Entries from June 2004 ↓
June 30th, 2004 | People
1895, Ann Arbor Register, October
A Beautiful Feat Performed by Hindoo Juggling Girls
One of the most wonderful of the many feats performed by Hindoo jugglers is the egg dance. Usually it is executed by a girl, fantastically dressed. She makes use of the willow wheel, around which at equal distances, are threads, and at the end of each thread there is a noose, held open by a bead. This wheel the girl places on her head, while she carries a basket of eggs on her arm. When the music strikes up she begins to dance and the wheel begins to spin around. She then takes an egg from the basket, places it in one of the thread nooses, and throws it from her with sufficient force to draw the knot tight. The spinning of the wheel keeps the thread stretched with the egg at the end of it. She then takes another egg from the basket, places it in another noose, and repeats this until there is an egg in every noose. Her fantastic costume, her perfect motion, and all the eggs swinging on the stretched threads at once, present a very pretty sight indeed. It requires much art to execute the dance, for at one false step the eggs would be dashed together, the dance spoiled, and the dancer thereby disgraced. After dancing for a time with all the eggs swinging around her head, she takes them out of the noose one by one, all the time keeping the wheel balanced and in motions, and again, places them in the basket on her arm. When the dance is finished the spectators are allowed to examine the eggs to see that they are real.
You can find another description of this dance here. No other comments, this stands on its own very well. Just try to visualize…
June 29th, 2004 | Project Gutenberg
1831, April, Periodicals
June 29th, 2004 | People
1868, April, Peninsular Courier and Family Visitant
Dr. Skac of the Morningside Asylum in Edinburgh, says in his annual report that among the patients who died last year was one who had been in the asylum for 29 years, and was a thorough gentleman. He possessed considerable humor, was an excellent player at bowls and billiards and whist. He displayed the most singular delusion of any man he (Dr. Skac) ever met. He asserted that he was upwards of twenty thousand years of age, and described the pre-historic period of the earth, during which he had witnessed three floods greater than Noah’s. Noah, he knew very well, and described him as a nice lad when he knew him first, but as having latterly fallen into dissipated habits. He has commanded numerous large armies at various periods, and for the last three or four thousand years was Agustus J. Caesar (his usual signature) commander-in-chief of the Roman armies. His anecdotes and imagination were inexhaustible, and a large book might be readily filled with the history he gave of himself and his time during his long, imaginary and eventful life.
Bill already has a copy of this article (one of the earliest I transcribed). However, I know something that he doesn’t…
“Dr. Skac” is more likely to be “Dr. Skae”. At Distributed Proofeaders, this typographical mistake is called a stealth scanno and denotes a word that is incorrect, but would still pass a spell-checker. Skac would have passed our editor in 1868, since he didn’t have spell-check and probably wasn’t familiar with Scottish names.
Sometimes listed as “David” and sometimes as “F,” Skae was one of the earliest directors of the Asylum, later known as the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. He apparently had a particular interest in classifying mental illnesses.
As for Mr. Caesar, well, who knows?
June 28th, 2004 | Project Gutenberg
1831, April, Periodicals
The Mirror of Literature, April 9, 1831. Number 484. Try The Battle of the Cats
June 28th, 2004 | Miscellany
1895, Ann Arbor Register, October
There is said to be a total of 482 systems of shorthand in practical use.
Orange growers of Southern California have realized $1,850,000 for their crop.
The income of the London Daily Telegraph is said to be about $650,000 per year.
Thirty per cent of the iron made in Tennessee is sold outside the Southern States.
There are now 249,273 Indians in this country, or were at the taking of the last census.
Illinois stands third among the states in the number of its milch kine, with 1,087,886 animals.
Pomona County, California, will produce 750 tons of apricots this year, against 2,800 tons last year.
A snake alleged to be fourteen feet long, steals chickens, ducks and geese at Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.
The largest map of the world is in fifteen feet wide and 126 feet long.
Bucharest has the reputation of being the place of residence of the greatest number of swindlers in the world.
In 1889, 10,250,410 bushels of flax seed and 241,389 pounds of fiber were produced on 1,318,698 acres in this country.
Beer frozen and called “hops frappe” is very popular in the Sunday resorts of Philadelphia since the enforcement of the Sunday law.
The numbers… how precise they are. I know they came out of a table somewhere from some sort of almanac. Perhaps I’ll find it someday in the Pile o’Books.
shorthand — The most common shorthands in use in English today are Pittman and Gregg. Although I wonder if people are starting to use Graffiti in writing if they’re good at entering stuff on their Palm? And what happened to the others? There are several collections of shorthand examples in libraries. I suppose they’re most frequented by scholars of the Voynich Manuscript?
oranges — The rise of the Calfornia orange industry was probably helped by the Big Freeze in the northern Florida groves.
income — That would be about $6.5 million today. The Daily Telegraph was recently sold for about $1.33 billion. Well, sold isn’t correct. It’s the pre-lawsuit price. But still, it seems its fortunes have improved.
Tennessee iron — According to the Tennesee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Tennessee’s production in 1894 wasn’t very much:
In 1870, however, the census reported only six producers of iron ore in the state producing just over 34,600 tons of ore worth nearly $132,000. Tennessee had fallen to ninth among twenty-one states in iron ore production from its position of fourth in 1850.
census — There is no good way to verify this number, since the 1890 Census was destroyed by fire in 1921. What a loss to historians, genealogists, and others who care about the demographic changes in the United States.
milch kine — a pair of words we don’t use anymore, unless you spend a lot of time reciting 1st Samuel 6:7. Too bad.
apricots– A 1910 brochure touting southern California fruit growing indicates that one could sell apricots for $30/ton. So the Pomona farmers were getting about $22k for the bad season. But who knows? Maybe the year before was an especially good year? According to more recent apricot industry information, 69,000 tons were sold in 2001, with 20% going to the “fresh market”.
Cold Spring Harbor is also known for the Laboratory that focuses on genetics and molecular biology. But did you see this?
While eugenics was indeed popular, it was poor science and it was rejected on scientific grounds. However, the hereditarian social attitudes that supported popular eugenics remain in the public consciousness to this day.
largest map — is now about 100 feet in diameter.
Bucharest is “one of the few cities in east-central Europe with gambling.” A different type of swindling, to be sure, but a still a way to play on one’s greediness to part one from one’s money.
flax — now primarily a dietary supplement and an ironing-hater’s nightmare. Recently production has been about half a million acres in the US, and 12 million world wide. Flaxseed oil is also commonly known as linseed oil, but I suppose most people wouldn’t want to take capsules of an ingredient in varnish, would they?
beer — I’ve forgotten a bottle of wine in the freezer once or twice, but not beer. However, thawed frozen beer, while not harmful, probably doesn’t taste very good. Sunday laws which pre- and proscribed citizens behaviors were common in the US until quite recently, but now about the only remaining laws control the sale of liquor.
This is the article that was the source for the title of this blog. What a random agglomeration of information! It is so much like many blogs today, where you see a link to something that you think is interesting, but often the context just doesn’t make sense. It’s also enlightening to see that we’re not so different from our ancestors–obsessed with triva, numbers, miscellanea, context- and content-free typing… we live lives of Odd Ends.
June 27th, 2004 | Project Gutenberg
1862, March, Periodicals
The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1862. Number 53. Be sure to see A Raft That No Man Made.
June 24th, 2004 | People
1895, Ann Arbor Register, May
Euphrates Esculapius Endymion Mc[?]msey is the name of a clerk in the recorder’s office at Marysville, Mo. He signs his rather euphonious name with a big rubber stamp. His mother was a student of oriental history and mythology.
A nice alliteration: euphonious with Euphrates Esculapius Endymion. Unfortunately, I am totally unable to parse the clerk’s last name, and so he is unfindable at the moment. It is in Nodaway County, so if you know somebody who could look this up for me. The only info I can find is an 1850 census, which shows “McKinsie” and “McKensie”, but nothing ending with “msey.”
Chalk this up as another incomplete. Phooey.
June 18th, 2004 | People, Weird Stuff
1895, Ann Arbor Register, July
Strange Yarn Told About a Jefferson County Damsel
The southwestern part of Jefferson county, that strange region of hermits an recluses, is all agog over another sensational discovery. The latest wonder to come to light is an electric girl, Mary Birchall by name, who lives with her parents in a dilapidated frame house on the lake shore, in that rock-riven scrub in a district of Henderson known as “The Jobs.” As Trilby was dominated by a superior force, so has this uneducated girl become possessed of a wondrous power. Miss Birchall is a comely girl of 18, tall and graceful, with an abundance of dark brown hair, regular features and a complexion rivaling La France roses. She is almost a recluse, however, and is rarely seen away from the tumble-down structure she calls her home. She is also uneducated save for the knowledge she may have gleaned from the birds, the flowers and the forest of scrub pines that surrounds the house. But she is endowed with a strange electric power that would make her fortune in the museums of the country if she would consent to exhibit herself. One of her methods of utilizing the power is the transmitting of a current of electricity to a sewing machine and a grindstone, causing them to run at any desired rate of speed, and all the family sewing is performed on an old-fashioned machine driven by the electric current from the girl’s finger-tips, while the edged tools of the little farm are sharpened on the grindstone revolved by the same force. She can, in a measure, likewise light up a dark room at her will by her presence. When Farmer Birchall wants to investigate matters at night in the barns, Miss Mary accompanies him and illuminates the building, and there is not the danger of fire there would be by the use of a lantern. When producing the phenomena she seems to be charged with all the electric energy of a live wire, and it is extremely dangerous for a person to touch her. The heavily charged atmosphere that surrounds her at such times repels, and thus has saves many from injury. A large shepherd dog owned by the family rubbed his nose against Miss Birchall when she was transmitting force to the grindstone and received a shock that stretched him lifeless. When illuminating the cow stables one night a vicious heifer kicked at the girl, striking her on the head. Instantly the animal experienced a shock that paralyzed its limbs, and not recovering afterward it was killed by Mr. Birchall. A young man named Charles Harris, who lives at Six Town Point, volunteered to investigate the mystery on April 30. He asserted his willingness to undergo the risk of the girl’s powers, took hold of her hands, and at once began to experience terrible shocks and in a few seconds was unconscious. There are many other strange things told of the girls, but her extreme diffidence and shyness have led her to refuse to see many who have visited the house.–St. Louis Star Sayings.
The writer certainly romanticizes her, doesn’t he? Unfortunately, there are no Google-recorded instances of Miss Birchall, she who killed animals with a touch.
The most famous “electric girl” was Lulu Hurst, also known as The Georgia Wonder and The Magnetic Girl. Her talents were not the same as Miss Birchall’s though, being more along the lines of performing feats of strength a young lady shouldn’t be able to do.
There were electric boys, too. It seems they were more likely to be used at science hall demonstrations of static electricty — much like my brief stint at COSI, where we demonstrated a really cool Van de Graaff generator. I never knew the VdG apparatus was originally designed for serious particle acceleration, did you? I thought it was always just a demonstration device.
The St. Louis Star Sayings is most commonly associated now with the story “The Poppyland Express” which is in volume 2 of Journeys Through Bookland.
