“Eating a Candle After Lighting It”

This is done by cutting a piece of apple the shape required, and sticking into it a little piece of nut or almond, to make it resemble the stump of a candle. The almond wick can be lighted, and will burn for about a minute, so that the deception is perfect. You can afterwards eat it in the presence of the company. … [T]his candle should be already in front of the audience, and should be placed in a candlestick, and if well introduced it goes down (in more senses than one) capitally.

— Frederick D’Arros Planche, Evening Amusements for Every One, 1876

| Entertainment

R.I.P.

Writing in the New York Mercury in 1863, Robert Henry Newell noted the curious pine-board epitaph of a Union fifer at Manassas:

http://books.google.com/books?id=CylLAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Orpheus+C.+Kerr+%22&as_brr=1&ei=qreiScWwHpHKMsSk3YoC&rview=1#PPA126,M1

The lower portion “had to be inscribed figuratively, in order to get it all upon the narrow monument.” It means:

http://books.google.com/books?id=CylLAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Orpheus+C.+Kerr+%22&as_brr=1&ei=qreiScWwHpHKMsSk3YoC&rview=1#PPA126,M1

“In all its praise of that quiet sleep in which there are no anticipations to be disappointed, no gluttony to make sick, and no Confederacies to guard against,–the verse will be plain to all.”

| History · Language

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.

| Oddities · Society

“Fairy Castles”

http://books.google.com/books?id=RVmOSM2RlOcC&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#PPA60-IA1,M1

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.

| 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.

See also Love Padlocks and Shoe Trees.

| Oddities

“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

| Death · Literature · Oddities