Milt's Corner on the Black Bear Blog has a great photo post showing some overly amorous trees that have become completely intertwined. Hooray for weird trees! Check out Milt's other entertaining and interesting photo posts while you're there.
The Journal Tribune ran a great article recently, in which they interviewed Patricia Mayo about her love of cemeteries. Her graveyard pursuits are not unlike those of many of us who find a fascination in the toppled rows of stone markers that fill acres of the Maine landscape. The article talks about some interesting epitaphs, how Mayo got started on this hobby, and much more.Patricia Mayo likes to wander around in cemeteries. She can spend hours in them, especially the old ones, taking in the artwork of the stones and marveling at the poetic inscriptions.The photo above is one I took myself, during one of my own boneyard forays. This one was taken exactly two years ago, on Christmas Eve 2006, in Fort Fairfield, in a small family cemetery well off the main road. I've visited many cemeteries throughout New England and New Brunswick, such as (click links below for a selection of photos)...
“Some people look at me like I’m really weird,” she said, but cemetery viewing is actually a rather common hobby, with enthusiasts seeing the acres of plots as a sort of museum.
For Mayo, her visits are about remembering – the people, the history and the art of the monuments.
Read the full article here: [Source]
While most of us have been heavily exposed to Dickens' famous Christmas story, "A Christmas Carol," few in America know that it is part of a larger British tradition of holiday ghost stories. While here we tell spooky tales during the Halloween season, over in Great Britain they feast on the supernatural around cozy Yuletide fires as part of the annual holiday doings. Sounds good to me!
How can you NOT read something that starts with a paragraph like this?The deal went down in a Wendy's parking lot in Biddeford, Maine, nearly eight years ago. Huddled between a Subaru station wagon and a 1961 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, two men made a seemingly lopsided exchange: One left with $40,000, the other with an old license plate.The New Hampshire License Plate Museum has a nice selection of antique Maine license plates in their online display, for those of you curious about what they used to look like in the early 1900s. Click here to see some of their Maine plates. Likewise, the Plate Shack has a detailed rundown of more recent plates (boy I miss the old black and white ones).
[Source]
...or perhaps I should say "melts" instead of "meets"?Once bitten, Newman had the racing bug
December 16, 2008 5:00 PM
...
“Dave? I’ve got a deal from a guy in Maine,” the voice on the other end said.
“It’s a custom Volvo 960 station wagon, OK? But it’s different. He’s going to take a small-block Ford V8 racing engine, strip out the transmission and suspension, then supercharge it. My guy’s gonna make it for me. Would you like one?”
David Letterman was stunned.
“Well, yeah, Paul,” Letterman told the caller. “Wouldn’t we all?”
So Letterman, one of the most famous late-night talk show hosts and a car nut, told Paul Newman, one of North America’s most famous actors and a car nut, to go for it.
Supercharge the Volvo. Swedish safety be damned! Go nuts!
“So, Paul eventually brings the car over, drops the car off and this is the kind of car that people would stare at street lights,” Letterman told his TV audience earlier this year upon Newman’s death.
“It was like an atomic furnace under the hood. I used to love driving it. It would go 170 miles per hour and, underneath, the exhaust system would glow bright orange.”
Then, one day, Letterman was in the Volvo on a New York interstate with his girlfriend when she asked a simple question: “What’s that smell?”
Letterman turned to her and said, “Raw power and speed, baby.”
Wrong. The Volvo was on fire.
“We had to pull over. The car was shooting flames everywhere. It couldn’t handle the power,” Letterman said.
“I call Paul and say ‘The wheel wells, everything is on fire.’ But, wow, what a car. Paul Newman and I were the only ones with this car.”
...
[Read the full article here: Source]
Paul Newman fans will be happy to note that the article contains some great anecdotes about the man.
Maine.info's website has started hosting The Daily Maine Fact on their front page (formerly posted daily by AroundMaine.com). They don't have an archive, which is sad for folks like me, but every now and then I remember to look at it. Earlier this month, the fact-of-the-day was about letter writing in the early history of Maine.The first letter ever sent from Maine went to King James I of England in 1607. It was dispatched on this date by George Popham, founder of a short-lived colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Popham ran to excess in praising both his monarch and the natural resources of the new land, which he claimed included nutmeg and cinnamon. (Source: Maine: A Literary Chronicle, W. Storrs Lee, editor. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968)The Maine Historical Society has extensive collections of Maine-related letters for those interested in digging further. Many of the documents are beginning to appear on the Maine Memory Network website, www.mainememory.net, as they are scanned and transcribed to make them more accessible to researchers. The Maine Memory collection is remarkable in that it collects documents from a wide variety of sources and makes them fully available in a number of formats for history sleuths.
There is an interesting post about Maine Railroad Accident Reports from 1874 over on the MaineGenealogy blog. If this sample is any indication, Victorian era railroads were a bustling and fast-paced environment, and resulted in a wide range of serious injuries, usually ending in amputation or death. A surprising number of these were the result of simple slip-and-fall accidents.January 16. The night express train from Boston was thrown from the track near Newport station, and ran along for a short distance, tearing up the rails and badly frightening the passengers. Frank Jackson, a brakeman, was thrown on to the ground with great violence and injured internally. Charles Estes, also brakeman, was thrown off and his ankle sprained. None of the 49 pass[e]ngers on board were injured.MaineGenealogy blog has a wide range of these reports available in its archives, which can be found at http://www.mainegenealogy.net/blog.html.
Normally stand-up comedy wouldn't have much of a place on the Strange Maine blog. However, there is an exception to be made, and that exception is for the one and only Tim Hofmann. [illustration by the man himself]
Hello all, I received an email this morning complaining about spam on my Google Strange Maine mailing group, and I have just finished banning the two so-called "members" who were polluting the message pool, and somehow hacked the welcome message, with porn. They also hacked the settings for posting, and that has been fixed as well.
