• Wear your undershirt inside out to protect you against the evil eye.
• Never step over a person lying on the ground, if you do you have step back over them with the same foot. If you don’t they either go bald or stunt their growth.
• Eating with you left hand and the devil eats with you.
• A turned over shoe will cause arguments in the house.
• If frightened or startled by something spit three times immediately.
• If you leg is hurting you have the mother of twins step on your foot.
• Never visit someone after a funeral in the same clothes you attended the funeral in.
• Hearing an owl is bad luck.
• If you see a cobra in your house follow where it goes into or comes out of the walls and you’ll find treasure there

*some maybe very regional
(none of these are made up I’ve heard all of them growing up, which may explain alot about how I turned out.)

Four children tried to extort money from an elderly woman after they heard a fairytale about a blackmailing goblin. The three brothers and their sister, aged from four to 12, made a threatening note out of words cut from newspapers and demanded E£600. Their victim called the police who tracked down the children, from Basateen El Maadi, Cairo. The children have been reprimanded, but no charges have been brought. (From Sout Al Omma, April 8)

(Wonder which Sunday School system they’re in?)

1285 – Philip III of France died of the plague.

1796 – Spain declared war on Britain in the Napoleonic Wars.

1859 – An arsonist sets fire inside New York City’s iron and glass Crystal Palace, the most presitigious museum in the U.S. at the time. It burns to the ground, causing $2M damage and destroying thousands of priceless artifacts.

1877 – After marching for more than 1,400 miles and confronting 2,000 US soldiers along the way, Chief Joseph surrendered with starving remnant of Nez Perce people.

1930 – The British airship R101 crashed on its first flight at Allonne, near Beauvais, France, killing 48 of its 54 passengers.

1942 – German engineer Herman Graebe witnesses a Nazi mass execution in the Ukraine.

1942 – America’s ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, George M. Cohan, died at age 64.

1954 – Blaming “conflicting career demands” for the breakup of their 9-month marriage, screen actress Marilyn Monroe filed suit for divorce in Santa Monica, California, against baseball star Joe DiMaggio on grounds of mental cruelty

1970 – Anwar Sadat was nominated to succeed Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of Egypt.

1994 – Almost 50 members of the Order of the Solar Temple sect died in two suicide fires in Switzerland.

1998 – Infamous David Letterman stalker, Margaret Ray, age 46, committed suicide by kneeling in front of a train in Colorado.

1999 – In a move reminiscent of a strange combination of Nazi crimes committed against Gypsies and the postwar construction of the Berlin Wall, the town of Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic begins construction of a wall to separate a portion of its Gypsy population away from more respectable folks.

“You should proud to be Egyptian. They are the only people in all of history to successfully enslave the Jews.”

 

– Unnamed Servant in an Unnamed Church

Pythagoras of ancient Greece forbade his followers to eat fava beans because, according to legend, they were said to contain the souls of the dead.

Erbici (spelled e, ro, beta, iota, sima, iota) is Coptic for Cannabis sativa, a.k.a. hemp or marijuana