Do
you remember the cartoonist Robert Ripley, who ran a series called Believe
It Or Not! in newspapers across the country (and probably the world)? He
proclaimed random amazing facts (amazing to him, at least) accompanied by his
very realistic drawings. Do you remember? If you are younger than me, as you
probably are, you don’t. Anyway. I ended up with six paperback books with his
cartoons. It is impossible for me to summarize these random pieces of information,
but I can see some overall themes. In particular, Ripley’s cartoons give us a
glimpse into how our brains work: how we gather information about the world and
draw conclusions from it, a topic about which I wrote an entire book, Scientifically
Thinking.
Many
of the items in Ripley’s cartoons were completely subjective to the imagination
of the observer. This is a trick our brains play on us. For example, a dog had
the shape of a three-leaved clover on its back. Of all the dogs in the world,
with splotches of color on their coats, it is nearly inevitable that you will
find one splotch that looks, to you, like a cloverleaf. Another example was the
Canadian map which, when held upside down, looks like a profile of the explorer
Jacques Cartier. How close does the resemblance need to be? It depends on how
credulous you are. Lots of rock formations looked like lots of different
things, the most famous of which was the Great Stone Face in New England. (It
recently collapsed.) The list is long, but I could add one more. Along a state
highway to the west of Rapid City, South Dakota, there is a cliff that looks
like a caricatured face.
It
would be a waste of time to read a book that consisted of nothing except such
random coincidences of appearance. Fortunately, Ripley’s work consisted of a
lot more than this.
Many
of the facts Ripley cited were statistical anomalies, things that are almost
but not quite impossible. Any one of them is almost impossible, but collectively,
there are lots of statistical anomalies happening all around us. He noted that
on one day in 1950 there were 78 babies born in Washington, D.C., and they were
all female. The odds against this happening are one in two to the 78th
power. Enough to make you say gee-whiz but not enough to change your view of
the world. What about all the other days and all the other places?
Some
of these statistical improbabilities involved human birth defects. Like the man
who had two irises in each eyeball, and another who had three tongues, another
who had two hearts, and a woman whose breasts were on her back. One man had
mirror-image organs inside his body. Ripley’s major example was a child who had
a single eye, in the middle of her forehead. This is known as a cyclops
mutation. These bits of information are rather creepy, since they show us how the
genetic health we take for granted can be so easily disrupted by a little
mutation, or a mistake during fetal development.
Some
of the examples Ripley cited were things that were only surprising to him but
not to anyone else. He reported tree seedlings growing out of gutters on
houses. This always happens unless you don’t have trees, or don’t have gutters.
He was also amazed that violets would bloom in October.
Other
examples were of almost unbelievable human cruelty or stupidity or just strangeness.
For example, there was a man who locked his wife inside their house every day
for 52 years. There was a Japanese priest who said “Butsu” (their word for
Buddha) sixty thousand times every day for thirty years. Voltaire, who could
never be accused of being ordinary, drank up to 72 cups of coffee a day.
Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil” was apparently based on a real
event. Juliette Drouet wrote Victor Hugo twenty thousand love letters.
Some
of the supposed facts must have been based on misinformation. A 160-year-old
man who fathered a child? When he died, his oldest son was 106, his youngest 3.
There are no verified accounts of people living, certainly of being virile,
this long. He also said goatsucker birds actually sucked goats.
I
will always remember, from the first time I read them until now, some really
amazing stories. For example, a Zulu king ordered thousands of his soldiers to
march into the sea and drown, just to prove how much power he had over them.
Then there is the story of Grimaldi the clown, which I write about briefly in
the next essay, which I will post soon.
Life
throws at us lots of disconnected bits of information. Our minds seek, or
should seek, some generalities in them, for example, that happiness is found in
creating a good life, not in power or possessions; and that there is almost no
limit to human cruelty.
