26. Harvesting rhubarb in candlelight helps preserve its flavour.
29. The average duvet is home to 20,000 live dust mites.
34. Kryptonite exists.
55. Books used to be bound in human skin.
87. Relocating crocodiles doesn't work - they come back.
Re #55, my high school Civics teacher told me that the second edition of Rosseau's Confessions was bound in the skins of those who had not read the first.
1 comment:
Personally, I was more impressed (or perhaps depressed) to learn that astronauts wear diapers (#11.)
I didn't know about the 30,000 wild parakeets in London (#30), but I'm not surprised. There's a colony of the same (all of them greenish in color) that were pointed out to me in Brooklyn a few years back, surviving New York winters with aplomb. (It was 16 degrees here today, not even accounting for the wind chill factor.)
The alleged origin of the Brooklyn parakeets is that they escaped from a shipment passing through JFK. Anyway, last I saw them they were living in trees and on lamp posts in the Coney Island section.
As for crocodiles finding their way home – perhaps that explains why the myth of albino alligators living in the sewers of New York is in fact a myth.
It exists because, back in the 1940s and early 1950s, doting grandmas in Miami were often sold baby alligators to ship home to their New York grandchildren as pets. Parents, noticing that baby alligators grow bigger - and begin heading from nippy toward lethal quite quickly - began flushing the 'gators down toilets while it still could be done without jamming up the plumbing.
So maybe the reason they didn't turn albino in the dark sewers and begin feeding on rats, as alleged in Thomas Pynchon's "V" (but he stole the episode from an urban legend that already existed) is that they made their way through the sewers, into the East and Hudson Rivers and out to the ocean, where they were able to pick up the Intercoastal Waterway and paddle back to Florida, feeding on flounder and seagulls along the way.
Now please! Don't call the damn paramedics. I'm only speculating, dammit. Spec-u-lating.
Yours Crankily,
The New York Crank
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