Weird Stuff
I have an old friend, named Jim Survis, who is a retired doctor and living in Peterborough. I have known him for about 50 years.
Aside from being a doctor, he is also a terrific violinist and at one time played in the Chicago Symphony.
He and some other musical types have formed a small, four-piece band called The Geriatric Quartet. Jim, at 76, is the youngest. They are quite busy, frequently being invited to play at various events.
They struggled a bit to choose the name. Other possibilities were, The Geriatricians, The Alzheimer’s Four, The Impotencies, or The Quartet Arthritica.
In the news
“The oldest and most common blood type is O,” writes Luis Villazon in BBC Focus magazine. “A and B evolved later and AB is the newest and rarest, being just 500 to 1,000 years old. Less than three percent of the population is type AB. But there are other, much rarer, blood types too. One, called Bombay blood (sub-type h-h) has been found in just three people in the world, so far.”
There is a German television show called Guinness World Records where they try to show people actually setting a record. They recently had a guy, Thomas Bladthorne from Britain, who stuck a jackhammer down his throat and turned it on for five seconds.
They should have been at the village of Stirling, just north of Belleville, this summer for the Sesquicentennial celebration. They had the longest tractor parade in the world. There were over 600 tractors of all makes and ages. I know, because I was there, since I have a couple of daughters and half a dozen grandchildren in town. The parade took about eight years to pass. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But that’s what it felt like.
A McGill University researcher has found a mysterious stretch of DNA that can make men lose their hair.
It is thought that the discovery could lead to new ways to prevent baldness or a quick genetic test to determine if a man is likely to hang on to his hair. It is not a gene but, apparently, has to do with the DNA between the genes.
A region of northern Sweden is trying to attract tourists by building a huge wooden moose atop a mountain. There will be a restaurant in its belly as well as a concert hall, conference rooms and a shop. An elevator takes you to the reception area between the teeth. The moose is named Stoorn.
Dr. Michael Levitt, a researcher at the VA Medical Centre in Minneapolis, specializes in the study of flatulence. Also known as playing the colonic calliope, stealth bombers or bottom burps. “I know a lot about farts,” says the gas-troenterologisr (sorry about that). “Everybody farts 10 to 20 times a day, with some hitting the 30 to 40 mark.” He also studied volunteers who were fed a diet of pinto beans.
Where can I sign up for this?
The United Nations declared 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato. Also, Californians observed Dried Plum Digestive Health Month. I can’t remember which month it is. (The dried plum is formerly known as a prune.)
Will this help promote the Alliston Potato Festival?
I guess that’s a good thing. Vegetables rarely get the recognition they deserve. For example, there has never been an International Year of the Parsnip. I wonder if there will be a Declaration of Rights of Potatoes and other Starchy Edible Tubulars? Quackery has a long history. In the past, con-artists sold potions, pills, herbs and roots and, even now, those late-night infomercials sell various fitness machines.
These days the big one is “stem cell therapy.” Fraudsters sell it to the gullible with the promise that it will cure everything from cancer to piles.
Don’t believe any of it.
I am told that 80 percent of the world’s lawyers are in the USA. Maybe that is because they sue everybody. This has nothing to do with my opinion that, for the most part, lawyers are the hyenas that hide in the dark and only come out when they can pick the bones of the productive.
There is an outfit that keeps an eye on this. It is called the Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch (M-LAW). They run an annual competition, called the Wacky Warning Label Contest. This year (the 11th), first prize went to the manufacturers of a small tractor who applied a warning label to potential operators, “Danger: Avoid Death”.
Second prize went to a label on an iron-on T-shirt transfer that warned: “Do not iron while wearing shirt.” Third prize was given to a warning on a baby stroller featuring a small storage pouch: “Do not put child in bag.”
Apparently they have put out a book of the funniest warning labels. The title was taken from the warning on a baby stroller that said, “Remove Child Before Folding”.
A survey company in Britain polled 3000 adults on their country’s history and came up with some surprising results. Twenty-three percent thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character and 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes had been a real person. Twenty-three percent thought Florence Nightingale was a figment of some writer’s imagination. And some thought Charles Dickens himself was fictional, as well as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo and Mahatma Gandhi.
Other fictional characters that respondents thought were real people were the Three Musketeers and Robinson Crusoe. I wonder, if you were to take a poll in Canada, how it would turn out? For example, who were Tim Horton, Robert Service, and Samuel de Champlain? Or even Lester Pearson?
Anyway, that’s enough for now. See you next time.
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