George Morley writes in
Shakespeare's Greenwood: The Customs of the Country (1900) of the curious tradition of "telling the bees":
I don't have any bees, but I guess I could try "telling the gopher" that lives in my front yard.
A perfect weird book for Halloween, judging from the pages shown here!
Anyone in LA might be interested in this signing:
Paul Koudounaris signs and discusses his book,
The Empire of Death
Thursday, October 27, 7 p.m.
The Brand Library
1601 West Mountain Street
Glendale, CA 91201-1209
(818) 548-2051
Awhile back I posted a link on here to an article about strange places to visit. More recently I wrote about unusual contests. Now I can combine the two! Men's magazine
askmen.com has created a list of what they think are the top ten weird festivals held around the globe each year. For example, there's the Cow Painting Festival held in Luxembourg each summer. And you probably shouldn't miss the Moose Dropping Festival in Talkeetna, Alaska in July. Plus there's the So Joo Festival in Porto, Portugal in June - bring a hammer!
You can see the entire list here.
While it might be fairly common for couples to get a divorce in the United States these days, it's certainly not easy. There are questions of support, custody issues if there are children involved, and bitter arguments over who gets to keep what; all of which can drag a divorce into months of stress. But what is it like in other cultures and in other times? In centuries past, in China, a divorce could be granted for any number of reasons, so long as the bride's family agreed to take her back. Aborigine women in Australia can convince their husbands to grant a divorce but if that's not working, then all they need to do is elope with someone else. The ancient Athenians and modern-day Eskimos share an extremely simple divorce process - live separately as though they were never married. In the UK, a man tired of his wife could slip a halter around her neck, lead her into town to the cattle market, and sell her to the highest bidder. Japan had a much more advanced view, however. Marriage was not sacred and divorce was not immoral - it was merely a mismatch between families. Women's dowrys were returned in the hopes of encouraging re-marriage. You can read more on
Purple Slinky, and on
Hope's Blog, and in
this review.
First up, a UK judge has spoken out to say children
should be allowed to take knives to school. Not all children mind you, just Sikh children. Justice Mota Singh, a Sikh himself, is talking about the kirpan, a ceremonial three-inch knife worn as a show of faith by devout Sikhs, the wearing of which by one boy was banned by a North London school earlier this year. Singh later supported the boy's family's decision to withdraw him rather than accept their compromise offer that he carry a 'disabled' equivalent claiming the school's refusal was discriminatory (
BBC News).
Meanwhile another UK court last week ruled that particularly pious Hindu Davender Kumar Ghai
can have the open-air cremation he fervently desires. It's been a long battle for Ghai, who found his proposal to site traditional funeral pyres on land outside Newcastle blocked by the city council in a decision later upheld by England's High Court. Now the UK Court of Appeal has said that the open-air ceremonies can go ahead, and that the requirement that all cremations occur 'within a building' could be met by any reasonable structure and did not dictate that structure have walls or a roof. Davenda Kumar Ghai, who is 76 and in poor health, can now go ahead and build his roofless crematorium, once he gets planning permission to do so, from Newcastle City Council (
Times).
And in yet another landmark decision, the councillors in Reading, England have given the local Muslim community permission to carry out their own burials in the borough's cemeteries at weekends, which council gravediggers do not work. Many Islamic traditions favour burial very soon after death, and the delays caused by the weekend closures was cited as a significant cause of stress for relatives. In response, the council have agreed to dig some graves beforehand for later use in a pilot scheme expected to last one year, or until the first Saturday night drunk falls in one and sues (
GetReading).
Mind you, even once you're in the ground you're not always safe. A row over the siting of a new museum on a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalen has boiled over this week with families who claim to have relatives buried there petitioning the UN. The cemetery, which dates back several hundred years, is due to be excavated to make was for a new “Center for Human Dignity – Museum of Tolerance” being built by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who dispute the families' claims. “The Museum of Tolerance project is not being built on the Mamilla Cemetery. It is being built on Jerusalem’s former municipal car park, where every day for nearly half a century, thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews parked their cars without any protest whatsoever from the Muslim community,” said founder Rabbi Marvin Hier (
Telegraph).
More >>
In 2009, all WU readers are commanded to attend Michigan's Red Flannel Festival, where natives parade in public in their longjohns.
Here's the history of the tradition,
taken from the Festival's homepage.
It all began in 1936 in the midst of "the worst winter in years." The whole country suffered in the grip of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures. A New York feature writer bemoaned the "fact" that, "Here we are in the midst of an old- fashioned winter and there are no red flannels in the USA to go with it."
The local newspaper, The Cedar Springs Clipper, owned and edited by "The Clipper Gals" Nina Babcock and Grace Hamilton answered the writer with a RED HOT editorial stating: "Just because Sak's Fifth Avenue does not carry red flannels, it doesn't follow that no one in the country does. CEDAR SPRINGS' merchants have red flannels!"
The story was picked up by The Associated Press and orders began pouring in from all over the USA.
Seeing the possibility of at least a few years of publicity because of our famous “drop seaters" and lumbering history, a "RED FLANNEL DAY" was planned for the fall of 1939. After the closure of the Red Flannel Factory in 1994, the citizens became concerned as to the fate of their beloved Red Flannels and of the Red Flannel Festival. However, due to the love of their community legacy, volunteers rallied to keep the Red Flannel Festival tradition alive. It has continued to be an annual event, held the last weekend in September and the first weekend in October. The production of Red Flannel garments was reestablished and they are available to purchase in Cedar Springs.
And here are some shots from early on, courtesy of the
Life Photo Archive
Here at WU Central, we're all about providing useful knowledge to our eager readers, serving as a resource to help them with their perplexities.
For instance, I cannot count how many times readers have written in with this question:
Well, now you need no longer live in darkness and confusion, as we present the scanned pages of a 1972 youth sex-education manual:
A Boy Today...A Man Tomorrow. The cover is reproduced below, and the rest of the content after the jump.
On a semi-serious note: we've all seen sex-education materials from earlier decades that are full of prejudices and misinformation. While I have not yet read every word of the current sample, I found what I did read to be highly broadminded and useful and in line with current teachings. Note that the version here is a 1972 revision of a 1961 revision of a 1959 original. I'd love to have the earlier versions, to see the differences.
It's easy to make fun of the Sixties, but their legacy in such matters as this is truly exemplary.
More >>
The concept of
micronations is a fascinating idea. I utilized the notion in one of my recent stories, the title piece from
The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories. But I hardly began to exhaust the narrative possibilities of the idea.
Here's a
recent article on one such place, the
Republic of Molossia.
Category: Animals, Customs, Superstition