Weird Universe Archive
July 2012
July 21, 2012
History Of Nukes
The history of nuclear explosions world wide and a tally of who set them off where. It speaks for itself I think.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Jul 21, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category:
The Congrelephant Bus
[From Life magazine for October 18 1954]
A strange vehicle rolled down Denver's Ivanhoe Street one day last week and pulled to a stop in front of No. 626. It had once been a bus until Mrs. Ellen Harris, G.O.P. candidate for Congress in Colorado's First District, gave it the jawbreaking name of "Congrelephant," and made it over. From the front hung an elephant's trunk spouting smoke. It had a tail and four-foot ears, and big blue eyes were painted on the windshield.
[From Time magazine for October 18 1954]
Surely there is a place for a revived Congrelephant Bus in this election year.
Posted By: Paul - Sat Jul 21, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Anthropomorphism, Politics, 1950s, Bus
How many people will run over a turtle?
Mark Rober, who apparently works at NASA, has posted an interesting video about what he calls his "roadkill experiment." It explores how many people will swerve into the shoulder lane to deliberately run over an animal, such as a turtle, snake, or tarantula. No real animals were harmed. He used rubber ones.The results: Most people ignored the animals, but one person swerved to hit the turtle, and slightly more swerved to hit the snake and spider. What does this tell us about human nature? Perhaps that most people are basically decent, but there are definitely a few psychos out there. (via Gizmodo)
Posted By: Alex - Sat Jul 21, 2012 -
Comments (11)
Category: Animals, Evil, Violence
Archiology
600 years and things don't seem to have changed all that much!
Read All About It!
Posted By: Expat47 - Sat Jul 21, 2012 -
Comments (8)
Category:
July 20, 2012
Vegeterrible
Vegeterrible from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.
That's a mighty big fridge interior.
Posted By: Paul - Fri Jul 20, 2012 -
Comments (5)
Category: Anthropomorphism, Horror, Vegetables, Cartoons
Eat the whole animal!
The Globe and Mail has a review of The Feasting Room, a small Toronto restaurant whose motto is "eat the whole animal!" The chef picks a different animal each week and creates a six-course tasting menu from its parts... all its parts. Some of the dishes from pig week included: pig's skin served with a bowl of creamy apple sauce, sweet-pea soup with ribbons of crunchy-chewy pig's ears, pig's spleen layered over pork belly and sage leaves and rolled into a pinwheel, pig's trotter stuffed with pork shoulder, and for dessert pistachio and pig's blood Nanaimo bars.Shown in the picture is a dish from chicken week: chickens feet with strawberry maple glaze.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Jul 20, 2012 -
Comments (11)
Category: Food, Restaurants
July 19, 2012
Orwell’s Cough
I just read an advance copy of Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough
by John J. Ross, M.D. It examines some of the literary greats (Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, etc.) from the viewpoint of a doctor, diagnosing what medical problems they may have suffered from (they tended to be a sickly bunch), and also discussing what medical "cures" doctors of the time subjected them to. It's good stuff that I imagine will appeal to many WU readers.For instance, Jonathan Swift suffered from bouts of dizziness and deafness. Here's Ross on how 18th Century medicine treated him:
Swift took a variety of useless medication for his 'giddiness.' These included asafoetida, the herb so foul-smelling that it is known as devil's dung, as well as 'nasty steel drops' (a crude iron supplement). Swift also took something that he called 'a vomit.' This vile treatment was based on the ancient Galenic theory of ridding the body of evil humours. It could have been one of many drugs, ranging from the merely unpleasant (ipecac) to the potentially toxic (arsenic or antimony). Had Swift taken arsenic or antimony only rarely, he probably would not have had long-term side effects, as most of the dose would have quickly left the body in the urine and from both ends of the gastrointestinal tract. His doctor pal John Arbuthnot prescribed confection of alkermes (a scarlet syrup in which the active ingredient was crushed parasitic insects), the vigorous laxative castor oil, and cinnabar of antimony (mercuric sulphide). Swift thought the cinnabar helped. This is just possible: some mercury compounds are mild diuretics.
Posted By: Alex - Thu Jul 19, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Medicine, Books
Johnson Smith Catalog Item #24
Won't everyone just guffaw when your hysterical suicide attempt proves to be a prank! Don't be surprised if some angry relative whips out a real gun and finishes the job.
From the 1930s catalog.
Posted By: Paul - Thu Jul 19, 2012 -
Comments (6)
Category: Death, Johnson Smith Catalog, 1930s, Pranks
July 18, 2012
Old x-ray of a foot in a boot
Circa 1922. Not particularly weird, but an interesting x-ray nonetheless. From The Outline of Science by J. Arthur Thomson.
Posted By: Alex - Wed Jul 18, 2012 -
Comments (13)
Category: Science, Feet
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Chuck Shepherd Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre. Our banner was drawn by the legendary underground cartoonist Rick Altergott. Contact Us |
