If you don’t speak, you can’t misspeak, right? Not so: American Sign Language has the equivalent of tongue twisters, known as finger fumblers.
One example is “good blood, bad blood” — which is hard to say in speech or sign.
Oddities
Bigfoot East
That’s “Wild Man Cave” in Chinese. It’s an inscription near the entrance of the “Yeren Cave” in Western Hubei Province, China.
Known variously as the yeren, wild man, man-monkey, and man-bear, a huge red-haired hominid has been sighted at least 400 times in Hubei since the 1920s. In recent years the Chinese government has even begun distributing posters and funding scientific expeditions.
Maybe it’s just a legend, or maybe it’s a new species of orangutan. Or maybe it’s a remnant line of a giant ape that lived in these very mountains until about 100,000 years ago. Gigantopithecus was the largest ape that ever lived, three times the size of a gorilla — and its bones are still found in local caves. Hmm.
Dighton Rock
In May 1502, Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real set out to find his brother Gaspar, who had disappeared somewhere near Newfoundland the previous year. Miguel also disappeared, and was assumed to have died in a storm …
… but no one has explained the inscriptions on Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder in the Taunton River in Massachusetts. It was customary for Portuguese explorers to inscribe their nation’s coat of arms as a land claim during the Age of Discovery, so some scholars believe that Miguel reached the New World and survived long enough to stake an early claim in Massachusetts. No other trace of him exists.
The St. Augustine Monster
On Nov. 30, 1896, two young boys came across an unidentified carcass on the beach near St. Augustine, Fla. Pale pink and rubbery, it was huge, 18 feet long and weighing an estimated 5 tons.
An analysis in 1971 agreed with early guesses that it was a gigantic octopus — in this case almost unthinkably huge, “with arms 75 to 100 feet in length and about 18 inches in diameter at the base — a total spread of some 200 feet.”
More recent studies in 1995 and 2004 say it was “the skin of an enormous warm-blooded vertebrate,” probably the entire blubber layer of a whale. Ick.
Lost at Sea
In July 1920, two railroad workers found a life jacket on the shore of the Delaware River in Philadelphia.
It bore the name LUSITANIA.
The Skeleton in Armor
In 1832, a human skeleton was unearthed in a sandbank in Fall River, Mass. A triangular plate of brass covered its sternum, and it wore a broad belt of brass tubes. The grave also contained a number of brass and copper arrowheads. To judge from the skull, the skeleton had belonged to a young man, but from where? The local Indian tribes did not work brass.
One commentator claimed it as evidence that the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, or Egyptians had discovered North America in the remote past. Later historians speculated that an early Norse explorer might have traveled south from Newfoundland, but the style of armor was unknown to medieval Norway. A third possibility is that it belonged to an early European colonist, perhaps a Portuguese explorer.
The skeleton was destroyed in a fire in 1843, so there’s no way now to date the remains scientifically, or to gather any further information. Its identity must remain a mystery.
tfeL to thgiR
Leonardo da Vinci recorded most of his personal notes in mirror writing. Maybe he wanted to hide his ideas from the Church … or maybe, being left-handed, he didn’t want to smudge the ink.
“A Stoppage of the Falls of Niagara”
The following remarkable account of the stoppage of Niagara Falls, appeared in the Niagara Mail at the time of the occurrence: “That mysterious personage, the oldest inhabitant, has no recollection of so singular an occurrence as took place at the Falls on the 30th of March, 1847. The ‘six hundred and twenty thousand tons of water each minute’ nearly ceased to flow, and dwindled away into the appearance of a mere milldam. The rapids above the falls disappeared, leaving scarcely enough on the American side to turn a grindstone. Ladies and gentlemen rode in carriages one-third of the way across the river towards the Canada shore, over solid rock as smooth as a kitchen floor. The Iris says: ‘Table Rock, with some two hundred yards more, was left dry; islands and places where the foot of man never dared to tread have been visited, flags placed upon come, and mementoes brought away. This unexpected event is attempted to be accounted for by an accumulation of ice at the lower extremity of Fort Erie, which formed a sort of dam between Fort Erie and Buffalo.'”
— Barkham Burroughs’ Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889
Cheaper Than Renovation
The frontage of the Saint-Georges Theater in Paris, transformed entirely with paint by muralist Dominique Antony.
This technique, where an effect emerges only when an image is viewed from a certain perspective, is called anamorphosis. Here’s a much earlier example.
Egging the Question
The magnificently named Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone is just that — an odd carven stone, about 4 inches long, turned up by workmen digging a fence post in New Hampshire in 1872.
No one knows who carved it, when, or why. On one side are carved an ear of corn, a deer’s leg, and several other figures. One the other side are inverted arrows, a moon shape, a spiral, and some dots.
When the stone first came to light, the American Naturalist suggested that it “commemorates a treaty between two tribes.” But after an analysis in 1994, state archaeologist Richard Boisvert said that the holes drilled in the top and bottom are more consistent with power tools from the 19th or 20th century. He said that scratches in the lower hole suggest that the stone was placed on a metal shaft and removed several times. We’ll never know its real origin.