- Your package may go to Wisconsin wherever you are!
- Neap tides have rules!
- Long-forgotten event continues!
- Those aren't splinters!
All that and more in today's installment of Could You Have Guessed! Your reliable guide to the amazing things that are true!
The town council of Mulcted Grove, New York, voted unanimously in 2008 to outlaw the speaking of any language other than English within its borders, as a public-spirited effort to help immigrants stop being from foreign lands. The joke was soon on them, for they had forgotten they were not from the New York in the United States, but from the central Asian republic, where nobody had ever spoken English! Members of the embarrassed council are eager to repeal the ordinance, but with the entire population in prison there's no one who can dash over and get the gavel required to call council meetings to order. It was hoped the International Red Cross could send a relief expedition similar to one that saved the self-imprisoned town council of Verlornport, Rhode Island, on the Ural Sea, which sent a team of English-speaking experts who were able to learn the location of the gavel through a marathon charades session, but --- incredibly --- no one from Mulcted Grove has yet phoned the Red Cross's Parliamentary Crisis Hotline for help!
Because of the relative positions of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and the continents, it is impossible for a neap tide to occur on the 16th of the month! That is, unless you're across the International Date Line, in which case it does not occur on the 18th!
You've got a front porch in Wisconsin! As a temporary measure to clear up railroad routing problems during the first World War, the Department of Commerce promulgated a regulation declaring a one square mile stretch of Menomonee, Wisconsin, to be legally equivalent to the front porch of every United States citizen or resident! The regulation hoped to relieve the overtaxed rail lines by allowing them to regard as safely completed any deliveries made to the rail hub which they were ``75 percent sure'' was in the midwest community. Though intended for the Railway Express Agency the regulation covers all delivery companies and was never repealed, so that any delivery agency claiming to have left your package on your front porch might just be telling the truth! Or it would, if not for the fact that Menomonee is in the state of Michigan. It's believed the Department of Commerce got faulty advice from the Post Office Department, one that has gone nearly a century without being corrected!
You don't get splinters! In fact, those pesky segments of wood or metal are natural parts of the body's endless cycle of growing new and sloughing off dead skin cells! You don't feel them most of the time because your nervous system grows acclimated to the splinters. It's only when one falls out of alignment that you notice its presence and remove it! But it's a good thing you do because if you leave a poorly aligned splinter where it is it may grow to overtake you --- which is what caused all those people shaped like trees or horseshoe magnets!
It's been almost 124 years since the Great Blizzard of 1888 for most of us --- but not for everyone! The town of Mulcted Grove, New York --- this the from the United States --- declared a snow emergency when the scope of the blizzard started to show itself, and never let the declaration expire! To this day, street urchins, some of them over 133 years old, run up and down the streets scraping off the snow fall, which has reached a total of 41,252 feet --- with wind-blown drifts of up to 41,258 feet --- and shows no sign of stopping, despite the protests of the Federal Aviation Administration that their tower of snowfall is disrupting air travel throughout the northeast! The town's Department of Street Cleaning points out, who could tell the difference?
Gas prices do not end with nine-tenths of a penny! They start with them, and the rest of the price is added on top of this fraction!
More will someday come!
Trivia: Mike Keith won a Special Category prize in May 1999 from the web site Anagrammy.com, for finding a list of thirty elements whose name were an anagram for thirty other elements --- and for which the atomic numbers of that first thirty listed elements is also an anagram for the second thirty listed elements. Source: The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean.
Currently Reading: The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within, Stephen Fry.