Monthly Archives: May 2006

Spring Heeled JackSometimes “Spring Heeled Jack” pops up in literature–sometimes as a villain, sometimes as a hero–perhaps even an early ancestor of modern superheroes. The strange bit is the fact that Spring Heeled Jack is based on real events and a real person from Victorian era England who purportedly leapt over walls and onto rooftops easily, assaulted men, accosted women, blew gouts of flame from his mouth, and always eluded capture while laughing with mad mirth.

The first confirmed sightings of old Spring Heel were in London of September 1837–though there is speculation that he was in action some twenty years previous. A man walking home late one night reported a muscular male with devilishly pointed ears and glowing red eyes had leapt over the tall cemetery fence with ease and landed right in front of him. This witness did not report being attacked or harassed by Jack, making him one of the lucky few.

Shortly later a barmaid named Polly Adams was found laying in the street in a state of semi-undress. She reported that she’d been attacked by a man of the same evil features who has ripped off the top of her blouse, grabbed her naked breasts with his corpse-cold hands, and deeply scratched her belly with his claws.

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During times of economic hardship, people turn to the road to see if they can make their luck somewhere else. As such, back in the days of the Great Depression, the U.S. saw an increase in the hobo population. Walking along long roads or hitching rides on trains, these hobos would travel about, looking for a place where they could get lucky and find a better home. Of course, such a life of wanderlust was difficult, especially since one has to travel without knowing anything of the landscape or local populace.

To combat this ignorance, the hobos came up with an ingenious sign language to communicate to each other along the way. This is not like the sign language that hearing-impaired people use to communicate; rather, it was markings and drawings that hobos would leave along the road for their fellow travelers. Whether a sign told others of locations of important places in town, the attitudes of the locals to tramps, or the best places to beg, the hobo sign language helped many get by in hard times.

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Gerald Bull is a prime example of a man who created his own luck–unfortunately for him most of it was bad. A brilliant and distinguished artillery engineer, Bull spent much of his life in the upper echelons of government-funded weapons research. Though his career took him down a convoluted and often difficult path, he devoted his professional life to a single-minded pursuit of his dream: to build a gun large enough to shoot satellites into orbit.

Bull nearly single-handedly resurrected the science of supergun artillery, and in so doing played a major role in 2 wars. But Bull’s confrontational style and brusque manner won him very few friends within the governments for which he worked. His poor networking skills combined with a near total disregard for the dangerous politics in which he meddled led to heavy fines, a short stint in prison, and ultimately, to his assassination.

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It is a technique used all over the world, and training in it is widely offered. Many employers, especially in France, rely on it heavily to evaluate contenders for high positions. Specialists are called upon to share their views in court and even for the Secret Service. Which technique is this? Graphology, or the analysis of handwriting to reveal character traits.

Along with the International Graphology Association itself, handwriting experts generally object to being associated with anything New Age. Yet psychologists tend to agree that graphology is a pseudoscience. The fact is that the empirical evidence overwhelmingly refutes it; of all the studies which have examined graphology, only one has found a correlation between personality and handwriting styles. The British Psychological Association considers handwriting analysis to be absolutely worthless. The consensus from the psychology world is that graphology is only slightly more useful than astrology. Yet the practice continues.

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We here at Damn Interesting are preparing to move the site to its new home on a dedicated server, which should help improve both the site’s performance and our hosting provider’s mood. Consequently we’ll be very busy preparing for this migration for the next week or so, and we may not have a shiny new article to publish on each of the intervening days. We’ll try, but no promises.

On days where we don’t quite have one ready, I’ll exhume one from the archives and try to pass it off as fresh.

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