Book is just as good as the show
I've been listening every night to some episodes of Strange as it Seems, the best regular broadcast of all. The same 20 episodes have been floating through my dreams for several years, and I never get tired.

I wanted to find out if the radio version and the original newspaper version agreed in tone. The unique quality of the radio version is total empathy. Hix always takes the side of the besieged commoner against the arrogant aristocrat, and pays no attention to the usual political and religious divisions. Good is good, bad is bad. Was this quality added by the radio writers, or was it innately Hix?

So I bought a copy of the book version. Hix's large sketchbooks apparently qualify as comics, so they're around $80. Not worth it. The regular book is like any book from the era, in the $15 range.

Got the book yesterday, opened it at random, found:


Mohammed is the most popular name.
The given name of Mohammed is extremely popular among the followers of that great prophet, and the Mohammedans form no small part of the world's population. There are a lot of Johns and Williams in the world, but not so many of either as there are Mohammeds.


Sure enough, the same universal respect for ordinary people. As with the radio show, there's a mix of silly 'technically correct' stuff along with the humanity. (The buffalo nickel doesn't have a buffalo! It's a bison. Ha ha ha.) Other 'technically correct' items are a little more meaningful:



These situations are more common than you might think. When I taught at the DeVry school in KC, I was lecturing in Kansas and Missouri at the same time. The state line cut through the middle of the building.

Some of the science items are outdated now, but all were accurate by the knowledge available in the '30s. Marconi didn't invent wireless details the earlier history of radio accurately.

Here's a genuinely strange sciency item:



A floating island. Is it still there? Yes.

The pond is very clean, has a small beach reachable only by boat, is virtually deserted on week days, has New England's only floating bog, there is a profusion of wild life, including great herons, and there's excellent fishing.

Googlestreet catches a pretty good view of the quage:



How does a floating island maintain itself for decades while drifting around the lake? Is there a giant fungus holding the trees together? Does the fungus paddle its quage to find better food supplies?

= = = = =

Language sidenote: One modern reference to the floating island says that "locals call it The Quag". I suspect Hix misspelled the odd word, or else a local informer misspelled it. Looking it up, quag is an old word for bog, normally seen only as part of quagmire. A quagmire is a bogbog. But I like quage and decided to keep it as a precise term for a floating boggy island.
  ¶ 1:47 AM