FICTION
The Odditorium
/ Melissa Pritchard
11.21.09
No one had the faintest idea who was behind all of this. Who made it happen. I’ll tell you who: The Astounding! Supernal! Ghostly Appendage. Otherwise known as the fact checker.
How Old Was Moses When Pharaoh’s Daughter Found Him in a Basket?
Answer Next Sunday
Eighty million yawning, sad Americans rattled open their newspapers every morning to read about: Liu Ch’ung, the double-eyed man of China!, or the long-tailed shrew, smallest mammal in the world, breathing 800 times a minute!, or Kuda Bux, the man who walked on fire through a 20 foot long bed of charcoal without a single burn on his feet!, or “Three Ball Charlie,” who could put three balls in his mouth and whistle at the same time!, or a seventy-five-year-old petrified apple! or Laurello, the only man in the world with a revolving head, who could walk forward while looking backward! - all this set Ripley fans agog, agog enough to forget there were no jobs, dough had dried up and a wholesale slaughter called war was taking place on a never-before-seen scale…. forget it, readers could marvel at The Human Slate, the Human Flag, the Human Belt, the Human Pincushion, the Human Cork, the Human Autograph Album, glimpse wider possibilities for themselves in the ice sitters, the one-legged lawn mower hoisters, the upside down writers and readers, the waitress from Clayton’s Café in Tyler, Texas, who could carry twenty-five cups of hot coffee in one hand or Johnny “Cigars” Connors of Roxbury, Massachusetts who rolled a peanut with his nose from Boston to Worcester.... if you were unemployed, wearing week old newspapers for your shoe soles, if you were tempted to drown yourself in a teaspoon of something awful, you could always try stacking quarters in your ears, playing the piano with the tip of your nose, knick-knack-paddy-whack your mutt-dog into telling time while puffing a cheroot, remove nails with your teeth, lift your sister on your chin, be like Dr. A. Boinker, jumping backwards from a train going 20 miles an hour, or outdo James Weir of Weirton, West Virginia, who could hold a half dollar in his eye, a pencil between his upper lip and nose, another pencil between his lower lip and chin and a cigar between his teeth all while moving his scalp back and forth and singing. This was no time to die.
Under the reign of Ripley, America became more wonderstruck than beautiful, and in 1929, when his Believe It or Not column in the New York Post declared that America had no national anthem, the consequent uproar resulted in the official adoption of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner” (Francis Scott Key penning the words to an old English tavern ballad during the 1812 siege of Fort McHenry,) as the nation’s paean to itself. Rip-o-mania kept people awake nights, kept folks writing letters, millions upon millions, 3,000 a week, the envelopes addressed in Braille, wigwag, semaphore, Morse code, upside down and backwards or sometimes with just a single rippley line. America’s hunger for whimsy, for petty invention and pointless stunts, the vanity of the human mammal, that “mute creature of the breast,” performing feats of repetitive idiocy; Ripley had struck upon it like a bottomless seam of black gold pluming skyward, a geyser coating him and everyone else with slick tomfoolery and genuine amazement. Life was fun again.
How Old Was Moses When Pharaoh’s Daughter Found Him in a Basket?
Answer Next Sunday
Eighty million yawning, sad Americans rattled open their newspapers every morning to read about: Liu Ch’ung, the double-eyed man of China!, or the long-tailed shrew, smallest mammal in the world, breathing 800 times a minute!, or Kuda Bux, the man who walked on fire through a 20 foot long bed of charcoal without a single burn on his feet!, or “Three Ball Charlie,” who could put three balls in his mouth and whistle at the same time!, or a seventy-five-year-old petrified apple! or Laurello, the only man in the world with a revolving head, who could walk forward while looking backward! - all this set Ripley fans agog, agog enough to forget there were no jobs, dough had dried up and a wholesale slaughter called war was taking place on a never-before-seen scale…. forget it, readers could marvel at The Human Slate, the Human Flag, the Human Belt, the Human Pincushion, the Human Cork, the Human Autograph Album, glimpse wider possibilities for themselves in the ice sitters, the one-legged lawn mower hoisters, the upside down writers and readers, the waitress from Clayton’s Café in Tyler, Texas, who could carry twenty-five cups of hot coffee in one hand or Johnny “Cigars” Connors of Roxbury, Massachusetts who rolled a peanut with his nose from Boston to Worcester.... if you were unemployed, wearing week old newspapers for your shoe soles, if you were tempted to drown yourself in a teaspoon of something awful, you could always try stacking quarters in your ears, playing the piano with the tip of your nose, knick-knack-paddy-whack your mutt-dog into telling time while puffing a cheroot, remove nails with your teeth, lift your sister on your chin, be like Dr. A. Boinker, jumping backwards from a train going 20 miles an hour, or outdo James Weir of Weirton, West Virginia, who could hold a half dollar in his eye, a pencil between his upper lip and nose, another pencil between his lower lip and chin and a cigar between his teeth all while moving his scalp back and forth and singing. This was no time to die.
Under the reign of Ripley, America became more wonderstruck than beautiful, and in 1929, when his Believe It or Not column in the New York Post declared that America had no national anthem, the consequent uproar resulted in the official adoption of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner” (Francis Scott Key penning the words to an old English tavern ballad during the 1812 siege of Fort McHenry,) as the nation’s paean to itself. Rip-o-mania kept people awake nights, kept folks writing letters, millions upon millions, 3,000 a week, the envelopes addressed in Braille, wigwag, semaphore, Morse code, upside down and backwards or sometimes with just a single rippley line. America’s hunger for whimsy, for petty invention and pointless stunts, the vanity of the human mammal, that “mute creature of the breast,” performing feats of repetitive idiocy; Ripley had struck upon it like a bottomless seam of black gold pluming skyward, a geyser coating him and everyone else with slick tomfoolery and genuine amazement. Life was fun again.