Poison Tips

Food that one cannot eat together include prawns and vitamin C, which will cause arsenic poisoning; cold remedy and Coke, which will cause poisoning; eggs and saccharin; tofu and honey, which will cause deafness; kelp and coagulated pig blood, which will cause constipation; potatoes and banana, which will cause freckles; beef and brown sugar, which will lead to abdominal distention; dog meat and eels, which will lead to death; mutton and mud snails, which will lead to retention of food; celery and rabbit meat, which will lead to alopecia; tomatoes and green beans, which will undermine vigor; and goose meat and pear, which will injure one's kidney.

Source: Global Times, 17 December 2012

Aswang

Ethiopian spider

An American mercenary, an old African hand, once told me that in Ethiopia there is a spider that eats only living flesh. It's called the camel spider and is equipped with a prong on its back that emits a local anaesthetic. He told me that at night the camel spider descends while you sleep, gives you a shot, and eats your lips. I slept with my hand over my mouth.

Source: Donald R Katz, "Ethiopia After the Revolution: Vultures Return to the Land of Sheba",  Rolling Stone, 21 September 1978

Prophesying newborns

On Friday, word spread that shortly after a woman delivered twins at the Tirupur Government Hospital, one of the babies died and the surviving baby mysteriously spoke, warning that  an evil spell has been cast due to which several infants would die. After delivering the "message of death", the baby too died. Within no time some people performed special pooja and started breaking coconuts smeared with turmeric outside their homes to ward off evil.
[...] By evening many junctions in the town were filled with broken coconut shells. Incidentally most of these coconuts were broken at junctions where three roads meet, which parents believed was the "entry gate" for Satan.

Source: IBN Live, 27 August 2012

Melting money

Canada's new polymer $50 and $100 dollar notes melt in intense heat. There have been reports of wads of notes melting together when left inside hot cars, or in metal tins.

 

 

Source: The Star, 12 July 2012

The enemy beneath the streets

HWASEONG, South Korea — “Some people think I’m crazy,” says Kim Jin-cheul, a Christian preacher who is convinced that North Korean soldiers are digging tunnels that extend under the capital, Seoul, 30 miles from the border, and have reached this town, 10 miles farther south, where he ministers to a congregation of nine families.

“Imagine hordes of crack North Korean troops streaming out and taking the whole city hostage!”

[…] The narrator in a video shown to visitors intones: “Listen carefully. You might hear a faint noise from a motor running in the dark underground.” He continues, “As long as underground provocations continue, there can be no true peace above the ground.”

Few take this exhortation more to heart than the Rev. Lee Jong-chang, 78, a Roman Catholic priest and veteran tunnel hunter. “I am doing this work so that we won’t have another war and nobody will be hurt,” he said.

Father Lee said he was helping villagers find ground water with dowsing skills he had learned from a French missionary when the government asked him and other civilian experts to join the military’s search for tunnels in 1974. He was awarded a presidential medal for helping find the second tunnel, in 1975.

He has since made hundreds of field trips with his dowsing rod, pursuing what he calls a mission from God. Some church authorities disapproved of the extracurricular activity and sent him to Ecuador as a missionary from 1987 to 1989. That failed to weaken his resolve.
[…] “With my rod, I can see underground as vividly as a good doctor reads a patient with his stethoscope,” Father Lee said. “But some people and the military call me superstitious.”

Source: The New York Times, 2 July 2012

Galoshins

Doctor Brown: Here comes I old Doctor Brown
                         The best old doctor in the town.
Anon:               Well doctor what can you cure?
Doctor Brown: I can cure the plague, within, without,
                         Also the palsy and the gout,
                         Bring me an old woman, three score and ten
                         The knuckle joint of a big toe broke,
                         I'll take it off and put it on again.
Anon:               Well done doctor. What is your medicine?
Doctor Brown: A wee bottle in my waistcoat pocket called:
                         Hens pens, peezy weezy,
                         Bumbie's bacon, donkey's treacle,
                         Sap of the poker, juice of the tongs,
                         Three turkey's eggs, nine miles long.
                         Put that in a mouse's blather,
                         Stir it up with a wild pig's feather.
                         Put three drops in Jack's ear
                         And he'll get up and sing a song!
Jack:                 Once I was dead but now I'm alive,
                         God bless the old doctor who made me survive.

Or, in another version:
MC:                  And what can you cure, Doctor?
Doctor Broon:  I can cure all sorts.
MC:                  And what kind o all sorts.
Doctor Broon:  Liquorice allsorts. I've got a little bottle
                         here of inksy pinksy parleyvous, all covered
                         over wi cats' feathers and midges' ribs.
                         I shall put a little on his nose.
                         I shall put a little on his toes.
                         Rise up Jack and sing a song ...

from Galoshins Remembered, ed. Emily Lyle (Edinburgh: NMS, 2011)