It was Noah Kellogg's donkey that alerted the prospector to a mountain outcropping of galena, a lead ore often containing silver. This miraculous moment would attract a rough-and-tumble-type crowd to dig up and refine the resources below. What this visually stunning Silver Valley town is today — through mining ups and downs, population decline and industry changes — is just as the town motto cheekily states: "Founded by a jackass and inhabited by his descendants."
The current era has been compared to the Depression and New Deal under Roosevelt. But what's lacking today as we seek to emerge from the pandemic malaise is--parades!
To celebrate "NRA Day," New York City threw a parade that utilized a quarter of a million participants.
We've all seen those features that dig up "Crazy Laws Still on the Books." But how did such ordinances ever first get established? By big and small towns trying to regulate every human behavior they could think of.
Here are a few choice samples from a randomly chosen place!
Source: The Lancaster News (Lancaster, South Carolina) 16 May 1903
No public marble playing
No annoying churchgoers
No hookers
No tramps, cardsharps or fortune tellers
No dirks or slingshots
No outward-opening gates
Must ring bicycle bell
No piles of public poop
No bad oysters
To their credit, the officials imposed lots of rules on the cops as well. These are just a few.
The FBI's main thrust was not investigations but public relations and propaganda to glorify Hoover. Everyone who worked in the bureau, especially those of us in high places around him, bear our share of the blame.
Flacking for the FBI was part of every agent's job from his first day. In fact, "making a good first impression" was a necessary prerequisite for being hired as a special agent in the first place. Bald-headed men, for example, were never hired as agents because Hoover thought a bald head made a bad impression. No matter if the man involved was a member of Phi Beta Kappa or a much-decorated marine, or both. Appearances were terribly important to Hoover, and special agents had to have the right look and wear the right clothes...
Though a bald-headed man wouldn't be hired as an agent, an employee who later lost his hair wasn't fired but was kept out of the public eye.
I guess that means that, under Hoover, Walter Skinner would never have made the cut.
The Japanese government recently created an animated character that definitely belongs in our ongoing series of strange spokesbeings. It was a "cute fish-like creature with rosy cheeks" that was intended to represent a radioactive hydrogen isotope. The government was hoping that this creature would help gain public support for its plan of releasing contaminated water from Fukushima into the sea.
While the government didn't give this creature a name, people have been calling it "Little Mr. Tritium".
In 1960, the late Mrs. W.L. Clayton reportedly left $25 million in her will to the U.S. government to help pay down the national debt.
The amount she left for this purpose may have been unusually large, but it turns out that leaving behind money to help pay off the national debt isn't unusual. The Associated Press reports that, every year, the U.S. government receives about $1 million in bequests to help with the national debt. And since 1961, it's received $100 million.
However, the AP also notes that all these bequests, though well-intentioned, are "pointless" and "essentially, useless". This isn't just because the amounts are like a drop in the ocean compared to the size of the national debt. It's because: "The donations are recorded on the receipts ledger of the federal government’s general fund. So, rather than actually paying down the national debt, these donations just reduce the amount of money our government will borrow."
But back in 1968, reporter Jed Drews heard something else there.
Source: Fort Lauderdale News (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) 24 Feb 1968, Sat Page 15
I can find literally not one other online endorsement of this interpretation of the lyrics--except when Mr. Drews's article was inserted into the Congressional Record upon his testimony in DC.
Imagine the insults suffered by the dweeb forced by well-meaning parents to carry this lunch pail to school.
The objects children take to school can communicate messages. In the 1970s, the U.S. government encouraged more general use of the metric units of weight and measure, units that had been adopted in almost all other nations. To teach children about metric units, some parents purchased this lunch box.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.