Futility Closet

Is there an aquatic church we don't know about? Three centuries after John Stow's sea monk escaped, a "bishop-fish" was caught and taken to the king of Poland. It gestured to a group of Catholic bishops, appealing to be released, and when they granted its wish it made the sign of the cross and swam away.

Another bishop-fish was reportedly caught near Germany in 1531. This one refused to eat and died after three days.

Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, who described it in his Historia Animalium, also refers to monk-fish caught off Norway and in the Firth of Forth. Someone ought to take up a collection.

Solution to Desert Downpour, from yesterday:

The stream of water hides a pipe that supports the handle and drives the fountain.

"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information." — Oscar Wilde

Adam Cheng isn't very popular among stockbrokers. That's because every time the Hong Kong actor stars in a new television show, there's a sharp drop in global stock markets.

No one can explain it, but it's happened eight times since 1993, when Cheng first starred as Ding Hai in the dramatic series Greed of Man. Only once, in 2004, has a new Cheng series not been accompanied by a drop in the stock market.

A "magic tap." Can you see how it's done? I'll give the answer tomorrow.

Amazing Stories was full of, well, amazing stories, but Richard Sharpe Shaver insisted that his were true. Between 1943 and 1948, Shaver and editor/publisher Ray Palmer told of cavern cities filled with evil robots that kidnapped and tortured unwary humans. Shaver insisted he had been a prisoner for several years.

Strangely, the first story brought a flood of excited letters corroborating Shaver's tale. One woman claimed she had been abducted from a Paris subbasement and raped and tortured before good robots freed her. "Shaver Mystery Club" chapters began to spring up, and Amazing gained about 50,000 subscribers.

The stories petered out as the sensation ran its course, though the clubs persisted into the late 1950s. By the 1970s, Shaver was insisting that certain rocks were "books" created by ancient Atlanteans. Today it seems he was not a misunderstood visionary but a troubled schizophrenic with a compelling imagination.

In English, every odd number contains the letter e.

The Forevertron is the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world. Salvage expert Tom Every spent decades collecting 320 tons of antique machinery, including dynamos built by Thomas Edison and an actual decontamination chamber from the Apollo project. It's in southern Wisconsin.

jerque
v. to search for smuggled goods

In 1961, three prospectors in California found a sparkplug encased in solid rock.

It was originally thought to be 500,000 years old, which would put it in a class with the Kingoodie Hammer and the Dorchester Pot.

More recent investigations say the "rock" is just a concretion of iron oxide produced by the rusting plug, which may date only from the 1920s … but discoverer Mike Mikesell says he destroyed a diamond-edged blade in cutting through it.