Back in in 1969, a golfer accidentally managed to hit a plane with his ball. The ball went through the plexiglass windshield and into the cockpit.
Which raises the question: Do golf balls pose a potential hazard to planes? This is discussed in a thread over at aviation.stackexchange.com, and the consensus seems to be, not really. Even if a golf ball were, somehow, to get into a plane's engine, it's probably small enough that it wouldn't cause damage.
Oakland Tribune - Jan 16, 1969
I was curious about how often golfers hit planes. Apparently, not often. But some googling yielded this video, which purports to show a golfer hitting a 757 with a ball. Though no one in the YouTube comments seems to believe he actually hit the plane.
From Japan, comes a solution to the problem of getting your fingers greasy when you eat potato chips. Snack-maker Koike-ya has designed chips that you can 'drink' directly from the bag. From the Wall Street Journal:
[Koike-ya’s] One Hand brand features a line of splintered potato chips and other snacks that can be consumed like a bottled drink. It’s marketed with a jumbo-size premise—“a new snack style humankind has been waiting for.” The idea originated with the observation that customers like the mix of potato chip crumbs and flavored powder left at the bottom of the bag. Some eaters tip the chip bag into their mouths to dump the delectable detritus. “What we said is, ‘Why don’t we make it easier for them to do that?’ ” said Kohei Shimosaka, who led a five-member team of chip designers to find the optimum configuration... The research and development finally cooked up a hand-held package with an angled opening.
It looks like a bag of french fries to me. And couldn't you do this on your own with regular chips if you smashed them up while in the bag, and then cut an angled opening to pour them right into your mouth?
Urban Dictionary defines 'newsbabe' as "a sexually-attractive female news anchor or reporter on TV." It sounds like a modern term, but it actually was in use as far back as 1949, and originated in the context of radio news.
Back then, Christina Ohlsen earned the title of newsbabe while she was working at the U.S. Army's radio station in West Berlin (RIAS, or Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor). On-air, she played a character called 'Das Botenkind' which was a Berlin slang term that got translated as the Newsbabe. She would essentially make fun of the headlines in the Soviet newspapers, while in the persona of this newsbabe.
According to her obituary in the Washington Post (she died in 2012), she later married Air Force Col. William Heimlich, who was her boss at the station, moved with him to Falls Church, Virginia, and taught dance classes there for the rest of her life.
In an interview, her husband offered some recollections of her times as the newsbabe:
Q: How did you meet your wife, who was then Christina Olsen?
A: Christina Olson. She was a guest of my British opposite, Colonel E A Hollard, at a tea to which I was invited. I saw her, I thought she was the loveliest thing I'd ever seen in my life and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her - on the spot. I - came to know her then when she was in RIAS, came to know her much better, and when she came to the United States as a guest of the State Department in 1950 - yes, 1950, we were married here.
Q: If you describe exactly what she was doing for RIAS?
A: In RIAS she was an actress of course and a charming one, a very popular one, and - she did particularly a role called 'Das Botenkind' or 'The Little Messenger - The Newsboy, that's about the only way I can translate that. And she would sing song a pompous news story that appeared in, let us say, the T&aumb;gliche Rundschau, the Soviet Newspaper, and then poke fun at it. Typical example: 'The meat ration this month will not be filled. Instead you will receive four hundred fifty five grams of sugar.' or 'The potato ration this week will not be filled. Instead you will get thirty- three hundred and fifty grammes of soya beans.', or 'The travel cards between Berlin and Dresden will no longer be honoured until further notice. There will be no German personnel allowed to leave the city of Magdeburg until further notice' These pompous things would appear constantly in the Soviet newspaper, and she would talk about it on the air and say, 'I don't understand it. But the big ones, they've got to understand it. All of these things which violated agreements between the Western and the Eastern allies.
The most distinctive practice of the Aetherius Society is its use of Spiritual Energy Batteries. The prayers and chanting of members are focused through trained leaders, and poured into a battery where they can be stored indefinitely. In times of crisis, such as war, earthquake or famine, thousands of hours of stored prayer energy can be released in one moment.
Invented in 1932 by C.R. Fellers and J.A. Clague of Massachusetts State College. It's technical name is the Fellers-Clague Penetrometer.
As is explained in The Complete Book on Gums and Stabilizers for Food Industry, there are two ways of testing the strength of jelly: 1) "tests in which the elastic limits (breaking strength) of the jellies are exceeded and the jelly is ruptured", or 2) "tests measuring deformation (sag) of jellies without exceeding the elastic limit."
The Fellers-Clague Penetrometer is of the first type.
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.
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