The Curiosity Shop

1. Some stories:
   • "On Softball and Women." - a true story written by my friend Steve.
     
   • "A Business Trip Gone Wrong" - my own experience.
     
   • "How My Father Killed a Cow with an Airplane." - my dad's experience and an old family story.
     
   • "My Unusual Experiences." - my own experiences, somewhat odd but true.
     
   • "Stanley (and Steve) Knee Deep." - a story about my dad from an email from Steve.
     
   • "My First Wedding Cake" - my own experience.
     
   • Steve and "The Solitary Reaper" - an amazing coincidence from Steve.
     
   • Steve and the Visiting Professor - another odd experience of Steve's.
   • A Hotel Room in Paris - an experience of ours in 2022.
     
   
   
   
2. Solution to the Cracker Barrel Restaurant Puzzle.
   
   
3. Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson of Australia wrote poetry and stories in the last part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
   Perry Middlemiss has a wonderful collection of links.
   The link there for "Saltbush Bill" is broken but this one works.
   
   
4. Conjunctions: "She and I" or "Me and her", which is right? It's easy to tell if you know the trick.
   
   
5. "Never end a sentence with a preposition!" - Good advice gone wrong.
   
   
6. My U.S. Bicentennial 7up can collection from 1976.
   
   
7. Why do mirrors reverse right and left, but not up and down? Find out why. Includes email exchange on mirrors with a dissatisfied reader.
   
   
8. Rays from the sun at dusk and dawn.
   
   
9. "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." What does Newton's third law of motion really mean? Find out here.
   
   
10. For those who remember The Whistling Wizard, a T.V. show from 1951.
    
    
11. League Game Scheduling: You have 12 teams and each needs to play a different team each weekend. There's an easy way to figure out the schedule.
    
    
12. Especially for cake decorators - Mr Dana's method of baking better cakes from mixes.
    
    
13. Gravity and the Common Cold.
    
    
14. The mysterious Gurdon Light can be seen many nights along a lonely stretch of railroad track outside Gurdon, Arkansas.
    
    
15. You can make sugar cubes glow in the dark by twisting and grinding them together as hard as you can in a really dark place. Be persistent, it may take a minute or two and the green glow is dim, but you should be able to see it.
    
    
16. If you get a friend to crunch Wint-O-Green Lifesavers in the dark with his/her mouth open you will see flashes of light. These are much brighter than the sugar cubes. "James the younger", at Lake Ouichita (pronounced wash-i-tah) State Park, Arkansas says this is called "sparking".
    
    
17. My daughter Verene's Winchester Mystery House Page gives you curious facts and pictures about a very curious place. A new addition is 18 pictures from the Winchester Mystery House from the early 1940s
    
    
18. I was told by a specialist in computer programs that try to understand the English language that he has a favorite challenge for his colleagues' programs. It is, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas."
    
    
19. The Ghost of Pine Bluff, Ark.
    
    
20. I've been to the end of the rainbow. (But I don't know how it happened.)
    
    

Some other rather curious sites

1. Join NASA in the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home)
2. A letter to Dr. Laura on Richard Stallman's page
3. E-World which, among other things, contains "The Scriptural Basis for a Geocentric Cosmology". Look toward the bottom of the page.
4. "Young Earth": Foolish assertions by someone who knows little about the world around us.
5. The unusual number 1/89 (This works again: 7-6-2019.)
6. BrowserSpy: Everything about your browser and you.
7. Privacy on the Internet
8. An interesting drug for the heart and tissue regeneration is Trodusquemine, also known as MSI-1436. Google it to get the latest.
9. Urban Legends by topic.
10. DMHO: a "dangerous" chemical all around us. :-)
11.   The Wychwood Brewery - see their gallery. See also the almost lost labels page of 2001 - 2002.