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.
Oddities
Tally Ho
“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.
One Man Is an Island
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they found his mummified body in the bed, spoiled food in the refrigerator, and a wall calendar that was two years out of date.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.
Bon Apetit
A masochist’s lunch menu:
- Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese riddled with live insect larvae that can jump up to 6 inches. Wear goggles.
- Kopi luwak, sometimes described as “cat poop coffee,” is a Sumatran beverage made from berries that have passed through a civet’s digestive tract.
- Lutefisk is a Nordic dish made by soaking whitefish in lye. It is the only food refused by Jeffrey Steingarten, author of The Man Who Ate Everything: “Lutefisk is not food, it is a weapon of mass destruction.”
- “Stinky tofu,” a favorite of Mao Zedong, is marinated for months in a brine of fermented vegetables. Reportedly it tastes like blue cheese, but its smell has been compared to sewage, horse manure, and “a used tampon baking in the desert.”
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.”
“Get Thee Behind Me”
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.
Extreme Hospitality
Except for the beds, Sweden’s Ice Hotel is made completely of ice blocks — 60 rooms and suites, a bar, a reception area and a chapel, 30,000 square feet in all. Even the glasses in the bar are made of ice. You can book a room for about $400, but hurry — it melts in May.
Its alter ego is the Uyuni Salt Hotel, in Bolivia, where everything — including the beds — is made of salt. (Photo (c)2005 Tom Corser, www.tomcorser.com.)
Hello?
Until 2000, calling 760-733-9969 would connect you to a single phone booth in the Mojave desert, 15 miles from the nearest interstate and miles from any building.
Tired of vandalism, Pacific Bell finally took down the booth. Fans put up a headstone, but they took that down too. Killjoys.
U.S. Camel Corps
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the 1840s, when Army horses and mules were failing in the American Southwest, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (yes, same guy) allocated $30,000 for “the purchase of camels and the importation of dromedaries, to be employed for military purposes.” The Navy sent a ship to North Africa, and in 1856 33 confused camels arrived in Indianola, Texas.
They did pretty well. After a survey expedition to California, an enthusiastic Col. Edward Beale declared, “I look forward to the day when every mail route across the continent will be conducted … with this economical and noble brute.”
The Civil War put an end to the project, but there’s a strange postscript. Some of the camels escaped into the Texas desert, where apparently they adapted to life in the wild. The last feral camel was sighted in 1941. There’s a movie in here somewhere.
Ojibwa Prophecy
In the 15th century, among the Ojibwa people of Lake Superior, a prophet dreamed of “men who had come across the great water … their skins are white like snow, and on their faces long hair grows. These people have come … in wonderfully large canoes which have great white wings like those of a giant bird. The men have long and sharp knives, and they have long black tubes which they point at birds and animals. The tubes make a smoke that rises into the air … from them come fire and … a terrific noise.”
After this prophecy was made, a group of Ojibwa traveled down the St. Lawrence waterway to investigate and made their first contact with white men, possibly a party from John Cabot’s (1497) or Jacques Cartier’s (1535) expedition.
Reviewing the Troops
If you visit the Edinburgh Zoo, be prepared to salute — in August a penguin named Nils Olav was promoted to colonel-in-chief of the Royal Norwegian Guard.
Apparently penguins are pretty active in the Guard — since 1982 they’ve held the ranks of lance corporal, sergeant, and regimental sergeant major. They’re certainly dressed for it.
08/23/2016 Now promoted to brigadier! (Thanks, Dan.)