The largest flower on earth bloomed around 9:00 a.m. on July 31, 1996. It did
not smell as nice as it looked--in fact, the titan arum's aroma was described
as being like rotting fish and dead mice.
Its home was the tropical section of London's Kew Gardens Princess of Wales
Conservatory. The previous time one of its ilk--Amorphophallus titanum--blossomed at Kew was 33 years previously, in 1963, reported the August 1,
1996 Washington Post.
Crowds had gathered on July 29 to see the blooming of the vertical yellow and purple flower, but insufficient sunlight put that off for two days. From July
30 to August 4, 49,000 people visited the Gardens. Roger Joiner, the Marketing
Manager at Kew, enthused about the international media attention.
This carrion flower arum is native to the Sumatran jungles, where it is called
by Indonesians the "corpse flower." Other names for it are the krubi ["grubi"]
or "devil's tongue."
It is not the only gaggingly fragrant blossom in Sumatra, though. Dr. Karl P.
N. Shuker, in "More Mystery Plants of Prey" (Strange Magazine no. 12),
and William A. Emboden, in Bizarre Plants: Magical, Monstrous,
Mythical, write of the parasitic Rafflesia arnoldii, a horizontal
flower, also called the "stinking corpse lily" and the "giant panda of the
plant world." It possesses a stench that nauseates humans but attracts
blowflies and carrion beetles. They search for rotting meat upon it, and
transfer pollen to other plants of the same species while questing for
carrion. Other animals that aid the seed dispersion process are, according to
some accounts, wild pigs, tree shrews and elephants.
The titan arum's stink is designed for a more limited repertoire; it lets bees
know it is ready for the pollination process.
Either of these blooms could be mistaken for the man-eating Death Flower of
legend--if encountered at the right time. The titan arum flowers once every
six or seven years under normal jungle conditions.
Dr. Odoardo Beccari, the Italian botanist, was the first western expert to
come across the Titan Arum in the Pading Province during 1878. Seeds he sent
back to his patron the Marchese Corsi Salviati in Italy were grown, and a few
plants were at Beccari's request sent to Kew in 1879. One of those seedlings
flowered in June 1887. Another plant bloomed there in 1926, to wide
attention.
At the New York Botanical Garden, a 1937 flowering was even filmed for a
newsreel.
Even its appellation attractions attention. The plant's generic name of
Amorphophallus is derived from the Greek and means shapeless phallus.
According to a June 5, 1996 entry on the Wayne's Word! website
(http://issfw.palomar.edu/Wayne/WW0602.html), at maximum size, the spadix of
an A. titanum is about the size a blue whale's male sex organ.
William A. Emboden described the plant's unusual erect spadix, having "male
parts above and female parts below" as "bizarre and erotic."
Thus the great appeal to the publics of 1937 and 1996 is made clear: it is
large, "dangerous" (to one's nose at least), and sexy.
The nine-thousand-year-old statues are the oldest known life-size
representations of the human form--but to modern eyes they do not look quite
human. Due to their big--sometimes slanting--eyes, rudimentary noses, and tiny
mouths, some have compared them to space aliens. They resemble the kind
popularized by Whitley Strieber's "visitors" books and Steven Spielberg's
movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Ann Gunter, the curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Sackler Museum of
Asian Art in Washington, D.C., acknowledges this. She and her colleagues feel
that, since the sculptures may have depicted the ancients' ancestors, the
creation of features looking like "beings from some other time and place" may
have been intentional, reported the August 1, 1996 Washington Post.
The figures, made of plaster, and with actual human skulls within their heads,
were retrieved from their longtime home at 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan after a
bulldozer accidentally revealed a corner of their place of rest. The figures
were in two groups, discovered in one cache. After a decade of study and
restoration in Suitland, Maryland, at the Smithsonian's Conservation
Analytical Lab, the public finally could view these seemingly unearthly pieces
from 3,000 years before the use of writing, now that they were on display at
the Sackler.
James Lochart, writing about the exhibit for the August 2 Washington City
Paper, suggests another unorthodox theory that could be applied to the
statues. He recalls the theory of the bicameral mind, explicated by Julian
Jaynes, which posits that, until about 1000 B.C., people did not possess
subjective consciousness. Decisions were supposedly carried out via auditory
hallucinations--the sacred voice of authority. But he feels the Jaynes theory
applies more to the famous Olmec heads (on temporary display at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) than to these small-mouthed depictions,
unless "their makers had yet to fine-tune their technique...."
TAROT AND A TIP
Octavia, a fortuneteller in Warsaw, pays mind to macroeconomic texts and
marketing tomes as well as to her tarot cards. The Polish prognosticator
recently revealed: "Sometimes the tarot cards are only to distract clients.
What I say is mostly common sense."
Also known as Barbara Drazek, the 34-year-old onetime nurse is commercializing
on the concerns that have come lately to Poland.
Her spiel combines the jargons of both mysticism and management-consulting,
and has proven useful to some.
One client, who did not take her advice, was told not to ship during late 1996
thousands of frozen chickens from the United States to Russia via Gdynia. She
said he would miss the New Year deadline. When he shipped the cargo anyway,
the birds arrived at their final destination three weeks late.
Octavia's advice here came from her good sense rather than any methods of
mysticism; dock workers in the Polish port of Gdynia are known to get mid-
December bonuses. After that, work is hampered by liquid celebrations.
Octavia is just one among many. The March 18, 1996 Wall Street Journal,
which reported about Octavia, revealed that the popularity of her line of work
is indicated by the 250,000 per month sales of the magazine
Fortuneteller.
PILTDOWN PERPETRATOR PUBLICIZED
The May 23 issue of the English science journal Nature contains an
article dealing with Brian Gardiner's findings which may, after many decades
of speculation by others, reveal the true culprit in the Piltdown Man hoax.
The Piltdown Man fossils, originally thought in 1912 to be of a missing link,
turned out to be, when exposed as a hoax forty years later in 1952, more
recent fossils from a human and an orangutan.
Gardiner shows that Martin A. C. Hinton was probably the actual hoaxer, rather
than those people commonly blamed. Some eight decades ago, Hinton was a
curator at the Natural History Museum in London. Unhappy over delayed
payments, in revenge he chemically treated fossils, Gardiner claims.
Corroborating this theory are identically processed bone samples in Hinton's
trunk, found in a loft in the museum. Also, human teeth, prepared in the same
way, were discovered among Hinton's belongings.
The May 24, 1996 Washington Post disclosed that the Nature
article is based on a manuscript by Gardiner, who elsewhere stated that one of
the usually blamed culprits, Charles Dawson, was too ignorant to have been
capable of the hoax.
PRAIRIE DOGS GET SUCKED
A report out of Amarillo, Texas, reveals that Dog Gone, a company specializing
in pest control, has a profitable use for the prairie dogs it eliminates from
U.S. sites.
It sells them to Japan--at $700 per animal--after collecting them in a
gigantic vacuum cleaner.
This suction device was invented by Gay Balfour, the co-owner of Dog Gone,
reported the May 24, 1996 Washington Post.
On May 21, some three to four dozen valuable rodents were sucked out of their
underground dwellings by the machine and deposited into a containing area.
Only creatures of lighter weight made the trip through the big hose, because
of the machine's specs.
The other co-owner, Dave Honaker, spoke of capturing only the littler prairie
dogs, and added, "They make good pets; they're real trainable and social
animals."
His announcement did not answer certain questions that could occur to one.
Like: how much did the process traumatize the creatures, and how did the
wholesale removal of their young affect the parents left behind in the
colonies?
However, the company's methods are certainly preferable to other, more fatal,
types of "pest control."
RUSSIAN VAMPIRE BITES HIMSELF TO DEATH
An article by Dimitry Frokofeiv in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper (apparently circa early 1996) reviews a few weirdnesses that happened in Russian forests, including a six-month mystery concerning people found dead--with "vampire" marks on their necks.
Russian police found some camps where barefoot residents wore unprocessed animal furs. In one of these, a jar of human blood turned up--which, after testing, turned out to be that of a person missing three weeks.
In another incident, a police truck ran into trouble in the area. When stopped to check the vehicle's wheels, one officer was attacked. His partner left the vehicle to rescue him, helping him arrest the malefactor.
The uncouth arrestee wore only a torn gown made of furs and rags. He said nothing in his defense, just growled. A bottle of human blood was found in his pocket. He did not survive captivity, having that same night bitten his wrists and died.
DON'T TOUCH THAT E.T.
The Code of Federal Regulations, Section 14, Part 1211 used to make it
problematic for people who touched extraterrestrial objects--or entities. They
had to face quarantine without even a hearing. But, George Sloup, attorney
advisor for the Ames Research Center, reveals that these codes--dating back to
1969 and the moon missions--are no longer in effect.
The chief counsel for NASA-Ames, Dr. George Lenehan, noted that these
codes had been instituted because of worry about contamination from postulated
extraterrestrial microbes on the surface of the moon.
However, in 1995, on the Internet, speculations were posted that these
codes were actually meant to intimidate efforts at communication with UFO
occupants.
Lenehan disagreed, according to a March 23, 1995 article in San Jose,
California's Metro. He felt that alien contact would be desirable since
it would increase his agency's budget.
Now that, in 1996, scientists have identified apparent fossils of
Martian life on Earth, Lenehan's contention of such an increased NASA budget
seems especially plausible.
FANCY FISH FOOD
Seventy-eight-year-old Lewis Slight caught a 5 pound bass while fishing
at a beach not far from Netley Abbey in Southampton, England.
That was not his only "lucky catch" circa late June 1995. The fish's
stomach contained a silver ring dating back a century-and-a-half.
PLUNGING PINNIPEDS
The walruses have been dropping to their deaths in behavior that has not
until now been widely documented--but their actions are not deemed suicides.
On August 27, 1996, some 41-60 of these pinnipeds fell off a number of
high bluffs sometimes 100 feet high, at Cape Peirce, a part of the 4.3
million-acre Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Biologists, monitoring the group of as many as 12,500 walruses at any
single time, obstructed 155 of the beasts from the cliffs, but about 70 of the
animals got there anyway, indicated a report in the August 31, 1996
Washington Post.
In 1994, 42 walruses fatally fell off the cliffs, and in 1995
approximately 59 met their death that way. But the fatalities are apparently
not uncommon to these creatures whose populations are not at present
imperiled.
While Mixed Bag appears regularly in STRANGE MAGAZINE, many of these clips have never been published in the magazine.
