I don’t understand. It was a hoax when it was published in 1874. Tom Waits mentioning it over 100 years later doesn’t make it less of a hoax.
Station wagon missing since December 1958 may have been found.
The Martins took their daughters - Barbara, 14; Virginia, 13; and Sue, 11 - on a ride to the mountains on Dec. 7, 1958, to collect Christmas greenery, according to AP stories from the time. The children left the Sunday newspaper comics scattered about their home. Dishes remained in the sink and a load of laundry in the washing machine.
They never returned. Officials narrowed their search for the family after learning that Ken Martin had used a credit card to buy gas at a station near Cascade Locks, a small Columbia River community about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Portland.
“Police have speculated that Martin’s red and white station wagon might have plunged into an isolated canyon or river,” the AP reported. “The credit card purchase was the only thing to pinpoint the family’s movements.”
Five months after their disappearance, the body of the youngest daughter was found “bobbing in a Columbia River slough,” according to the AP. “The body of Susan apparently floated free of the wreckage in the spring current and was washed to a back water slough near Camas, Washington,” the AP wrote.
Virginia Martin’s body was found the next day about 25 miles (40 kilometers) upstream from where her sister’s was located. The other family members were never found, but the search continued.
The Martins had a 28-year-old son, Don, who was a Marine veteran and graduate student at Columbia University in New York at the time and told the AP he believed his family was dead.
Huh, I knew that the bullet-impregnation story was probably false, but I had assumed it was just an urban legend, of no definite provenance. I hadn’t realized that it had a single, well-defined origin. And you can hardly blame later retellers for accepting the word of an established medical journal.
A Ukrainian refugee in Japan is building a career as a sumo wrestler. Not that earth-shattering, perhaps, but the puerile side of me is amused to learn that a sumo bout is, in Japanese, a basho (I’ll bet it is - and this man is just 20?!)
The surprising part of that story to me is that they used a credit card to buy gas in 1958. I know Diners Club existed then, but could you buy gas with it? BankAmericard was only a trial project in Fresno in 1958.
Maybe just a gas station brand credit card. Esso, Sunoco, etc. had them. They were often just ‘charge’ cards with a balance that had to be paid off monthly.
Sanskrit has a large number of words borrowed from an untraceable donor language. They are thought to have come from a little-known ancient civilization of Central Asia, the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The ancestors of the Indo-Aryan speakers, having migrated from the Proto-Indo-European homeland across Central Asia, stayed in the BMAC for a while before going over the mountains into India.
Linguistic fossils are fascinating to me. Very cool!
I thought that sumo was not merely a sport but had connotations in the Shinto religion. How have the Japanese received non-Japanese aspirants to the art?
Akebono (born Chadwick Rowan) was a sumo champion a generation ago.
There have been difficulties in non-Japanese entering the sport in the past. Back in the 80s Canadian John Tenta who later became a professional wrestler had a brief successful career in sumo. He experienced cultural bias and despite his success left in less than a year. He also saw that professional wrestling would be more lucrative and a more attractive lifestyle for him.
The team name for Pennsylvania’s Williamsport Area High School is The Millionaires. No idea why.
I did a quick google and found
Williamsport Area High School is The Millionaires. Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was known as “The Lumber Capital of the World” in the late 19th century, and it had a high concentration of millionaires, leading to the nickname “Millionaires’ Row” for the area where wealthy lumber barons built their homes.
My understanding was that fewer young Japanese men are aspiring to be sumo wrestlers so importing wrestlers (e.g. Mongolians, Pacific islanders, etc.) is more common nowadays.
There’s probably also a geopolitical aspect to it, too, with him being specifically Ukrainian. Lots of people want to support Ukraine, and I imagine Japan is no exception.
I saw this yesterday. I was surprised that the car was apparently quite close to the low end of the old unused Cascade locks. Didn’t anyone else dive down to have a look at the submerged part in all that time?
It’s telling that the mystery loanwords in Sanskrit are largely agricultural, which tracks with the timeline that the traditionally nomadic Proto-Indo-Aryan herders learned agriculture during their sojourn in the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (present-day Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan).
This is the kind of thing that is so interesting about linguistics and the detective work used to figure that out.
Not proven, but still circulating: “daughter” comes from the Sanskrit for “one who milks.” Entomologists dispute this with science, though it was a culture where anatomy = destiny.
Daughter doesn’t come from Sanskrit. Daughter and its Sanskrit cognate duhitar both come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *dʰugh₂tḗr - which may be cognate with the Hindi word for milk, dūdh, dude.
*Etymologists