by Sharon Hall | Mar 24, 2016 | Far-Out Friday
I ran across this intriguing subject while researching an early Surname Saturday article about the Pimple surname. I found several references to so-called “death by pimple” and researched further. Clearly, the problem was due to lack of an effective way to treat...
by Sharon Hall | Oct 30, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
October is the spookiest month of the year, so a story about gravesite dowsing seemed in order for Halloween Eve-Eve, I guess you could call it. The article title pretty much encompasses the range of opinion regarding the subject, although I have to say a brief...
by Sharon Hall | Jul 17, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
On February 22, 1918, with war raging across the seas in Europe, Harold and Addie Wadlow of Alton, Illinois welcomed their firstborn child into the world – Robert Pershing Wadlow. He was a little over eighteen inches long and weighed eight pounds and six ounces – a...
by Sharon Hall | Apr 10, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
A friend forwarded a story to me recently from Retro Indy (Indianapolis) about a device invented in the late eighteenth century, which led me to explore a bizarre series of patents granted from the 1840’s through the early twentieth century. The September 20,...
by Sharon Hall | Mar 13, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
Do you suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia (and you say, I don’t even know how to pronounce it, so how could I be afflicted with it!?!). Maybe not, but it may affect between seventeen and twenty million Americans. According to the Mayo Clinic, in clinical terms a...
by Sharon Hall | Feb 13, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
Orville and Wilbur Wright had made headlines six years earlier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with their “flying machine.” However, from mid December of 1909 to late January 1910, newspapers across the country perpetrated, and later renounced, a farcical tale which...
