Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]
QUESTION: When you mail live creatures, insects and invertebrates (including bees, caterpillars, cockroaches, crickets, destroyers of noxious pests, earthworms, fish fry and eggs, leeches and other parasites, lugworms, maggots, mealworms, pupae and chrysalides, rag worms, silkworms, spiders and stick insects) in the UK, must you box and package them? The answer lies on page 26 of the Royal Mail‘s […]
A package arrived here, at our offices in the US, from a man in Poland. The package contained a letter and several little collections of tiny bones. (Each little collection was wrapped in its own piece of paper, and contained, in addition to the bones, a tiny slip of paper with a few words written on […]
There is much, perhaps, to be learned from this brief 1903 video (from the US Library of Congress) showing postal employees extracting mail from slots: