Damned If You Don’t

Marijuana is illegal in North Carolina, but the state still profits from its sale. Under state law, anyone who purchases illegal drugs must buy stamps within 48 hours and affix them to the controlled substance. If you’re caught without stamps, you’re still liable for the tax.

No one expects people actually to do this — since 1990, only a few dozen people have bought the stamps, and many of those are thought to be stamp collectors. But the state has collected more than $68 million for failure to display them.

| Crime · Society

The Yellowstone Lake Whispers

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/2834534801/
Image: Flickr

For more than a century, people have been hearing strange sounds in the sky over the lakes of Yellowstone National Park:

  • “While getting breakfast, we heard every few moments a curious sound, between a whistle and a hoarse whine, whose locality and character we could not at first determine …” (F.H. Bradley, 1872)
  • “[I]t seemed to begin at a distance [and] grow louder overhead where it filled the upper air, and suggested a medley of wind in the tops of pine trees and in telegraph wires, the echo of bells after being repeated several times, the humming of a swarm of bees, and two or three other less definite sources of sound …” (Edwin Linton, 1892)
  • “It put me in mind of the vibrating clang of a harp lightly and rapidly touched high up above the tree tops, or the sound of many telegraph wires swinging regularly and rapidly in the wind, or, more rarely, of faintly heard voices answering each other overhead.” (S.A. Forbes, 1893)
  • “They resemble the ringing of telegraph wires or the humming of a swarm of bees, beginning softly in the distance, growing rapidly plainer until directly overhead, and then fading as rapidly in the opposite direction.” (H.M. Chittenden, 1915)

Evidently the sound is very difficult to describe in words — one of Linton’s party called it “a twisting sort of yow-yow vibration.” Forbes calls it “really bewitching,” and Linton’s guide, Elwood Hofer, called it “the most mysterious sound heard among the mountains.”

Possibly it’s produced by the surrounding mountains under seismic stress, or it could be standing sound waves produced by the wind. No one knows.

| Oddities

A Man of Letters

“L E G on the Death of L X and R N S, Squire of the Coun T of S X”

In S X once there lived M N,
Who was Xceeding Y Y;
But with so much O B C T
It almost closed his I I.

When from his chair E would R I I,
U would have laughed to C
The awkwardness his fat did cause
To this old O D T.

But barring that E was so fat,
E was a right good fell O,
And had such horror of X S
U never saw him mell O.

N O O so red E did not like,
As that which wine will give,
So did S A to keep from drink
As long as E did live.

Two daughters fair this old man had,
Called Miss M A and L N,
Who, when the old chap took his E E,
Would try to T T the men.

Over the C C, these maids to please,
There came two gallants gay;
M A and L N ceased to T T,
And with them ran away.

These gallants did them so M U U,
And used such an M N C T
Of flattery, U must X Q Q
Their fugitive propensity.

The poor old man heaved many S I I
For frail M A and L N;
E called each gallant gay a rogue,
A rascal, and a villain.

And all with half an I might C
His gradual D K,
Till M T was his old arm-chair,
And E had passed away.

— William T. Dobson, Literary Frivolities, Fancies, Follies and Frolics, 1880

| Language · Poems

Two and Two

In 1977, a gravely ill 19-month-old Qatari girl was flown to a London hospital, where her condition continued to worsen, baffling her doctors.

On the sixth day, the observing nurse was startled to see that the girl began to lose her hair. She realized that the patient’s symptoms were strikingly similar to those in Agatha Christie’s novel The Pale Horse, which she had been reading.

In Christie’s novel, the murder victims had been killed by thallium poisoning. Tests confirmed elevated levels of thallium in the girl’s urine, and doctors treated her accordingly. Three weeks later she was well enough to go home.

| Literature · Oddities

Nice Kitty

http://books.google.com/books?id=orMGAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

French sculptor Louis Vidal was blind since youth, but he produced startlingly faithful renderings of animals: a bull, a wounded stag, a horse, a cow, a dog.

With domestic creatures he could do this by feeling their anatomy directly, or by referring to skeletons or to stuffed specimens. But how did he create The Roaring Lion, the masterpiece first shown at the Salon in 1868?

Legend has it that he did it the hard way: by running his hands over a live lion at the Jardin des Plantes.

“Convinced he would not succeed without having recourse to the living ‘king of beasts,'” reported The English Illustrated Magazine in 1900, “he entered the cage without the least hesitation, accompanied by the lion-tamer. The animal allowed itself to be caressed for some time, and Vidal was thus enabled to study its anatomy. As a result, he produced that most wonderful example of his art, ‘The Roaring Lion.'”

If that’s just a story … then how did he manage it?

| Art · Oddities

Tempus Edax Rerum

Visiting Rome in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain reflects on “the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame.” He imagines how the people of 5868 A.D. will remember Ulysses S. Grant:

URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT — popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’

“These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”

| History · Literature