I live at the end of a dead-end street. It’s name?ARGYLE PLACE.

I like the street and I like the name. And I like the sound the name makes when I tell folk my address.

With it’s connection to the world’s rarest type of pink diamond, ARGYLE has a ring of sophistication, nay even elegance to it.

Well, that’s what I tell myself.

Time now to pull back the curtain on some other standout street names. And STANDOUT I do mean…

Psycho Path is a private road in Traverse City in the U.S. state of Michigan. It was once voted America’s most bizarre street name. Right you are there.

Picture this conversation between a visiting tourist and a Maine local:

“Hi there. Can you tell me which way to the shops?”

“Be happy to friend. Just go UPTHA ROAD.“

“Which road?”

“UPTHA ROAD“

“You mean this one?”

“Yup”

Finding it – in Southern California – is the easy part. Pronouncing it? Yeah right.

Everyone knows that RED RUM is MURDER spelt backwards. Right? So why name a street after that most famous scene from the 1980 movie THE SHINING?

Well, maybe the movie is actually NOT the inspiration for this street name.

Seeing is believing. Where? Delaware – Ohio, U.S

And I know Victoria in Australia has a Tennis Court – and not the racquet kind.

 SHADES OF DEATH ROAD is a two-lane rural road, 10.8 km in length in New Jersey, U.S. It featured in an episode of the second season of the 2013 television series HAUNTED HIGHWAY. Now you know.

Does anyone else remember the television series I DREAM OF JEANIE, which ran for five seasons from 1965 – 1970?

Didn’t think so.

Good thing I do.

When a road prefers to stay anonymous. Definitely ‘under the radar’. Meaning actually very ‘above the radar’.

‘Ninth Avenue’ is so… oh, I don’t know… plain? How could it possibly standout from all the other 9th Avenues around the country?

I know! Let’s add a cute little half, up the unique factor and bring some smiles to people’s faces.

From earlier this week…

READ IT HERE

Everything begins with an idea.

Could a short story written almost 100 years ago have been the inspiration for the birth of the internet?

Maybe not. But it’s fun to think it might have.

THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY was a short story published in the May 1931 edition of the science fiction magazine AMAZING STORIES (1926 – present).

It’s author, David Keller (1880 – 1966) was a practicing psychiatrist.

He wrote fiction as a hobby, until his wife encouraged him to try profiting from it. He went on to publish more than a dozen novels and over 60 short stories.

THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY begins with an advertisement placed in the NEW YORK TIMES classifieds.

Thousands of out-of-work bachelors of arts (tee hee) applied; five hundred were hired. They go to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like billionaire who is devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.”

In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, shut off from the rest of the world, each man sets about reading three hundred books a year, after which the books are burned to heat the manor.

At the end of five years, the 500 employees, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars.

The twist is that when one by one they go to an office in New York City to pick up their paychecks, they encounter a surgeon.

After sedating them, the surgeon removes their brains and sticks them in glass jars. The literature and knowledge-filled brains are then shipped back to the spooky manor in Pennsylvania.

There, the billionaire mad scientist goes about wiring the jars together, then connecting the jumble of wires to an electrical apparatus, a radio, and a typewriter. He dubs the resulting contraption THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY.

“Now, suppose I want to know all there is to know about toadstools?” he says, demonstrating his invention. “I spell out the word on this little typewriter in the middle of the table,” and then, abracadabra, the radio croaks out “a thousand word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.”

Now flash-forward 92 years and what do we have?

IT’S OFFICIAL!

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK will report live from the DEF LEPPARD – MOTLEY CRUE Brisbane concert in November.

Excitement? Oh yeah. Below, a little taste…

Click HERE to backwards time-travel to HAPPY DAYS.