They’re (almost) all mad!

The world continues to be rather crazy.

There’s Robert Mugabe, at 93 years old, desperately hanging on to power in Zimbabwe. Surely it’s time to go with dignity.

Our own nonagenarian head of state is celebrating seventy years of being married to the same bloke, in itself quite an achievement. She’s also doing a fair job of hanging onto her position. If I were a royalist, I could feel quite sorry for poor Charles, almost my own age and still waiting!

Angela Merkel is having a tough time of it. And as for our Theresa, well, what can we say?

It’s all almost enough to have us believing that the gods are punishing us, especially when you read what the scientists have to say. They are warning that 2018 could well see an increase in the number of devastating earthquakes around the world. This is apparently because of variations in the speed of the earth’s rotation which might trigger intense seismic activity.

Good grief! Is the earth’s motor broken? Do we need a new fan belt? It’s bad enough when they forecast unusually heavy snowfall without giving us earthquake warnings to boot. Surely we have had enough extreme weather with all the named storms and hurricanes and such!

Not all is craziness though. Denise Gough, actress, interviewed in Sunday’s Observer, was asked why she prefers to be called an actress and not an actor, replied, “We fought to be on the stage. We should reclaim that word: I don’t know where it came from, this fucking notion that putting “ess” on the end makes us weak. I would be no less afraid of a lioness than a lion”. Oh, well said!!! At last, a kindred spirit.

But, back on the crazy radar, here are some odd laws from certain American states, researched and publish by a photographer called Olivia Locher:-

In Illinois a hatpin can be considered a concealed weapon. Fair enough! my grandmother had a formidable and dangerous-looking collection of hatpins. We used to borrow them to pick out and eat individual pomegranate seeds. But does anyone still wear hatpins now?

In Utah no-one may walk down the street carrying a paper bag containing a violin. Golly gosh! Where did that come from and how is it a threat of any kind.

In Michigan it’s illegal to paint sparrows to sell them as parakeets. That smacks of desperation measures in trying to earn a living. Imagine the effort involved in catching sparrows, then making them keep still while you paint them. And finally, you have to persuade the purchaser that this small, remarkably un-parakeet-shaped bird is really a parakeet. Amazing!

In Kansas it’s forbidden by law to serve wine in teacups. Does this one date back to the prohibition era? Possibly I suppose!

Here is a link to more such oddities, with photos to illustrate them.

Did you know that there are still people around who believe the earth is flat. Someone called Mark Sargent has 43,415 subscribers to his “Flat Earth” YouTube channel. Thus is not a huge number, of course, and maybe they are all cranks and conspiracy theorists who think that the photographs of the world as seen from space have been created specially to deceive us all. I particularly like the lady who said, “I went down to the seashore, down New Jersey, and did my own testing... ypu take a straight edge and you go from one end and you follow the horizon of the ocean... it’s flat.”

I am so glad we got that sorted out!