This makes me think of a missing persons case in my home town, years after I left.
Over 600,000 individuals go missing in the United States every year. Fortunately, many missing children and adults are quickly found, alive and well.
and
It is estimated that 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year, with approximately 1,000 of those bodies remaining unidentified after one year.
Source:
Here’s a success story of sorts, many years later:
That article states
Southward said there is a vetting process for the information, but whatever inconvenience that may prove to be, it is worth the possible results.
Here’s something interesting I just stumbled across.
For years I thought that Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book were more “natural” than Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels. Tarzan is an unbelievably unlikely creature. He’s the child of not only a white couple, but of the British aristocracy and heir to a title. His parents are marooned in Africa and survive for a time before both die, leaving their infant son alone, just in time for him to be found by Kala, whose own ape child has just died. Tarzan is thus raised by the apes. He also is a superb autodidact, who teaches himself to read (but not to speak. Interestingly, he first learns to speak French before learning English)
Mwgli, on the other hand, is a feral wolf-child, and there are stories of children raised by wolves in India. One was still around during Kipling’s time in India – Dina Sanichar
Surely, I always thought, Kipling knew about such children from Indian lore and built his Mowgli stories around the tradition. And it made a lot more sense – Mowgli was an Indian child who circumstances lead to being adopted by wolves. It’s a lot more likely than an aristocrsat from another country just happening to fall into the same circumstances.
But it turns out that Kipling wasn’t inspired by those Indian feral children. At least not directly. By his own admission, he was inspired to write the Mowgli stories after reading a book by another famous author – H. Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892). That book features Galazi the Wolf, who was raised by wolves – in Africa. In fact, uncharacteristically for a book written in that place and time, the entire cast of characters is black. It’s a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines , following the adventures of Umslopogaas from that book. The first Mowgli story appeared the next year.
Furthermore, Haggard wrote a story about a human raised by apes , years before Tarzan appeared – Hendrika in Allan’s Wife (1889). She is raised by baboons, with whom she communicates. And, like Tarzan (and unlike Mowgli) she has incredible strength. You have to wonder if Burroughs ever read it.
The Deuce of Clubs is a playing card or a main drag of a small town in Arizona.
The Duce of Clubs was an Italian politician working his way up through the ranks of the thugs who broke up opposition rallies using heavy sticks. He later moved up to Duce of Jails then Duce of Armies before settling on Duce of All He Surveyed. But only briefly.
The NHL’s Stanley Cup has a tradition of each player on the winning team having possession of it for a day during the off-season. The bowl at the top - often used to hold champagne for the winning team - has been used as a baptismal font by more than one player.
At least three players have had their dogs eat out of it, and Eddie Olczyk (NY Rangers, 1994) took it to the Belmont Stakes, where Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin, ate out of it.
Major League Baseball’s two Rookie of the Year Awards (one for each league) were officially renamed the Jackie Robinson Award in 1987, forty years after Robinson won the very very first Rookie of the Year Award. The name has never really caught on though, and they’re usually just called the Rookie of the Year Award. (At one time they were named after Charles Comiskey, which also never caught on.)
“Retarded” is a slur aimed at those who are mentally disabled. Or more often, at those who aren’t, but giving the implication that those who ARE mentally disabled are lesser human beings. Slurs – racial, sexual, and yes, disability-related, are not tolerated in MPSIMS.
This is Michael Polan’s (the guy who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma) contention, but i think he’s wrong.
John Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseed, planted seeds that grew up into apple trees, and he sold the resulting orchards to incoming settlers. It’s true that random seeds don’t generally result in edible apples, so he figured that he was selling the aples to make cider out of.
But what if he HAD been planting the orchards to produce eating apples? How would it differ?
Answer – it wouldn’t. He’d go about it in exactly the same way. The first step in growing apples is to grow your apple trees to use as root stock. Then you buy your buds, your scions from guys who come by later. These contain the buds from which your edible apples grow. They’re gut from a long line of trees that had similar shoots grafted onto previous trees and have since grown to produce more. The scion is grafted onto your existing tree to provide a new source of edible apples.
But you can’t do it without having planted and grown a sapling onto which these buds can be grafted. so Johnny Appleseed was selling the necessary basis for edible apple orchards. I guess you could just have bought the orchard he planted, not graft anything onto it, and used the resulting inferior fruit to make cider, but why bother?
The same procedure, by the way, is necessary for pears and cherries and and other fruit that has a lot of genetic variation and drift and requires grafting. I’m surprised that there’s no equivalent person for those – a Johnny Pearseed and Johnny Cherrystone
