Victims of Belgian “entarteur” Noël Godin, who flings cream pies at the self-important:
Godin told The New York Times he’s trying “to function in the service of the capitalist status quo, without really using his intelligence or his imagination.” Touché.
For an imaginary creature, the Popo Bawa of Zanzibar seems pretty eager for publicity. According to legend, the creature — described as a one-eyed dwarf with batlike wings and sharp talons — seeks out men who deny its existence, sodomizing them for up to an hour and threatening longer, and repeated, attacks unless they tell their friends and neighbors about the experience.
Strangely, the creature’s attacks are said to rise and fall with the local election cycle. Maybe it’s campaigning.
Last year Sharon Tendler married a bottle-nosed dolphin.
Tendler, 41, first became captivated with the animal during a dolphinarium show in Eilat, Israel. She visited him regularly for 15 years (“The peace and tranquility under water, and his love, would calm me down”) and finally approached the trainer for permission for an unofficial ceremony.
On Dec. 28, 2005, Tendler walked down the dock in a white silk dress, kissed the dolphin, and whispered “I love you” into his blowhole (video). They had to make some concessions, of course: Instead of rice, the crowd threw mackerel.
Mammoths generally died out with the last ice age, but some survived on Russia’s Wrangel Island until 1500 B.C., around the same time Stonehenge was built.
Reportedly the Soviet Air Force spotted a group of mammoths in Siberia during World War II but subsequently lost them.
Madagascar’s elephant bird died out around Shakespeare’s time.
So it’s a little weird that two eggs were found in Western Australia in 1930 and 1993.
Did they float there? No one knows.
En route from Vancouver to Australia on Dec. 30, 1899, the captain of the S.S. Warrimoo spotted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At midnight, he stopped the ship at the intersection of the international date line and the equator.
At that moment, the ship was straddling two different hemispheres, days, months, years, seasons, and centuries, all at the same time. By passing between the bow and the stern, passengers could stroll between winter and summer, north and south, and the 19th and 20th centuries.
The downside: For the Warrimoo, Dec. 31 disappeared entirely.
(Roberto Casati points out that if you return to this point on June 21 and lie down on the deck, at midnight your left hand will be in summer, your right hand in spring, your left foot in winter, and your right foot in autumn.)
A gigantic figure haunts the Vosges Mountains, known by the name of “The Spectre of the Brocken.” The ignorant peasants were, in former times, in great fear of it, thinking it a supernatural being, and fancying that it brought upon them all manner of evil. And it must be confessed it was a fearful sight to behold suddenly upon the summit of a lofty mountain an immense giant, sometimes pointing in a threatening attitude to a village below, as if dooming it to destruction; sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds, then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to reappear more formidable than before.
But now the Spectre of the Brocken is no longer an object of fear. Why? Because men have found him out, and he is nothing in the world but a shadow. When the sun is in the right position, an ordinary-sized man on a lower mountain will see a gigantic shadow of himself thrown upon a cloud beyond the Brocken, though it appears to be on the mountain itself, and it is so perfect a representation that it is difficult to believe it is only a shadow. But it can be easily proved. If the man stoops to pick up anything, down goes the spectre; if he raises his hand, so does the spectre; if he takes a step of two feet, the spectre takes one of miles; if he raises his hat, the spectre politely returns his salute.
— Frank R. Stockton, Round-About Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, 1910
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble,” wrote Dr. Johnson.
During World War II, 300,000 American troops were stationed in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Greatly impressed with the Westerners’ wealth and power, the natives began to worship a messiah they called Jon Frum, “the king of America,” who lives in the crater of a local mountain.
To this day, every Feb. 15 they celebrate Jon Frum Day by offering prayers and flowers at a red cross — that’s the date the believe Frum will return bearing cargo from heaven. They also conduct a flag-raising ceremony and a military parade with bamboo “rifles.” The movement even has its own political party.
Records show there never was an actual Jon Frum. But a separate cult has found a real messiah: They worship Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
The Colossi of Memnon, in Egypt. After an earthquake, the one on the right began to “sing” every morning at dawn, producing a light moaning sound probably related to rising temperatures and evaporating dew. In “The Sphinx,” Oscar Wilde wrote:
Still from his chair of porphyry gaunt Memnon strains his lidless eyes
Across the empty land, and cries each yellow morning unto thee.
Hearing the song brought good luck, so the colossi began to attract pilgrims from across the ancient world. It stopped in 199 when Emperor Septimius Severus tried to fix the damage. Nice going.
It’s bad enough that the Chase family of Barbados had to inter six members between 1808 and 1819.
But each time they opened the family vault, they found that the coffins had been rearranged into awkward positions.
After the last instance, the island’s governor pressed his personal seal into fresh cement in the vault’s door. The seal was intact when the vault was opened the next year — but the coffins had been rearranged again, with one thrown up against the door.
Finally the coffins were buried separately in the Christ Church graveyard. No explanation was ever found.
