Needles in Playground Sand (Wigan) – Men Fear Mosquito Nets (Malawi) – Pete Buttigieg’s Foreign Language Count

https://www.wigantoday.net/news/crime/needles-found-sticking-up-through-sand-at-fire-wrecked-wigan-children-s-play-area-1-9734516

Wigan Today [UK]

26 April 2019

Needles found sticking up through sand at fire-wrecked Wigan children's play area

Needles have been found in the sand at a Wigan children's play area shut after being torched by yobs. Nine syringes were recovered from Norley Hall playground on Lamberhead Road by Wigan Council employees. Horrifyingly the needles were placed pointing upwards, suggesting they were placed there deliberately. […]

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http://www.maravipost.com/sleeping-under-net-contributes-to-infertility-myth-still-hunting-malaria-fight-in-malawi/

The Maravi Post [Malawi]

27 April 2019

Sleeping under net contributes to infertility’ myth still hunting Malaria fight in Malawi

MCHINJI-(MaraviPost)-The myth that says sleeping under mosquito nets contributes to infertility among men in rural Malawi remains a challenge in the fight against Malaria. […] Some women confessed that their husbands still shun mosquito nets for fear of being barren. […]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/pete-buttigiegs-polygot-magic/588169/

The Atlantic

29 April 2019

Pete Buttigieg’s Foreign-Language Count Is Only Going Up

Michael Erard

Peter Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Democratic presidential candidate, has become famous for speaking lots of languages. Depending on the day and the media outlet, the number rises and falls. […] One important key to the myth that tends to be built up around polyglots is the vaporous quality of numbers of languages. How many languages can Buttigieg actually speak? […]

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Snopak Kidney Cooler

Conan (TBS), 23 April 2019. Comic video: “You worked hard to illegally harvest that kidney. Don’t just put it into any cooler. The Snopak Kidney Cooler is specifically designed to keep human kidneys fresh and viable until the buyer meets your price. (Can also hold soda.)”

Gold Record Surprises

John Simon, Truth, Lies & Hearsay: A Memoir of a Musical Life in and out of Rock and Roll (The Author, 2018), 87.

Over the years, the Grammy organization has presented me with a few frames containing records coated with certain precious metals, gold being the most common. When I actually put my first one, for [producing Simon & Garfunkel’s] “Bookends” on the turntable, I discovered that the label bearing the title of the album I worked on had been pasted on an Andy Williams Christmas Album.

[Often RIAA gold records did not in fact correspond to the actual LP displayed in the frame. Many of the stories about artists discovering their gold records are someone else’s concern youth-oriented musicians who are amused or affronted that the fraudulent artifact is by an older, less hip artist. See, for example, the following anecdote by the drummer for The Doors.]

John Densmore, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (Delta, 1991), 226-7.

A week later Julia and I were back in L.A., and the abortion seemed pretty much in the past. I was playing records when I noticed something odd about the gold album I had just received for Waiting for the Sun.

"Hey, this isn't our third album!"

             

"How can you tell?" Julia inquired.

"The number of songs on the label doesn't match up to the number of songs on the disk! Wait a minute...let me see...'Love Street' is about three minutes long, and there's no way it could fit into this tiny bandwidth! This song looks like it's under two minutes."

"Can you open it?" Julia asked. Her eyes widened.

"I'll have to break the glass. It's sealed." I grinned at the prospect of smashing the front glass.

Julia nodded her encouragement.

After getting a hammer from the kitchen, I took the gold record outside to the trash cans. I leaned the frame over one of the cans and tapped hard on the glass. It broke and I carefully pulled out the record, making sure there wasn't any broken glass stuck to it. I brought it back inside to the turntable.

"This thing is really flimsy! It isn't a real record...some kind of pressing...I wonder if it will play?" I put the needle down on the first cut, and through lots of audio crackling we could hear a large orchestra with someone reciting poetry.

"It's Rod McKuen! It's fucking Rod McKuen!"

"That's funny." Julia laughed. "Why do you think they did it?"

I laughed uproariously, yet at the same time I felt insulted. "I don't believe it. They're too cheap to spend five or six bucks on the real thing. So they just get an old $1.98 Thrifty Drug Store discount bin record and schlock it with fake gold, stick a new label on it and slam it into a frame! God damn."

Another myth shattered.

Hitchhikers Stranded in Wawa, Ontario

Linda Mahood, Thumbing a Ride: Hitchhikers, Hostels, and Counterculture in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018), 172, 202-3.

“Hey! Did you hear about the hitchhiker who got stuck so long in Wawa he got married?”

“He got what?”

“He got married. He waited there a month and then he got married to a chick he met the second week he was there.”

– “The legend of the Wawa hitchhiker,” heard in 1971 in a youth hostel in Kamloops, British Columbia, and retold in numerous interviews

***

In 1972 the Canadian rock band Crowbar captured the living folklore of life on the road in its song “Tits Up on the Pavement,” which is a dirge about the blues of hitchhiking in Wawa, northern Ontario: “Anytime you go across this country, you have to go through Wawa, Ontario. Cars are going by at 85 miles an hour with nobody in ‘em. The longer you stand there, the longer your hair gets. The longer your hair gets, the less your chance of getting a ride.”[167] Today, Wawa residents still tell “horror stories” about the “big headache” caused by “thousands and thousands” of hitchhikers stranded for days, weeks, and months on the outskirts of town.[168] Soldiers stationed with Wawa’s 49th Field Regiment used to put hitchhikers in army trucks and drive them “off to Sudbury.”[169] Tall tales of thumbers stranded in Wawa passed from hitchhiker to hitchhiker and across the Atlantic Ocean. A Canadian in Europe said, “People asked me if it was true.”[170] The longevity of these stories about Wawa hitchhikers was not solely due to Wawa’s position on the shore of Lake Superior, which made getting a ride around it “notoriously” difficult, but also due to their status as urban legends, the telling of which was an essential part of the pleasure of travel, communitas, performance, and play.

167. Crowbar, “Tits Up on the Pavement,” on the album Larger Than Life (Daffodil Records, 1972).

168. Wawa is often looked on as the watershed of cross-country travel and is notorious as the place to get marooned. “Army of Hitch-Hikers Already on the March,” Winnipeg Free Press, June 22, 1972.

169. Interviewee 23b, Erin, Ontario, March 7, 2013.

170. Interviewees 34a and 34b, Toronto, April 8, 2013.

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Jake Anderson, “HITCHHIKER WAITS TWO YEARS FOR RIDE!” Weekly World News, 4 April 2005, p. 55.

When it comes to hitching a ride, Freddy Turner is all thumbs. The 27-year-old traveler has been waiting for a lift for two years! This sucks, man," Turner says from the same spot where he's stuck his thumb out every morning for the last 741 days. "But I have a feeling today's my day." Turner's been saying that every day since a truck driver dropped him off in Wane, Canada, a small town smack dab in the middle of the country. "There's really nothing for about 400 miles either way," Turner says. Turner says that because it's in the middle of nowhere, Wane is known to be an impossible place to hitchhike from, and that he wouldn't have taken the ride if he knew he'd get dropped off there. [...]

[In this piece of tabloid fiction, Wane is obviously a stand-in for Wawa.] 

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Jake Williams, “The World Capital of Hitch-hiking Stories,” Folklore Frontiers #2 (1986), 2.