From a distance, Dr. Evermor's "park" in Wisconsin looks like a junk yardfull of twisted metals and rusted machines, but it houses one of the coolest sculptures ever: Forevertron. Standing at 120 feet wide, 60 feet deep, 50-foot tall, and weighing 320 ton, this behemoth of an artwork is billed as the world's largest scrap metal sculpture.
All components of Forevertron are salvaged from old bits and pieces of machineries between 50 to 100 years old, and are welded and bolted together for stability. Its components include a pair of bipolar electrical dynamos constructed by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century and a decontamination chamber from the Apollo space mission. The top of the sculpture is a copper-clad glass ball, meant to be Dr. Evermor's space capsule!
Another picture, showing the scale of Forevertron. Image: LiveALittle.org [Flickr]
Close-up photo of the Forevertron. Image: florador [Flickr]
Dr. Evermor is actually artist Tom Every, 70, who used to be an industrial wrecking and salvage expert. He spent decades collecting scrapped machines and other mechanical ephemera. In 1983, Every retired from his business, renamed himself Dr. Evermor and began to build Forevertron and other whimsical scrap metal structures.
Ever the prankster, Every explained the story of Dr. Evermor as such:
As Every tells the story of Evermor: "When he was a child, Dr. Evermor witnessed a massive electrical storm with his father, a Presbyterian minister. Asked where lightning came from, his father told Evermor that such awesome power could come only from God. From that day on, Evermor dedicated his life to constructing an antigravity machine and spacecraft that would catapult him from the phoniness of this world to the ultimate truth and power of the next.
"Dr. Evermor believes that if he can ever figure out a way to combine magnetic force and electrical energy, he can propel himself through the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam," Every said. "That glass ball inside the copper egg is his space ship. There's also an antigravity machine (made from an early X-ray machine), a teahouse for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to observe the event, a telescope for bystanders to watch as Evermor flies off to his meeting with God, and a listening machine that will transmit Evermor's message back to Earth when he arrives at his ultimate destination." (Source: Wired)
Also a big attraction at Dr. Evermor's Art Park is the Bird Band, which consists of 70 sculptures, some of which can actually play music:
Does the peacock "toots" when it farts? Image: hartichoked [Flickr]
Let's take a virtual tour of the other fantastic sculptures by Dr. Evermor:
The Overlord Control at Dr. Evermor's Art Park. Image: florador [Flickr]
The Juicer Bug, a giant spider. Image: florador [Flickr]
Even the popcorn stand is fantastic! Image: starchy [Flickr]
Don't even think of stealing these sculptures - they've got big guns at the park! Image: starchy [Flickr]
And no sculpture park is complete without cats! Image: florador [Flickr]
If you ever find yourself on Highway 12 in North Freedom, Baraboo, near Devil's Lake, Wisconsin, it's worth to stop and take a look at Dr. Evermor's Art Park.
Here’s the story of a pokey little horse who has won the hearts of Japanese racing fans … by losing every race she enters.
STEED WITHOUT SPEED
In the summer of 2003, the owners of a struggling track in Kochi, Japan, were looking for a way to keep from going under. Someone noticed that one of the horses competing in an upcoming race, an eight-year-old named Haru-urara (“Glorious spring”), was just a few races away from losing her 100th race in a row - why not try to get some publicity out of it? They got a local newspaper to do a story on Haru-urara, and the national press picked it up.
Until then she’d been just another unknown loser, but Haru-urara turned out to be just the right horse at just the right time: Japan had been on a losing streak of its own - the economy had been in bad shape for more than a decade and unemployment was high - and the losing horse that kept on trying was an inspiration to Japanese workers worried about their own economic futures. Attendance at the race track soared from an average of 1,600 fans per day to 5,000 on Haru-urara’s 100th race (she lost.) Thirteen thousand showed up on her 106th. Japan’s top jockey rod her … and she lost again.
NEVER GIVE UP
Haru-urara has become the most famous horse in Japan. Fans expect her to lose but bet on her anyway, just to get a ticket with her name on it - it’s considered good luck. So many people place bets on her, in fact, that she’s usually favored to win, even though everyone knows she will lose. Like a pro athlete, she endorses products (she races with a pink Hello Kitty riding mask), appears in beer commercials, has her own line of merchandise, and has been the subject of both a pop song and a major motion picture.
Best of all, she has been saved from the fate of many losing horses - the slaughterhouse. Her trainer, Dai Muneishi, has arranged for her to retire to a farm on the northern island of Hokkaido. “I don’t really know why she’s so popular,” Muneishi says, “but I guess the biggest reason is that the sight of her running with all her heart gives comfort to people’s hearts.”
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers' Institute. The 17th book in this the Bathroom Reader series is filled to the brim with facts, fun, and fascination, including articles about the Origin of Kung Fu, How to Kill a Zombie, Women in Space and more! Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
You've watched them work, you've heard them speak - but you've probably never heard their names. They're the actors inside the gorilla suits, the voices of talking animals, etc. We think they deserve a little credit.
The Voice of E.T.
E.T.'s voice was created by combining the voices of three people, a sea otter, and a dog. But the person who spoke the most famous lines - "E.T. phone home" and "Be good" - was Patricia A. Welsh, a former radio soap opera star who'd only been involved in one other movie (Waterloo, with Robert Taylor, in 1940).
By contract, she was forbidden to say her lines (which are copyrighted) even casually in a conversation; Steven Spielberg said he "didn't want kids to get confused about E.T.'s image." Her name isn't even listed in the credits.
Darth Vader
David Prowse [wiki | official site] is a 6'6", 226-pound former heavyweight wrestling champion. George Lucas saw him in A Clockwork Orange and offered him his choice between two parts - Chewbacca or Vader. Prowse chose Vader because he didn't like the idea of going around in a "gorilla suit" for six months.
James Earl Jones (Darth Vader's voice), and David Prowse never met.
The "Lost in Space" Robot
Bob May, a stuntman, had a few small parts in a TV series called "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." The producer, Irwin Allen, told May he was the right size for a part in a new TV series and asked if he'd be interested. May said yes; Allen said: "Fine, you have the part, go try on the robot costume."
Cast members goofed on May a lot. One time they locked him in the robot suit and left him there during a lunch break. He tried yelling, but no one was around .. So he had a cigarette. Irwin Allen wandered in, saw smoke coming from the robot and thought it was burning up. He went to get a fire extinguisher while May yelled from inside the suit. Later, Allen decided he liked the effect and had May smoke a cigar in the suit for a story about the robot burning out. (Image: Lostinspacerobot.com)
Mister Ed's Voice
When "Mister Ed" [wiki] debuted in 1960, the horse's voice was credited to "an actor who prefers to remain nameless."
TV Guide sent a reporter to the studio to figure out who it was. The reporter found a parking space on the "Mister Ed" set assigned to an old 1930s movie cowboy named Alan "Rocky" Lane.
Lane admitted it was his voice (he'd been too embarrassed to let people know.) He dubbed Ed's voice off-camera, while the horse was "mouthing the words." A nylon bit concealed in Ed's mouse made him move his lips.
R2-D2
Kenny Baker [wiki | official site], 3'8" tall, was hired simply because he fit into the robot suit. "They made R2-D2 small because Carrie and Mark were small … My agent sent me down. They looked at me and said, "He'll do!"
"I thought it was a load of rubbish at first. Then I though, "Well, Alec Guinness is in it; he must know what's going on."
The Voice of the Demon in The Exorcist
Mercedes McCambridge [wiki], an Academy Award-winning actress, was a Catholic. So when she was offered the role, she was uncertain about whether to take it. She consulted Father Walter Hartke at Catholic University, and he approved.
In the film, the demon's voice is heard as Linda Blair vomits green gunk. According to one report : "A tube was glued to each side of Blair's face and covered with makeup. Two men knelt on each side of Blair holding a syringe filled with the green stuff, ready to shoot on cue."
"McCambridge had to coordinate her sound effects with the action. A prop man lined up a row of Dixie cups in front of her containing apple pieces soaking in water, and some containing whole boiled eggs. McCambridge held the soft apple chunks in her jaws as she swallowed a boiled egg. On cue, in precise coordination with the screen action, she flexed her diaphragm and spewed everything on the microphone… "It was hard," she said. "I sometimes had to lie down after those scenes."
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
The Song: "I Put a Spell on You" (1956)
The Story: Hawkins' signature tune was originally intended as a ballad, but it came out as the haunted howling of a jilted lover.
Listeners may have guessed (correctly) that the singer had been drinking when he laid down the vocals, and according to Hawkins, "Every member of the band was drunk." Even the recording engineer and the A&R man, Arnold Maxin, was plastered. It was Maxin who effectively changed the song from a torch song to a frenzied rant by supplying the band with several cases of Italian Swiss Colony Muscatel.
"We partied and we partied," Jay recalled, "and somewhere along the road I blanked out. When he regained consciousness, he had a hit record on his hands but no recollection of how he made it.
The Tornados
The Song: "Telstar" (1962)
The Story: This landmark recording featured the very first use of a synthesizer and was one of the bestselling musical instrumentals of all time. The song was recorded in a makeshift studio in producer Joe Meek's apartment: the mixing board was in the living room; the musician performed in the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen.
Meek came up with the tune, but couldn't read or write music, so he hummed the melody on demo tapes and then played it back to the band. The fact that they were able to discern any tune at all from the tone-deaf Meek's fractured, off-key humming is a testament to their musical talent.
Bad luck: The song became a huge #1 hit, but a French film composer sued Meek for plagiarism. Meek lost the suit, which cost him millions of dollars in lost royalties.
Serge Gainsbourg
The Song: "Je T'Aime … Moi Non Plus (I Love You … Nor Do I)" (1969)
The Story: There were several "heavy breathing" songs during the sixties, but none more notorious than this one. Originally written as a love song to sex kitten Brigitte Bardot, Serge rerecorded it in 1969 with his new lover, actress Jane Birkin. It features Birkin panting and moaning, "Je t'aime, oui je t'aime" ("I love you, yes I love you!"), and Serge reciting unromantic lyrics like, "Between your kidneys, I come and go."
Moral authorities were outraged; the Pope even excommunicated the record executive who'd released it in Italy. But despite being banned everywhere, the single was a huge international hit. In the United States, the vocals were completely erased and it was issued as an instrumental
The Ramones
The Song: "Blitzkrieg Bop" (1976)
The Story: Sometimes you don't need to be on the record charts to have a hit. This early punk-rock anthem is played during almost every pro football, baseball, and basketball game. Sports fan shout out its chorus of "Hey ho, let's go!" as a rallying cry.
But most stadium spectators probably don't realize that the band originally wrote the song as a celebration of gang rumbles, but with lyrics like "Shoot ‘em in the back now," it fits right into today's professional sports scene.
Patsy Cline
The Song: "I Fall to Pieces" (1961)
The Story: Few singers conveyed emotion the way Cline did, and this anguished ode to the pain of an ended love affair sounded like she'd torn her own heart out during the recording session.
Truth was, she hated the tune and didn't want anything to do with it, but her record label was desperate for a hit and tricked her into believing she would be dropped if she didn't record it. It became her first #1 single and stayed on the charts for an amazing 39 weeks.
Oddly enough, Cline found out it was a hit after she'd literally fallen to pieces herself. Songwriter Hank Cochran recalls, "Patsy had been in a bad car wreck. It almost killed her. She was in the hospital with her head wrapped with bandages. I told her, ‘You got yourself a pop hit, girl.' I think she thought I was just fooling around. When she finally got good enough to look at the numbers, she just laid back and said, ‘Damn!'"
Beck
The Song: "Loser"
The Story: One day, Beck was fooling around at producer Karl Stephenson's house. Beck started playing slide guitar, and Stephenson began recording. As Stephenson added a Public Enemy-style beat and a sample from Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," Beck attempted to freestyle rap - something he had never done before.
Frustrated by his inability to rap, Beck began criticizing his own performance: "Soy un perdedor") ("I'm a loser" in Spanish). Beck wanted to scrap it, but Stephenson thought it was catchy. Stephenson was right - "Loser" made Beck a star.
David Bowie
The Song: "Fame"
The Story: In 1975, as Bowie and his band were playing around in the studio with a riff that guitarist Carlos Alomar had come up with, former Beatle John Lennon dropped in. When they played the riff for Lennon, he immediately picked up a guitar, walked to the corner of the room and started playing along muttering to himself, "Aim … aim!" When he said, "Fame!" the song started to come together. Bowie ran off to write some lyrics while the band worked out the music. Bowie gave writing credit to Lennon, saying: "It wouldn't have happened if John hadn't been there."
The Byrds
The Song: "The Ballad of Easy Rider"
The Story: In an effort to convince Bob Dylan to write the theme song for Easy Rider, Peter Fonda gave him a private screening of the movie. Dylan didn't like the movie and wouldn't write the song. But he scribbled the words "The river flows, it flows to the sea, wherever the river flows, that's where I want to be" on a napkin and told Fonda: "Give this to McGuinn," referring to Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.
Fonda gave McGuinn the napkin, and McGuinn immediately finished the song. But when Dylan learned that he had gotten songwriting credit, he called McGuinn and chewed him out, saying he didn't want to be associated with it in any way. Dylan co-wrote the song, but McGuinn got all the credit.
Aerosmith
The Song: "Walk This Way"
The Story: Guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton were exhausted from rehearsing the new riff they had written, so they took a break to see a movie - Young Frankenstein. Says Hamilton, "There's that part in the movie where Igor says ‘Walk this way,' and the other guy walks the same way with the hump and everything. We thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen." After the movie, they told singer Steven Tyler that the name of the song had to be "Walk This Way." Tyler rushed out and scribbled the lyrics to the song on the walls of the studio's stairway, and the band recorded the song right then.
Darlene Love / The Crystals
The Song: "He's a Rebel"
The Story: Phil Spector wanted to record "He's a Rebel," but the publisher told him it was taken - another producer, Snuff Garrett was preparing to record it with singer Vikki Carr. Spector ran out in a panic and dragged vocalist Darlene Love and a bunch of musicians into the studio to cut the song.
That evening, Garrett was preparing to record the song when his studio guitarist walked in. He glanced at the music and exclaimed, "Hey, man, I just played this!" Garrett asked "Where?" "In Studio C," the guiatarist replied. By the time Garrett got to the studio to see what was going on, Spector had already put the finishing touches on his version - the version that became the hit.
The Rolling Stones
The Song: "Jumpin' Jack Flash"
The Story: One rainy winter morning, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in Richards' living room when Jagger suddenly jumped up, frightened by a stomping noise. Richards explained, "Oh, that's just Jack, the gardener. That's jumpin' Jack." The two laughed and Richards began fooling around on the guitar, singing, "Jumpin' Jack." Inspired by the lightning, Jagger added "Flash!"
The article above, titled What the #!&%?, is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
THE STYLE: Originally sported by warriors of various Native American tribes, the hairstyle was adopted by a squad of U.S. Army's bad-to-the-bone 101st Airborne Division during World War II, before being commandeered by the punk rockers in the 1970s.
THE STORY: Up until a few years ago, no one would have questioned the mohawk's [wiki] roots. However, in 2003, an Irish peat harvester made a discovery that would change the hairstyle's history forever - a 2,300-year-old corpse, remarkably well preserved by the unique chemistry of a peat bog, sporting a bonafide 'hawk.
THE SHOCKER: The ancient Irish punker, dubbed Clonycavan Man [wiki], had gel in his hair, which archaeologists determined was made from vegetable oil mixed with resin from southwestern France or Spain. Imported hair product? Today, scientists are still working hard to determine whether Clony was a prehistoric punker or just an Iron Age metrosexual.
2. Pompadours
Elvis's pompadour
Madame de Pompadour
THE STYLE: If the word brings to mind images of pink Cadillacs and bouffant 'dos, you're on the right track. But in the same way America borrowed rock 'n' roll from the blues and method acting from the Russians, the key to those 1950s locks lies in 18th-century France.
THE STORY: The Marquise de Pompadour [wiki] was King Louis XV's über-fashionable mistress, and her elaborately teased, upswept hair was imitated by high-society women throughout the country. While 20th-century pompadours were considerably tinier than those of its namesake's, the modern version claims one definitive advantage: technology. Where today's science has yielded hair wax, putty, glue, and paste to cement them into place, pomps of yore depended on beef tallow, bear grease, and other artery-cloggers.
THE SHOCKER: Not surprisingly, slathering one's hair with animal remains tended to attract animals (insects and other nasties), which occasionally turned the original pompadour [wiki] into, quite literally, a rats' nest.
3. Beehives
Marie Antoinette
B-52 "Balls Eight" Stratofortress
Marge Simpson
THE STYLE: Speaking of rats' nests (and the Marquise de Pompadour, for that matter), the beehive [wiki] of the 1960s is itself a 200-year throwback to the 1760s Big Hair Days.
THE STORY: There's more to those 18th-century bouffant styles than meets the eye. Whereas the modern beehive is nicknamed "the B-52" for its uncanny resemblance to the B-52 bomber's distinctive nose, Marie Antoinette and her gal pals stowed actual warships in their hair - or at least miniature replicas of them.
THE SHOCKER: Like precursors to the Cracker Jack box, these 18th-century 'dos served as treasure troves, housing exotic prizes like tiny caged birds, cupid dolls, and other bulky curios. Of course, not every hairdo was a winner. When millions of hungry peasants revolutionized France, the over-the-top hairstyle quickly fell out of fashion - landing in that little basket just below the guillotine.
4. Queues
Nurhaci, the Manchu emperor who brought the queue to China
A queue wrapped around the head
THE STYLE: When the Manchu invaded China in the 17th century, they brought over a killer fashion trend - killer as in, adopt it or else.
THE STORY: The Manchu sported the queue, a shaved-in-front, pony-tail-in-the-back haircut, and forced the Han Chinese to do the same. The effect? Quite a lot of protest.
THE SHOCKER: While much of China eventually submitted to the do-or-die trend, many thousands bravely chose to keep their hair - and lose their heads. So what was the big deal with getting a little shave? Aside from the queue not being such as flattering cut (even compared to, say, the mullet), it also happened to be against the religion of millions of long-haired Confucian Chinese, who believe that one's skin and hair are sacred.
5. Mullets
THE STYLE: A fad gone bad or the most reviled haircut in history? Popularized by David Bowie and others during the glam 'ol days of the 1970s, the mullet [wiki] was adopted (and expanded voluminously upon) in the 1980s by hard rockers and their headbanging army of fans. As hair metal gave way to grunge and alternative music in the early 1990s, a term was coined to describe those who still clung to the headbangers' signature cut - "mullet heads."
THE STORY: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which inducted "mullet" into its venerable lexicon in 2001, the word (as it refers to the hairstyle) was "apparently coined, and certainly popularized, by U.S. hi-hop group the Beastie Boys" in their 1995 song "Mullet Head."
THE SHOCKER: Since making it into the OED, ridicule of the bemulletted has grown increasingly vocal and, judging from a random sampling of anti-mullet Web sites, rather virulent. The mullet is one haircut Americans love to hate - and give funny names to. To list a few: The Tennessee Top Hat, The Kentucky Waterfall, and The Camaro Crash Helmet. Our personal favorite, however, is The Missouri Compromise, which manages to reference both the haircut's "business in front, party in the back" policy, as well as the shameful Compromise of 1820, which regulated slavery in developing U.S. territories.
The article above appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the March - April 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.
Origin: Actually refers to tree stumps. “Pioneers built their houses and barns out of logs … and they frequently swapped work with one another in clearing new ground. Some frontiersmen would brag about their ability to pull up big stumps, but it wasn’t unusual for the boaster to suffer defeat with a stubborn stump.” (From I’ve Got Goose Pimples, by Marvin Vanoni)
PAINT THE TOWN RED
Meaning: Spend a wild night out, usually involving drinking
Origin: “This colorful term … probably originated on the frontier. In the nineteenth century the section of town where brothels and saloons were located was known as the ‘red light district.’ So a group of lusty cowhands out for a night on the town might very well take it into their heads to make the whole town red.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins Vol. 3, by William and Mary Morris)
STAVE OFF
Meaning: Keep something away, albeit temporarily
Origin: “A stave is a stick of wood, from the plural of staff, staves. In the early seventeenth century staves were used in the ‘sport’ of bull-baiting, where dogs were set against bulls. [If] the dogs got a bull down, the bull’s owner often tried to save him for another fight by driving the dogs off with a stave.” (From Animal Crackers, by Robert Hendrickson)
WING IT
Meaning: Do something with little or no preparation
Origin: “Originally comes from the theater. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it refers to the hurried study of the role in the wings of the theater.” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)
PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAP
Meaning: Carefully and thoughtfully consider something
Origin: In previous centuries, it was customary for judges to put a cap on before sentencing criminals. Because judges were respected thinkers, it was referred to as a “thinking cap” (From Gordon’s Book of Familiar Phrases)
PLAY FAST AND LOOSE
Meaning: Stretch the truth or meaning of words or rules, deceive or trifle with someone
Origin: This term dates from the 16th century. It comes from a game called “fast and loose,” which was played at fairs. Operators rolled up a strap and left a loop hanging over the edge of a table. To win, a player had to catch the loop with a stick before the strap was unrolled. But they never won. Cheating operators rolled it up in such a way that the feat was impossible. (From Have a Nice Day – No Problem! by Christine Ammer)
BOTCH A JOB
Meaning: Repair badly
Origin: “In old England, bodgers were peasant chairmakers … They produced, by traditional handicraft methods, simple and serviceable objects. When chairmaking was transformed into high art, the bodgers was correspondingly downgraded to ‘bodge’ or ‘botch,’” which came to mean an item or service of poor quality. (From To Coin a Phrase, by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith)
IN HOCK
Meaning: Broke; have all of your belongings in a pawn shop
Origin: Comes from the Old West. In a common gambling card game called “faro,” “the last card [to be played] was called the hocketty card. It was said to be in hocketty or in hock. When a player bet on a card that ended up in hock he was himself in hock, at risk of losing his bets.” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)
TAKE ANOTHER TACK
Meaning: Try a different strategy
Origin: “Sailing ships could not move directly into the wind but had to tack – zigzag back and forth with the wind first on one side, then on the other. If a skipper approaching harbor found that his vessel couldn’t make the harbor mouth on the starboard tack, he was obviously on the wrong tack, and would have to take the other (port) tack.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)
GOT OFF (OR GO) “SCOT-FREE”
Meaning: Escape punishment
Origin: “In the thirteenth century, scot was the word for money you would pay at a tavern for food and drink, or when they passed the hat to pay the entertainer. Later, it came to mean a local tax that paid the sheriff’s expenses. To go scot-free literally meant to be exempted from paying this tax.” (From How Does Olive Oil Lose its Virginity?, by Bruce Tindall and Mark Watson)
SLUSH FUND
Meaning: A hidden cache of money used for illegal or corrupt political purposes
Origin: “Derived from Scandinavian words meaning ‘slops,’ this phrase is derived from the nineteenth-century shipboard practice of boiling up large pots of pork and other fatty meats. The fat that rose to the top of the kettles was stored in vats and then sold to soap and candle makers. The money received from the sale of the ‘slush’ was used for the crew’s comfort and entertainment.” (From Eatioms, by John D. Jacobson)
TAKE SOMEONE DOWN A PEG
Meaning: Humble someone who is self-important and conceited
Origin: “The expression probably originally referred to a ship’s flags. These were raised or lowered by pegs – the higher the position of the flags, the greater the honor. So to take someone down a peg came to mean to lower the esteem in which that person is held.” (From Get to the Roots, by Martin Manser)
BUY A PIG IN A POKE
Meaning: Buying something sight unseen
Origin: “The poke was a small bag (the words pouch and pocket derive from the same roots), and the pig was a small pig. As related in Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1580), the game was to put a cat in the poke and try to palm it off in the market as a pig, persuading the buyer that it would be best not to open the poke because the pig might get away.” (From The Dictionary of Cliches, by James Rogers)
TOUCH AND GO
Meaning: A risky, precarious situation
Origin: “Dates back to the days of stagecoaches, whose drivers were often intensely competitive, seeking to charge past one another, on narrow roads, at grave danger to life and limb. If the vehicle’s wheels became entangled, both would be wrecked; if they were lucky, the wheels would only touch and the coaches could still go.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)
KNOCK OFF WORK
Meaning: Leave work for the day
Origin: “[This phrase] originated in the days of slave galleys. To keep the oarsmen rowing in unison, a drummer beat time rhythmically on a block of wood. When it was time to rest or change shifts, he would give a special knock, signifying that they could knock off.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins Vol.2, by William and Mary Morris)
DOES THAT RING ANY BELLS?
Meaning: Does that sound familiar?
Origin: “Old-fashioned carnivals and amusement parks featured shooting galleries, in which patrons were invited to test their marksmanship by shooting at a target – often with a bell at the center: if something was right on target, it rang the bell. Similarly, to say that something ‘doesn’t ring a bells’ means that it doesn’t strike any ‘target’ (evoke any response) in your mind.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)
BEAT THE RAP
Meaning: Avoid punishment for wrongdoing
Origin: “It is likely that this slang Americanism originated in another expression, take the rap, in which rap is slang for ‘punishment,’ facetiously, from a ‘rap on the knuckles.’ One who takes the rap for someone else stands in for the other’s punishment. Beat the rap ... often carries with it the connotation that the miscreant was actually guilty, though acquitted” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)
BE ABOVEBOARD
Meaning: Be honest
Origin: Comes from card playing. “Board is an old word for table.” To drop your hands below the table could, of course, be interpreted as trying to cheat – by swapping cards, for example. “But if all play was above board this was impossible” (From To Coin a Phrase, by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith)
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers' Institute. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
RUSSIA (ALSO OUTER SPACE): In 1957, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow became the first dog in space& - proving that dogs always can be tricked into going for a ride, no matter how far. The mission also proved that yes, dogs can live in space, and yes, dogs can die in space... especially when they don't have any food or oxygen. Laika [wiki] (known to Americans as Muttnik) was cremated upon reentry 163 days after launch.
First Lady Grace Coolidge with her pet raccoon Rebecca at the White House Easter Egg Roll on April 18, 1927 (Image Credit: Herbert E. French, Library of Congress)
WASHINGTON, D.C.: The White House saw raccoons roaming the halls under Calvin Coolidge; Teddy Roosevelt's son's pony took a ride in a White House elevator; Benjamin Harrison's presidential goat, Old Whiskers, escaped and had to be chased down Pennsylvania Avenue; and Warren Harding's Airedale terrier sat in on cabinet meetings. Apparently, it's not easy to find human friends when you're the president. Harry Truman summed it up: "If you want to find a friend in Washington," he once said, "get a dog."
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: In the 1960s and '70s Mao Zedong decided that dogs (even being raised as livestock) were filthy manifestations of bourgeois decadence and had them all killed, proving once again that anyone carrying pictures of Chairman Mao ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow. But now, 30 years later, the Chinese taboo on pets is slowly lifting. In a country where Big Brother says you can only have one child, these days he'll let you have several dogs
GERMANY: Even Hitler had a dog. Blondi [wiki] was a German (surprise!) shepherd who slept by Hitler's bed every night in his Berlin bunker and probably gave an evil man pure and unconditional love. In return for this service, Hitler let her have a cyanide tablet right before he and Eva Braun ate their own.
Long John Silver by Monro S. Orr (1934)
THE HIGH SEAS: Animals aboard pirate ships may have been well loved, but hard life on the high seas trumps love. Whole swaths of the Earth's oceans were dubbed Horse Latitudes, where winds stopped blowing and horses were slaughtered and consumed. As for parrots, they were kept in cages and used to bribe port officials in the 18th century because their feathers carried considerable value. Oh, and the bird on Long John Silver's shoulder? It was an invention of author Robert Louis Stevenson and would probably have created an unacceptable mess for an actual swashbuckler.
Burmese Python in Florida's Everglades National Park (Image Credit: Buzzle.com)
THE EVERGLADES: Pet Burmese pythons have long been "set free" in Florida's Everglades after reaching unmanageable lengths, and the python population in the Everglades now seems to be self-sustaining. If you fear pythons (and who doesn't?), the man to ask for intercession is Saint Patrick. The patron saint of Ireland is also the man some believe responsible for having thus far kept Ireland a snake-free isle.
From mental_floss' book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Don't forget to visit mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog!
1942: Tweety Forced to Wear Clothes Tweety Bird first appears in "A Tale of Two Kitties." Animator Bob Clampett originally draws him without feathers but the Hays Office censorship bureau thinks the plucked bird is just a little too naked. So Clampett covers Tweety's titillating flesh with yellow plumage. (Note: Clampett doesn't let this pass quietly, though. In the episode, a cat yells to his partner, "Give me the bird!" To which the other cat responds, "If the Hays Office would let me, I'd give him the bird, all right!")
1952: Lucy Gets Knocked Up Despite Lucille Ball's pregnancy during an entire season of I Love Lucy, the actual word "pregnant" isn't allowed on air. Instead, the show uses phrases that seem equally informative but (somehow) less fraught with sin, such as "with child," "having a baby," and "expecting."
1956: Elvis' Pelvis Shoved Off Screen Elvis' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show is seen by 60 million people (about 80 percent of America's TV owners at the time). His hips, however, aren't so lucky. After his cover of Little Richard's "Ready Teddy" - complete with trademark gyrations - the camera switches to a close-up of his face as not to over-stimulate the American public. By the time he appears on the show for the third time (in January 1957), he's only shown from the waist up.
1959: Advertisers Rewrite History On the dramatic anthology series Playhouse 90, an episode titled "Judgment at Nuremberg" has all references to gas chambers eliminated from its re-enactment of the Nazi trials. This is done at the behest of the show's slightly sensitive sponsor, the American Gas Association.
1964-1966: Censors Throw Down in Navel Wars Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island, Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, and Gidget are all barred from baring their navels. Actress Mariette Hartley receives the same treatment in a 1966 episode of Star Trek, but the show's director, Gene Roddenberry, gets his revenge in 1973. He recasts Ms. Hartley in the pilot for his new show, Genesis II, and gives her two belly buttons.
1967: Actors Successfully Hide Pot on Set It's a tough year for network censors struggling to keep up with the hippie culture's profusion of drug slang. Ed Sullivan requests that the Doors change the lyric "Girl, we couldn't get much higher," since it sounds suspiciously like a drug reference. Meanwhile, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour has a recurring skit about Goldie, a housewife with her own talk show called Share a Little Tea with Goldie. The skit constantly plays on the tea/marijuana connection, which goes straight over the censors' heads. Goldie's opening lines include "Hi[gh]! ... And glad of it!"
1970: Studios Learn to Cope with Cannibalism Monty Python's Flying Circus airs "The Undertaker Sketch," in which an undertaker convinces a man that the best way to dispose of his deceased mother is to eat her (with French fries, broccoli, and horseradish sauce). Bizarrely, the BBC allows this to be shown, but only if the sketch ends with the studio audience storming the stage in disgust.
1979: Miss Piggy's Ultimate Rejection The Muppet Show is banned from TV in Saudi Arabia, due to Miss Piggy's, well, pig-ness. (The Prophet Muhammad declared the flesh of swine "an abomination.") Merchandise bearing her likeness is confiscated from shops and destroyed.
2004: Nipples by the Number We know it's a little obvious to mention Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during Super Bowl XXXVIII, but it's worth recapping a few stats:
» Amount of time the nipple spent on-air: 1.01 seconds (we actually timed it) » FCC fines levied on CBS: $550,000 » Cost to NFL (in sponsor refunds): $10 million » Ranking among 2004 Internet searchers: 1 » Ranking in TiVo's "most rewound moments": 1 » Number of American complaints to the network: more than 500,000 » Number of Canadian complaints: about 50
2006: South Park Draws Up Controversy Comedy Central prevents South Park from using the image of the Prophet Muhammad in the episode "Cartoon Wars." However, for the benefit of freeze-frame geeks everywhere, Trey Parker and Matt Stone sneak a tiny Muhammad into the opening credits in a shot that shows every resident of the town.
Bonus: The Turbulent Life of the TV Toilet
1957: Before it airs, CBS yanks the pilot episode of Leave It To Beaver because of its plot: Wally and the Beav mail-order a baby alligator and are forced to hide it in the tank of the family's toilet. CBS finally decides the show can air, but only if all shots of the toilet seat are excised. The toilet tank is left unharmed, marking the first time a toilet (or half of one, anyway) appears on TV.
1960: Host Jack Paar walks off the set of The Tonight Show in the middle of taping an episode. He would not return for a month. The reason? Censors cut a joke that used the phrase "water closet."
1971: A major breakthrough occurs as the toilet is finally allowed to perform its function. The first flush is heard, but not seen, on the first-season episode of All in the Family. TV's first flusher is, of course, Archie Bunker.
1973: Jack Paar's censors are proven right about the toilet's power over The Tonight Show audience. In the era of gasoline shortages, Johnny Carson jokes about an imminent shortage of toilet paper. Across the country, panicked viewers go on a hoarding spree, emptying store shelves and forcing Carson to publicly apologize the next night.
The article above, written by Ian Lendler (July-August 2007 issue - a really neat issue, guys!), is reprinted here with permission from mental_floss magazine.
For those who are tired of hearing their friends going ga-ga over the iPhone, but are too cheap to shell out $500 for a phone (or if you live in Vermont), I present to you something you can make for about $2 - behold, the iToid: the iPhone Altoids! From a distance, it looks quite like the real thing, so your co-workers may scoot over to your cubicle for a closer look. If they're disappointed that you don't have the real thing, there is a plus side to it: you can offer them an Altoid.
If the process isn't obvious to you, here's how to make it:
Step 1. Get Yourself a tin of Altoids Duh.
Step 2. Paint the red parts black. You can also use permanent markers, though I happen to have black paint.
Update 7/4/07: Apparently, licorice flavored altoids already comes in black, so you can skip this messy step.
Step 3. Print the iPhone Picture The dimensions of the iPhone are slightly different than that of an Altoids tin, but fear not: I've "right-sized" one for you.
Download the iPhone picture (JPEG | PNG formats) then print it and cut it out. (You may need to open it with Photoshop or Fireworks rather than printing it straight from the browser.)
Step 4. Glue and Affix Glue the printed paper onto your altoids tin, and voilà! You've got yourself an iPhone Altoids!
Step 5. Celebrate by Eating an Altoid Or two. Or three. Share with a friend and let them marvel at your creation.
Main plaza of Mayan ruins in Tikal, Guatemala (Image Credit: weisserstier [Flickr])
Jaguar Temple in Tikal (Image Credit: erushing [Flickr])
Mayan ruins at Calakmul, Mexico (Image Credit: von Kinder [Flickr])
We tend to think of the Dark Ages as a bleak time when King Arthur was caught in the grip of lusty princesses and clashing knights. But while Europeans were busy eating giant turkey legs and trying to act interested in converting pagans to Christianity, a great culture was flourishing in Southern Mexico and northern Central America. Between 200 B.C.E. and 900 C.E., the Mayan civilization was anything but dark. Kings and queens rules over a huge empire of cities, palaces, and temples adorned with fine art and steeped in gold and gems.
Its people were highly advanced, mastering disciplines as varied as astronomy, engineering, architecture, and urban planning.
Today, however, these once-great Mayan cities lie hidden under dense rainforest. To the average American, how this happened is a mystery. We say the Maya “disappeared” and blame it on alien invaders. But the Maya aren’t gone. Millions of them still live in Guatemala and Honduras, and thousands more come to the United States to eke out livings as migrant laborers. It didn’t take a supernatural force to put their civilization into decline, either. In fact, archaeologists now blame the fall of the Maya on deceptively simple flaws that could topple any culture - even ours.
RAIN DROPS AREN’T FALLING ON MY HEAD
These days, so few people live in the region once dominated by the Mayan empire that researchers believed there weren’t a lot of Maya living there in the past, either. But the landscape is deceptive. Decades of research reveal that the Maya had completely transformed the land on which they lived by turning jungles into a vast area of plains filled with cities, farms, and an ever-growing population. In fact, settlements around centers like Tikal reached population densities of up to 2,600 people per square mile. That’s more than half the population density of modern-day New York City.
The ancient ruins of Tikal, as captured by the IKONOS satellite (Image: Space Imaging, Inc.)
Archaeologists have even found evidence of a kind of Mayan urban sprawl. In the spans between large cities, they’ve uncovered thousands of house foundations connected by what were paved roads. Even more spectacular, recent satellite imagery from NASA shows that may areas where the Maya used limestone plaster as floor and wall coverings can still be seen in the colors of the rainforest trees.
As the Mayan population grew, however, the society became vulnerable to the limitations of their environment. They gobbled up the resources around them, but failed to develop new technologies that might have allowed them to adapt to changes in their natural surroundings. So when change finally did arrive in the form of drought, catastrophe wasn’t too far behind.
Archaeologist Richardson Gill blames the Mayan collapse on an extended period of drought that affected most of Mexico and Central America in the 9th century C.E. Of the more than 15 million Maya inhabiting the region at the time, many lived far from major rivers, so people relied on water collected in reservoirs during the rainy season. Of course, when climate changes caused these reserves to drop to dangerous levels, it became impossible to feed the huge Mayan population. In 2003, Gill’s theories received support following the analysis of mud from lake bottom in the Yucatan. Essentially, the find confirmed they spread of deforestation, soil erosion, and drought. Sadly, famine and thirst appear to have contributed to widespread death and disease, eventually driving people out of the Mayan heartland.
While widely accepted, this theory of the Mayan collapse still leaves a lingering question. Evidence shows that most ancient civilizations dealt successfully with drought at one time or another; so why weren’t the Maya able to cope? The answer, according to recent research, was war.
AN OPEN WAR POLICY
Mayan ruler Chaan Muan with prisoners from a raid for sacrifices and slavery - from the murals of Bonampak (Image Credit: Ancient Mexico)
At the same time the drought was taking hold, it appears the Mayan city-states had their resources and attention focused on something else - fighting. In a way, some evidence of this has always existed in the form of smashed monuments and burned palaces found in the region. In the early 20th century, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russian inspired a theory that rapid Mayan collapse was the result of a popular peasant revolt, fueled by the lavish lifestyles and oppressive rule of the theocratic Mayan kings. Mayan revolutionaries, rejecting religions hocus-pocus from rulers who claimed to be able to bring rain for crops while stuffing their houses and tombs with expensive artwork and jewels, overthrew their priest-kings and, in the process, ruined everything. It wasn’t a bad theory, but it seems that the rulers, not the people, deserve most of the blame.
In the wake of new research, it appears that Mayan cities were locked in something similar to the Cold War, only hotter. Hieroglyphs in the area reveal that two metropolitan “super-powers,” Tikal and Calakmul, were bitter rivals for centuries. Skirmishes between the kings of each city grew increasingly violent, prompting both dynasties to build alliances with other cities via raids, conquest, and royal coups. But, as more and more cities got involved, the warfare spread.
In 2002, a few more clues came to light after archaeologists discovered a stunning new set of hieroglyphic texts carved into the steps of a palace staircase at Dos Pilas (uncovered thanks to an earthquake that hit the region the previous summer). The texts told the surprising story of renegade princes from Tikal, who tried to create an empire of their own by waging a full-force attack on their home city with the help of neighboring allies. Unfortunately, their timing was poor. The invasion occurred during the height of the drought, and the result was pure devastation. Pyramids and temples were torn apart to build fortifications, and what few trees were left in the razed rainforest were cut down to build fences. Eventually, farmers had to retreat to the fast-growing weeds. The war destroyed the cities, leaving behind ruins and refugees. The land could no longer support the population due to the drought, and the government was too weak to do anything about it due to the war. Rather than to remain in the cities and face death, the people scattered, and the jungle eventually reclaimed the land.
NOT-SO-UNSOLVABLE MYSTERIES
In the end, it was neither laser beams nor a migration to Atlantis that destroyed the Maya, but a simple failure to plan. Leaders put the majority of their resources into warfare, while simultaneously forgetting that those resources weren’t infinite.
Then, when a severe but conquerable drought crisis appears, they were unable to cope. In his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond claims that the scenario is more common than you might think, and that it maybe responsible for the fall of many ancient cultures we deem “mysterious.” Environmental destruction and the depletion of natural resources create vulnerability, especially in the face of natural disasters. And just like the Maya, the ultimate fate is rarely disappearance or extinction, but usually a decline from opulence to poverty.
The article above, "Vanishing Act: Explaining the Mystery of the Maya" written by John W. Hoopes, is reprinted with permission from mental_floss magazine (March - April 2005 issue).
Sure, there's lots to consider in planning a wedding: dresses, cakes, bands, halls ... all of which can add up to a hefty bill for the parents of the bride (or, in some cultures, the groom). But perhaps those bellyaching about the substantial hit their bank account is about to take should pause for a moment to consider some of history's most ridiculously, outrageously off-the-wall weddings. Suddenly, dropping a few grand on a one-wear gown doesn't seem so bad, does it?
1. Attila the Hun and Ildico (453 CE)
Attila the Hun [wiki], perennial barbarian bad boy, was apparently also a perennial playboy. Leader of the Huns, Attila somehow also found time to marry 12 women and father an unknown number of children. Never able to quite get enough, Attila still might have wanted to hold off on the last wife. On his last wedding night, in 453 CE, the royalty of every nation under Hun dominion, from the Rhine to the Volga, were in attendance, and thousands of gallons of booze and whole herds of sheep were brought in to slake their appetites.
No ordinary nuptials, the drinking and feasting were to last for days, but on the morning after taking his 16-year-old bride to bed, the 50-something warlord was found dead. Whether his death was caused by poison, overdrinking, or just too much fun in the sack, the world will probably never know.
2. Margaret of York and Charles the Bold (1468)
Despite the protests of France's Louis XI, who was fearful of an alliance between the English and the Burgundians, Margaret of York [wiki] was engaged to Charles the Bold [wiki], aka the duke of Burgundy. And in spite of the king's objection, the crazy cats decided to go forth with said ceremony and party like it was 1469.
Extravagant even by the standards of European royal weddings, the blessed event was accompanied by a tournament in which the most famous knights in Europe bludgeoned one another for days. And Margaret's crown, covered in pearls and diamonds, was so valuable that it's now on display in the treasury of Aachen Cathedral.
Of course, the preceremony celebrations were equally grand. The nuptials themselves were preceded by parades through the streets of Bruges, a pageant reenacted every year during (coincidentally enough) the tourist season.
Sadly, Margaret's subsequent life was a little less like a fairy tale: she lived to see the death of her husband in battle (1477) against the French and the overthrow of both Burgundy as an independent duchy (1482) and of her own family across the Channel (1485).
3. Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly (1956)
Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly
Billed as "the wedding of the century," the union between the prince of Monaco [wiki] (whose family is actually descended from Genoese pirates) and the Hollywood starlet [wiki] was the talk of the civilized world for much of the mid-1950s.
Rainier gave his bride a 10-carat diamond ring, and his subjects gave their new princess diamond earrings and a necklace to match and, for no particular reason, a Rolls-Royce. Of course, the gown was no joke, either, as Grace's new dress was designed by an Oscar winner, Helen Rose.
The couple had two wedding ceremonies, a private civil ceremony in the Riviera principality's throne room and a public religious ceremony in Monaco Cathedral. Over 600 of the world's rich and famous attended the reception, including Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner.
Tragically, Princess Grace was killed in 1982 in a car accident. Interestingly, commemorative U.S. postage stamps were issued in her honor, but they gave her name only as "Grace Kelly." Why? Because U.S. laws bans the placement of foreign monarchs on its postage stamps.
4. Muhammad and Salama of Dubai (1981)
Things can be rough when you're constantly trying to "keep up with the Joneses," or the Hamids, as the case may be. Arab weddings are often such bank-breakers that Arab economists frequently bemoan the size and expense that have become culturally expected. But that didn't stop Rashid bin Sayid al-Maktoum, sheikh of Dubai, in planning his son Muhammad's 1981 wedding to Princess Salama. Lasting a mere seven days (seven!), the wedding was held in a stadium built expressly to host the festivities. Twenty thousand guests attended, and the bill came in at just over $44 million.
5. The Mittal Affair (2004)
In possibly the most luxurious wedding in history, Vanisha Mittal, the daughter of Anglo-Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal [wiki], married Amit Bhatia, an investment banker who literally cashed in. The wedding, held in June 2004 in a chateau in France, lasted six days and was reported to have cost over $90 million (yes, that's U.S. dollars). The guest roster included some of Bollywood's brightest stars and some of Europe's deepest pockets. Among the expenditures: $520,000 for a performance by pop diva Kylie Minogue, who performed for a half hour. That's almost $300 per second, a figure even more shocking when you factor in dollars per unit of talent. (Image Credit: BBC News)
Saparmyrat Ataýewiç Nyýazow or Turkmenbashi [wiki] (1940 - 2006)
After the USSR broke up in 1991, the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan became an independent nation but had no identity of its own. Enter Turkmenbashi.
BACKGROUND
Turkmenistan had been under the control of Russia for more than a quarter century when it was declared part of the Soviet Union in 1924. In 1991, after the fall of Communism and the USSR, the country found itself independent for the first time in a hundred years. The new president, Saparmurat Niyazov, was the obvious successor – he’d been the Communist Party’s puppet governor since 1985. But easing a country of five million people into a new era of self-sufficiency and autonomy was not the highest item on Niyazov’s agenda. He was more concerned that decades of Soviet control had left Turkmenistan with no national identity. So, in 1993, Niyazov took it upon himself to create the country in a new image: his own. First, he took the name Turkmenbashi (Leader of All Ethnic Turkmen) and declared himself President for Life. Since then, he’s undertaken scores of self-aggrandizing – and bizarre – measures to make Turkmenistan a very unique place:
› The airport in the capital city of Asgabat was renamed … Turkmenbashi.
› Dozens of streets and schools across the country are now called … Turkmenbashi.
› In 1998 a 670-pound meteorite landed in Turkmenistan. Scientist named it … Turkmenbashi.
› The name of the large port city Krasnovodsk was changed to … Turkmenbashi. › The New president also renamed the months. January is now called … Turkmenbashi. April is called Gurbansoltan edzhe, after his mother. (Bread, once called chorek, is now also called gurbansoltan edzhe.)
Turkmenbashi TV: All Turkmenbashi, All The Time. (Image Credit: jabsonwheels [Flickr]) › The image of Turkmenbashi’s face is used as the logo of all three state-run TV stations, and is legally required to appear on every clock and watch face as well as on every bottle of Turkmenbashi brand vodka.
But thankfully, the brandy is called Sekerde - oh wait, that's Turkmenbashi's photo! (Image Credit: tienshan [flickr])
› In 2001 Turkmenbashi wrote a book – a combination of poetry, revisionist history, and moral guidelines – called Ruhnama (Persian for “Book of the Soul”). It is now required to be prominently displayed in all bookstores and government offices, and next to the Koran in mosques. Memorization of the book is required to graduate from school and to get a state job or even a driver’s license. Schoolchildren spend one entire day every week reading it. Since all Soviet-era book have been banned, most Turkmen libraries have only the Ruhnama and other books written by Turkmenbashi. In 2006 Turkmenbashi made reading the Ruhnama a requirement for entry into heaven.
The giant Ruhnama, in oversize format for easy reading. (Image Credit: Begemot [Flickr])
› There’s a 30-foot Ruhnama in Ashgabat, not far from a 50-foot solid-gold statue of Turkmenbashi. Statue of Turkmenbashi on top of the Arch of Neutrality. The statue always rotate to face the sun (Image Credit: Christopher Herwig of Herwig Photo | Flickr)
More gold statue of Turkmenbashi (Image Credit: mrtoes [Flickr])
Yet another gold statue of Turkmenbashi (Image Credit: blogjam [Flickr])
› Not surprisingly, Turkmenbashi recently “won” the Magtymguly International Prize, honoring the best pro-Turkmen poetry, which is awarded by … Turkmenbashi himself.
MORE STRANGE ACTS OF TURKMENBASHI
› In 2004 Turkmenbashi banned newscasters from wearing make-up. Why? He said he couldn’t tell the male and female news readers apart and that made him uncomfortable.
› After he quit smoking in 1997, he banned smoking for everybody else, too (but only in public places).
› In 2006, to mark Turkmenistan’s independence day, Turkmenbashi gave each female resident a gift of 200,000 manat (about $38).
› He banned gold tooth caps and gold teeth, and suggested that tooth preservation could be more easily accomplished by chewing on bones. › In 2000 he ordered that a giant lake be created in the desert along with a huge forest of cedar trees, which, he said, would help to moderate Turkmenistan’s climate. › In 2004, he ordered that a giant ice palace be build in the middle of the same desert, the Karakum – the hottest location in central Asia. It will include a zoo with penguins.
Karakum Desert, future home of some very unlucky penguins (Image Credit: UTexas)
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers' Institute. The 19th book in this fan-favorite series contain such gems like The Greatest Plane that Never Was, Forgotten Robot Milestones, Ancient Beauty Secrets, and more. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
The following is reprinted from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: World of Odd.Here’s the story behind one of the most peculiar (and most popular) grave sites in the entire United States. More than 60 years after it was completed, it still attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year. The Davis Memorial in Hiawatha, Kansas (Image Credit: KansasExplorer [Flickr])
(Image Credit: John Charlton, Kansas Geological Survey)
FORBIDDEN LOVE
In the mid-1870s, a college student named John Davis was forced to drop out of Urania College in Kentucky after his parents died and he was unable to pay tuition. He became an itinerant laborer, taking work wherever he could find it, and in 1879 he signed on as a farmhand for Tom Hart, a wealthy landowner in tiny Hiawatha, Kansas. Davis was a good worker, but that didn’t count for much when the penniless lad fell in love with Sarah Hart, the boss’s daughter. When the two announced their plans to marry, Mr. and Mrs. Hart, furious that Sarah would marry so far beneath her station, disowned her.
MOVING UP
Ever heard the expression "living well is the best revenge"? John and Sarah got back at the Harts by becoming one of the most prosperous couples in Hiawatha, though it took them a lifetime to do it. After scraping together enough money to buy a 260-acre farm, they managed it so wisely that they were able to use the profits to buy a second farm, which also did well. Then, after 35 years of living in the country, the childless couple moved to a stately mansion on one of Hiawatha’s best streets. They were still living there in 1930, after more than 50 years of marriage, when Sarah died from a stroke.
At first John commissioned a modest headstone for Sarah in Hiawatha’s Mount Hope Cemetery, but soon decided it wasn’t enough. He’d never forgotten how Sarah’s family had spurned them when they had nothing; now that they were more prosperous than the Hart clan, he decided that he and Sarah should be laid to rest in the nicest, most expensive memorial in town.
EDIFICE COMPLEX
Davis was friends with a local tombstone salesman named Horace England, and together the two men designed a memorial consisting of life-size marble statues of John and Sarah as they looked on their 50th wedding anniversary. The statues would stand at the foot of the graves and face the headstones; the cemetery plot would also be protected from the elements by a 50-ton marble canopy supported by six massive columns.
England stood to make a small fortune on such a grandiose memorial. Even so, he suggested that it might be a little much, especially considering that the country was in the depths of the Great Depression and folks in Midwestern towns like Hiawatha had been hit especially hard. Davis thanked him for his opinion and then offered to give the business to another tombstone salesman. England assured Davis that that would not be necessary and committed himself wholeheartedly to the task at hand. As far as anyone knows, he never raised another objection.
Statues of John and Sarah Davis (Image Credit: Kansas Travel)
More statues of John and Sarah Davis (Image Credit: Hilary (curioush) [Flickr])
Davis approved the final design and sent his and his wife’s measurements off to Carrara, Italy, where master craftsman carved their likenesses out of the finest Italian marble. Completed in 1931, the Davis memorial was easily the most impressive in Hiawatha, probably in the entire state. And yet when Davis got a look at it he felt something was missing. The giant stone canopy dwarfed the pair of statues beneath it. The solution? More statues. "I thought it still looked too bare, so I got me another pair," Davis explained. The second set of statues depicted John and Sarah as they would have looked on their tenth wedding anniversary, much earlier in life than the first pair of statues showed them.
NO STATUE OF LIMITATIONS
By now Davis was pretty much out of loose cash, so he signed over his two farms to Horace England for $31,000—more than enough money to pay for the second set of statues. What did he do with the money that was left? He bought a third set of statues, showing Sarah and himself seated in comfy chairs as they would have looked in 1898, after 18 years of marriage. (John is depicted clean-shaven—in the late 1890s, he had burned his beard fighting a brush fire and for a time went without his flowing beard.)
Why stop at three pairs? Davis then decided he wanted a fourth pair of statues. Again John is shown seated, this time missing his left hand, which he lost to infection in 1908 after he injured it while trying to trim his hedges with an axe. (The axe is on display in the nearby Brown County Agricultural Museum.)
Statue of John Davis and "The Vacant Chair" (Image Credit: Hilary (curioush) [Flickr])
Because this fourth set of statues depict John after his wife’s death, her absence is represented by a statue of an empty chair. (Just in case anyone misses the symbolism, the words "THE VACANT CHAIR" are carved into the chair.) Unlike the other statues, this pair was done in granite instead of marble. Davis claimed it was because he thought men looked better carved in granite.
FORMING A CROWD
Who says four pairs of statues are enough? Davis commissioned a fifth and then sixth. When the money from the sale of his farms ran out, he signed over his mansion to Horace England for $1, on the condition that he be allowed to live in it for the rest of his life. That solved Davis’s money problems, which may be why the fifth and sixth pairs of statues were once again done in Italian marble. The sixth—and—final—statues depict John and Sarah as angels kneeling over each other’s graves.
When the odd jumble of statues started to attract visitors, some of whom were disrespectful and climbed the statues or sat in The Vacant Chair, Davis had a three-foot-high marble wall built around the entire memorial, with marble urns at the corners inscribed "KINDLY KEEP OFF THE MEMORIAL." The wall is just low enough for the seated figures to be seen peeking over the top. [Note: Image Credit: Kansas Travel]
ANYONE’S GUESS
Why did Davis keep adding statues? Some people speculate that with no family of his own, he was determined to blow his entire fortune to keep his wife’s relatives from getting a penny of his money. Others speculate that Davis was motivated by guilt—he was apparently a very jealous man and during the more than 30 years that he and Sarah had lived on the farm, he had rarely let Sarah go into town alone or even visit the neighboring farm wives. Now, realizing too late how hard that must have been for Sarah, he was making it up to her in marble.
A third theory, simple but compelling, is that Davis was just plain nuts. He became a compulsive memorial builder in much the same way that some people are compulsive collectors. Even if he did realize that each new addition of statues further cluttered an already crowded memorial, he couldn’t stop himself.
THE END…OR IS IT?
In 1937, the same year that he signed over his mansion to Horace England, John Davis learned from his doctors that he had less than six months to live. Davis quickly gave away the rest of his fortune—possibly as much as $55,000—prepared to join his wife in their final resting place. Six months passed…and then a year…and then two years, until eventually Davis realized that the same doctors he blamed for losing his hand after his axe incident had also botched the diagnosis of his "terminal" illness. He didn’t have six months to live, he had ten years to live, and now that he had given away his entire fortune he couldn’t even afford to live in his mansion, even though it was rent-free. He moved into the local poorhouse and lived there for the rest of his days, though he did spend a lot of time out at the cemetery, proudly showing off the 11 life-size statues and The Vacant Chair to the throngs of people who came to see it. He died in his sleep in 1947.
In all, Davis is believed to have spent $200,000 on his memorial, the equivalent of well over $1 million today. (Many locals also credit him with giving tens of thousands of dollars to the needy during his lifetime, usually in small sums. But since this giving was done in private, it has been overshadowed by the memorial.)
A SIGHT TO BE SEEN
The Davis Memorial isn’t the prettiest grave in America. It looks like a cross between a gas station and a statue-company showroom. Nevertheless, it attracts as many as 30,000 visitors a year, many of whom go straight to the cemetery without bothering to visit the town. Perhaps it’s only fair, then, that Hiawatha’s townspeople are as ambivalent about Davis today as they were during the Depression, when he memorialized his wife in stone instead of building a library or a hospital that would have honored her memory while contributing to the common good. But Davis wouldn’t have had it any other way. "They hate me," Davis admitted late in life, "but it’s my money and I spent it the way I pleased."
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd.
This book focuses on the odd-side of life and features articles like the strangest TV shows never made, the creepiest insect on Earth, odd medical conditions, and many, many more.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
The Soviet Union decided the best way to show up the West was through building the biggest version of any given object. The following are just seven of the largest examples.
1. Magnitogorsk
In Magnitogorsk, fishermen often sell their catch from the polluted Ural River to market rather than consume it themselves (Image Credit: Gerd Ludwig Photography)
Whether it was for guns, tanks, ships, railroads, or bridges, Stalin, whose name means "Man of Steel," knew he needed one thing above all else for his 1920s Soviet Union: steel. He also knew that to the east, in the southern Ural Mountains, there was a unique geologic oddity named Magnitka - an entire mountain of pure iron ore, the key ingredient for steel. In 1929, Stalin decreed that a city, "Magnitogorsk" [wiki] (see what he did there?), be built from scratch around said mountain to mine the ore and turn it into steel.
So began one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken. With expertise provided by Communist sympathizer from the West, a ready-made city for 450,000 inhabitants was constructed in about five years. Of course, Stalin saved on labor costs by having the heavy lifting done by political prisoners. In fact, 30,000 people died in the effort. Steel production began in 1934, but shortly after World War II the iron ore ran out and the city's economy collapsed.
2. The Baltic - White Sea Canal
Political prisoners from the gulags digging for the canal. (Image Credit: Memorial Italia)
Though forced, workers at the canal was serenaded by an orchestra. (Image Credit: Alexander Rodchenko [Wikipedia])
Ever the optimist, this time Stalin wanted connect the Baltic Sea, with its key port of Leningrad, to the White Sea's port of Archangelsk. The idea was that he could move the Soviet navy back and forth. So Stalin had more political prisoners sent to work on the canal - there was a seemingly endless supply from the gulags - and after a few brutal years it was completed in 1933. Disease, poor nutrition, and brutal conditions took a huge toll, though, with as many as 250,000 of the slave laborers dead by the end of it.
Portions of canal is too shallow for anything larger than a small barge. (Image Credit: Thomasz Kizny, Forced Labor Camps)
The icing on the cake? The canal was completely useless when finished. For most of its length it was too shallow to admit anything larger than a small barge. Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot.
3. The World's Largest Hydrofoil
Ekranoplan [wiki], named the Caspian Sea Monster by CIA analysts (Image Credit: Wikipedia)
The world's largest hydrofoil wasn't really a hydrofoil at all. In fact, it was one of a series of unique machines called "ground effect" vehicles [wiki] built by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s.
The Soviets had a monopoly on this fascinating technology, relying on a little-known principle of physics - the "ground effect" - in which a dense cushion of air hugging the ground can provide more lift to a vehicle than air at higher altitudes.
Hovering about 3 - 12 feet above the ground, these vehicles resemble Luke Skywalker's levitating craft from Star Wars, and far more fuel-efficient than airplanes, helicopters, hydrofoil, or cars. And at 58 feet, the largest of these, the "Caspian Sea Monster" was given its distinctive name after CIA analyst saw it at the Caspian port of Baku in photos taken by spy satellites. The craft traveled at speeds of up to 240 mph, had a swiveling nose cone for cargo loading, and could carry up to as many as 150 passengers.
4. Avant-garde Design for a Funkier Parliament
Tatlin's Monument (Image Credit: Plates from the A.V. Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture, in Cooke, C. et al (1990) Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde [Wikipedia])
Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (1885 - 1953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International [wiki] was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller assembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance.
Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party's executives. The third level - a sphere rotating once daily - would house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built.
5. A Palace for the People
In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered that the largest Orthodox Christian cathedral in the world - 335 feet high, the product of 44 years of backbreaking labor by Russian peasants - be dynamited so he could build an enormous "Palace of the Soviets [wiki]," to celebrate the Communist Party.
Palace of the Soviets, a 1934 concept by Iofan, Schuko, and Gelreikh
Stalin wished to replace the church with a new structure taller than the Empire State Building, and capped with a gilded statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty, but the "Man of Steel's" mad scheme never came to fruition.
Although the first phase was completed (the dynamiting was the easy bit), the construction never took place as necessary resources were diverted to fighting World War II. After Stalin died, his successor - Nikita Khrushchev - ordered a large swimming pool built where the cathedral had stood. Old women who remembered the original cathedral could be seen standing at the edge of the swimming pool, praying to forgotten icons.
Recently Yury Luzhkov, Moscow's autocratic mayor, tried to make up for Stalin's mess by ordering the construction of a tacky reproduction of the original cathedral using precast concrete.
6. The World's Largest Hydrogen Bomb
Tsar Bomba-type casing on display.
Truth is always stranger than fiction, so it's no wonder that Stanley Kubrick's absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove is actually premised on fact. The strange truth here was that Nikita Khrushchev and company had actually been plotting to build a "doomsday" device. The plan called for a large cargo ship anchored off the Soviet Union's east coast to be loaded with hundreds of hydrogen bombs. If at any point the radiation detectors aboard the ship measured a certain amount of atmospheric radiation, indicating that the Soviet Union had been attacked, the bombs would detonate.
Mushroom cloud of the Tsar Bomba test detonation.
Soviet scientists persuaded Khrushchev to drop this mad scheme. He did, however, order the construction of the world's largest nuclear bomb in 1961, the so-called "Tsar Bomba [wiki]" ("King of Bombs"), which weighed in at about 100 megatons - equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. The largest nuclear test involved a smaller version of "Tsar Bomba" that measured somewhere between 50 and 57 megatons - the Soviets weren't sure themselves.
7. World's Largest Icebreaker, the Yamal
And it's the world's only nuclear-powered icebreaker at that! Confronted with the world's largest piece of ice - the Arctic Ocean - the Soviet had no intention of letting nature stand in their way. So, they came up with a simple solution: the world's largest icebreakers.
The first included the Lenin and Arktika class of nuclear-powered icebreakers, introduced in 1959 and 1975, respectively. The arktika icebreakers had not one but two nuclear reactors, powering 75,000-horsepower engines.
Yamal, world's largest icebreaker (Image Credit: ikzm-d.de)
None compare with the newest vessel, however - the Yamal [wiki] - launched in 1993. Also powered by two nuclear reactors, it measures in at 490 feet long, displacing 23,000 tons of water, with a crew of 150 and an armored steel hull 4.8 centimeters thick. Recently re-outfitted for tourist operations, it has 50 luxury cabins, a library, lounge, theater, bar, volleyball court, gymnasium, heated indoor swimming pool, and saunas. A helicopter is stationed on the ship to conduct reconnaissance of ice formations.
A.M. Walzer Co. United States Inlay Puzzle Map (Image Credit: Marxchivist [Flickr])
The following is reprinted from Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.
You know the names of all 50 states…but do you know where any of them come from? Here’s the best information we could find on the origin of each.
ALABAMA. Possibly from the Creek Indian word alibamo, meaning "we stay here."
ALASKA. From the Aleutian word alakshak, which means "great lands," or "land that is not an island."
ARIZONA. Taken either from the pima Indian words ali shonak, meaning "little spring," or from the Aztec word arizuma, meaning "silver-bearing."
ARKANSAS. The French somehow coined it from the name of the Siouan Quapaw tribe.
CALIFORNIA. According to one theory, Spanish settlers names it after a utopian society described in a popular 16th-century novel called Serged de Esplandian.
COLORADO. Means "red" in Spanish. The name was originally applied to the Colorado River, whose waters are reddish with canyon clay.
CONNECTICUT. Taken from the Mohican word kuenihtekot, which means "long river place."
DELAWARE. Named after Lord De La Warr, a governor of Virginia. Originally used only to name the Delaware River.
FLORIDA. Explorer Ponce de Leon named the state Pascua Florida - "flowery Easter"—on Easter Sunday in 1513.
GEORGIA. Named after King George II of England, who charted the colony in 1732.
HAWAII. An English adaptation of the native word owhyhee, which means "homeland."
IDAHO. Possibly taken from the Kiowa Apache word for the Comanche Indians.
ILLINOIS. The French bastardization of the Algonquin word illini, which means "men."
INDIANA. Named by English-speaking settlers because the territory was full of Indians.
IOWA. The Sioux word for "beautiful land," or "one who puts to sleep."
KANSAS. Taken from the Sioux word for "south wind people," their name for anyone who lived south of Sioux territory.
KENTUCKY. Possibly derived from the Indian word kan-tuk-kee, meaning "dark and bloody ground." Or kan-tuc-kec, "land of green reeds", or ken-take, meaning "meadowland."
LOUISIANA. Named after French King Louis XIV.
MAINE. The Old French word for "province."
MARYLAND. Named after Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of English King George I.
MASSACHUSETTS. Named after the Massachusetts Indian tribe. Means "large hill place."
MICHIGAN. Most likely from the Chippewa word for "great water." micigama.
MINNESOTA. From the Sioux word for "sky tinted" or "muddy water."
MISSISSIPPI. Most likely taken from the Chippewa words mici ("great") and zibi ("river").
MISSOURI. From the Algonquin word for "muddy water."
MONTANA. Taken from the Latin word for "mountainous."
NEBRASKA. From the Otos Indian word for "broad water."
NEVADA. Means "snow-clad" in Spanish.
NEW HAMPSHIRE. Capt. John Mason, one of the original colonists, named it after his English home county of Hampshire.
NEW JERSEY. Named after the English Isle of Jersey.
NEW MEXICO. The Spanish name for the territory north of the Rio Grande.
NEW YORK. Named after the Duke of York and Albany.
NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA. From the Latin name Carolus; named in honor of King Charles I of England.
NORTH AND SOUTH DAKOTA. Taken from the Sioux word for "friend," or "ally."
OHIO. Means "great," "fine," or "good river" in Iriquois.
OKLAHOMA. The Choctaw word for "red man."
OREGON. Possibly derived from Ouaricon-sint, the French name for the Wisconsin River.
PENNSYLVANIA. Named after William Penn, Sr., the father of the colony's founder, William Penn. Means "Penn's woods."
RHODE ISLAND. Named "Roode Eylandt" (Red Island) because of its red clay.
TENNESSEE. Named after the Cherokee tanasi villages along the banks of the Little Tennessee River.
TEXAS. Derived from the Caddo Indian word for "friend," or "ally."
UTAH. Means "upper," or "higher," and was originally the name that Navajos called the Shoshone tribe.
VERMONT. A combination of the French words vert ("green") and mont ("mountain").
VIRGINIA AND WEST VIRGINIA. Named after Queen Elizabeth I of England, the "virgin" queen, by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584.
WASHINGTON. Named after George Washington.
WISCONSIN. Taken from the Chippewa word for "grassy place."
WYOMING. Derived from the Algonquin word for "large prairie place."
This special edition book covers the three "lost" Bathroom Readers - Uncle John's 5th, 6th and 7th book all in one. The huge (and hugely entertaining) volume covers neat stories like the Strange Fate of the Dodo Bird, the Secrets of Mona Lisa, and more ...
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
