What’s this I hear about “crop circles” being mysteriously flattened in the corn and wheat fields in the English countryside around Stonehenge? I heard that attempts have been made to duplicate these circles without success. What’s the Straight Dope? –Kimberly Moon, Dallas
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Oh, God, not the alien spaceships again. According to a recent story in Skeptical Inquirer, about 165 of the flattened circles had been reported as of last year, some up to 150 feet in diameter. The stalks aren’t broken, just bent over. The earliest circles were reported in 1948, but they’ve only become common in the last decade. Numerous explanations have been offered: snared animals running in circles, helicopters flying upside down, giant mushrooms, and, just to show you even crackpots read the newspapers, a hole in the ozone layer that allows ultraviolet radiation to fry the alfalfa.
Jill and I walk every day on our lunch hour, so we see a lot of street and sidewalk repairing going on. What we’d like to know is, why do they put lines in cement sidewalks? They pour and smooth out a perfectly good sidewalk, then they draw lines in it. The lines only go a quarter-inch deep, so what good do they do? We remember the saying when we were kids, “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”–do we have sadistic city employees? –Lorraine and Jill, Santa Barbara, California
Has anyone ever had sex in space? If so, how was it? –Curious in North Dallas
