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.

| History · Oddities

Reviewing the Troops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nils_Olav_inspection.jpg

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.)

| Oddities

“A Case of Snake-bite”

From Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, 1896:

The following case illustrative of the tenacity of virulence of snake-venom was reported by Mr. Temple, Chief Justice of Honduras, and quoted by a London authority.

While working at some wood-cutting a man was struck on a heavy boot by a snake, which he killed with an axe. He imagined that he had been efficiently protected by the boot, and he thought little of the incident. Shortly afterward he began to feel ill, sank into a stupor, and succumbed.

His boots were sold after his death, as they were quite well made and a luxury in that country. In a few hours the purchaser of the boots was a corpse, and every one attributed his death to apoplexy or some similar cause.

The boots were again sold, and the next unfortunate owner died in an equally short time.

It was then thought wise to examine the boots, and in one of them was found, firmly embedded, the fang of the serpent. It was supposed that in pulling on the boots each of the subsequent owners had scratched himself and became fatally inoculated with the venom, which was unsuspected and not combated.

“The case is so strange as to appear hypothetic, but the authority seems reliable.”

| Oddities

“A Sonnet on a Monkey”

O lovely O most charming pug
Thy graceful air and heavenly mug
The beauties of his mind do shine
And every bit is shaped so fine
Your very tail is most divine
Your teeth is whiter than the snow
You are a great buck and a bow
Your eyes are of so fine a shape
More like a christian’s than an ape
His cheeks is like the rose’s blume
Your hair is like the raven’s plume
Your nose’s cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty woman
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was obliged to call him woman.

— Marjory Fleming, age 8 (1803-1811)

| Poems

Blind Tom Wiggins

Born in 1849, “Blind Tom” Wiggins found himself with three burdens and a gift: He was blind, he was mentally challenged, he was a slave, and he was a musical prodigy.

He was playing piano by ear at age 4, before he could speak. At 5 he composed a tune and found he could reproduce perfectly any piece from memory. His vocabulary was only about 100 words, and he spoke of himself in the third person (“Tom is pleased to meet you”), but in time he learned 7,000 piano pieces, mostly classics.

At age 8 a successful concert in Columbus, Ga., led to a tour. He played for James Buchanan and Mark Twain, accepting challenges to repeat original compositions to show there was no trickery. By age 16, he was touring the world.

He retired in 1883 but returned briefly for a series of New York concerts in 1904. He died in 1908.

| Oddities