National Geographic photographer Reid Blackburn’s car after the eruption of Mount St. Helens, May 18, 1980. The lava would have been about 680°F when it reached him.
In all, the eruption equaled 27,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. It killed 57 people, 1,500 elk, 5,000 deer, and 11 million fish.
When a film crew was dropped by helicopter on the mountain five days later, its compasses spun in circles.
“Military intelligence,” said Groucho, “is a contradiction in terms.” Other examples:
Also: Dodge Ram.
A 12th-century Javanese king, Jayabaya, predicted that white men would conquer the Indonesian island one day and tyrannize the people for years, until the white men were driven out by yellow men from the north. The yellow men would remain for one crop cycle, he said, and then Java would be free.
Amazingly, these predictions were fulfilled almost perfectly 800 years later. White settlers from the Netherlands ruled the island until the Japanese invaded in 1942, and two years later they officially granted Indonesia its independence.
Since Javanese predictions are so accurate, we should note that Indonesia seems due for another messiah — prophecies said he’d arrive “when iron wagons drive without horses and ships sail through the sky.”
In 1971, the Flat Earth Society announced that the world is a disc, with the North Pole at the center and a 50-meter wall of ice at the outer edge.
Strangely, that matches the flag of the United Nations.
Judge Learned Hand on the U.S. income tax code, writing in the Yale Law Journal, December 1947:
In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax … merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception — couched in abstract terms that offer [me] no handle to seize hold of [and that] leave in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
Even Albert Einstein, who died trying to find a generalized theory of gravitation, wrote, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
Excerpts from an eighth-grade final exam, Salina, Kansas, 1895:
Students were actually allowed to take it in seventh grade, and retake it in eighth grade if they didn’t pass.
Henry Roth had writer’s block for 60 years.
He published Call It Sleep in 1934 and couldn’t produce a followup until 1994.
Sam Patch (1799-1829), “The Yankee Leaper,” earned his epithet — in his 30-year lifetime he jumped from the following points:
That last one attracted a crowd of 8,000 — Upper Falls is 99 feet high. The first attempt went fine, but on the followup he dislocated both shoulders and drowned. His grave marker says “Sam Patch — Such Is Fame.”
As old as the pyramids, southern England’s Silbury Hill is even more enigmatic. It’s essentially a gigantic man-made hill, 130 feet tall and perfectly round.
It must have taken 18 million man-hours to build, but archaeologists are stumped as to its purpose.
“A witty saying proves nothing.” — Voltaire