Hell is in Norway, it turns out. The tiny village has a population of 352. This is the train station (curiously, “Gods Expedition,” or godsekspedisjon, means “cargo handling office”).
And, yes, in winter the temperature can drop below zero.
In July 1808, 100 kilometers east of the Montana Rockies, Lewis and Clark wrote, “We have repeatedly heard a strange noise coming from the mountains. … It is heard at different periods of the day and night … and consists of one stroke only, or of five or six discharges in quick succession. It is loud and resembles precisely the sound of a six-pound piece of ordnance.”
They were leading the first overland expedition of the United States territory, so it wasn’t a cannon. The sounds have never been explained.
In 1658, French admiral Etienne de Flacourt reported a curious legend among the natives of Madagascar. They described a creature, called tretretretre, that was as big as a 2-year-old calf, with a round head, a human face and ears, an ape’s feet, a short tail, and frizzy fur.
That description matched nothing on the island, so the Europeans dismissed it. But since then, fossils have been unearthed of a giant lemur, Megaladapis, that may explain the myth. It had been thought to become extinct thousands of years ago, but now zoologists think it may have survived into the sixth century, when humans came to the island, and entered their folklore.
A few Megaladapis may even have survived into the 16th or 17th century, so perhaps Flacourt was witnessing the birth of a legend.
These structures were discovered off the Japanese island of Yonaguni in 1985. Are they man-made? They resemble the pyramids of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mexico, and Peru, but analyses showed one was 8,000 years old, which would make these the oldest ruins in the world.
If that’s so, historians can’t explain who would have built them. And archaeologists have suggested that the plates may have formed naturally. For now, the jury’s out.
How much damage can one sparrow do?
Last year in the Netherlands organizers were preparing a world-record display of cascading dominoes when a house sparrow flew into the room.
The bird knocked over 23,000 tiles before organizers finally resorted to shooting it, setting off a furor among animal-rights activists.
Four days later, a new record was set when 4,002,136 dominoes fell in one continuous cascade.
The bird, stuffed and mounted, will go on display at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam this November, exactly one year after the shooting.
In western Namibia, there’s a deadly strip of beach where the Namib Desert runs right up against the South Atlantic Ocean. Shipwrecked sailors who landed there found themselves trapped between heavy surf on one side and hundreds of miles of desert on the other. Many starved to death right there on the beach.
It’s called the Skeleton Coast.
Drawn to megaliths but leery of foreigners? Then toss those plane tickets, drive to Hunt, Texas, and commune with Stonehenge II, a replica made of adobe and wire mesh.
Just watch out for the fire ants.
Gibsonton, Fla., has the nation’s only post office with a counter for dwarves.
That’s because Gibsonton used to serve as a sideshow wintering town, where Percilla the Monkey Girl, the Anatomical Wonder, and other circus “freaks” could spend the off season. Siamese twin sisters ran a local fruit stand, and special zoning laws permitted residents to keep elephants and circus trailers on their front lawns. The school board meetings must have been memorable.
If you think your commute is bad, check out the Kinetic Sculpture Race, held every Memorial Day weekend in Ferndale, Calif. In three days, participants must cover 42 miles of mud, sand, water, gravel and pavement in vehicles powered only by people (“and friendly extraterrestrials”). Arrows, anchors and grappling hooks are strictly disallowed.
The race’s slogan is “adults having fun so children want to get older.”
Published in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket tells of four men who survive a shipwreck. Starving, they draw lots to see which one is to be eaten. The loser is a man named Richard Parker.
Forty-six years later, in 1884, a yacht named the Mignonette sank during a journey from England to Australia. Four survivors were stranded in a dinghy. After 16 days, Captain Dudley and his two mates killed and ate the cabin boy–whose name was Richard Parker.
The three eventually returned to England, where they were convicted of murder.
