Postcards

This postcard was sent to me from Arizona in 1976, before the climate change, so global warming doesn't explain this strange mutation. And Photoshop didn't exist back then. My theory is that radiation may have caused the grasshoppers to grow like this, what with all those secret atomic test sites in the southwest deserts.

Although rare, these creatures still live on the American plains. There's also a European breed that lives in Bavaria, or possibly Belgravia.

This one has shed his antlers. Last seen in 1934, the jackalopus gigantus is now extinct.

This corny postcard was sent to me by healthyrage (an Iowa girl through and through) in 2002.

Many, many years ago -- eons, probably -- this species of mountain trout developed a fur coat to take a bit of the chill off the icy streams in which it lives. Now, global warming has caused the temperature of those streams to rise. Will the trout adapt to its environment once again by shedding its fur coat? Will it swim north to Canada, where it runs the risk of death by boredom? Or will it go the way of the dino and the dodo?

ScribeGirl sent this one to me from Cape Cod in 1999.

In the days before television or Photoshop, the farmers in Idaho made their own amusement by challenging each other to grow the juiciest watermelon, the sweetest pear, or the orangest pumpkin. In 1946, Farmer Homer Smith took up the challenge to grow the biggest potato. He spent the long winter in solitary contemplation of this conundrum, and in the spring he put his half-baked theory to the test, employing a combination of careful cross fertilization and liberal application of organic material obtained from the dairy farmer down the road. To the amazement of all, he harvested this whopper in the fall. Being both illiterate and furtive, Farmer Smith neither wrote nor spoke of the details of this fantastic accomplishment, and he took the formula with him to the grave. For a brief time, his cousin Arthur, an insurance agent with a keen eye for a growth industry, had his own success selling potato damage insurance to local homeowners who feared what one of these big guys could do if it rolled off a flatbed truck and into their front parlor. Alas, a potato this big has never been grown again.

"My ceiling the sky, my carpet the grass."

Back of postcard reads: Nicknamed "Little Miss Sure Shot," Annie traveled many years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Her accuracy with rifle and pistol astounded thousands who flocked to see the show. She once shot a cigarette from the mouth of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.