13, 2010 | Language · Oddities

Jerusalem Syndrome

Between 1980 and 1993, 42 visitors to Israel experienced a peculiar psychotic episode with seven consistent clinical stages:

Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone.
A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, togalike gown, which was always white.
The need to scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, religious hymns, or spirituals.
A procession or march to one of Jerusalem’s holy places.
Delivery of a “sermon” in a holy place. The sermon was usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.

These people had no history of psychiatric illness and arrived as regular tourists, with no special mission in mind. They recovered fairly spontaneously on leaving the country and were reluctant afterward to discuss the episode. No explanation has been found.

(Bar-el Y, et al. (2000) Jerusalem syndrome. British Journal of Psychiatry, 176, 86-90.)

March 1, 2009February 28, 2009 | Oddities · Religion

Bon Appétit!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chapulines.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Menu proposed by Vincent M. Holst in Why Not Eat Insects? (1885):

Slug soup
Boiled cod with snail sauce
Wasp grubs fried in the comb
Moths sauteed in butter
Braised beef with caterpillars
New carrots with wireworm sauce
Gooseberry cream with sawflies
Deviled chafer grubs
Stag beetle larvae on toast

“Why on earth should these creatures be called loathsome, which, as a matter of fact, are not loathsome in any way, and, indeed, are in every way more fitted for human food than many of the so-called delicacies now highly prized?”

He has a point — viewed as livestock, house crickets convert energy to protein about 20 times more efficiently than beef cattle.

February 23, 2009June 22, 2013 | Oddities · Society

“Fairy Castles”

On Oct. 21, 1796, at about 4 p.m., “a number of spectators” witnessed a curious mirage in clear weather near Cork, Ireland:

It appeared on a hill, on the county of Waterford side of the river, and seemed a walled town with a round tower, and a church with a spire; the houses perfect, and the windows distinct. Behind the houses appeared the mast of a ship, and in the front a single tree, near which was a cow grazing: whilst the Waterford hills appeared distinctly behind. In the space of about half an hour the spire and round tower became covered with domes, and the octagonal building, or rather round tower, became a broken turret. Soon after this change, all the houses became ruins, and their fragments seemed scattered in the field near the walls; the whole in about an hour disappeared, and the hill on which it stood, sunk to the level of the real field. The hill and trees appeared of a bright green, the houses and towers of a clear brown, with their roofs blue.

From Curiosities for the Ingenious, 1825.

February 22, 2009December 17, 2010 | Oddities

The Cardrona Bra Fence

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardrona_bra_fence.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

If aliens are studying us, they must be baffled sometimes.

In late 1999 four women’s bras appeared on a wire fence in southern New Zealand. That’s innocent enough, but by February the number had grown to 60. In October it reached 200, and by the following February nearly 800.

Why? Who knows? The local council waited until September to clear the fence — by which time it had accumulated more than 1,500 bras.

“Extraordinary Prediction”

It is recorded of the poet Dryden, by Charles Wilson, in his ‘Life of Congreve,’ that having, strange to say, belief in astrology, he was careful to ascertain to the second the time at which his son Charles was born. He then calculated the boy’s nativity, and was alarmed to discover that evil influences prevailed in the heavens. … He concluded that in his eighth year, and on the day of birth, his son’s life would be seriously endangered if not lost; and that if he lived, the same danger would exist when he attained his twenty-third birthday, and again on his thirty-third or fourth. On the boy’s eighth birthday, despite every precaution to keep the boy from every possible danger, he was nearly killed by the fall of a wall. On his twenty-third birthday he was seized with giddiness and fell from an old tower belonging to the Vatican at Rome; and he was drowned at Windsor while swimming across the Thames in his thirty-third year.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

February 21, 2009February 21, 2009 | Death · Literature · Oddities

“A Bird Caught by a Fish”

In a pond near Lewes, in Sussex, a pike, in appearance about a foot long, was seen to seize and gradually gorge a swallow (probably one of the web-footed kind), as it was wantoning on the surface of the water. The above is an indubitable fact, as witnessed and related by a clergyman, whose veracity cannot be disputed, and on whose authority we feel a pleasure in recording this piscatory anecdote.

— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822

February 14, 2009February 14, 2009 | Oddities

Showoff

Feats of Canadian strongman Louis Cyr (1863-1912), “the strongest man who ever lived”:

In 1881 he lifted a horse weighing at least 1500 pounds.
In 1886 he lifted a 218-pound barbell with one hand and raised 2,371 pounds on his back.
In 1895 he raised a platform that held 18 men.
In 1889 he shouldered a 433-pound barrel of cement with one arm and lifted 552.5 pounds clear of the floor with a single finger.
In 1891 he resisted the pull of four draft horses even as grooms drove them apart with whips.

Where did he get these gifts? “The mother of Louis Cyr … could easily shoulder a barrel of flour and carry it up two or three flights of stairs.” (Josephine Beiderhase, American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, 1906)