Created by Native Americans at least 1,000 years ago, Ohio’s Serpent Mound is a double mystery.
First, while there are several burial mounds nearby, the serpent itself doesn’t contain any human remains. It’s just a giant earthen snake, 1,330 feet long.
Second, the site on which it’s built shows faulted and folded bedrock, meaning that a huge cataclysm, a meteorite or a volcanic explosion, happened here in the ancient past.
Is that why the serpent was built there? We may never know.
Ozzy Osbourne’s all-time top 10 favorite rock albums, as told to the British newspaper The Observer in June 2004:
When French psychologist Michel Gauquelin set out to determine whether astrology was valid, he found a curious anomaly.
His analysis showed that sports champions are more likely to be born when Mars is in the fourth quadrant. Examples include Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods and Venus Williams.
It’s called “the Mars effect.”
An Irishman, an Englishman, and a Scotsman are out walking when they capture a leprechaun. It agrees to give each of them one wish.
The Scot says, “My grandfather was a fisherman, my father’s a fisherman, I’m a fisherman, and my son will be a fisherman. I want the oceans full of fish for all eternity.” The leprechaun winks and instantly the oceans are teeming with fish.
Amazed, the Englishman says, “All right. I want a wall around England, protecting her, so that no one will get in for all eternity.”
Again the leprechaun winks, and suddenly there’s a huge wall around England.
The Irishman says, “I’m curious — please tell me more about this wall.”
“Well,” says the leprechaun, “it’s 150 feet high and 50 feet thick, protecting England so that nothing can get in or out.”
The Irishman says, “Fill it up with water.”
“Dear Abby” and Ann Landers were identical twins.
They even had a joint wedding ceremony in 1939.
French forger Vrain Denis-Lucas must have had a golden touch. His customers bought “manuscripts” from all of the following authors:
… even though all of them were written in contemporary French. All told, Denis-Lucas sold 27,000 manuscripts before the French Academy of Science realized something was wrong. He spent two years in prison and then disappeared.
Account of an execution by guillotine, recorded in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, July 7, 1827:
Arrived near the fatal machine, the unhappy man stepped out of the vehicle, knelt at the feet of his confessor, received the priestly benediction, kissed some individuals who accompanied him, and was hurried by the officers of justice up the steps of the cube-form structure of wood, painted of a blood-red, on which stood the dreadful apparatus of death.
To reach the top of the platform, to be fast bound to a board, to be placed horizontally under the axe, and deprived of life by its unerring blow, was, in the case of this miserable offender, the work literally of a moment. It was indeed an awfully sudden transit from time to eternity. He could only cry out, ‘Adieu, mes amis,’ and he was gone. The severed head, passing through a red-coloured bag fixed under, fell to the ground-the blood spouted forth from the neck like water from a fountain-the body, lifted up without delay, was flung down through a trap-door in the platform.
Never did capital punishment more quickly take effect on a human being; and whilst the executioner was coolly taking out the axe from the groove of the machine, and placing it, covered as it was with gore, in a box, the remains of the culprit, deposited in a shell, were hoisted into a wagon, and conveyed to the prison. In twenty minutes all was over, and the Grande Place nearly cleared of its thousands, on whom the dreadful scene seemed to have made, as usual, the slightest possible impression.
In America, when both people on a date pay for their own meals, we call it “Dutch treat.”
The Dutch have another name for it.
They call it an “American-style party.”
On March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial about the nation’s economic woes:
Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it carried the headline “Mush From the Wimp.”
In 1984 Globe editorial writer Kirk Scharfenberg admitted he’d written it. “I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication,” he wrote. “It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day.”
“Man is the noblest work of God!” roared Mark Twain. “Well now, who found that out?”
Consider the case of Oliver the chimpanzee. Oliver liked to stand upright instead of knucklewalking like his peers, and his keepers noticed that his face was flatter than other chimps’, who tended to avoid him.
That’s all the impetus they needed. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s Oliver was paraded through a succession of theme parks, zoos and promotions, billed as a missing link or even a “humanzee,” or human-chimp hybrid, and confined for seven years in a cage that measured only 7 by 5 feet.
It all came to nothing. In 1996, when Oliver was old, blind, and arthritic, University of Chicago geneticist David Ledbetter checked his chromosomes and discovered he was just an ordinary ape, albeit one who preferred to walk upright.
It’s still possible that Oliver belongs to a rare subspecies of chimps who resemble humans … but after that treatment, would he take that as a compliment?
