“Mister Eat-Everything”

France’s Michel Lotito, better known as Monsieur Mangetout, eats metal and glass for a living. He began eating unusual materials compulsively as a child and has made it into a career, performing publicly since 1966.

Thanks to an unusually thick stomach lining, Mangetout can safely consume 2 pounds of metal a day with no ill effects. Generally he cuts large items — bicycles, television sets, shopping carts, a coffin — into 1-kilogram pieces, which he washes down with mineral oil and plenty of water.

In 1978 he started eating a small plane, a Cessna 150. He finished it in 1980.

| Oddities

Petroleum V. Nasby on “The Woman Question”

  • From the begining woman has occupied a dependent position, and has been only what man has made her. The Turks, logical fellows, denied her a soul, and made of her an object of barter and sale; the American Indians made of her a beast of burden. In America, since we extended the area of civilization by butchering the Indians, we have copied both.
  • The inferiority of the sex is easy of demonstration. It has been said that the mother forms the character of the man so long, that the proposition has become axiomatic. If this be true, we can crush those who prate of the equality of women, by holding up to the gaze of the world the inferior men she has produced. Look at the Congress of the United States.
  • My friend is learned. She has a tolerable knowledge of Greek, is an excellent Latin scholar, and as she has read the Constitution of the United States, she excels in political lore the majority of our representatives in Congress. But nevertheless I protest against her voting for several reasons:
    1. She cannot sing bass! Her voice, as Dr. Bushnell justly observes in his blessed book, is pitched higher than the male voice, which indicates feminine weakness of mind.
    2. Her form is graceful rather than strong.
    3. She delights in millinery goods.
    4. She can’t grow whiskers.

— Satirical lyceum speaker Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, “The Struggles of a Conservative with the Woman Question,” 1868

| History · Society

Pareidolia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Canadiandollar_devilshead.gif

Pareidolia is the experience of “seeing” something in a stimulus that’s simply vague and random.

You’ve felt it if you’ve ever seen images of animals or faces in clouds, or the man in the moon, or heard messages when records are played in reverse. It’s the basis for the Rorschach inkblot test.

This is a portrait of Elizabeth II as it appeared on the 1954 series Canadian dollar bill. So many people thought they saw the face of the devil in the queen’s hair that the bills were eventually withdrawn from circulation.

There’s nothing there — the portrait was adapted from a photograph.

| Oddities

A Lifetime’s Eating

“A French statistician has just ascertained that a human being of either sex who is a moderate eater and who lives to be 70 years old consumes during his life a quantity of food which would fill twenty ordinary railway baggage cars. A good eater, however, may require as many as thirty.”

— Barkham Burroughs’ Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889

| Trivia

Clerihews

A clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. They’re named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented them, and they get pretty erudite, for some reason:

Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison’s dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

The world’s densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:

To the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker

Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noël
Coward,
Howard?

| Humor · Poems

Sheep Rising

A tremendous blizzard in January 1978 buried a flock of sheep under a snowdrift in Sutherland, Highland, Scotland.

Weeks later, after digging out 16 dead sheep, Alex Maclellan found one ewe still alive. Its hot breath had created air holes in the snow, and it had gnawed its own wool for protein.

It had survived that way for 50 days.

| Oddities

A Tennessee Parthenon

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Parthenonnashville1.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Nashville’s Centennial Park contains a full-scale replica of the Parthenon.

Like the original in Athens, it’s “more perfect than perfect”: To counter optical effects, the columns swell slightly as they rise, and the platform on which they stand curves slightly upward. So the temple looks even more symmetrical than it actually is.

| Art · Science & Math