Oysters for dinner. 1925 and 1952.

Imagine the owner of this Madrid oyster bar. One minute he is having the best bit of publicity he could imagine and the next his bar is being trashed by an angry crowd.

Chronicle 10 Jan 1925 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87511595

Senor Herroro was having a very lucky day wasn’t he? First he wins the second prize in a Christmas lottery and then finds a large pearl in his plate of celebratory oysters. He quickly rushed out and sold the pearl to a dealer for 100 pounds.

While he was doing so the bar started doing a brisk trade in people expecting their luck to turn as well. Unfortunately the stock of oysters ran out and no other pearls were found.

As you can imagine the crowd were none too happy with this turn of events, but instead of going home to whinge to their families they wrecked the restaurant.

I did another search for unexpected pearls in meals and there was no shortage of them, including one found in a can! Clearly these were the days before quality control.

The Advertiser 22 Oct 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47430307

This quarter-inch pearl found by Mr Wauhop in 1952 was quite a prize wasn’t it. I wouldn’t be too sad about finding that in my dinner.

I was interested in Mr. Wauhop’s title though, Chairman of the State Licensing Court. I wonder if the pearl really was an amazing find or if it was supposed to be some sort of distraction or secret payoff 😉

Today is bissextile….

Yes, bissextile. An unexpected word really, and upon my first reading of it I had an instant flash of a decorative tile adorned with an illustration taken from the sealed section of the Karma Sutra. Something not usually found in your average bathroom.

Bissextile, disappointingly, turned out to be nothing so startling. It is another name for today, the extra day falling in a leap year. Bissextile doesn’t really shout calendric term to me.

I am absolutely not a mathematician, words are the thing I love, and that will be fairly obvious to you when I say I can’t work out why on earth bissextile, twice sixth, is used for something that happens every four years. I really wanted to know why, and to share it with you, and I read any amount of explanations. No matter what, nothing made any sense to my brain whatsoever.

Barrier Miner 3 Mar 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49237433

The usually helpful thefreedictionary.com confused me even further with the explanation of the latin at the end of their bissextile entry stating it was because the sixth day before the Calends of March on February 24 occurred twice every leap year.

Ummm….yeah…. You can’t see me but I have a glazed look in my eyes.

This article from 1952 tells me that Mrs. Myrom Palmer had bissextile births in both 1948 and 1952. In 2012 her children are now celebrating their 14th and 15th birthdays. An excuse to be cheap on the presents if you are a mean parent!

I love that the doctors estimated the chances of two leap year births happening in one family as one million to one. It is amazing how often that happens, isn’t it? One million to one chances seem to crop up nine times out of ten. (I dips me lid to you, Sir Terry Pratchett)

Money doesn’t grow on trees, just inside carrots. 1952 and 1945.

A woman in northern Sweden was lucky enough recently to have her lost wedding ring delivered to her via a carrot from her garden 16 years after it was lost in her kitchen. What were the chances that a carrot grew in the very spot the ring was lying?

Barrier Miner 10 Apr 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49240889

A florin arrived in the kitchen of a Glenorchy housewife in 1952 via a carrot and a Smithton housewife found a penny in a carrot in 1945. Again, what were the chances of a carrot growing exactly where these coins were lying? Is there a large amount of coinage just under the surface of Tasmania waiting for root vegetables to bring them to the surface?

These stories make me think I should get out there and put some carrots in my vegie garden!

Advocate 13 Jun 1945 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article68928158

Don’t Grab the Emu. 1952.

Sunday Times 16 Nov 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60101550

What was this guy thinking? The pity is that the emu was killed by this idiot and he got off scott free.

At 30 mph I am not sure how he proposed to actually subdue 35 kilos of feathered fury, it is quite hard to persuade an emu to do something it doesn’t want to do, and almost as hard to stop it doing something it wants to!

Even if he had managed to bring the bike safely to a halt with the emu still alive and amenable, how was he going to get it back to his interested passengers? No amount of occy straps were going to hold an emu across his handlebars or on the pillion seat!

Hidden twin. 1952.

Townsville Daily Bulletin 18 Sep 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63540977

It is not unusual to hear of semi-absorbed twins, although I am sure finding out that you have been carrying around a small embryo in your head would be quite unnerving.

The Man of the House has a weird extra toenail thing on one toe and I have often suggested that he is the evil twin and that is all that is left of the good one….