Random Stuff from my Files (that I usually keep hidden...)

01.  Hairy Question

Why do some women sprout chin hair as they age?

02.  Dolly Parton says:

"If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.

03.  Neon?

Certain kinds of mushrooms produce fox fire, an eerie blue-green light.  (I'll bet that's scary!)

Foxfire is also called fairy fire or chimpanzee fire. It is created by some species of fungi present in decaying wood.  Visit Appalachia and find out all about it.

04.  Strange British Names

Some time ago, Russell Ash produced a list of interesting people's names for the Reader's Digest (RD), here are a few:

Lurking Crabb (1780)

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned-Barebon (1640)

Wack Broomhead (1848)

(Mencken writes in his American Language book about the Johns Hopkins interns who gave names to babies in poor families.  Here are a couple of them:

Jesus-Born-In-Hellfire Smith

(and my favorite: Positive-Wasserman Johnson)

05.  School Prom Rules

Ruby E. Wallace reports that the Spring Creek High School put out rules for their prom.  One was:

"Females are not allowed to have backless dresses, and they must cover all of their dairy airs."

(Years ago there was a wonderful magazine of culture called "The Saturday Review of Literature."

I always called it the "Satyr Dairy View.")

06.  Scientific Branches

Many branches of science had names ending in -logy or -ology meaning "study" from the Greek "logos" ("word").  Here are a few lesser-known studies:

oology - the study of bird's eggs

koniology - the study of dust

ichnology - the study of fossil footprints

dendrochronology - the study of tree rings

... and, of course, there is scatology.

07.  Recurring Nursery Rhyme

The latest Funny Times mentions the poor people of Ipswich, England who had been hearing a nursery rhyme being played from time to time in the middle of the night.

The good people attributed "It's raining, it's pouring" to ghostly spirits.

Finally, a brave group of citizens did a thorough investigation and found that a business in a neighboring industrial park set a recording each night as a deterrent to someone coming near their property.

Since cameras showed that nobody was trespassing, they looked further and found that spiders were crossing the lens sometimes and setting off the recording.

The company lowered the sound enough that the Ipswich residents could not hear the rhyme and therefore get some uninterrupted sleep.

(When we lived in Gamber, our next-door neighbor had a motion sensor spotlight that lit the whole front of our house when the light was tripped on.

One night, the light went on and off and on and off for an hour.  Of course, the neighbor wasn't home to shut the light off.

While I was watching and cursing, I noticed a little chipmunk running back and forth, tripping the light over and over.  I ran out and chased that critter into the next county.  

I believe that the rascal was just having fun turning that light off and on and irritating the hell out of me.)

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