Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 477
June 23, 2016
Gravediggers in Hungary Compete in National Competition
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
One way that companies can often inspire team-building is through competition. Working together to achieve a specific goal often brings people closer together. Feeding a person’s competitive spirit can also attract someone to your company or profession. That’s the hope of gravediggers.
Earlier this month, the best gravediggers in Hungary competed in a grave digging competition intended to increase respect for the profession.
While machines do most of the grave digging, humans are still needed in crowded cemeteries where a machine can’t maneuver without disturbing someone else’s resting place.
But an increasing amount of people choose cremation over burial. And young people often avoid professions requiring manual labor. The profession is under threat, so the competition was meant to make the job more appealing to youth looking for honest work.
The hardest part of the job is to deal with the mourners. But it’s a good job, with good colleagues and a good environment.
Gravediggers Competition
At a graveyard in Debrecen, Hungary, 18 two-man teams were assigned plots at random.
Each team was supplied with regulation-size shovels, rakes, axes, and pickaxes.
Contestants were judged on speed, grave neatness and whether they complied with the regulation size: 200 cm long, 80 cm wide and 160 cm deep (7 feet x 2 feet 7 inches x 5 feet).
One aspect of the competition was to showcase the different techniques of grave digging. Some teams dug simultaneously, and others had one man digging while his partner cleaned up the outside.
The home team won and will progress to represent Hungary at the regional competition later this year.
There’s a youtube video of the contest, but I warn you, it’s all in Hungarian.
Source: Gravediggers in Hungary Compete in National Competition
Puzzling Roman Tactic: Whistling Sling Stones
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Slings are believed to be one of the oldest weapons on Earth. Their popularity predates the bow and arrow and even the thrown spear, and though slings have been used by almost every civilization in history, one thing has continued to puzzle archaeologists: why would Romans put holes in their sling stones?
All over Europe, historians have encountered sling bullets with very purposeful holes bored into them. Some are made of lead, some are ceramic, but it doesn’t really seem to make sense.
“They are ballistically inferior.” -archaeologist John Reid
One prevailing theory was that the holes would be filled with poison, but as Reid points out, the bullets would then have almost no chance of effectively hitting or harming the enemy.
Eventually, the light bulb went off, and Reid theorizes the slings were purposefully holed in order to make sound when thrown. Listen:
Why make a whistling sling stone?
Most of these bullets have been found in Northwest Europe and dated to periods of Roman invasion. Scientists believe the whistling sling stones were used to scare their enemies and keep them pinned down as Roman soldiers advanced to engage in close combat. It was a distraction.
The Humble Sling
The sling has probably participated in more wars than any other weapon. Simple to build and requiring few materials, the sling wasn’t just easy to make; it was easy to use.
Slings weren’t just for war though; they were even more common as a hunting tool used by the wealthy and poor alike. Two slings were even interred with King Tut so that he might hunt in the afterlife.
Advantages of the Sling
In 401 b.c. a Greek army was thoroughly trounced by Artaxerxes II’s Persian army whose slings fired farther than the Greek’s javelins could be thrown.
Though the sling itself is simple, the ammunition can make all the difference. Shortly after the Greek’s defeat, a company of soldiers from Rhodes began making lead sling bullets. This denser ammunition was much more easily thrown, and could travel twice as far as the rock-hurling Persian slings.
Sling Mythology
Many cultures viewed the sling with begrudging mysticism. The concussive damage done by slings could kill without breaking skin, a trait many saw as unfair or magic.
In the same fashion that World War II pilots painted jaws on their planes or wrote messages to the enemy on bombs, so too did ancient slingers write on sling bullets: Dexai, “take that”!
Dexai
Ammunition
Stones ranging in size from a pebble to a fist-sized stone
Clay bullets provided a consistent shape and size
Lead became the most effective ammunition, easily produced and very dense
More Modern Uses of the Sling
Though the sling eventually waned in popularity by the 14th-century, the invention of gunpowder revitalized the sling as a simple, effective grenade throwing apparatus.
Slings were even caught on film being used in the Spanish Civil War in 1939!
June 22, 2016
Who Doesn’t Love a Good Nun’s Fart?
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Pet de nonne is a popular French Pastry. It’s name translates to “Nun’s farts” or “Nun’s puffs.”
It’s made from butter, milk, flour, sugar, eggs and sometimes honey
They’re usually fried and then baked, and are kind of like doughnuts
The dessert has been described “heavenly light and tender morsels”
A similar French-Canadian dessert, pets de soeurs, translates to “Farts of religious sisters,” but it’s a totally different food
MINI BION
“BIONs” – short for Believe It or Not – is the word we use at Ripley’s to refer to anything that is unbelievable and worthy to become part of Ripley’s lore and collection.
2,000-Year-Old Bog Butter Still Edible
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
What would you do with 20-pounds of butter? Unless you’re heading to a butter festival, I don’t know that it would be of much use. But what if the butter was 2,000-years-old and had been found in an Irish bog?
When farmer Jack Conway was working on Emlagh bog in Co Meath, Ireland, he found something no one ever expects. The bog butter was initially brought to the attention of the Cavan County Museum. As a designated museum, Cavan had to contact the National Museum in Dublin.
Via Cavan County Museum
This particular chunk was found 5 meters (16 feet) below the surface, and no attempt had been made to cover it up. It was not in a wooden container or keg. This leaves experts thinking it wasn’t meant to be found and used later.
Research suggests that this butter was intended as an offering to the gods.
In the past this was a common ritual as butter was seen as a luxury and a sign of wealth – it was often used to pay rents and taxes. -Savina Donohoe, Curator at Cavan County Museum
The butter is currently being researched and analyzed by the National Museum in Dublin, but when that process is complete, there’s hope that it will make its way back to Cavan and be put on display.
Irish Bogs
Flowering Heather by Aqwis via Wikimedia
A bog may not be the first place you think of when going to store your butter, but bogs have excellent preservative properties. They’re naturally low in oxygen, have a high acidic quality, and maintain low temperatures.
The Irish bogs are essentially man-made. As people settled in Ireland, they started cutting down vegetation. But this led to the soil losing nutrients in the rain, and the ground became more acidic.
Because of the nutrient leaching, heather and rush became the only thing capable of growing in these areas. But the debris from the plants didn’t decompose. Peat began to build up, and the trees were choked off. As a result, the cycle would begin again, and the bogs would be formed.
Walls and evidence of the initial farms that started the process have been found buried in the Irish bogs. And now 2,000-year-old bog butter can be added to the list of secrets hidden in the depths of the Irish countryside.
The Winner of the Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Ripley’s got involved with the Cheap Chic Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest after Edward Meyer saw the first one on Martha Stewart and knew we had to get involved. In the 11 years since then, Ripley’s has proudly been a sponsor of this great contest.
We told you about the finalists a few weeks ago, and now it’s over. The votes have been cast, and we officially have a 2016 winner!
The Big Day
As a sponsor, Ripley’s got to attend the final runway show. The backstage images are great. The excitement of getting ready for your wedding day is a feeling a lot of women recognize. These girls aren’t getting married on the day in question, but the same joy and anticipation can be seen on their faces. With $10,000 and a trip for two to any town with a Ripley’s ODDitorium going to the winner, it’s easy to understand why.
Choosing a Winner
The judges, including our own Edward Meyer and the owner of Sanctuary Hotel, Hank Freid, were given score cards. As each look traveled down the runway at Haven Rooftop, the judges scored it on five different categories with a number between 1-5. The categories were:
Creativity
Originality
Beauty
Use of Charmin
Workmanship
And the looks with the highest combined score would be the winners.
All of the judges selected the same three dresses as their highest scoring dresses, but drama ensued when everyone had them in a different order.
The Winners
Third Place:
Donna Vincler
Second Place:
Judith Henry of Utah
First Place:
Van Tran of Brooklyn, NY
Online Voter’s People’s Choice:
Ronaldo Cruz of Virginia
Source: The Winner of the Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest
June 21, 2016
Kenya has Nationwide Blackout Caused by Monkey
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
We’ve all been in power outages. In the Sates, they’re often caused by storms and provide a minor inconvenience. But in Kenya, a blackout is more likely to be caused by “marauding wild animals.”
A vervet monkey caused a nationwide blackout in Kenya when it fell from the roof and landed on a transformer.
The KenGen (Kenya Electric Generating Company) Gitaru Power Station is the largest in the company and supplies about 10 percent of the country’s electricity. They have an electric fence around the property to keep the animals out, but this monkey would not be deterred.
While he was monkeying around on the roof, the vervet fell and landed on a transformer. That transformer shut off and led to a dominoes effect of one transformer after another shutting down.
The result was a loss of more than 180 megawatts of electricity and Kenya being without power for four hours.
KenGen took to their Facebook page to explain what happened and to assure everyone that the monkey was alive and well.
The Animals Revolt
This isn’t the first story this year of an animal causing chaos. In April, a weasel knocked out the Larger Hadron Collider.
The little guy got somewhere he wasn’t supposed to and shut down the world’s largest, most powerful, particle accelerator for a few days.
We can’t be sure if this is the latest in what will be a long line of animal’s revolting against the status quo, but if a chipmunk brings down the stock market, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
JC Sheitan Tenet and His Prosthetic Tattoo Machine Arm
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Have you ever tried to perform mundane tasks with your non-dominant hand? If you’re right-handed, have you ever tried to feed yourself with your left? Or if you’re left-handed, how well can you write with your right? For some people, using both hands comes naturally, but if you’re anything like me, your non-dominant hand is just about useless.
For JC Sheitan Tenet, there wasn’t another option. He lost his right arm below the elbow 22 years ago. Since he was right-handed, he not only had to learn how to perform tasks with one hand but with his non-dominant hand.
Sheitan Tenet didn’t allow the setback to stop him from pursuing a life as an artist. He taught himself how to draw with his left hand and progressed from there to tattooing. It wasn’t easy. Sheitan Tenet admits that he had a hard time finding an artist willing to take him on as an apprentice because of his disability.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and now he has a new way to tattoo.
Prosthetic Tattoo Machine Arm
Tenet met artist JL Gonzal at tattoo conventions. The two of them talked about ways for Tenet to use his right arm to tattoo. As a result, the new prosthetic was born.
Gonzal mounted the kind of tattoo machine that Tenet was familiar with using onto an old prosthetic arm. He added parts from a mechanical typewriter and a gramophone to give it that steampunk look. He finished the effect by painting it with a rusty finish.
It should be noted that the arm is perfectly safe, and the tattoo portions are disposable.
The arm may be a kinetic sculpture for now, but Tenet has said that this only version one. We’ll have to wait and see what version two has in store.
For updates and examples of JC Sheitan Tenet’s work, be sure to check out his Facebook page.
Source: JC Sheitan Tenet and His Prosthetic Tattoo Machine Arm
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