A photo taken at Swan Park, Buncrana, County Donegal, Eire (courtesy of Fortean Times, Christmas 2014, p.69):
Tag Archives: curiosity
Phone box calendar
Celebration of Welsh phone boxes fails to sell a single copy
Publishers of Fast Disappearing Red Telephone Boxes of Wales 2014 have admitted they might have misjudged their target market after failing to shift a single unit of the niche calendar since it hit shops in September….
I would by a copy but can’t find a link to it anywhere!
Post box story
This is a post box story that tickles my fancy so I thought I should share it…
Post box appears on Thames bridge, confuses village and Uri Geller
A red letter box suddenly appears in the middle of a bridge in Berkshire.
Uri Geller and other villagers have been left confused by the sudden arrival of a red letter box in the middle of a bridge.
The box has been placed a metre above the water on a parapet of the bridge, which crosses the River Thames in Berkshire.
People in Sonning-on-Thames said that the box can only be accessed by boat users.
Geller, who has lived in the village for 33 years, told BBC News he had “never seen anything like it”.
“This is a very unusual village. There are many sightings of a child ghost that walks on the bridge,” he commented.
“Maybe it was the ghost of a mischievous little girl? I have never seen anything like this anywhere in the world, it’s a new one on me.”
Royal Mail spokesperson Val Bodden said: “The recent appearance of a post box frontage on the side of the river bridge at Sonning is a mystery to us.
“It is certainly not an operational posting facility and we have no knowledge of how it arrived at this location.”
BY TOM EAMES10/09/2013
Model phones and much more
“Alan Wolfson is a master of the miniature. His urban sculptures are tiny, incredibly detailed views of the mundane city landmarks that urban citizens interact with on a daily basis…”
These models include phone boxes (of course).
Click here for ‘tiny streets’.
Alan Wolfson miniatures
Isle of Wight
We recently visited the IoW where there is a funky model village in the town of Godshill. Of corse it has it’s own communications…
Godshill
Phone-henge
Freestyle Music Park, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
“This completely fabulous Stonehenge replica, playfully named Phonehenge, sits in the Freestyle Music Park (formerly the Hard Rock Park) in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It surrounds a large performance space in the British Invasion section of the park and is comprised of lots of red old-style British telephone boxes” (http://weburbanist.com/2009/09/03/clonehenges-20-creative-recreations-of-stonehenge/)
Urinals
While I photograph phone boxes I have discovered that Cory McAbee (of American Astronaut and Stingray Sam fame) takes photos of urinals.
For a look go to: http://thesmalleststar.blogspot.com/
(update 12/11/15 – can’t find his post on his blog anymore. Ah well.)
Spooky
I read this great little story in The Fortean Times last night. FT251, July 2009, p.77. Author is Darren Ryden:
“In the 80s a friend of mine decided to go hitchhiking around Europe, and on the way call in on some friends in Italy. After a row at work, he quit his job early and started travelling two weeks earlier than he had originally planned. One night, during a heavy downpour in Germany, he took shelter in a phone kiosk. The telephone rang and, having nothing better to do, he answered it, expecting to hear someone speaking German.
To his suprise, it was our mutual friend in Italy calling to check some arrangement on meeting up. It transpired our Italian friend, not knowing about his early depature, has simply dialled his home phone number and had somehow been connected to that particular public phone.
Our Italian friend phoned me straight after to check that this wasn’t a hoax and that our friend was indeed abroad, which I confirmed. To this day, none of us knows how it happened. Misdial a number and the odds of picking up a particular phone in another country must be infinitesimal.”
Coming out of the phone booth: phone box references in modern subculture
There is an article in the latest ‘Fortean Times’ (Krulos, T. 2014. Heroes in the night. In: Fortean Times, Vol. 314 May 2014, pp.28-35) which discusses the modern phenomenon of Real Life Superheroes (people who dress in the style of a superhero and roam the streets looking to fight crime). What amused me was the coining of the term ‘coming out of the phone booth’ – used to refer to the time when you reveal your lifestyle to your friends and family.
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Tagged curiosity