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The 'Eternal' Brick & Other Anomalous Urban Objects

uair01

uair01

Antediluvian
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
Messages
5,528
Location
The Netherlands
In the courtyard of the Dutch Ministry of Health there lies a brick. It’s a simple red brick, with one corner broken off. Nothing remarkable about it, except that it has lain there since January and it probably won’t disappear soon.

LINK: Pictures here.

Evidently someone has put it there. It’s not a leftover from the construction, nor is it the same brick that the pavement is made of. It’s bigger and a different colour. It’s not a door stopper, like a stone that I know, that keeps a bank backdoor open. So evidently it’s urban garbage.

Now I’m quite interested in urban garbage and if I see an interesting piece of paper I usually read it (hoping to find a new MJ-12 document). And I often remember the location of dropped bottles, broken CD’s and other out of place stuff. Usually these are swept up in a week. The brick stays put.

I’ve been wondering why this is the case. Some theories:
- It has some useful purpose that I don’t know of.
- It’s so unobtrusive that no one has thought of removing it.
- It doesn’t do any harm so it’s nobody’s problem.
- It doesn’t look enough like “garbage” – would you throw a brick in a dustbin?

That makes me wonder – how many objects are there in the urban environment that are out of place, but still stay “under the radar”.

Since I’ve found this brick I’ve seen many more stones lying around, and I’m now taking pictures of them. I hope that they will stay put just as long. But surprisingly enough some of them disappeared quicker than I thought. I’m playing with the idea of planting some bricks in the city myself. (Of course you know that hollowed-out bricks have been used as dead-drops by both MI5 and the CIA.)

Another class of “eternal” objects are weeds. Since January I’ve been following one thistle that has managed to grow to respectable height – more or less opposite the workplace of our Prime Minister. I can’t understand that no one has uprooted it yet.

LINK: Pictures here.

I hope that you find this Fortean enough and that you will come up with some exciting examples of your own. In fact, I hope proves that you can find curious phenomena in the most common circumstances. And I hope to give some inspiration to those Forteans who say : “Nothing odd ever happens to me.” Maybe the odd fact is in front of your eyes.
 
Great, I love this idea. Its super. Thank you, you have opened up a new an exciting world to me.
 
This guy is rediculous. I've been to that site a number of times and theres always something stupid he is talking about. The brick is the best thing to date.
 
Man you need a proper hobby! Try stamp collecting or something - about as exciting :laughing:

Seriously though. I don't think you could describe this stuff as Fortean.
 
sorry horik but i think that was a bit of a low blow,
this stuff is fortean,think about it,what would charles say if was around today.i think you know.

"An opinion is a matter of evidence, but evidence is a matter of opinion".

"It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out."

think about it horik,and try and cut are fortean brother a break.
 
I remember when I was at middle school, the bus route took us past a farm. It had a stone stable, big sqaure open window. There was an empty beer bottle in the corner of this window, and I swear it was there for all the four years I went to that school.
 
Nah sorry Zed, not very Fortean at all IMO.

*. What does the word “fortean” mean?

Basically it refers to the whole grab bag of strange phenomena that scientists often ignore, suppress, discredit, explain away, or otherwise find inconvenient. Such phenomena include (to name a few) unidentified flying objects (UFOs), mysterious animals (cryptozoology), spontaneous human combustion, unexplained natural phenomena (such as non-flying animals falling from the sky), and often psychic phenomena.
Click to expand...

Not much mysterious about bricks in courtyards and untrimmed weeds to me. No offence meant to the original poster but I maintain that this stuff isn't really Fortean.
 
I think a house brick could be deemed to be "Forteana" if it held traces of an unidentifiable blood-type, a gorilla's fingerprint, a manufacturer's date of 2012 or some such similar "forteanic" evidence.....otherwise, it's just a bloody brick. And why doesn't somebody pick it up before it has somebody's eye out?

My Granny would have picked it up and put it in the lavatory cistern to save water, but then, she used to put all sorts of things in the lavatory cistern for various reasons.... none of which any of us in the family really understood. The chain had to be pulled and held three times followed by a sharp jerk to get anything to clear the u-bend :? Now that was Fortean! At least until we found the foreign objects lurking out of sight, under the water. :roll:

Merlin
 
if you can explain it...

if you can explain why the brick is left untouched/unmoved then there's no mystery and it's NOT fortean.

offer a solution and you're free to criticise.

i feel that Fort would be fascinated by this kind of humble conundrum. the humdrum is fascinating. pay more attention to it. look for patterns. use your mind.
 
A bit OT but in a similar vein - there's a pub in Brighton (The Basketmakers Arms) with a load of tobacco tins and other small boxes screwed to the wall in such a way that they can be used to hold slips of paper with drawings/writings etc. There was an unfranked 1st class stamp in one of them for ages - months in fact. People look in these tins all the time to read the scraps of paper yet nobody took the stamp. Many people must've taken it out said 'Oh look an unfranked first class stamp' and replaced it.

Not Fortean but slightly interesting. Not unlike that brick.
 
Well, about 15years ago, I used to walk past a derilict house in Kensington [London]. There was a milkbottle plainly visible in the entrance of the garden. Easy to remove. It stayed there for several month and I took pictures of the milk first curdling, then tuning yellow and eventually becoming a strange mass. Then one day it was gone and I felt quite disappointed. However instead a plastic drinking chocolate bottle was now in front of one of the windows. I photographed this as well but it only stayed a few weeks and was not nearly as good as the milk.
If you think I could post my pictures, I have to say I am completely hopless making links to photos. Its very awkward and when I tried it before it never worked... :cry:
But reading all your replies I recon nobody wants to see them anyway.
 
i would love to see them.
hmm try and ask one of the bigwigs about uploading pictures,
 
Am I the only one to use a brick as a doorstop? Surely the glazing behind the brick opens on a spring or something and the brick is used to stop the widow from shutting. A low-tech solution to this problem. The fact that a large brick would ruin the decor of a modern office means that in a way the brick HAS to be where it is!
 
now we just need to investigate how many doorstop bricks their are and map their location. a fascinating project for someone with lots of free time.

similar to the one about discarded shoes (they're supposedly nearly always the left foot)
 
You can't upload pics directly to the server any more, but you can give the link URL if it's on another site. I use Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com).

Here's how I linked a pic in "Nasty items found in food":

{IMG}http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v232/Leaferne/Notmyjob.jpg{/IMG}

Just replace { and } with [ and ].

One of my work colleagues had a full, unopened bottle of grape Fruitopia on his desk for about two years. He left recently for another job and I asked him about the bottle; he said his successor had already been asked to leave it there.

What's that website with all the found objects on it? I thought it was found.com but...nope.
 
I like this thread.

It reminds me that one of my hobbies is 'Noticeing Things' (which will be listed in Who's Who, if I ever make it into that august publication).

To explain a little, this consists in finding pleasure in seeing 'new' things in places often visited before (even daily).

The Fortean aspect is, "Was that always there, or did I just notice it? Or is it in fact completely new, which is why I didn't notice it before?"



Well, it makes sense to me! :madeyes:
 
rynner said:
...this consists in finding pleasure in seeing 'new' things in places often visited before (even daily).
Click to expand...

You do that as well Rynner? Along with peoplewatching one of my favourite pastimes. Some ignoramuses call it staring into space - what little they know.

I like this thread too.

Anything which makes us think about the space we occupy and how we use it is worthwhile and can open up whole new worlds of weirdness, albeit not necessarily paranormal. I also believe that a lot of apparently paranormal phenomena can be explained by our misunderstanding or lack of awareness of the spaces we inhabit. Everyone must have had that experience when a familiar environment suddenly becomes very strange simply because some physical or mental trigger has thrown it into a sharper focus.
 
Well since we are on the topic, have you ever been driving or out for a walk and saw shoes or sneakers ( tennis shoes) dangling from telephone wires or power lines? I see this now and then and I am always wondering how they got up there.

Sometimes I will see a single shoe or sock in a parking lot, too. How do you lose one shoe or sock? Whenever I go out, I always come back with my footwear.

And not very far from where I live, on the highway there is an area with some trees. One of the trees is very tall, yet near the top of it there is a branch with a tire swing on it. No human being could reach that high to put it there so how'd it get there? That is my question.
I suppose it could have been put on when the tree was small, but that would have been about 100 years ago ( judging by the size of the tree) and the rope that attaches the tire, and the tire itself do not look nearly that old.
It's very odd.
 
Have often wondered about the shoes and socks myself. Have also noticed that you (OK, I) tend to see a fair number of black plastic combs lying around.
 
They must be my boyfriends, because heaven knows where they go.
 
I think the black plastic combs are mine, actually, they usually disappear within a week of me buying them. They probably elope with the ballpoint pens.
 
Redhead said:
Well since we are on the topic, have you ever been driving or out for a walk and saw shoes or sneakers ( tennis shoes) dangling from telephone wires or power lines? I see this now and then and I am always wondering how they got up there.

Sometimes I will see a single shoe or sock in a parking lot, too. How do you lose one shoe or sock? Whenever I go out, I always come back with my footwear.
Click to expand...

Hope these will help answer your questions. :D

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_124b.html
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_274.html

kitten
 
Maybe these errant bricks, combs and shoes are portkeys............
sorry , couldnt resist
 
I have seen red rubber bands (something I don't see that often) on the floor almost everywhere I go for some months now. This does not depend on the city or the area within the city, the streets seem to be strewn with them. Also a pretty minor thing, but I've registered it as Weird.
 
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