Month: October 2016

Shirley Jackson’s horror story “The Lottery” is one of the most famous short stories in modern American literature. The disturbing tale, first published in The New Yorker in 1948—to the shock and consternation of many readers—surrounds an annual ritual in a small town, where every member of the community draws lots to determine who among them will be stoned to death.

The story was later adapted for radio, television, and the stage, and while Jackson died of heart failure in 1965, you can still hear the story performed by the author herself. An audio version of “The Lottery” was released by Folkways Records in 1960, with Jackson narrating. As part of the same audiobook, you can also listen to “The Daemon Lover,” a haunting story about a woman searching for her enigmatic fiancé on their wedding day. They were both published in Jackson’s 1949 anthology The Lottery and Other Stories.

Jackson’s work is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, thanks to a new biography of the author by journalist and book critic Ruth Franklin and the June 2016 release of a new collection of her previously unpublished fiction and nonfiction, edited by her children and Franklin. A graphic adaptation of “The Lottery” by Jackson’s grandson, the Paris-based artist Miles Hyman, goes on sale on October 25.

A digital download of the two stories is $7, or you can shell out $17 for a CD or $22 for a cassette copy. If audio isn’t your style, you can read “The Daemon Lover” on Google Books and “The Lottery” here.

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Following 27 hours of surgery, conjoined twins Jadon and Anias McDonald have been successfully separated, CNN reports.

The two brothers, originally from Coal City, Illinois, were born with a rare medical condition known as craniopagus in September 2015. They lived the first 13 months of their lives with the tops of their heads fused together before undergoing surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City on October 13 and 14.

Led by Dr. James Goodrich, 40 doctors were able to disconnect the patients’ skull and brain tissue using advanced imaging technology. At one point during the operation, doctors encountered a 5-by-7-cm area of brain tissue “with no definite plane for dissection,” according to a Facebook post shared by the boys’ mother, Nicole McDonald. She wrote, “Dr Goodrich had to make the call and the final cut based on his instinct.”

Craniopagus is exceedingly rare—occurring just once in every 2.5 million births—and the surgery needed to correct it is risky. A 2006 report co-authored by Goodrich [PDF] that looked at 41 craniopagus surgeries found a 77 percent success rate with multiple-stage operations and 37 percent success with those performed all at once.

The twins’ separation surgery was their fourth procedure. Both boys experienced slight complications following their most recent surgery: Anias had seizures the next day, and Jadon still hasn’t moved his left side. While Jadon’s issue is more worrisome, his father Christian told CNN Goodrich told him “that’s not out of the ordinary.” It took about a month for Jadon and Anias to fully recover from their previous operation, and the family is looking at a similar timeline this time around.

[h/t CNN]
 
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In 1903, Wind Cave—near Hot Springs, South Dakota—was the first cave to be designated a National Park. It’s currently the sixth-longest cave in the world, with more than 140 miles of explored passageways. But with several additional miles being discovered every year, it might not be long before Wind Cave surpasses Optymistychna Cave in the Ukraine (146.6 miles) and Sistema Ox Bel Ha in Mexico (159.8 miles) to reach the top four.

Due to its sheer size, there are a vast number of “rooms” in the cave, many with bizarre names: Andy’s Ice Box, Arm Pit, Bachelors Quarters, and the Bagel Ballroom, just to name a few. There’s a method to the madness, sort of: If you find a new room, you get to name it—and nearly anything goes. Here are the stories behind a few of the most interesting ones:

1. ANDY’S ICE BOX

Discovered on December 15, 1979, by Andy Flurkey, Norm Pace, and John Scheltens, Andy’s Ice Box is full of aragonite frostwork—delicate, needle-like growths of calcite that resemble frost creeping across a window. The room discovered by these three explorers is packed with the stuff, making it resemble a frosty freezer.

2. WHAT! YEAH!

If this sounds like a Lil’ Jon lyric to you, you’re absolutely correct. When Jason Walz, Jessie Mann, and Chris Dale found a chasm 30 feet deep, 20 feet wide, and 25 feet long, Lil’ Jon’s exclamations of “What! Yeah!” were the first words that came to mind.

3. WHAT THE HELL LAKE

Up until 1996, the place where What the Hell Lake is now had been completely dry. When Stan Allison discovered that the dry passage had suddenly become water-filled, he exclaimed, “What the hell?” The appearance of the lake prevented cavers from exploring significant sections of the passage until the water receded in 2004.

4. BACHELORS QUARTERS

The thin layer of dust and dirt that covers everything in this room resulted in this unflattering nickname.

5. BAGEL BALLROOM

When cavers found these two large rooms in 1987, they took a break to eat lunch. “To our surprise, everyone on the trip had brought sandwiches for lunch made on bagels (these are tough pieces of bread well suited to the harshness of being carried all day in a caving pack),” Jim Pisarowicz wrote in the official report. “The new rooms were thus named the Bagel Ballroom.” A hole in the floor that led to another room was dubbed “Bagel Hole,” and a large, connected gallery became “Bagel Bowl.”

6. NUDIST COLONY

Dave Schnute was surveying with famous cavers Herb and Jan Conn when they came across a room with a bunch of additional passageways and nooks to explore. Schnute declared that it was “more fun than a mosquito in a nudist colony.”

7. PANT PEELER

This small crawl space was named after explorer Randy Brown squeezed his way through—and it was such a tight fit, it peeled his pants and underwear down.

8. THE BEAUTY PARLOR

This area of the cave contains a red, sandy clay that was sold to women to wear as rouge in the 1890s. The National Park Service believes this room was named by the McDonald family, the family that first started developing the cave for tourism in 1890.

9. CAMPAIGN TRAIL

This walking passage was named on November 11, 2000—right in the middle of the Al Gore/George W. Bush election controversy.

10. DUNCAN ROOM

In 1989, Rachel Cox, a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) student involved in a mock search-and-rescue mission, actually got lost in Wind Cave. The park received a call from a psychic who said Cox would be found in a room with “Duncan” in the name. When Cox was found, 37 hours after she went missing, she was located in a room that hadn’t been named. To fulfill the psychic’s prediction, they dubbed it Duncan Room.

11. MRS. WILLIAMS WOMB

In 1985, NOLS student Geoff Williams was the first brave soul to lead the expedition into a small, tight spot. They named the area after his mother’s womb. Additionally, they named the tight crawl that led to the spot “Mrs. Williams Birth Canal.” We’re sure Mrs. Williams was flattered.

12. SPOOK ALLEY

On October 31, 2000, a group of cavers took an ABC World News Tonight crew on a surveying expedition. During this trip, the crew happened to discover a series of rooms where someone had left an old newspaper many years before. The newspaper was dated October 31, 1897—and the fact that a newspaper from a Halloween over a century prior was found on Halloween seemed pretty spooky.

Also worth mentioning: The Backstreet Boys, Vanilla Ice, NSYNC, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Phish, Darkwing Duck, the pop group Dream, Chris Farley, John Wayne, Pizza Hut, Miller beer, Pee-wee Herman, Yahoo!, and even the Lycos search engine have spots named after them within the cave.