Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 223
January 29, 2020
January 28, 2020
The Feathers That Could Buy A Boat (Or Bride)
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Feather Money Coils
The Santa Cruz Islands sit in the Pacific Ocean just north of the continent of Australia. The home of sea-centric Polynesian societies, ocean-going outrigger canoes—known as tepukei—were central to villages’ survival for hundreds of years.
Tepukei/Via MIT
Because these crafts were so important in Santa Cruz society, it would take something of great value to buy one from a native shipwright. With little need for currency beyond bartering, islanders developed a unique form of money: the tevau.
The tevau is a long coil of beautiful red feathers sewn together. These coils were made by hereditary craftsmen who were said to be endowed by spirits with the ability to make these intricate artifacts.
Measuring anywhere from 20 to 30 feet in length, it could take a person over a year to complete a full feather coil. The tevau starts with a belt of woven fiber, with tiny feathers from the scarlet honeyeater attached. It took hundreds of birds to supply up to 60,000 feathers for a single tevau. Craftsmen smeared branches with sticky sap to capture the birds, plucking nearly 20,000 individual birds each year. Despite this intense harvesting, bird experts say the population of wild honeybirds thrives to this day.
According to ornithologist David C. Houston, the Santa Cruz islands had the only known bird-based currency in human history. The islanders didn’t have access to rare ores or fuels hot enough to melt them, so coins were simply out of the question. Instead, scarlet honeyeater feathers were seen as the ultimate hard-to-get resource. The red feathers of honeyeaters quickly became signs of royalty. Their colors didn’t fade in the sun like red dyes made from sea mollusks.
These prized possessions were often kept in the roofs of people’s homes, wrapped in tree bark to protect them. The smoke of a home was also thought to help ward off insects who might deteriorate the coil. The longest, most well-made, and most valuable feather coils sometimes had their own dedicated buildings for storage and would be accompanied by magic seals for protection.
Though they were used as currency throughout the Santa Cruz Islands, they were only made on Ndende island. Robert Ripley visited in 1932. He was stunned to find that only ten craftsmen remained who could make the feather coils. He learned these masterpieces were used as payment for crimes, the all-important tepukei canoes, and even for a bride. Some payments even necessitated multiple rolls. A photo taken in 1909 shows a single bride being bought for ten feather coils.
King Umberto And His Long Lost Double
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
It’s not easy being royalty. It may seem that kings, queens, and their families live charmed lives, but the delicate balancing act of domestic duties, foreign relations and the like ensure they’re pulled from responsibility to responsibility at a breakneck pace. For one king, though, a simple meal in a restaurant perhaps proved to be the most important—and most impossible—event of his life!
A Fateful Dinner
King Umberto I of Italy assumed the throne in January 1878. He forged alliances with Austria-Hungary and the Empire of Germany while pushing an expansionist policy and gaining a foothold in Africa. Dubbed il Buono (the Good), Umberto’s rule was a turbulent time for the country—which had many balls in the air at home and abroad. Today, though, he’s remembered for an amazing chance meeting that is said to have occurred the very day before his death.
King Umberto I of Italy and his wife, Queen Margherita of Italy
On July 28, 1900, Umberto was enjoying a meal in a Monza restaurant, accompanied by a trusted aide. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary until the owner of the establishment approached to greet his prestigious guest. The restaurant’s proprietor and the king looked exactly alike! And, as if this physical similarity wasn’t surprising enough, the proprietor was also named Umberto and had also been born in Turin on the very same day. As they spoke, the eerie coincidences continued: both Umbertos had married on the same day, both to women named Margherita. Even more astonishingly, Umberto, the restauranteur, had opened his establishment on the exact day of King Umberto’s coronation!
The Death Of The Two Umbertos
If the connections between their lives seem uncanny, they’re nothing compared to the strange and tragic circumstances that surrounded their deaths. The King had been profoundly affected by his meeting with his ‘twin,’ and asked him to attend an athletics show he had been scheduled to appear at with him the next day. Sadly, the restaurant owner had been killed the morning after he met the king, shot in unexplained circumstances.
King Umberto I of Italy
No sooner had King Umberto heard this sad news that he too fell victim to a shooting; this time a well-documented one. He was shot and killed by Gaetano Bresci, an Italian-American anarchist who had been outraged—along with many other Italians—by General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris’ brutal massacre of protestors in Milan in May 1898. Beccaris authorized his troops to fire their rifles into those who had been demonstrating against the rising price of bread; Umberto praised his general and awarded him with the Great Official of Savoy Military Order medal for restoring calm to Milan.
A True Tale?
And so our fascinating tale ends: two men who had led remarkably similar lives meet remarkably similar ends on the very same day. The question is, what is the link between them? While we may never know for sure, it’s a popular theory that the pair were twins. They are said to have looked identical, after all, so that’s certainly more than feasible. It’s also been reported that Gaetano Bresci, the assassin, had been living in the U.S. where he worked on an anarchist newspaper, arriving back in Italy mere weeks before the king’s killing. Perhaps he had been in that restaurant that fateful day, saw the two men meet, and determined that both had to die?
Gaetano Bresci
Considering the fact that both men also had sons named Vittorio and had both been given commendations for their heroism in the military twice (in 1866 and 1870), yet another spooky coincidence in this tale wouldn’t surprise us at all. Perhaps all of this can be explained away as the king having a twin he hadn’t known about—one Umberto sent away to another family and the other raised as king, to avoid all the pitfalls twins naturally present in a royal lineage scenario—but we just can’t know for sure. Is this a fascinating tale that has been expanded and embellished over years of telling, or did Umberto I and his equally-doomed twin truly live such interconnected lives? Perhaps one day we’ll know the truth.
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
January 27, 2020
The Ants That Can Be Used In Place Of Stitches
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
They’re extraordinary architects with orderly societies and create colonies that stretch to mind-blowing proportions. They aerate our soil, help break down dead wood, and are even considered some of the greatest builders of all time. Ants may be small, but their impact is mighty. In fact, as far back as the Neolithic period—nearly 12,000 years ago—ants have been known to make quite a medicinal impact as well.
Before there were at-home ant farms or the fear of accidentally stepping into a swarming hill of biters, ants were actually employed to close open wounds on the human body!
Entomologist Justin Schmidt of the University of Arizona knows a thing or two about insects and their bite quality. In fact, he has experienced so many insect bites that Schmidt invented the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. This scale was created to rate the pain of various ant stings that he has suffered while working in the field; the index is detailed in his book The Sting of the Wild (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
The Perfect Man(dible) For The Job
“Army ants seem to be ideal” when it comes to this healing process, says Schmidt. This species of ant has colony members called majors—defense ants with huge wide-open-spread mandibles.
When grasped just behind the head, army ants will open their mandibles wide, Schmidt says. Carefully place one mandible on each side of the cut and the ant obliges, performing its normal defensive behavior of piercing “the enemy” and clamps down.
Army Ants
“The mandibles are extremely sharp and easily pierce human skin, thus making them ideal for the job,” he says.
To secure the heal, similar to that of a bandage, the ant’s head is snipped off while clamped onto the wound, acting similarly to a staple.
“The ant head,” Schmidt says, “stays in that locked position until the wound is healed and is then removed.” A wound could have several ants’ heads holding it closed, like buttons on a sweater.
One species often used in this fashion is the suturing army ant, Eciton burchelli, of Central and South America. These tiny, but mighty, biters mark up to about a 1.5 pain level on the Schmidt Pain Index. Schmidt writes that the pain is like “a cut on your elbow, stitched with a rusty needle,”—seems like a true testament to the whole “Good medicine tastes bitter,” analogy.
Eciton burchelli || Photo CC: April Nobile / © AntWeb.org
Sticking With Traditional Bandages
While we’d love to leave the healing up to these little backyard helpers, this method isn’t exactly recommended by your family physician. Due to the lack of hygienic information associated with this treatment, our advice is to stick with your drug store bandages in the event of an open wound. And, let’s be honest, a colorful character bandage is much more cheery to look at than a severed ant head.
By Liz Langley, contributor for Ripleys.com
January 26, 2020
January 25, 2020
January 24, 2020
Making A Planet Sandwich Using Longitude And Latitude
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
This Week
[January 17-24th, 2020] A planet-sized sandwich, falling iguanas, talking mummy, and the rest of the week’s weird news from Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Planet Sandwich
Deciding what exactly makes something a sandwich has been contemplated by many—including members of the Supreme Court—but Etienne Naude and Angel Sierra believe theirs should count. The two men, one in Spain and one in New Zealand, calculated their positions using longitude and latitude to ensure they were on exact opposite sides of planet Earth. Using a slice of bread each, they made “the largest known sandwich,” placing the Earth between two slices of bread.
Falling Iguanas
As temperatures in Florida dropped into the low 30s, the National Weather Service was warning residents about the unusually low-temperatures… and a chance of falling iguanas! Iguanas have long been an invasive scourge in southern Florida, wreaking havoc on public infrastructure and native habitats, but now residents also have to fear the cold-blooded reptiles going catatonic above their heads. Reports confirmed these lizards—weighing up to nearly 20 pounds—indeed fell dormant to the ground. Residents were asked not to disturb the grumpy reptiles.
“Thunderstruck” Baby Cover
Ryan Macmillan may only be a year old, but he’s already covering songs by AC/DC. His father, Matt MacMillan, spent a year turning his son’s coos and laughs into an approximation of “Thunderstruck.” He had to painstakingly sort the sounds by pitch before stitching them together.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Matt MacMillan (@mattmacmakesstuff) on Jan 14, 2020 at 4:53am PST
Voice of the Past
Millennia ago, Egyptian priest Nesyamun was mummified in the city of Luxor. Now, 3,000 years later, people are hearing his voice. The Leeds City Museum acquired the mummy in 1823, and his coffin has been carefully studied for over a century. Using medical scans, researchers recreated a 3D-model of Nesyamun’s vocal tract and produced a single sound from it. It sounds like a short “ahh.”
Nesyamun’s coffin/CC Tomohawk
Robocops in Houston
Houston, Texas, has a few new sheriffs patrolling its transit center. The Metropolitan Transit Authority has decided to spend $270,000 to roll-out police robots called K5s. The robocops likely won’t be chasing anyone down—they only move at about three miles per hour—but are outfitted with cameras to record any crimes-in-progress.
Credit: ZikG/Shutterstock
Source: Making A Planet Sandwich Using Longitude And Latitude
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