Gizella Bodnár AKA “Airplane Gizi” RIP
Gizella Bodnár has died. No, I hadn’t heard of her either until I came across her via Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page. Hungary’s “Queen of Thieves”, she also earned the name…
Category: oddly enough
Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe, and a cheers to the Poe Toaster
Poe would be 210 if he was alive today, which would be a surprising development for all concerned. And presumably today will see the appearance of the Poe Toaster at Poe’s Baltimore…
The mysterious number 6174
6174. Does not seem, at first glance, an interesting number. Maybe paradoxically uninteresting? Or maybe not, for as Yutaka Nishiyama wrote back in 2006 here, 6174 pops up in a rather interesting manner: In…
Don’t trust Alexa Crazy Fact: the name “Wendy” wasn’t invented for Peter Pan (and pig orgasms don’t quite last as long as all that)
One of the skills of Amazon’s Alexa is Crazy Fact. This skills allows Alexa to pop up with a fact which is a little unusual or offbeat. From this, I learnt…
“The Menace From Ennis”, a lost classic from Sonny Knowles
The singer Sonny Knowles “known as The Window Cleaner to his fans,”, a staple of the Irish showband scene, has died. Via Wikipedia I came across this, which I screenshotted…
Shrewstruck
From “The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names” by John Wright It may sound extraordinary, but until recently the shrew had a most fearsome reputation.…
A 8½ mile putt
From “Golf’s Strangest Rounds: Extraordinary but True stories from over a Century of Golf” by Andrew Ward “A RECORD PUTT ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN, SEPTEMBER 1997 If a golfer…
‘Eels, being put into wine or beer, and suffered to die in it, he that drinks it will never endure that sort of liquor again’
Not sure what has moved me to resurrect this old post, but here are two letters I sent to the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism from May 2010 and then May 2014 on…
Séamus Sweeney 