#weird wiki

[an-admiring-bog]

An incomplete list of things that happened in the longest professional baseball game (AAA, between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings):

- the first 8 hours were played in one go, Saturday into Sunday morning

- the teams played until 4 am because the home plate umpire’s rule book didn’t mention the cutoff time of 12:50 am

- it was so cold they burned bats and benches for warmth

- one pitcher’s wife didn’t believe his excuse for coming home at that hour, and because it was 1981 he couldn’t prove it until the Monday newspaper came out

- the umpire had brought his nephew to the game, and the kid’s parents became concerned for his safety and called the police, who told them the game had not ended

- of the roughly 1,740 people present for the start of the game, 19 remained at 4:07 am

- the game was only stopped because the manager of one team called the PRESIDENT OF THE LEAGUE and explained. He ordered play to stop at the end of the current inning (the 32nd)

-the records set:

- they resumed the game a few months later and it only took 18 minutes to finish. The losing pitcher was not even on the team when the game began

It is my favorite Wikipedia article by far:

Longest professional baseball game - Wikipedia

Longest professional baseball game - Wikipedia

[yr-bed]

“The Hands Resist Him” is a painting that was created by artist Bill Stoneham in 1972. It depicts a young boy and a female doll standing in front of a glass paneled door, against which many hands are pressed. According to Stoneham, the boy is based on a photograph of himself at age five. The doorway is a representation of the dividing line between the waking world and the world of fantasy and impossibilities, while the doll is a guide that will escort the boy through it. The titular hands represent alternate lives or possibilities. The painting became the subject of an urban legend and a viral internet meme in February 2000 when it was posted for sale on eBay along with a description implying that it was haunted.

The Hands Resist Him

[yr-bed]

Onfim (Old Novgorodian: онѳиме, Onfime; also Anthemius of Novgorod) was a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who was most likely six or seven at the time, wrote in the Old Novgorodian dialect of Old East Slavic. Besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher".

Onfim

[yr-bed]

The Curse of the Colonel (Japanese: カーネルサンダースの呪い, romanisation: Kāneru Sandāsu no Noroi) refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders.

The curse was said to be placed on the team because of the Colonel's anger over treatment of one of his store-front statues, which was thrown into the Dōtonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. Some fans believed the team would never win another Japan Series until the statue had been recovered. They have appeared in the Japan Series three times since then, losing in 2003, 2005 and 2014.

Although the leap into Dōtonbori canal and the Curse of the Colonel is usually associated only with a Hanshin Tigers victory, in 2002, when Japan beat Tunisia in the World Cup, some 500 fans jumped into the canal as a celebration, in spite of heavy police security.

In addition, a Colonel Sanders statue was taken from the storefront of a KFC in nearby Kobe, and its hands were cut off supposedly in imitation of Sharia law.

Curse of the Colonel

[yr-bed]

"A man who won't meet his own men halfway is a damn fool!" --Mark Hanna, on George Pullman George Pullman (1831-97) was the inventor of the Pullman sleeping car. When a Pullman car was attached to the funeral train carrying Abraham Lincoln's body, demand for Pullman's product surged, and the Pullman Sleeping Car Company grew quickly.

George Pullman and architect Solon Beman built the town of Pullman for his employees near 111th street. Pullman joked that the town had been named for both of them: the first syllable of his name, the second syllable of Beman's. The town of Pullman was a planned community, with schools, theaters, library, hotel, all operated by the Pullman Sleeping Car Company.

When the fortunes of the company declined in 1894, Pullman slashed wages by 25 percent. However, he neglected to lower the rents or cost of groceries in the company town. A delegation of workers went to meet with Pullman and ask him to reduce these costs - the next day, these men were fired. His workers went on strike, aided by Eugene Debs' American Railway Union. Workers refused to handle any train with Pullman cars attached. In order to ensure that the mail on those trains would not be delayed, President Cleveland sent federal troops to break the strike, over the protests of Governor Altgeld. All Pullman employees were then required to sign a statement that they would never attempt to join a union.

Pullman was so hated by his employees that when he died in 1897, his heirs feared that the body would be stolen and held for ransom. The coffin was covered in tar paper and asphalt, and enclosed in the center of a room-sized block of concrete, reinforced with railroad ties. Ambrose Bierce said "It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to get up and come back."

Graceland Cemetery: George Pullman

[yr-bed]

“The Australian Sheep-Goat Scale (ASGS) is a questionnaire conceived by Michael Thalbourne to determine the extent to which the respondent believes in the paranormal. The description 'Australian' is given because the test was devised in Adelaide, South Australia, and to distinguish it from other nations' instruments (such as the Icelandic Sheep-Goat Scale). A person who believes in some aspect of the paranormal is termed a 'sheep', and a disbeliever a 'goat' (after the New Testament simile about Christ separating the [nations (error)] /people (correction)/ as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats Matthew 25:31–33).”

Australian Sheep-Goat Scale

[yr-bed]

Human flesh search engine (Chinese: 人肉搜索; pinyin: Rénròu Sōusuǒ) is a Chinese term for the phenomenon of distributed researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums. Internet media, namely dedicated websites and Internet forums, are in fact platforms that enable the broadcast of request and action plans concerning human flesh search and that allow the sharing of online and offline search results. Human flesh search has two eminent characteristics. First, it involves strong offline elements including information acquisition through offline channels and other types of offline activism. Second, it always relies on voluntary crowd sourcing: Web users gather together to share information, conduct investigations, and perform other actions concerning people or events of common interest. Human flesh search engine is similar to the concept of 'doxing'. Both human flesh search engine and doxing have generally been stigmatized as being for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals to public humiliation, sometimes out of vigilantism, nationalist or patriotic sentiments, or to break the Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. More recent analyses, however, have shown that it is also used for a number of other reasons, including exposing government corruption, identifying hit and run drivers, and exposing scientific fraud, as well as for more 'entertainment'-related items such as identifying people seen in pictures.

Human flesh search engine

[yr-bed]

In German culture, Ostalgie (German: [ˌʔɔstalˈɡiː]) is nostalgia for aspects of life in Communist East Germany. It is a portmanteau of the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia). Its anglicised equivalent, ostalgia (rhyming with "nostalgia"), is also sometimes used.

The term was coined by the East German standup comic Uwe Steimle [de] in 1992. Social scientist Thomas Ahbe argues that the term ‘ostalgia’ is often misunderstood as a lack of willingness to integrate, an uproar to reverse German reunification and reinstate the GDR. However, Ostalgia is rather an integration strategy used by East Germans who wanted to retain their own original experiences, memories and values incompatible with those of the West German majority.

As with other cases of Communist nostalgia, there are various motivations, whether ideology, nationalism, wistfulness for a lost sense of social status or stability, or even aesthetics or irony.