A homicide sergeant stood in the hotel suite, gazing down at the body of Bugsy Ferret. "He was a card sharp," the sergeant told the hotel manager. "Bugsy preyed on tourists. He'd lure them to a hotel, start a friendly poker game, and take them to the cleaners. I guess someone came back this time and took Bugsy."
Bugsy lay sprawled amid a carpet of scattered playing cards and a bottle of Blush gin. He'd been stabbed in the chest.
"Looks like he didn't die right away," said the sergeant as he pointed to the five cards held in the victim's stiff grip. All diamonds. "Maybe he was trying to tell us something."
"We got our suspects," came a voice from the bedroom. The sergeant's partner emerged, holding a handwritten list. "Benny King, Jack Lawrence, Joe Blush, Alan Spade. He listed their hotels, too. Let's check 'em out."
On September first, 1914, one hundred years ago today, the very last passenger pigeon, named Martha Washington, died of old age at the Cincinnati Zoo. It's hard to imagine that once there were billions of passenger pigeon in the U.S. An account from 1860 described a flock that took 14 hours to fly overhead.
It is testimony to humankind’s great powers of destruction that within 50 years of this event, only a single captive pair remained, named after the US’s first president and lady George and Martha Washington. George perished in July 1910 at Cincinnati Zoo. Martha survived for four more years, sufficient time for her to garner celebrity as the sole-surviving member of her species. When she eventually died on 1 September 1914 “at 1 P.M. of old age”, she was frozen in a huge block of ice and sent by train to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Snell’s O & P has been in business since 1911, and Chris Snell is the fourth generation of his family to make orthotics and prosthetics. Chris recently made this steampunk leg that has gears controlled by a microprocessor and powered by movement. It creates the illusion that a presumably steam-powered set of gears is moving the leg! He also posted a gallery of some pictures taken during the building process. -via Geeks Are Sexy
ZDoggMD (Dr. Zubin Damania) blames George Lucas for ruining his childhood with retroactive edits to the Star Wars series. I don’t know if that really inspired this parody song of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida,” but that’s what he complains about at his site. Unlike most of his videos, this one has no real medical connection, just some Star Wars fun.
This article is republished with permission from the May-June 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can purchase back issues of the magazine or subscribe to receive future issues, in printed or in ebook form. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
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Borders, fences, fortifications, demarcations- whatever you call them, there are a lot of dividing lines in history. Here are some of the most famous.
1. HADRIAN’S WALL
Milecastle 39 on Hadrian’s Wall near Steel Rigg. (Image credit: Adam Cuerden)
In AD 122, the Roman Empire was near the height of its power, but in the far-flung imperial province of Britannia, the empire was having some trouble near its northern border. To control that line in the heath, Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of what became the most heavily-fortified border in the Western world at the time: a 73-mile wall of limestone and turf, with small forts roughly every Roman mile occupied by a few dozen troops. Additionally, larger forts were also constructed. The Romans built the wall well enough that it survived the Roman Empire, and what remains of it became a World Heritage Site in 1987.
There’s a reason that the citizens of Brazil speak Portuguese while nearly all of the rest of South America speaks Spanish: that reason is the Tordesillas Meridian. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI offered a papal edict saying that Spain (Alexander VI’s native country) would control any land west of a meridian (a line stretching from pole to pole) that lay 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, which were off the coast of Africa. This meant that the pope was giving the Americas to Spain, which did not sit well with the Portuguese, who thought they were entitled to it.
In 1494, the Spanish and Portuguese signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which nudges that papal line further west -giving Portugal the eastern “bump” of the South American continent that would become Brazil.
When is a line not just a line? When it is “the Pale” -an area on the eastern shore of Ireland that was directly under the control of the English crown during the Middle Ages. It derived its name from the Latin word palus, which literally meant a stake, but figuratively meant a fence or line, the lands beyond which one does not have control (and indeed, the Pale had a border fence, or some say a line of dikes). This is what people are referring to when they use the expression “beyond the pale.”
Alex Burkovskiy taped a laser pointer to his cat’s head. Usually, just a piece of tape on a cat will cause the animal to go bonkers trying to get it off, but this cat was too fascinated with the red dot to notice he had something taped to him! He chased the dot for over an hour. That’s about as long as a piece of tape stuck to fast-moving fur can possibly last. -via Tastefully Offensive
When you fart, are you spraying microbes all over? Should we fear the effects of flatulence in a crowd? Science is on the question!
“It all started with an enquiry from a nurse,” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told listeners to his science phone-in show on the Triple J radio station in Brisbane. “She wanted to know whether she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations, and I realised that I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out.”
The upshot is that if people fart while wearing clothes, you’re pretty safe. But fart naked, and it’s a whole different story. And you’ll want to read that story of the experiment by which Dr. Kruszelnicki found the answer at Discover magazine. Oh, the things that researchers do in the name of science! -via Digg
Maybe you’ve noticed a trend lately of people posting long strings of emojis as translated text. Those are a real pain for someone like me, who has neither the time not the inclination to parse them out. But then here comes Slate with a quiz about some short, familiar phrases. These twelve strings of pictures are well-known first lines of classic novels that you know, rendered in emoji. Can you figure them out? I can’t say I did well, but I was proud to figure out a few. And your first impressions can be hilarious: for #3, I read "Here's an idea you're going to love! Let's cook eggplant!" When you’ve strained your brain enough, you can check the answers at Slate. -via mental_floss
Just For Laughs planted a dog puppet in a park. Real dogs may have never noticed it, if it didn’t have a nice, meaty bone! But the bone attracts the dogs, and the puppet defends his treasure. These poor confused dogs don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore! -via Viral Viral Videos
For those who wish to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations in pop culture and science fiction, the Star Trek universe can be intimidating. Yes, there are plenty of people who haven’t watched Star Trek for one reason or another, but might if they knew where to start.
Star Trek is more than pop culture; it’s 20th century mythology with its own complicated mythos. “Beam me up” and “live long and prosper” may have invaded the cultural lexicon, but Star Trek is particularly intimidating for the uninitiated. Where to start and what to skip are up for debate even among the most hardcore Trekkies and Trekkers (the fandom can’t even decide on a name for itself). One thing is clear: It all begins with Gene Roddenberry, the visionary who created the original show in the 1960s and presided over the franchise until his death in 1991. The WWII fighter pilot turned TV writer would have turned 93 this August. He’s survived by a franchise that encompasses five live action TV shows, one animated series, and 12 films. Given that Star Trek will celebrate its 50th anniversary in just two short years, this the perfect time for new fans to jump on Roddenberry’s “Wagon Train to the stars.”
The A.V. Club has stepped up to the plate with a guide for Star Trek newbies, which includes a brief history and description of each series and recommends standout episodes to introduce the viewer. There are also recaps of the movies and miscellaneous information to make tackling Star Trek both easy and fun for a beginner. Baby steps. For the established Star Trek fan, it’s a walk down memory lane (or more likely, Memory Alpha), with plenty to argue about, which you’d expect.
Jorge lives in Australia, and has always dreamed of running with the bulls in Pamplona. But that’s in Spain, far, far away. Then one day he heard about an event called the Running of the Sheep at a local festival in the Australian town of Boorowa. Excited, he goes to Boorowa and finds out that it’s not quite the same. This short film by Sam Matthews is just as cute as it can be. -via Tastefully Offensive
Oh, this will be exciting -the strange phenomena known as the water blob gets the Devin Supertramp POV treatment! But that’s not all that’s going on: there’s also wakeboarding, waterskiing, jet skiing, surfing, and that odd water jetpack thing. Makes you wish that summer vacation could last forever, doesn’t it? That, and I wish I was thirty years younger and had the wherewithal to travel to such fun places. If you’d like more, there’s a behind-the-scenes video, too. -via Viral Viral Videos
When you’re shooting video from up on the penthouse of a beachfront hotel, you can see what’s in the shallow water a lot better than the people who are in the water can see. These guys could see a hammerhead shark chasing a stingray, while the guys in the water couldn’t. They couldn’t hear the shouting from the hotel for a while, either. This happened in Destin, Florida. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
