Kailashgiri Brahmachari is carrying his mother across India. They left the northern village of Piparia eight years ago and hope to reach Varanasi in 2013.
He says it’s the will of God.
“He is a nice son, but I am getting tired,” his mother told the BBC. “I sometimes feel like ending the journey and getting back home.”
In 1920 two English cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, produced a series of photos that seemed to show them cavorting with fairies and gnomes.
The images were published in The Strand and convinced Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. In The Coming of the Fairies (1922), he wrote: “It is hard for the mind to grasp what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations.”
But see Fairies Unmasked.
Blue Peacock was the sexy code name of a secret British plan to salt the Rhine with nuclear mines in the 1950s, in case of war.
Less sexily, they planned to put a live chicken in each one, to keep the electronics from getting cold.
When the file was declassified on April 1, 2004, this was taken to be an April Fool’s joke, but it’s true. Fortunately, the project was canceled.
Ernest Hemingway’s former home in Key West, Fla., contains a colony of six-toed cats.
The author had a sailor’s love of polydactyl cats — their extra toes are considering good luck at sea, giving them superior abilities to climb and to hunt shipboard rodents.
So when Hemingway received a six-toed cat from a ship’s captain, he provided for its descendants in his will. There are currently about 60 cats at the Key West house, and about half of them have extra toes.
The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is decorated with 40,000 human skeletons.
“If life must not be taken too seriously,” wrote Samuel Butler, “then so neither must death.”
In October 2003, a couple hiking in the mountains of northern Sweden came upon 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter.
No one knows who put them there, or why.
“Twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.”
That’s a typical description of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake, held each May at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester, England. The participants run downhill after a Double Gloucester cheese, which the winner gets to keep. Theoretically they’re trying to catch the cheese, but it rapidly gets up to 70 mph (knocking over a spectator in 1997) and this rarely happens.
The racers themselves get sprained ankles, broken bones and concussions, and the first-aid services are getting stretched as the race grows in popularity. Last year they ran out of ambulances.
Winnipeg resident Jim Sulkers lay dead in his apartment for two years before his body was discovered.
Sulkers was estranged from his family, and automated banking processed his disability checks and paid his bills.
When police finally climbed through the window in August 2004, they found his mummified body in the bed, spoiled food in the refrigerator, and a wall calendar that was two years out of date. Everything else was in perfect order.
A masochist’s lunch menu:
Mark Twain wrote, “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”
Here’s one way to beat temptation: file a lawsuit. In 1971, Gerald Mayo sued “Satan and his staff” in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He alleged that “Satan has on numerous occasions caused plaintiff misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall” and had therefore “deprived him of his constitutional rights,” a violation of the U.S. Code.
The court noted that jurisdiction was uncertain; legally the devil might count as a foreign prince. Also, Mayo’s claim seemed appropriate for a class action suit, and it wasn’t clear that Mayo could represent all of humanity. Finally, no one was sure how the U.S. Marshal could serve process on Satan.
So the devil got away. Mayo’s case has been cited several times, and has never been overturned or contradicted.
