Tony Pastor

Mr. Pastor had a somewhat unusual voice and presentation. I'm thinking Jim Nabors combined with Lou Costello.











His Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Thu May 09, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Eccentrics, Music, Twentieth Century

World Black Pudding Throw Championship

The Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Wed May 08, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Eccentrics, Food, Regionalism, United Kingdom

Raising a Perfect Wife From Scratch

Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts.

In 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water.

The full story here.

Posted By: Paul - Tue May 07, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Education, Husbands, Wives, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Love & Romance

The Rotating-Disc Ornithopter

Major article here.

Second piece here.

Inventor's Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Apr 28, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Eccentrics, Technology, Air Travel and Airlines, 1930s

The Suitcase Junket

Hipster musician features homemade instruments, such as in the video below: silverware and cooking pot percussion.



His YouTube channel.

His homepage.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Apr 27, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers, Hobbies and DIY, Music

Professor Burt, Endurance Pianist

"Lady nurse in attendance shaves him every day."



Source.



Source.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Apr 16, 2019 - Comments (3)
Category: Eccentrics, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Human Marvels, Motor Vehicles, Music, 1920s

The Ohwadas and their Tattoos

An instance of the Formerly Weird becoming No Longer Weird.







Original article here.

More pics here.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Apr 09, 2019 - Comments (1)
Category: Art, Eccentrics, Museums, Foreign Customs, 1980s, Asia

Prince Leonard Casley, RIP

Full article here.

Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Thu Feb 14, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Curmudgeons and Contrarianism, Government, Unauthorized Dwellings, Outsider Art, Performance Art, Foreign Customs, Obituaries, 1970s

The woman who counted to one million

The great claim to fame of Marva Drew of Waterloo, Iowa was that she typed the numbers one to one million on a manual typewriter. It took her about six years, starting in 1968 and ending in 1974 (although she took several years off in the middle). It totaled 2,473 pages.

She explained that she got the idea when she heard that her son’s high school teacher had told him that no one had ever counted to a million, and that anyone who tried would be crazy. So Marva decided she’d do it.

She noted that if someone started at the age of 18, they could conceivably type up to 50 million in their entire life.

Some other info from the Waterloo Courier:

Marva Drew poses with the stack of completed pages.

Update: I just recalled that we have another story on WU about someone counting up to one million. It's the case of Henry Parish of Meddybemps, Maine who counted a million peas in one month, back in 1922.

The first and last pages typed.

Waterloo Courier - Dec 5, 1974

Posted By: Alex - Mon Feb 04, 2019 - Comments (4)
Category: Eccentrics, World Records, 1970s

Canadian Prime Minister Consults Ghost Dogs

Article:

William Lyon MacKenzie King (1874-1950), Canada’s 10th and longest serving Prime Minister was a devoted dog owner in life and in death.While active in politics King had an achingly dull public image, which was certainly at odds with the goings-on in his private life. What the Canadian populace wasn’t aware of was his séances, his consultations with spiritual mediums, table-rapping sessions, tea-leaf readings and communing with the spirits of the likes of former PM Wilfrid Laurier, his long-deceased mother, and of course his dear ghost dog, Pat. That he owned and frequently used both a Ouija board and a crystal ball was published in Time Magazine in 1953, news that shocked the nation. Rampant rumours circulated about King’s oddities, some true, most false. That King had Pat stuffed by a taxidermist so that the little dog would always be by his side turned out to be untrue. King’s detailed diary entries, published after his death in 1950 revealed that King consulted the dead Pats during these séance sessions in manners of international political policy, conscription, and Liberal Party Leadership.

King, obsessed with death and the afterlife, often expressed his wish to communicate with the living after he died, just as he hoped to be reunited forever in the spirit world with his three Pats; “we shall all be together in the Beyond,” he wrote, “of that I am perfectly sure”.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 30, 2019 - Comments (2)
Category: Communications, Eccentrics, Government, Officials, New Age, Paranormal, Dogs, Twentieth Century