Gail Heriot reflects on the bogus holiday tradition of Kwanzaa:

If you visit a card shop at your local shopping mall these days, chances are you will see Kwanzaa cards. It’s big business. (Well, maybe it’s just medium-sized business, but it is evidently lucrative enough for card companies to bother with.) And if you go to swanky private schools like the one attended by the children of my fellow Right Coaster Chris Wonnell, you may well receive instruction on this traditional African-American holiday. Taking Kwanzaa seriously is all part of the spirit of multiculturalism.

Except, of course, Kwanzaa isn’t traditional at all. It was invented in the late 1960s by convicted felon Ron Everett, leader of a so-called black nationalist group called United Slaves. I use the word “so-called” because United Slaves’ veneer of black nationalism was very thin; most of its members had been members of a South Central Los Angeles street gang called the Gladiators, just as the Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers had been members of the Slauson gang.

In the early 1960s, these gangs were mostly concerned with petty and not-so-petty crime in the Los Angeles area, including the ever-popular practice of hitting up local merchants for protection money. By the late 1960s, however, they discovered that if they cloaked their activities in rhetoric of black nationalism, they could hit up not just the local pizza parlor, but great institutions of higher learning as well.

US Patent No. 6,960,975 B1
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Boris Volfson, 5707 W. Maple Grove Rd., Apt. 3046, Huntington, Ind. 46750 (US)
Filed on Mar. 14, 2005.

Full text.

It certainly looks like a joke, but the patent can be found by the search engine on the US Patent Office site.

Science Daily is not pleased.

Nature comments.

In 1986, a regional council placed Sweden’s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, a variously described creature named Storsjudjooret supposed to inhabit Lake Storsjon in the district of Jamtland, on the endangered species list. Higher authorities recently objected to the listing on the grounds that it was inappropriate to apply endangered species listings to imaginary creatures. The regional council has reluctantly agreed to de-list the monster, but an association of Monster fans is displeased.

The famous treasure site island off the eastern coast of Nova Scotia is for sale, complete with flooded money pit, where treasure hunters have spent many treasures worth of fortunes trying to find something allegedly buried there in the 17th century. The treasure is believed to lie deep underground beneath multiple layers of oak planking, and to have been booby-trapped with a complex, and brilliantly engineered, system of tunnels designed to flood with seawater any recovery effort attempted by parties not privy to the secret. The first treasure-hunters to excavate on Oak Island found when they came back to work the following day that their diggings had flooded overnight to sea level. No one since has managed to close the money pit’s connection to the Atlantic Ocean, and therefore no one has managed to pump out the water and dig down to what is thought to be the level of the treasure.

Unsuccessful attempts to extract the treasure pit’s contents have gone on since its discovery in 1795, and participants have included Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

One of many web-sites detailing the legend and history of the Oak Island treasure pit.

From the same media that brings you news of the latest health hazards and environmental threats, here comes a contemporary updating of last century’s newspaper-concocted Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, which supposedly was responsible for the premature deaths of all the individuals involved in the tomb’s discovery. Unfortunately, in her selection of examples of parallel curses, Ms. Marks overlooked one of the best, the one impacting people involved in the Clintons’ Whitewater real estate deal. I’ve read of an eerily similar mysterious series of unfortunate coincidences negatively impacting the longevity of all potential Whitewater witnesses in some not-necessarily-completely-credible ultra-Right sources.