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.
The U.S. Senate used the same gavel for 165 years, from its inception until 1954, when the vice president splintered it during a heated debate on nuclear energy.
Who broke it? Richard Nixon.
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.
“Fancy being remembered around the world for the invention of a mouse!” — Walt Disney, during his last illness
In 2004, French writer Michel Dansel published The Train from Nowhere, a 233-page novel written entirely without verbs.
He even organized a funeral for the verb at Sorbonne in Paris, calling it the “invader, dictator, usurper of our literature.” No word where it’s interred.
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.
What’s the difference between a psychologist and a magician?
A psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
I had often, cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.
That’s from “Durer: Innsbruck, 1495,” a poem by Ern Malley. When it was celebrated in the Australian modernist magazine Angry Penguins, its real authors, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, stepped forward. Not only had they written the poem, they said, but they had “deliberately perpetrated bad verse”: “We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions.”
The point, they said, was to show that modern critics had become “insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.”
The critics insisted that they had accidentally created a masterpiece.
George Lucas originally wanted Orson Welles to provide the voice of Darth Vader.
Finally he opted for James Earl Jones, whose voice was less recognizable.
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
n. fear of long words