Last year I took my wife to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Odditorium in San Francisco. I had visited it as an 8-year-old boy with my sister and it had left a huge impression of the many amazing things in the world I had absolutely no exposure to: strange cultures that reshaped their own bodies and shrank the heads of enemies, people and animals with bewildering abilities or defects, survivors of freak accidents, and outlandish events that left no doubt we were in the hands of a creative force with a twisted sense of humor. Imagine my delight in April discovering that the museum is every bit as fun and exciting now as it was 35 years ago. Either there’s still something wonderful about the world of the strange and bizarre or I haven’t grown up (or both), but Valorie and I loved every minute of it.

With that in mind, late last fall when I went to the worst going-out-of-business sale ever (that would be Tower Records, which started with discounts of something like 10% on product that was already marked 25% too high) imagine my delight in seeing the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. For more than 20 years at our house the Page-A-Day calendars — note the plural — have been an important tradition. What Page-A-Day calendars will Santa Claus (or Joe Stafford) bring us this year? Some years it’s the Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar (the clear favorite among family members), some years the Duh! Page-A-Day calendar or the Mom’s Advice Page-A-Day calendar or various trivia Page-A-Day calendars. I had never seen the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar and immediately scooped it up.

Some Page-A-Day calendars don’t make the grade. Last year’s Duh calendar seemed less about stupid people and their antics than about the sour grapes attitude of its writer. This year’s George Carlin Uncensored Page-A-Day calendar lived in the kitchen alongside our other calendar for all of two days before being relocated to an interior bathroom far from children, mostly because a) it’s not funny and b) it features wisdom like this, for today, Monday January 8th: “Haven’t we gone far enough with colored ribbons for different causes? Every cause has its own color. Red for AIDS, blue for child abuse, pink for breast cancer, green for the rain forest. I’ve got a brown one. You know what it means? ‘Eat shit, motherfucker!'” My wife and I are fans of Mr. Carlin’s, but we think his humor works better off the page, as when he is saying it. Moreover, we imagined asking one of the kids to pass the broccoli and being told, “Eat shit, motherfucker!”

The Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar, as I said, is the most important calendar in the house. (And I guess we’ll have to get one for this year, since neither Santa Claus nor Joe Stafford brought one.) The esteem in which it’s held is clear: In November our eight-year-old daughter was taken to publicly musing over it, pencil poised, then flipping it over to the solution when we were not looking and writing the answer on the front as though she’d solved it. (I asked her to stop.) One of our son’s proudest moments last year was when he proved that the Mensa puzzle was wrong. (No wonder I hadn’t solved that one.) It hasn’t proved to be an indication of Einsteinian intellect, and he didn’t lord it over us, but I do appreciate his ability to question authority — in this case, the geniuses at Mensa.

Given all this, you can see the anticipation that greeted the 2007 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. Not only is it a Page-A-Day calendar, it also features sightings from the world of the bizarre. I looked forward to more tales of, say, the man with a 10-foot steel rod stuck halfway through his body who walked to the hospital, or the little boy born with bat wings, or the church made entirely of Spire Christian Comics. (These latter two don’t exist — That I Know Of.)

Imagine my response, then, on seeing Believe It or Not! panels with “amazing” reports such as this (from today): “Believe It or Not! Basketball great Michael Jordan played wearing his University of North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform to bring good luck!”

Um… I believe it. No problem.

Or this one, from April 6th: “A thorn from the crown of Christ, brought back from the Hold Land (sic) by a Crusader in 1185, is preserved in the Church of Chalandry, France, and exhbited each Good Friday.”

Yeah, again, no problem. We call them “relics,” they indeed date from the late Dark Ages and Medieval Age, they are now universally believed to be false, and they led almost directly to Martin Luther’s starting the Reformation. The only part of this that I can’t readily Believe is that the editor of the calendar didn’t catch the typo and correct “Hold Land” to Holy Land.

To be sure, this year’s calendar does still feature what I would call Robert Ripley-quality Believe It or Not!’s, as shown by this one, for October 9th: “Chou Kung, the inventor of the compass, had a swivel wrist and could turn his hand completely around.” To me that’s not only odd — and I hope there’s a picture in one of the Odditoriums around the globe — but useful information for a future dinner party. Or this one, from November 2007: “Sir Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, once worked as a greeting card designer at Hallmark!” That gives one thought as to the nature of his output, for example on Valentine’s Day: “I shall never never never surrender! Except to your love. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

I hope to discover over the course of the year that there are more tidbits that are hard to Believe than not. We need to have our disbelief pricked every day; it’s part of staying alert. Every day the Page-A-Day calendar gives flight to our imagination. Or at least, it should.

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