This just ended up being painful on my eyes.
(via Kottke)
From the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society who also has a link to a Dutchman who is building an Ark.
The 47-year-old from Schagen, 45km (30 miles) north of Amsterdam, plans to set sail in September through the interior waters of the Netherlands.
Johan’s Ark is a fifth of the size of Noah’s and will carry farmyard animals.
Pamphlets had been dropped informing the holdouts that the war was over and that they should surrender, but these requests were ignored. They lived a sparse life, eating coconuts, taro, wild sugar cane, fish and lizards. They smoked crushed, dried papaya leaves wrapped in the leaves of bananas and made an intoxicating beverage known as “tuba”, (coconut wine). They lived in palm frond huts with woven floor matting of pandanus. Their life improved after the crash of the aircraft . They used metal from the B-29 to fashion crude implements such as pots, knives and roofing for their hut. The oxygen tanks were used to store water, clothing was made from nylon parachutes, the cords used for fishing line. The springs from machine guns were fashioned into fish hooks. Several in the group also had machine guns and pistols recovered from the aircraft.
The most famous of the holdouts was Second Lt. Hiroo Onoda who finally emerged from the jungle in 1974 and wrote a book about his experience called No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
From LiveScience.com:
True to form, the great San Francisco earthquake of April 18,1906 churned out its fair share of extraordinary behind-the-scenes vignettes, many of which have since been relegated to the file cabinet of other tall (and false) tales.
We’ve weeded out a few of the most interesting to emerge from the rubble, all of which historians claim are more than just hearsay:
(via Linkfilter)
One of the most bizarre stories I have ever read dealing with William Sheldon’s use of anthropometry and photographing nude freshmen at Ivy League colleges.
Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were — and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students — some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society — would survive.
It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon thousands of photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this day.
More about William Sheldon and his projects here.