https://www.express.co.uk/sport/football/1095371/Keint-Flint-Prodigy-Arsenal-Aaron-Ramsey-curse-news
Express [UK]
5 March 2019
Prodigy singer Keith Flint
becomes 17th star to pass away after Aaron Ramsey scores
FANS think the Aaron Ramsey curse has struck again as,
just 48 hours after the Arsenal star scored against Tottenham, Prodigy singer
Keith Flint died. Ramsey was on target for Arsenal on Saturday, scoring in the
north London giants’ 1-1 Premier League draw with Tottenham at Wembley. And
now, for a stunning seventeenth time, a celebrity has unfortunately lost their
life in the aftermath. […]
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Bloomberg
5 March 2019
'Brilliant' Man Who Was An Inventor of the Calculator Dies
Dallas
(AP) -- Jerry Merryman, one of the inventors of the hand-held electronic
calculator […] has died. He was 86. […] His friends and family say he was
always creating something. His daughter Melissa Merryman recalls him making his
own tuning fork for their piano. She said she asked him how he made it out of
that "hunk of metal" and he told her: "It was easy, I just took
away all the parts that were not an F sharp." […]
[Merryman’s
quip was likely based on anecdotes and jokes about a certain sculptor’s
methodical approach to accessing a figure “hidden” inside a block of stone;
e.g., Michelangelo “saw a David in a chunk of marble and then chipped away the
surplus.” The Quote Investigator has an article on this
topic.]
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The Advocate [Baton Rouge, LA]
28 February 2019
Smiley: News flash: Tabasco is hot!
[…] Vince
Caruso says, regarding our mention of the early days of TV: "Back in the
'50s, we got our first TV. The antenna was rabbit ears. Whenever I saw a house
with an outdoor antenna, I thought these people were 'in the dough.' In fact,
we never ever had an outdoor antenna! Back then I used to hear of people who
installed an outdoor antenna as evidence of their prosperity, when they didn't
even had a TV. […]
The Advocate [Baton Rouge, LA]
6 March 2019
Smiley: The care and feeding of grandkids
[…] J.B.
Castagnos, of Donaldsonville, says, "The story about the TV antenna with
no TV reminded me of the early '60s, when a certain man would ride around town
in his early '50s Cadillac with the windows rolled up, in mid-summer, to make
people think he had A/C." […]
[Long before
their current ubiquity, cell phones were considered a status symbol, and a now
outdated contemporary legend relates the comeuppance of a man who faked
ownership of one of the devices in a public situation.]
Phil Healey & Rick Glanvill, Incredible But True (London: BCA, 1992), 35-7.
A friend of a former colleague told me about an
incident that recently befell his boss on a train. He was feeling chuffed at
claiming a four-seat table for himself and settled down to a nice quiet journey
reading his book. The whistle blew and as the train lurched away, a loud,
acne’d yuppie trousered his way into the carriage, threw his bags down on the
table, collapsed into the seat opposite, and immediately brandished his
portable phone and began a loud, oafish conversation — ‘Buy … sell … take a
rain check … hyper!’ — that sort of thing.
The quieter man couldn’t believe his misfortune and
tried to ignore the boorish city type, but he was so noisy, ringing up people
and rustling papers and shouting, ‘Yah … yah … yah’ into the phone all the
time, that the bloke couldn’t take any more and set off with his stuff for
another part of the train.
He’d just sat down when an old man opposite him went
pale and groaned. He was having a heart attack and collapsed on the floor. The
guard arrived as passengers tried to come to the old gent’s aid, and he
explained that they’d have to wait ’til the next station before they could
phone as the train’s communication lines were down.
‘I know someone with a phone!’ said the bloke happily.
‘We can ring ahead and have an ambulance waiting for him at the station.’
So the guard, the bloke and some other concerned
passengers marched triumphantly back down the carriage. The yuppie was still in
mid-conversation when the guard cut in to explain the situation and ask him, as
it was an emergency, if they might have the use of his portable phone.
At first the yuppie waved them away as if he was busy,
still talking down the line. But when they persisted and got increasingly
agitated, he threw the phone down, went the colour of beetroot and looking down
mumbled, ‘You can’t. It’s only a fake phone.’
[What new
technologies or high-prestige products could lend themselves to similar
legends? Self-driving cars, perhaps?]
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Jack Kamen
(art), “The Eternal Man.” Weird Science #14,
Sep.-Oct. 1950. In Jack Kamen, The
Martian Monster and Other Stories (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2019), 29.
“A man has ninety million brain cells. Only a genius uses even one-tenth of
them!” [On this belief, see Barry L. Beyerstein, “Whence Cometh the Myth that
We Only Use 10% of Our Brains?” In Sergio Della Sala, ed., Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions About the Mind and Brain
(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 3-24.]
