In the 1930s, brothers Homer and Langley Collyer withdrew from society and began to fill their Manhattan brownstone with newspapers, furniture, musical instruments, and assorted junk. By 1947, when Homer died, the house was crammed with 140 tons of rubbish, and Langley had gone missing. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the strange, sad story of the Hermits of Harlem.
We’ll also buy a bit of Finland and puzzle over a banker’s misfortune.
The world’s shortest St. Patrick’s Day parade starts at 11 a.m. today in the Village of Carmangay in Alberta. It should be over by 11:02.
Mayor Kym Nichols told the Calgary Eyeopener, “About 32 years ago, the owner of the hotel, who was Irish, came over to the village office with his shillelagh stick on St. Paddy’s Day and said to the mayor at the time, ‘Why don’t you come across and have a beer with me for St. Patrick’s Day?’ And that started it.”
The Carmangay parade covers less than 100 meters, but Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas holds a 29-meter parade that starts at 7:30 tonight. Presumably there are also quantum parades that are too short to measure.
(Thanks, Dan.)
04/10/2021 UPDATE: Alas, the hotel has now burned down.
Near the village of Katashina in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, workers have cut 2,559 grooves into a 175-meter stretch of roadway so that motorists hear the tune “Memories of Summer”:
Japan has now built 30 such “melody roads,” and they’re proliferating. The Singing Road in Anyang, South Korea, plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”:
And the Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, California, plays the William Tell Overture:
A commenter on the last video wrote, “If you drive it in reverse it says Paul is dead.”
Actress Marilu Henner has hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that permits her to recall nearly every day of her life in almost perfect detail. She’s one of only six cases that have been confirmed in peer-reviewed articles.
“It’s like putting in a DVD and it cues up to a certain place,” she told CBS. “I’m there again. So, I’m looking out from my eyes and seeing things visually as I would have that day.”
Her earliest memory is of her own baptism. “My godmother was a nun, and so she’d talk about my baptism all the time,” she said. “Even as a tiny child, I could recall that event. I know people don’t believe me, but it’s really true.”
Phyllis Brienza, a waitress at Manhattan’s Bun & Burger since the day it opened on Oct. 26, 1970, became famous for a unique gift — she had “such an extraordinary memory for the niceties of appetite that regular clients do not have to speak their wishes aloud,” reported Israel Shenker in the New York Times in 1975.
She recognized a customer in a Nehru jacket as “medium with half a bun and French.” A man in a raincoat was a “well,” a well-done hamburger.
“If you order it once one way, that’ll stick in my mind,” she said. “When someone new comes in, I think to myself, ‘That’s a medium,’ or ‘that’s a rare.’ Sometimes they have this serious look and I think, ‘That must be a well.’ Usually I’m right.”
In 1974 she received a Christmas card from a customer whom she remembered at once. It was signed “Medium rare, pressed.”
In September 1914, a crater wall collapsed on the marine volcano Whakaari, east of New Zealand.
The resulting mudflow overwhelmed 10 sulphur miners.
Three weeks later, when a resupply ship landed on the island, it found Peter the Great, a camp cat, hungry but uninjured.
The bodies of the 10 men and the other camp cats were never found.
A tromboon, above, is a trombone played with the reed and bocal of a bassoon.
A saxobone, below, is a trombone played with the mouthpiece of a saxophone.
If you could play a bassoon with a saxophone mouthpiece I suppose it would be called a saxoboon, but I don’t think that’s even technically possible.
Every year hundreds of thousands of people gather on Jindo Island at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula to watch the sea part, revealing a 1.8-mile causeway that permits them to walk to the nearby island of Modo, where they dig for clams.
Legend tells that Yongwang, the ocean god, split the sea to permit an old woman to rejoin her family. But National Geographic explains that the truth lies in tidal harmonics.
While clearing land on his Smithville, Texas, ranch in the late 1990s, cattle farmer Jimmie Luecke wrote his name in letters a kilometer tall, producing the world’s largest signature.
It lies on several major flight paths into Houston, and NASA uses it to evaluate satellite imagery.
During World War II, the U.S. Army experimented with a bizarre plan: using live bats to firebomb Japanese cities. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the crazy history of the bat bomb, the extraordinary brainchild of a Pennsylvania dentist.
We’ll also consider the malleable nature of mental illness and puzzle over an expensive quiz question.