hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
n. fear of long words
Fortune Favors the Bold
On Oct. 16, 1906, small-time criminal Wilhelm Voigt became a big-time criminal … for one day.
Wearing a secondhand captain’s uniform, he appeared at the local army barracks, where he dismissed the commander. Then, with 10 grenadiers and a sergeant in tow, he took a train to Köpenick, east of Berlin, and took over city hall.
There he confiscated 4,000 marks and 37 pfennigs and ordered the town secretary and the mayor sent to Berlin on charges of crooked bookkeeping. He told the remaining soldiers to guard the building for half an hour and then left for the train station, where he changed back to civilian clothes and slipped away.
Why? Why not?
Snap, Crackle, Pop
The sound of Rice Krispies in other languages:
- Finnish: “Riks! Raks! Poks!”
- French: “Cric! Crac! Croc!”
- German: “Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!”
- Swedish: “Piff! Paff! Puff!”
- Spanish: “Pim! Pum! Pam!”
In 2002, pollster Kellyanne Conway found that most Americans could name the three elves but could not name any three of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices.
Over Easy
Madagascar’s elephant bird died out around Shakespeare’s time.
So it’s a little weird that two eggs were found in Western Australia in 1930 and 1993.
Did they float there? No one knows.
Rig Latin
In the dusty street of an Old West mining town, a classics professor was stunned to find a post bearing this inscription:
TOTI EHORS ESTO
What was the post for?
A Freak of Navigation
En route from Vancouver to Australia on Dec. 30, 1899, the captain of the S.S. Warrimoo spotted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At midnight, he stopped the ship at the intersection of the international date line and the equator.
At that moment, the ship was straddling two different hemispheres, days, months, years, seasons, and centuries, all at the same time. By passing between the bow and the stern, passengers could stroll between winter and summer, north and south, and the 19th and 20th centuries.
The downside: For the Warrimoo, Dec. 31 disappeared entirely.
(Roberto Casati points out that if you return to this point on June 21 and lie down on the deck, at midnight your left hand will be in summer, your right hand in spring, your left foot in winter, and your right foot in autumn.)
“The Spectre of the Brocken”
A gigantic figure haunts the Vosges Mountains, known by the name of “The Spectre of the Brocken.” The ignorant peasants were, in former times, in great fear of it, thinking it a supernatural being, and fancying that it brought upon them all manner of evil. And it must be confessed it was a fearful sight to behold suddenly upon the summit of a lofty mountain an immense giant, sometimes pointing in a threatening attitude to a village below, as if dooming it to destruction; sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds, then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to reappear more formidable than before.
But now the Spectre of the Brocken is no longer an object of fear. Why? Because men have found him out, and he is nothing in the world but a shadow. When the sun is in the right position, an ordinary-sized man on a lower mountain will see a gigantic shadow of himself thrown upon a cloud beyond the Brocken, though it appears to be on the mountain itself, and it is so perfect a representation that it is difficult to believe it is only a shadow. But it can be easily proved. If the man stoops to pick up anything, down goes the spectre; if he raises his hand, so does the spectre; if he takes a step of two feet, the spectre takes one of miles; if he raises his hat, the spectre politely returns his salute.
— Frank R. Stockton, Round-About Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, 1910
Unquote
“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” — Sigmund Freud
Cargo Cults
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble,” wrote Dr. Johnson.
During World War II, 300,000 American troops were stationed in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Greatly impressed with the Westerners’ wealth and power, the natives began to worship a messiah they called Jon Frum, “the king of America,” who lives in the crater of a local mountain.
To this day, every Feb. 15 they celebrate Jon Frum Day by offering prayers and flowers at a red cross — that’s the date the believe Frum will return bearing cargo from heaven. They also conduct a flag-raising ceremony and a military parade with bamboo “rifles.” The movement even has its own political party.
Records show there never was an actual Jon Frum. But a separate cult has found a real messiah: They worship Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
Song of the Sphinx
The Colossi of Memnon, in Egypt. After an earthquake, the one on the right began to “sing” every morning at dawn, producing a light moaning sound probably related to rising temperatures and evaporating dew. In “The Sphinx,” Oscar Wilde wrote:
Still from his chair of porphyry gaunt Memnon strains his lidless eyes
Across the empty land, and cries each yellow morning unto thee.
Hearing the song brought good luck, so the colossi began to attract pilgrims from across the ancient world. It stopped in 199 when Emperor Septimius Severus tried to fix the damage. Nice going.