THE ODDITORIUM
                                                 
Mr. Rip-Li
(Astounding!  Supernal!  Ghostly Appendage!)
                                           
Who, you ask? A third or fourth leg of Swiss-Austrian descent? A shrunken head schooled in Krakow? A Friday night cranial hopper? If you collect junk long enough…. (“get rid of the junk or get rid of me,” said Beatrice Roberts after two months of connubial stress. An evening gown competition winner in the Miss America pageant, Beatrice went on to star as Azura, Queen of Magic in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars and had a fling with Louis Mayer of MGM, gravitating from one set of junk to another. She was a different kind of human cork, the dime a dozen kind, female corks who cling to moguls like Mayer in order to stay afloat in their own mediocrity. Bah! Enough of a studio actress who died alone in her North Hollywood bungalow with no greater distinction than having been a villainess and Robert Leroy Ripley’s wife for less than nine embryonic weeks. The junk stayed and she ventured on.)

What is the Mark of Cain?
^{Answer Next Sunday
Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the King Features Syndicate
June 10, 1945}                             

As Mr. Ripley’s Astounding! Supernal! Ghostly Appendage, I can, with authority, compare him to Stambaugh’s great ball of string:

A recluse named S.S. Stambaugh for several years collected eight inch lengths of string from a local flour mill in Tulare, California, and by knotting and winding the pieces was able to build a three-foot-diameter twine ball in less than two years. Upon seeing the huge creation, a friendly visitor calculated that Stambaugh had tied 463,040 knots in nearly 132 miles of twine to make the 320 pound ball. (March 22, 1938)

That was Ripley to a "t." He couldn’t roll into a room without rolling back out again covered with the shortest lengths of ideas and the tightest knots of objects in there. Beyond Beatrice, he wouldn’t let go of a thing. Including me.