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.
Well, okay, actually he will READ your mind. But it might be a mind-blowing experience.Greetings! Welcome to the Theater of the Mind. I am Rory Raven, Your Host. I am a mentalist with over a dozen years' experience reading minds and astonishing audiences. Neither a psychic nor a magician, I offer a new and compelling kind of entertainment unlike anything you've ever seen. With a few simple props (paper and pencil, a pack of playing cards, some paperback books, and the thoughts of some volunteers) I involve the audience in a highly unusual -- and unusually entertaining! -- experience. Thoughts are revealed, predictions come true, and perhaps even the spirits are summoned ....
St. Lawrence Theater Manager's note: When Rory Raven was here last, the audience was so stunned by his abilities that we were all speechless! We have spent the last few months trying to figure out exactly what happened that night. Not for the faint of heart!
A wonderful groundbreaking event to support the International Cryptozoology Museum has been planned by Boston comedian Shawn Donovan.You can click the blank button below to link to PayPal to donate to the museum:
Coming on Saturday, November 22, 2008, at the Empire Lounge on Congress Street, downtown Portland, Maine, the “Bene-foot: A Comedy Benefit for the Cryptozoology Museum” will kick off at 8 PM.
Besides Shawn, who has been part of the Boston Comedy Festival for the last 3 years, the other comedians confirmed to be performing will be Paul Nardizzi (Late Night w/Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central) and Dan Sally (Comedy Central, Just For Laughs). Shawn told a popular comedy forum this morning that he would “leave it up to Sally to bump with the Patterson/Gimlin film.”
“Bene-foot: A Comedy Benefit for the Cryptozoology Museum” is being held to support the museum, and all proceeds go to the museum. No corporate fiscal umbrellas in the mix here. Although tickets can be bought at the door for $25, I’m going to begin selling tickets online via my PayPal account and through the mail at a pre-event discount.
Here’s the rundown for ticket sales:
Pre-event tickets: $22.00/one ticket ($20 + $2 service charge) ~ Via PayPal (to LColeman@maine.rr.com ) or via snail mail (International Cryptozoology Museum, attn: L. Coleman, PO Box 360, Portland, ME 04112).
Pre-event tickets plus a signed book by Loren Coleman = $45.00/one ticket/one book.
One of eight tickets to the VIP table, $100 per ticket.
Special to someone, have dinner with Loren Coleman, $250.00, before the Bene-Foot or perhaps at a time convenient to you.
Additional donations to the Bene-Foot, $25 to $1000, will be appreciated for the museum fund. Use PayPal or the mailing addresses above. DO NOT use the PayPal button for Cryptomundo on the upper right corner on this page. Use the instructions above for funds, thank you.
Shawn is also taking donations for raffle items that will be announced closer to the event (gift certificates to eating and entertainment locations to objects you wish to donate are what he is thinking about).
Further details on event poster art, possible tee-shirts and more will be forthcoming.
Fund Bene-Foot, support the Museum!!
All donations are greatly appreciated, and they are not tax deductible due to the home museum not being a 501(c).
View his original post for video clips of the performers and more: Source
Mark LaFlamme’s Dirt: An American Campaign
WHAT: TWISTED TALES FROM MAINE DVD RELEASE PARTY
Covered in Bees will be celebrating the release of their outrageous 24-Hour Album, as well as their participation in creating the soundtrack for the zombie film "2", included in the DVD 4-pack. Playing with them will be two other ever-rowdy and fun-loving bands, The Pubcrawlers and the Hand Me Downs. Top it all off by helping Knaughty Sarah celebrate her birthday!
Some of you may have attended last year's early November performance by the eerily wonderful Robert Lloyd Parry at One Longfellow Square. Others of you may not have. Which is why you should come this year! Highly recommended as an addition to your Halloween season spooky fun stuff.
This is a brief but excellent photo essay by Nate (a.k.a. Ravenwing) about the South Oakfield, Maine, cemetery that I found online at fourthirdsphoto.comSouth Oakfield met decline and finally oblivion soon after the advent of the railroad, with a few farms holding on into the 1930’s, but is now wholly forested, marked only with a few cellar holes, and a small cemetery. Since moving here some 25 years ago, the South Oakfield cemetery has held a certain fascination for me.
If ever a place can be haunted, this place is. I don’t mean haunted in the ‘scary’ sense, but when I visit this little cemetery, the feelings of dreams unfulfilled, geographical isolation, and human despair seem thick in the air. It is quiet, peaceful, even beautiful in a way, yet an indescribably sad place. I went there the other day, my first visit in several years, and found it much as I left it, though if anything more lonely and perhaps a bit more dilapidated than ever.
It is rugged, and stony ground surrounded by forest, accessible only by several miles of rough and narrow gravel road over steep hills and across northern bogs.
Read full essay and view all the photos here: [Source]
WHAT: a performance of Dracula’s Guest, written originally by Bram Stoker
Slaid Cleaves has a great song about Maine's drowned town on Dead River, Flagstaff. (see our prior posts on this subject here)In the months before it was to be flooded, all improvements and repairs in the whole town were stopped. What was the use of painting a house if it were to be covered with water in six months? Why repair anything when the whole village was to be wiped out? So, week by week, the whole town became more and more bedraggled, more gone to seed, more woebegone.In addition, one of the commentators, Richard Paradis, added an article which is well worth reading about another Maine town that, while not drowned, was emptied out and left, graveyards and all, because of another project, near Frye Mountain. Click here to see the post. Mr. Paradis' comment is #3 below the original article.
One of the elements of Portland's history that I was surprised to find out about 5 years ago or so is the amount of Chinese-American culture that made its way into the city early in the 20th century. This is a great opportunity to lay your feet on the pavements of the city and see where all this happened, nestled in among the shops of today.
