Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for September 17, 2019

How obsolete is their man of the year for 1982?

I’ll pass on the bizarre botany flora.

The monster pomato plant yields horrible tasting ersatz tomatoes and unsatisfactory quasipotatoes.

Where’s Dan Quayle? My spellcheck’s gone berserk. It kept asking if I meant Quasimodo’s potatoes.

I’ve read a honeybee will live if you give it time to work its’ stinger out.

My aunt had MS and used bee venom therapy. She tried a lot of things and I’m not sure how well it worked, but it was odd enough to me at the time that I remembered it…. probably 40 or so years ago.

The drawing here looks more like a wasp than a bee. Which made me wonder what bee is used for this treatment. I was unhappy to learn they use honeybees.

I don’t have the time to research this very deeply, so I might be missing something. Honeybees are decreasing in numbers. While this sounds harsh, we need to be cultivating honeybees for food for everyone, not used in the treatment of a few. This is especially so for cosmetic purposes (treating mild to moderate acne and decreasing wrinkles for example). I have RA, one of the inflammatory diseases Bee Venom is used for. Heaven knows there needs to be better treatments for diseases like RA, Lupus, Cancer, and MS that cause so much pain and damage. However, I would much rather have enough food for me and my family than less pain and inflammation for me alone.

But, Time magazine named the computer the “Machine Of The Year” in 1982.

So computers are male?

I heard bee venom is also being used to treat some cancers as well

Just one reason I don’t subscribe to Time

Tomatoes can also be grafted onto jimson weed – but the result can be deadly!

The Potato and the Tomato are both of the Nightshade family of plants. The fruit of the Tomato and the tuber of the Potato are eatable but the plant it self is poisonous.

The Tomato was once thought to be poisonous and was known as the “Love Apple” because it was thought that jilted lovers would give their ex-lover the supposed poison apple.

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Did Time magazine ever name a clock as the Man of the Year?

Because back in the 80’s there was no necessity to be politically correct and call the computer a “Person of the year”?

It works. I had a friend with severe back pain that tipped over a bee hive and they say he died of health…

if they can get the plant to grow cheeseburgers, too, then they’ve really got something…

Why is a wasp shown instead of a bee?

That plant should have a corn stalk grafted on it too – corn syrup is one of the primary ingredients in ketchup.