Malcolm's Musings: Strange but True
Occasionally I come across a quirky story which begs to be preserved. Unlike those in my cryptozoology and anomalies blogs, these do not defy the scientific paradigm. They are more Ripley's "Believe It or Not!" than Charles Fort. And, of course, everything is documented.
Wednesday 7 December 2022
Gotta Sell Those Hats!
Tuesday 1 March 2022
The Danger of Dealing with a Witch
Sunday 2 January 2022
A Noise Annoys a Caterpillar
Sunday 5 December 2021
Come Home; It's Time for Your Execution!
Saturday 6 November 2021
"Is This Not the Carpenter?"
Thursday 28 October 2021
How Gordon Died
Monday 4 October 2021
"Seadromes": an Idea Whose Time Never Came
Sunday 5 September 2021
The Remarkable Birth of Television
Saturday 24 April 2021
The Fabulous Londonderry Gold Bubble
Wednesday 25 November 2020
A Leopard by the Tail
Thursday 1 October 2020
Of Cricket Balls and Sparrows
Thursday 10 September 2020
Women of Tunisia, 1913
Tuesday 25 August 2020
The Fireman Prince
Monday 10 August 2020
Hide! The Comet is Coming!
Halley's Comet, as everyone knows, appears every 76 years - more or less. Its return in 1986 was a damp squib. We were all disappointed. But in 1910 its appearance had some interesting effects. Here is the brief account given by Frank Edward Johnson about what happened in Tripoli, in what is now Libya, on that occasion.
Rain water is the only drinking water used and is kept in huge cisterns build under the houses. During the passage of the Halley comet the Jews of Tripoli were afraid of dying and took refuge in their great cisterns, which they had pumped dry for the purpose. Twenty-four hours having elapsed, they came out of their hiding places to find the world the same as before.The Arabs said that they were in the hands of Allah and refused to take refuge in their cisterns. So the few foreigners and the Arabs were the only ones who had any drinking water left, and the Arabs sold drinking water to the Jews until the next rains, about six months later.
And if my experiences were anything to go on, the two groups would have lived in separate quarters of the city.
Reference: Frank Edward Johnson, 'Here and There in Northern Africa', The National Geographic Magazine, Jan. 1914, at pages 95-6
Sunday 13 October 2019
The Blind Girl Sees
"I see men; but they look like trees, walking." (Mk 8:24, RSV)Such were the words of a blind man in the process of regaining his sight. Those who have lost their sight, I presume, remember to some extent what the world used to look like. But what about those born blind? Initially, in fact, they would not even know they were blind.
Wednesday 14 August 2019
Chased by Mickey Mouse Gas Masks
Sunday 23 June 2019
The Virgin Matriarchs of Albania
Thursday 9 May 2019
The Balloon Locomotive
However, in late 1897, in the Austrian Alps, a single rail line was introduced driven, not by steam or electricity, but by a balloon!
Wednesday 10 April 2019
The Witches Who Failed to Fly
Thursday 17 January 2019
The Dubious Delights of the Upper Salween
Thursday 20 December 2018
Would You Like to Live in a Palace?
People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart can desire, and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum. These historic places are so old, so tied up with tradition, that they are dropping to bits, all the equipment there decades behind the times.That was the summation made by Marion Crawford ("Crawfie") of her experience of moving into Buckingham Palace when her employer, the Duke of York had unexpectedly and unwillingly become King George VI.
Tuesday 20 November 2018
Traitors to the Human Race
Greed for money and, as we shall see, for power can be a strong solvent of a person's morality. Thirty pieces of silver was enough to buy Judas Iscariot's treachery, and a long list could be made of those who turned traitor for the sake for pay. Greed can also dissolve the critical faculty. No-one would possibly fall for the Nigerian scam, for instance, if the prospect of enormous riches hadn't blinded him to the extreme improbability of the proposal. However, it takes a massive combination of baseness and stupidity to fall for a project which is both evil and utterly ridiculous, and one can must grant a certain grudging respect to a con artist who realised it would actually work.
Wednesday 19 September 2018
The Riddle of the Amazonian Amazons
This, essentially, is the experience of thousands of Indians who are literally hiding from the outside world in the fastness of the Amazon jungle. Every time it is announced that the last uncontacted tribe has been discovered, another turns up. But once there were millions of them - only to be wiped out by massacre and enslavement, but mostly, as in North America, by infectious diseases which could devastate whole communities before any white man arrived. And somewhere in this maelstrom of destruction there was lost a community which most people now relegate to mythology: the women warriors after which the Amazon River was named.
Tuesday 14 August 2018
The Tale of a Silly Shakedown
That was late on Thursday. None of us could have predicted the sort of craziness which the weekend would bring.
Wednesday 13 June 2018
Weird Happenings at the Battle of Acoma
Tuesday 1 May 2018
Quick Thinking in Time of Danger
Wednesday 4 April 2018
"We Could Have Been British Saboteurs"
Thursday 1 March 2018
An Island Without Wheels
Thursday 1 February 2018
African Stupidity
Sunday 14 January 2018
Elephant Antics
Saturday 2 December 2017
A Real Life Evangeline
Sunday 19 November 2017
Egypt's Cannibal Year
Saturday 14 October 2017
Hunting Squirrels with Snogg and Squail
Wednesday 27 September 2017
The Girl I Met Without a Face
It was 1982, and I was about to embark on a 6½ month journey through North and South America commencing, ironically enough, with a bus journey southwards from my home city of Brisbane. On such trips my custom was to chat to whomever fate had placed in the seat next to me, for travellers tend to have interesting life stories to relate. This time I found myself next to a young lady who was nothing to look at on the outside. She wore a pair of thick glasses, her face was misshapen, and her nose was just a shapeless lump, but shyness and diffidence did not come with the features. I shan't repeat her name, although she probably wouldn't mind, but she informed me that she was almost nineteen, and was returning home after receiving her twenty-first operation to repair her face.
Saturday 9 September 2017
The Slaves of Savage Senegal
Friday 11 August 2017
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
Sunday 25 June 2017
Swinging a Dead Cat
One thing you must understand is that, when he first started writing, he never expected to be world famous. He saw his books, not as mémoires, but as novels: collections of short stories about a fictitious vet called James Herriot, who just happened to have a lot in common with Alf Wight, and who was married to someone unlike his real wife, but possibly modeled on his first girlfriend. As for the stories themselves, they were fiction based on fact, inspired by his own experiences and those of other vets, plus anecdotes which did the rounds of the profession, and which the members considered believable. But some true (?) stories were just too bizarre to be included. Take, for example, this tale recounted by his biographer.
Saturday 10 June 2017
Holy Suicide
Wednesday 24 May 2017
How a Drunken Sailor Captured a Fort
Saturday 13 May 2017
You DON'T Know What You're Standing in Line For?
Monday 17 April 2017
Born in a Forced Labour Camp
I am writing this on Easter Day, an appropriate day, one might think, to reflect on the miraculous. Take Paul Israel Kraus, for instance. His first claim to fame is that he is the longest documented survivor of mesothelioma, a lung cancer caused by asbestos. His second is that he is probably the only Jewish Holocaust survivor in the Australian Lutheran Church, for he was born on 20 October 1944 in a Nazi Forced Labour Camp. But the real heroine of the story is his mother, Clara.
Friday 31 March 2017
A Life Cut Short at 109
Saturday 4 March 2017
Quick Thinking in the Heat of Battle
Sunday 12 February 2017
The Black Pearls of Fatu Hiva
Friday 6 January 2017
Voyage to the Edge of the World
Sunday 11 December 2016
A Sherry for the Saviour
Wednesday 23 November 2016
Sex, Sorcery, and Swordfish
But what happens when both phenomena occur together?
Monday 31 October 2016
The Adventures of a Curio Collector
But recently, I came across yet another source of envy: Frank Burnett (1852 - 1930), whose 1,200 Pacific Island artifacts was donated to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and became the founding collection of the UCB Museum of Anthropology. And I can't think of a better way to introduce him than to quote verbatim from this 1920 article by Francis J. Dickie.