Aug 1985: Four British ex-servicemen, all missing both their legs, embarked on a tour of France to promote English wines. Their motto: "You don't have to be legless to enjoy English wine."
Some explanation may be needed for Americans. 'Legless' is British slang for 'very drunk.'
I don't have any valuable family heirlooms. Wish I had something classy like this to leave to heirs when I die.
Update: Thanks to Patrick for giving a heads up about the identity of this pig flask, and that a similar one was discussed on Antiques Roadshow.
These pig flasks were made by Anna Pottery (located in Anna, Illinois) during the late 19th century. They weren't considered valuable when they were made, but due to their rarity and quirkiness they're now collector's items.
In 1883, Wakefield resident Jonathan Nichols established a $1000 fund from which $10 would be paid to any Wakefield boy (girls excluded, I assume) who took and successfully completed the "Jonathan Nichols Temperance and Tobacco Pledge."
The pledge was to not "drink intoxicating liquors and not to chew or smoke tobacco" before they turned 21. They had to take the pledge before their 16th birthday.
Unfortunately, Nichols didn't bother to have the prize adjusted for inflation. So while $10 in 1883 may have been a decent prize, today it seems like a joke.
Six hundred boys took the pledge before 1918. From 1918 to 1959 only 10 did. There was some publicity about the pledge in 1959, which inspired 29 Boy Scouts to take the pledge in 1964 (but only a couple of them subsequently got the cash payout). Since then it doesn't seem that anyone has bothered with the pledge.
Ocean Fathoms promised its customers truly superior wine (for the price of $500/bottle) based on its unique method of aging the wine: in the ocean. It dropped the wine bottles to the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel and brought them up a year later. From its website:
The Santa Barbara Channel offers not only the perfect environment for the aging process of wine, but is sits in a rich sea-life transition zone, where cold arctic waters meet warmer waters from the equator providing more than 100 species of flora and fauna unique to this location. The combination of flora and fauna attracts an abundance of sea-creatures and sea-life which ultimately adorn our bottles.
It is also the interaction between the submerged wine cages and the set of special characteristics of the Channel Islands’ environment that gives Ocean Fathoms a superior product. We sourced the absolute best location on planet earth to age our superior wine.
One problem. It never got permits to do any of this. The Bureau of Alcoholic Beverage Control seized and destroyed 2,000 bottles of the wine.
I wonder if the ocean-aging actually made any difference. My guess is that it's just the latest wine-industry gimmick.
A German brewery, Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle, has developed a powdered beer. Its rationale is that this will save on shipping costs, since eliminating the water from beer also eliminates most of its weight.
Reputed to be the worst whisky ever made for sale. It started out as a Bruichladdich single malt, but was then matured for three months in a cask that had previously contained salted herring. Why? Because according to legend (possibly urban legend) early Scottish distillers occasionally used herring casks to mature their whisky. So a German whisky maker decided to see what it would taste like. From a review:
I took a mouthful big enough to swirl around the palate as I would with any other whisky that I review and regretted my decision immediately. When those sour and salty notes hit my tongue, my eyes watered and I immediately wanted to spit it back out. However, I suffer for my art and carried on. You could say I overreacted, but I retched after that initial mouthful and broke out in a sweat.
In the late nineteenth century, a brief moral panic emerged about the alleged existence of "cologne drunkards" — society women who inebriated themselves by means of sugar cubes soaked in cologne.
Seems like an expensive way to consume alcohol, but I guess it's plausible that some women really did this.
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.