Lithuanian Toll Keepers

Ask any tourist who has travelled to Lithuania and they will confirm the viral fascination for tollbooths. 

Vincas Kurdica who is best known for composing Lithuania's national anthem is also is the first Lithuanian to have set up toll booths in his country. That's why he appears on the 500 Litu banknote and on the verso is inscribed "maut" for toll.

Wheras the Soviets tried to impose their tollbooths after WWII, the Lithuanians stuck to their original design which was taken from the honeycomb of bees or the hive itself. (This stems from their bee culture that dates back to the middle ages and is even embedded in their language.)

Lithuanian toll booth, circa 1960

Toll worker going back to work in a beehive booth.

as opposed to the Russian designs that were more traditional and include coal stoves to keep the toll workers from freezing.

What few people know is that Vincas wrote a song about tollbooths and it goes like this:

When you drive up to my boothz

You will give me a 10 or 20 litu billz

And you should not be scared to give me a 50

Becauz

Liberty is our motherland

On our frozen lips and lanez

You choose to come to my booth or my comradez 

Stalin will not tell you whose booth to drive up to

We are a nation of hope

And we will build our beehive booths like no other nationz

Our pockets will buzz with change at the end of the dayz

And we will hover over the steamy hot soup our mothers' make uzzz.

My tollbooth operator's arm may be trembling

But I am not scared! 

Let the tanks roll into my backyardz

And I will give you your change and smilezzz.

Dicky Dickens Jr's letters

This is my 13,345th letter, mail, tweet, correspondence, whatever you call it. My great-great grandfather wrote over 14,000 and he died at 59. I'm 79 but I got a later start than Charles that's because my parents wouldn't let me have wifi until I was 20 years old.
Today, like most days,  I got 42 tweets, 67 emails, 131 instagram likes, and about 400 snapchat shares. I gave up on  facebook some years ago because of ads I kept receiving.
Last week some of my fans came down hard on me after learning that in 1996 I slammed JK Rowling when she sent me a sample of her Harry Potter manuscript. At the time I wrote:

The Pierre Hotel, New York, 1996

Dear JK Rowling,

"Do you think it should be deemed suitable that I should pass my eyes, rolls them over such demonically ludicrous characters and then use my name in order to gain favour in an illustrated house of publishing? True, I might do so if your story built something more than a slurry cauldron  of infertile magic posed on feeble foundations that couldn't set tension in the eyes of a scared cat. Your hapless, timid Harry Potter weakling character, transformed into a powerhouse hero only shows you have no inkling of an idea what the magnanimous responsibility true authorship entails.
Go wash some more dishes and think of another career.

So why do you think I didn't stroke her ego? Years later, Rowling's father was an engineer who went bust and when his burger van business failed he needed help. Do you think his daughter helped him? No. But I knew that even before she got famous. Just another unthankful daughter, that's who she is.

So I said I gotta write my 13,000 whatever letter. Whom to? Yes. My wife Martha,
even though I'll see her a few hours from now.

Grand Hotel Dieu de Lyon, Sunday March 18

Dear Martha,

I know you say that I seldom speak of myself, share my thoughts and the inner monkey in me. Prey tell I bid you my apologies but the truth is I am inhabited by my characters to such an Everestian degree that they feel more real than my family. You also consider me a liar but what liar would come out in public? Remember when President Bush bestowed me the medal of Freedom back in 2002? He whispered in my ear, "Dicky, who is your true inspiration?" and I quickly replied, "Collodi, the creator of Pinocchio." At that Bush smiled and placed his finger on my nose and then on his nose all the while people looked on somewhat perplexed and the cameras flashed in rapid fire and you were there.
I lie not when I say that I don't think I really should speak more about our 5 children, all of them, nevertheless are gamers and have only the slightest regard for their parents. My thoughts race past these misplaced conceptions and most certainly we should have stopped at 3.
Know that my love for you is truer that the cold that penetrated soviet prisoners in the Gulag.
Yours,

Feeling a little bit guilty I decided to write one more letter, and why not, I had 20 minutes before making my next speech before a French literary society on how most of my characters are vegan and would not even eat croissants. I slid my chair closer to the desk that overlooked the famous fontaine Bartholdi, known for the Statue of Liberty.

Grand Hotel Dieu de Lyon, Sunday March 18

Dear Dora Annie Dee and Sidney Jr.,

I usually don't write a letter addressing the two of my children but the situation seems exceptional.

Your Mummy tells me Sidney Jr. is doing a continuum Airdop on Dora Annie Dee's Airpad and in retaliation Dora Annie Dee is nixing the Mesh network of Sidney Jr's audio relay play. Now that the Bannon revolution has passed I should remind you unless a cessation of hostilities is in sight I shall send you, like your great-great Grandfather's father did, to work on the Wall. (Charles was sent to a shoe polishing factory to pay for his father's debt.) Either that or to Siberia to work in a Hacking Think tank. Have it your way. For starters, I think I'll reconfigure the Zigbee and have your toast burnt every morning.

Your loving father,

Tuffi and polydipsia

Wuppertal, famed for the Pina Bausch dance company, is also home of the first suspended rail that was built and opened in 1901. In 1949 the town was looking to promote its ridership and hired the Althoff Circus to do a publicity stunt. A small female elephant was hoisted in to the train to show how safe this train was. The elephant, whose original name was Tarto, was thought to have panicked and smashed its way out of the cabin dropping 12 meters into the Wupper river. Tarto's name was changed to Tuffi, Italian for "dive" after this incident and the suspended rail became famous after this infamous incident.
When Tuffi died an autopsy was done which revealed the elephant suffered from polydipsia, a rare disease that shuts off the brain's understanding when one's thirst is quenched. Indeed, this elephant drank enormous quantities of water and when it was above the Wupper on that ill-fated summery day of the 21st of July 1950, it was not frightened by the wobbly steel structure that made screeching sounds as the elephant was forced in, but it, being just above the river, saw a flow of irresistible water that provoked her to spring for it.