Well I’m sure Kevin Costner is pissed, but that’s not going to stop folks from fawning over this 100-year-old message in a bottle that was recently hoisted out of the Baltic Sea. A grizzled looking group of fisherman handed the bottle over and took it to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg for closer inspection, finding a message from May 17, 1913 written by Richard Platz. From NPR:
On a nature hike along Germany’s Baltic Coast in 1913, 20-year-old Richard Platz scrawled a note on a postcard, shoved it into a brown beer bottle, corked it and tossed it into the sea.
Where it traveled, no one knows for sure, but it was pulled out of the Baltic Sea by a fisherman last month not far from where Platz first pitched it.
It’s thought to be the world’s oldest message in a bottle.
You probably would’ve had better luck with a carrier pigeon if that’s case. I guess dramatically throwing things into the sea is pretty cool though, even if it rarely works. If only they had Arrested Development on the radio back then to teach people that the sea is not our friend. From BBC:
Researchers at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg were eventually able to track down Angela Erdmann, 62, who lives in Berlin. Platz was her grandfather. She visited the museum last week and was able to hold the bottle.
“That was a pretty moving moment,” she tells German news agency dpa. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.” Erdmann says she never knew her mother’s father, who reportedly died in 1946 when he was 54 years old. But she says the discovery of his message has inspired her to find out more about him.
This smells like a viral marketing ploy. Is Kimmel involved here? Is he cashing checks from those genealogy freaks now? People trying to find out if their parents ever rubbed shoulders with our great giants of history. It’s bullsh*t. My ancestors were nothing by drunks and thieves and I’m not wasting my money to find out more. I get enough of them from the current batch.