23 October 2009

Maybe Amelia Earhart simply unraveled?

This article made me laugh so hard, and for so long, I have to make sure you read the whole opening, so I'm going to reprint the first two paragraphs:

Famed US aviator's hair actually 'piece of thread'


An aviation museum in the US state of Ohio that believed it was displaying a hair sample from famed flyer Amelia Earhart made an unfortunate discovery, after DNA analysis revealed it to be a piece of thread.

"In a disappointing turn of events," as Cleveland's International Women's Air and Space Museum described it in a statement, the lock of "hair" in their possession since 1986 was revealed as thread only after they put it on display this year.



There are just so many dimensions of funny here, it seems to be, at least for me, a bottomless well of mirth.

I would give up a finger --cannibal's choice, even-- to have been there at the DNA lab when they got that thing under an electron microscope, or whatever else they typically do with such samples. I wonder if they were required to continue running through the rest of the tests to make sure they were confident in their result.

I wonder how much that maid got paid for this find all those years ago, and how much the museum itself paid. The possibilities are intriguing, but I fear my potentially lucrative customers/rubes might be dangerously wary now.

Still, it kinda makes me want to send a bunch of random fibers I find in to labs around the country, each labeled --as condescendingly as I can manage-- as merely needing confirmation of some groundbreaking find.

I would of course also issue press releases for each one at the same time, to build suspense. You know those 24-hour networks would roll with it immediately, balloon boy hoax be damned.

I'm can't decide if the most disappointed analyst would be the one testing Beethoven's lead-laden follicle before realizing it's a broken rubber band, or the one excitedly inspecting my Bigfoot Hair? sample only to learn that it's actually a stale strand of angel hair pasta.

I think, at least linguistically speaking, that one would be a touch closer to the real thing than the aviation museums' treasure. I wonder if the museum world has jocks and bullies who'll be teasing these people for decades? I sure hope so.

13 comments:

harmzie said...

Or, just submit a bunch of your own and your family's hairs. Then, when, for some strange reason, the need to believe supercedes the science and the hairs are confirmed, you can step up and say you are related to Beethoven. Or, um, I guess bigfoot...

Sally HP said...

How?! I just don't understand...thread, dental floss, speaker wires...

How did thread get mistaken for hair? By a museum curator? It's not like Jesus toast that 'could' be anything... oh my lanta, I hope this was a donation and not a purchase.

Kevin McKeever said...

But are the toenail clippings the maid found in Lincoln Bedroom also fakes?

unmitigated me said...

Reading this post, I think I've just reached Nerdvana.

Mary said...

I'm wondering about the museum staff's qualifications. Hair pretty much just looks like hair. And I'm not sure why her hair is an attraction anyway.

Kori said...

What the hell? I would SO not ever go to a museum of any kind to wax poetic over ANYONE's piece of hair, so this is especially hilarious to me.

Swirl Girl said...

And without DNA testing, we wouldn't have all those Law and Order and CSI shows ...we'd suffer with Matlock and Murder She Wrote...oh for shame!

Dawn said...

Damn! ...and I was planning a trip to Cleveland to see THAT hair!
Maybe some other state will have some unconfirmed body folicles that I can go visit.

Bookworm said...

Really? Hair or not, who really gives a care about seeing her hair? People are so weird.

The Stiletto Mom said...

It won't be too long now before we hear that tuft of Elvis' hair some idiot paid tens of thousands of dollars for is actually knitting yarn.

Jenny Grace said...

How do they know she didn't wear thread wigs?

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