Category: Oddities

Making Points

Posted by Nexus – 09/01/2010

[via futilitycloset.com]

The London Medical and Physical Journal records the case of Kate Hudson, a 31-year-old single woman who was admitted to the general hospital at Nottingham on Aug. 4, 1783. “On inspection of the arm two needles were discovered under the skin, a little above the dorsal side of the wrist.” These were removed with forceps, but more needles were discovered farther up the arm.

This continued, on and off, for nine years. Needles were discovered in Hudson’s leg, foot, breast, and stomach; she passed needles in her urine and stool and vomited up still more. Just as abruptly, on June 12, 1792, she was dismissed as cured, and was reported in July to be married with two children and enjoying “better health than for several years past.”

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Israel: Peace Wish As Hummus Record Broken

Posted by Nexus – 08/01/2010

[via news.sky.com]

Israeli Arab and Jewish chefs have served up a world record for cooking hummus in the name of Middle East peace.

The Lebanese broke the hummus-making record in October last year

More than fifty cooks from both sides of Israel’s religious divide filled a seven-metre-wide satellite dish with four tonnes of the dip.

The chefs mashed up the monster mix of chickpeas, sesame paste, olive oil, lemon juice and garlic to make twice as much as when the record was set last October.

The Guinness world record idea was originally cooked up by Lebanese chefs who claimed the record last year.

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The Deadliest place on Earth? Surviving Cueva de los Cristales – The Giant Crystal Cave

Posted by Nexus – 08/01/2010

It’s 50C and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it’s so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.

For ‘How Earth made us’ I have been lucky enough to film everywhere from tiny Pacific islands to the centre of the Sahara desert, yet nowhere could prepare me for filming in The Giant Crystal Cave – Cueva de los Cristales of Mexico.

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Ishi

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via futilitycloset.com]

In August 1911, a group of butchers discovered a 50-year-old “wild man” in their corral in Oroville, Calif. The local sheriff gave him into the keeping of a San Francisco anthropology museum, where he remained until his death five years later.

It’s believed that “Ishi” was the very last of his kind — the last of his group, the last of his people, and the last Native American in Northern California to have lived free of the encroaching European-American civilization.

The rest had been killed in encounters with the white man.

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Hungry McDonald’s Customer Throws Mop Water At Cashiers

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

A bucket of dirty mop water is nobody’s friend, which is exactly why you shouldn’t leave it out where customers can reach it. Because eventually someone will get angry over an order and feel a need to throw something, and oh look, mop water.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Oh no she di’n't

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A Look Around

Posted by Nexus – 05/01/2010

[via futilitycloset.com]
i'm a ghost
In September 1893, London doctor Farquhar Matheson was sailing with his wife on Scotland’s Loch Alsh, between the isle of Skye and the mainland. “Our sail was up and we were going gaily along when suddenly I saw something rise out of the loch in front of us–a long, straight, necklike thing as tall as my mast.”

The thing was 200 yards away; it was not until it began to submerge that Matheson saw “it was a large sea-monster–of the saurian type, I should think.”

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