The picture above was taken in January of 2013 in Sri Lanka. The people pictured hail from India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, and Rwanda, as well as Sri Lanka itself. As you can figure out by the caption, each of these nations produces a lot of tea. A whole lot, in fact. Of the estimated 4.5 million metric tons of tea produced worldwide in 2010, more than half came from these nations. These nations are now part of a cartel of tea exporters known as the International Tea Producers Forum (as the caption states), with two other nations – China and Iran — joining the Forum informally as “observers.” The formal members of the Forum agreed to collectively discuss ways to work together in their own interests. But for now, there are no concrete details as to how they’ll accomplish that. In November, the group will meet to decide on possible price controls and/or production quotas. 

This agreement-to-agree may not be much, yet, but historically, it’s significant. As Reuters reports, eighty years ago, a group of tea producing countries entered into another, similar cartel, and were able to raise the price of tea significantly in only about six months. Sri Lanka has been working toward re-instituting that cartel (or a similar one), proposing a cartel in 1994 (per the BBC), but the group failed to come to terms. 

If you’re a tea drinker, don’t worry too much about the price of tea rising. While the cartel will likely try to manipulate markets, it’s an uphill battle. First off, tea isn’t like oil. As Reuters notes, tea can’t be stored for very long; any unsold tea, therefore, quickly becomes lost profit. And unlike other perishable commodities such as sugar, tea isn’t graded based on its quality — the quality of tea is too subjective to place an objective standard across all types. This makes price differentiation difficult. And finally, while China is an observer to the Federation, it is not a party to any of its agreements. And China may be imperative to any price fixing, as it produces as much as 30% of the world’s tea output all by itself. 

Bonus fact: The United Kingdom is widely regarded as a major consumer of tea, and while it is — 1.9 kg per person, per year — it’s not in the top ten. Paraguay tops the list, at 11 kg of tea per person, annually, followed by Uruguay (9.3 kg) and Argentina (6.7 kg). The UK is 13th on the list, surrounded by the archipelago nation of Seychelles at #12 and Azerbaijan at #14. The reason may be a semantic technicality: the three listed countries count their consumption of yerba mate as “tea.”

From the Archives: Not a Bright Idea: A cartel to control light.

Related: Tea, in bulk, in case you want to stock up.

Image via the Tea Research Association

Seemingly forever, Coke and Pepsi have been rivals in the soft drink game. Even the occasional third-party soda company makes light of this fact, as seen in this ad from SodaStream, for example. (The advertisement was, allegedly, intended to be aired during the Super Bowl in 2013. But it was also, allegedly, disallowed by CBS, the broadcaster of the game.) The rivalry isn’t limited to the United States, either. Anywhere people will pay for a bottle of cola — and that’s basically everywhere on Earth — the two are likely in competition.

Sometimes, the two companies get creative.

Leading up to the mid-1990s, Pepsi dominated the cola market in Venezuela. As the Chicago Tribune reported, Pepsi held 40% of the market there at the time with Coke barely registering 10%. This was an exception to the rest of Latin America, where Coke reigned supreme, topping 50% in many areas. Venezuela was regarded by many as a blueprint for Pepsi’s endeavors outside the United States. An expert with industry trade publication Beverage Digest, in a report by the New York Times, called Venezuela “Pepsi’s global success story.” Until Coke stole it away.

Pepsi had been selling four million cases of product each month in Venezuela, all being bottled by a company owned by a man named Oswaldo Cisneros. Cisneros, per Fortune, was a closer personal friend of Pepsi’s then-CEO Roger Enrico, and his bottling company was packaging $350 million of Pepsi product each year. As time went on, for reasons unknown, Cisneros wanted to sell part of his interest in the bottling company. Looking for suitors, he claims that he asked Pepsi, who only wanted to purchase a small sliver. Cisneros declined and sought other suitors — ones willing to buy a large part of his company. He found one willing to buy half of the bottler and make an additional investment in the company as well. That investor, of course, was the Coca-Cola Company.

Cisnero’s company stopped bottling Pepsi and switched to Coke. Seemingly overnight, this torpedoed Pepsi’s Venezuelan market share to zero. Coke acquired that business, reaching 50% market share in the country — without much of a fight, let alone a war.

Bonus fact: One place that is free from cola wars? Space. As NASA explains, astronauts have to give up the bubbles when they take to the heavens. The bubbles don’t separate out when the bottle or can (or whatever space-friendly container would be used) is opened in an environment with so little gravity. As a result, the bubbles would enter the astronauts’ digestive systems and get trapped there, with unknown consequences.

From the Archives: Vodka and Cola: How Coke made inroads in the Soviet market.

Related: “The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars” by Roger Enrico. (Yes, really.) Published in 1986.

f you can crack the code above, congratulations — you’re the first person to do so. And you may be helping solve a murder case in the process.

On June 30, 1999, a 41-year-old man named Ricky McCormick was found dead in a field about 15 to 20 miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. McCormick was unmarried but had at least four children. He was unemployed on and off for years. He had previously been convicted of statutory rape but was out on parole. He had chronic lung and heart problems and, five days prior to his death, was in a hospital in St. Louis getting a checkup. (He left the same day.) At the time of his death, he had multiple home addresses in the area.

The FBI investigated his death and found virtually no answers. McCormick’s body was badly decomposed (the FBI identified his body via his fingerprints), preventing authorities from determining the cause of death. McCormick’s whereabouts for the days between that doctor’s visit and the discovery of his body were, and remain, unknown. How he got to this field is also unknown, as McCormick didn’t know how to drive and public transportation did not service the area. There were no known people who would have the motive to kill him, nor any signs of suicide.

But while there were few answers, there were some clues. Two, in fact. In McCormick’s pockets were two notes, one above and another seen below.

In March of 2011 — more than a decade after McCormick’s death — the FBI disclosed that these potential clues existed. The Bureau’s reason for not disclosing this sooner isn’t known, but its reasons for doing so then are. The FBI was stumped, and wanted help. They set up a webpage, here – still active, as of this writing — asking the world to assist in deciphering the messages. Despite the “outpouring of responses” to the call to action (the FBI had to set up a separate page solely for the gathering of theories), the code remains encrypted.There is, of course, the chance that McCormick (or whomever wrote the note) simply put gibberish to paper.

Have any ideas? You can let the FBI know via this link, but don’t expect to be showered in money if you do — there’s no reward being offered.

Bonus fact: The CIA has an uncracked-code mystery of its own. As reported by Wired, in 1988, the Agency commissioned the creation of a sculpture named “Kryptos” which contains four encrypted messages. Three of them were solved (here are the solutions) after its dedication in 1990, but the fourth one remains unsolved to this day. The creator of the sculpture, an artist named James Sanborn, asserts that there is, indeed, a real message hidden within, and has given a clue or two to its meaning.

From the Archives: The Taman Shud Mystery: Another encrypted note. Another unsolved mystery.

Related: Cracking Codes and Cryptograms for Dummies. Probably won’t help, but if the pros can’t do it….

The details — the names of the cities and the restaurant — his story seems like the beginnings of a mundane life, destined to be more a struggle than a success. A fractured family life. Dropping out of high school. A McJob, so to speak. When he died, he was worth well more than $100 million and one of the most recognizable people in the United States. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, beat the odds.

 
In 1930 — two years before Thomas was born — a man named Harland Sanders opened up a small gas station in a small town in Kentucky. Sanders, a school dropout from a broken home himself, started serving country ham, steaks, and fried chicken to his customers at the gas station. Over time, Sanders’ reputation as a cook grew, and he opened a bona fide 142-seat restaurant. In 1939, he was discovered by travelling food critic Duncan Hines (yes, the same guy as the recipe-per-box baked goods company). When his restaurant failed in 1952 — a new highway diverted traffic away from its location — Sanders decided to start franchises. We know him as Colonel Sanders, and his restaurant as Kentucky Fried Chicken.

One of the first potential KFC franchisees? The Hobby House. In the mid-1950s, Sanders offered to sell a KFC franchise to the restaurants’ owners, the Clauss family, but they declined. Sanders, persistent, got them to change their minds, and in time, the Clausses ended up owning a few others in the region. Dave Thomas was the head cook at the Hobby House at the time and, over the course of the late 1950s, Thomas worked directly with Sanders on tactical efforts to improve the KFC experience.Thomas is credited with reducing the number of menu items and convincing Sanders to appear in advertisements himself — the latter a strange portent to the future.

While Thomas was helping KFC franchises generally become more successful, four of the Clauss family’s restaurants were not doing as well. Sometime in the 1960s, the family asked Thomas to go to four Columbus, Ohio stores and help turn the businesses around. Apparently, Thomas was given (or was allowed to buy) some ownership interest in these restaurants, and in 1968, sold that interest for $1.5 million — nearly $10 million in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation. Thomas used that money to begin a restaurant of his own, opening the first Wendy’s in the fall of 1969.

Wendy’s grew to a multi-billion dollar business under his leadership — and along the way, Thomas became the face of the business, literally. In 1989, Wendy’s commercials began featuring Thomas speaking straight to camera. By the time he retired, he appeared in more than 800 commercials and had become an American icon.

Bonus fact: In 2006, a 22-year-old man was fired from his job at a Wendy’s for robbing the safe. Normally, this wouldn’t be all that newsworthy. But in this case, the perpetrator’s name set him apart. The thief was named Ronald MacDonald. 

From the Archives: Wendy: The origin of the name Wendy has a story, literally, behind it.

Related: Dave’s Way: Dave Thomas’ autobiography from 1992.

But what about oranges and lemons? Or McIntoshes and Galas? Not only are they easier to compare, but despite being different cultivars (in the case of the apples) or different fruits all together, here’s something neat: you can grow those pairs on the same tree as their tandem-mate. Fruit salad trees, so to speak.

When orchard growers have a fruit that they want to grow more of, they can’t simply plant the seeds from that fruit. The seeds contain genetic information from the two “parents” from which it came, and therefore, aren’t going to produce the same type of characteristics. (Occasionally, we’ll develop a new cultivar of fruit this way. The Granny Smith apple, for example, is believed to be the hybrid of two other types of apples, as is the McIntosh.) To get the right type of fruit, growers graft parts of that fruit’s tree onto rootstock — a tree with a healthy root system. The grafted-on piece, called a scion, will, over time, join together with the rootstock, forming a viable, fruit-producing part of the tree. Because the genetic information in the scion is left undisturbed, the resulting fruit has a high likelihood of tasting similar to that of the tree the scion originally came from.

Because the scion and resulting fruit do not change the genetic makeup of the rootstock, it’s possible to graft two (or more) different fruits on the same tree, so long as they’re from the same family of fruit. In 1990, an Australian company set up the Fruit Salad Tree Company to provide exactly that — trees which grow multiple fruits. For example, in the video below, there are both oranges and lemons growing from the same trunk.

The possibilities are not, however, endless. Citrus fruits, stone fruits, and apples must be grafted onto separate trees, and due to different ripening times, some fruits preclude the inclusion of others. That company only ships to Australia and New Zealand, but there are some in the United States which do the same.

Bonus fact: The “apples and oranges” idiom is a type of idiom called an “irreversible binomial,” named as such because there are two parts to it and one rarely finds it in reverse order. (That is, it’s always “apples and oranges” and never “oranges and apples.”) The reasons for this linguistic phenomenon are unclear at best, but it is not all that rare – Wikipedia has an extensive list of examples.

From the Archives: Navel Oranges: The Mutant Clones in Your Kitchen: An early Now I Know sharing the story about oranges and grafting.

Related: Apparently, you can order a fruit salad tree via Amazon, but who knows what you’ll actually get.

Ron Luciano was a Major League umpire from 1969 to 1979. He was best known for his dealings with the Orioles’ Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver. Weaver, known for his fiery temper, was ejected at least 90 times during his 17 year career as an MLB manager, and Luciano tossed him at least six of those times. On August 15, 1975, Luciano tossed Weaver for arguing over a call at first base during the first game of a doubleheader. And when Weaver picked up the argument again when the teams exchanged lineup cards for the second game, Luciano tossed him again. 

Weaver probably thought that Luciano needed to get his eyes checked — that half-joke is commonly tossed at umpires by fans, and probably players and managers too. But in Luciano’s case, it was probably wrong. Because in 1972, after seeing weird things happen on the field, Luciano went right to his optometrist, and was told he was okay. It was his brain that was having trouble.

Luciano’s umpiring career kept him in the American League throughout, and before the 1972 season, the Mets traded Nolan Ryan to the Angels. Luciano had heard that Ryan’s fastball was special, but until that season, hadn’t witnessed it for himself. As he’d attest in a Sports Illustrated article he wrote in 1982, even seeing wasn’t believing. The story may be apocryphal — a review of box scores of August 1972 doesn’t show any games where Luciano was behind the plate during one of Ryan’s starts, but there were two when he was on a short-staffed (three umpire) crew. (Most likely, though, Luciano was just remembering some details incorrectly, and actually did go to the doctor.)  Luciano recounts calling balls and strikes that month with Ryan on the mound — or, trying to, but failing: 

I was immediately impressed, but not overwhelmed, not until the fourth inning. In that inning he went into his fluid wind-up, reared back and fired. Until the pitch reached home plate it looked like a very good, but normal, rising fastball. Then, suddenly, it exploded! A million specks of shiny white cover blinded me. I closed my eyes to protect myself. I waited for the roar of the crowd. 

 

Nobody else noticed it. 

 

I blinked, tried to shake the flash out of my eyes, and called it a strike. Must have been my imagination, I thought, and put it out of my mind. But a few innings later, bam! The same thing happened. The baseball actually exploded. 

 

Luciano, worried, made an appointment to see a top Manhattan eye doctor the next time he was in town. And the doctor told him that his eyes were fine. He was a victim, like many batters, of the deceptiveness inherent to Ryan’s fastball. Like anything else, baseballs appear to get larger as they get closer, and typically do so at a predictable rate. Unfortunately for Luciano, his brain couldn’t predict the outcome in this case – something which was perfectly normal, albeit rare. Ryan, on occasion, was simply bringing too much heat for Luciano’s brain to process properly. He explained: “my eyes simply couldn’t make the adjustment fast enough, so it remained golf-ball size until it got to the plate, then popped, or exploded, into a full-sized baseball.”

Luciano’s eyes figured Ryan out before hitters did, though. On July 15, 1973, less than a year after his visit to the eye doctor, the umpire found himself behind the plate for another Nolan Ryan start. Ryan amassed 17 strikeouts that day, getting each of the Tigers’ nine batters to whiff at least once, en route to his second career no-hitter. 

Bonus fact: Baseball icon Yogi Berra used to say that you can’t hit and think at the same time — and, unlike most of his muddled words of “wisdom,” this one may be right. The time it takes for a 90 mile per hour fastball to go from the pitcher’s hand to home plate is only about half a second, which shouldn’t be enough time for the brain to figure out what to do and then do it. According to a recent study, our brains compensate by “perceiv[ing] speeding objects as further along in their trajectory than seen by the eyes, giving us time to respond,” as summarized by the Mercury News. 

From the Archives: Swing and a Miss: Another baseball story. (The title is a pun.)

Related: Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible. 4.3 stars on 19 reviews. Probably does not teach you how to throw a 90++ mile per hour fastball, though.

Carbonated water. High fructose corn syrup. Caramel color. Phosphoric acid. Natural flavors. Caffeine. If you are in the United States and look at the side of a can of Coca-Cola, that’s what you’ll see listed under “Ingredients.” But it won’t get you very far if you’re trying to make some bootleg Coke at home. For its century-plus history, Coke’s formula has been a guarded trade secret. And in general, Coke has been effective in keeping its secrets secret. Over the years, many different people in many different capacities have done their part to ensure that Coca-Cola’s trade secrets and formulas remain out of the hands of both the public and the competition.

Including Pepsi.

In 2006, the FBI announced the arrest of three people who, allegedly, attempted to sell a secret formula which was purportedly for a new drink. The trio attempted to broker the sale of “an envelope containing documents and a glass bottle containing a liquid sample,” per the BBC, which together, they claimed, would give the buyer the ability to replicate one of Coke’s products. Their asking price — low seven figures — priced most individuals out of the market. The most obvious potential customer was Pepsi, given the relatively tiny universe of cola producers. So they approached Pepsi, expecting a large check. And they were correct — a few weeks later, the suspects received an offer of $1.5 million — even going so far as to open a special bank account for the incoming cash. The only problem? The money wasn’t coming from Pepsi — it was coming from the FBI. Pepsi had turned the scammers in.

Working from Pepsi’s tip, the FBI was able to foil the scheme — a scheme which Coca-Cola’s CEO notes “included an individual within [the Coca-Cola] Company,” per CNN. The secret formula for Coke itself was apparently never at risk, but other information likely was. Despite the advantages that the information would have likely provided to Pepsi, their executives did the right (and probably only legal) thing by assisting law enforcement instead of the information thieves  A Pepsi spokesperson told the media that the company “did what any responsible company would do. Competition can be fierce, but it must also be fair and legal.”

Bonus fact: According to Beverage Digest (pdf), a publication which (no shock here) monitors the beverage industry, Coca-Cola was the highest selling soda in the U.S. in 2010, with over 1.5 billion cases shipped. Number two wasn’t Pepsi though. Only about 890 million cases of Pepsi sold that year. Number two, with 926 million cases sold, was Diet Coke.

From the Archives: Mice Cold Soda: Something you may not want to know about Mountain Dew (which Pepsi owns, and, by the way, was the fourth highest seller in 2010).

Related: Pepsi syrup, which can apparently be used (with some work) with an in-home carbonator like a SodaStream.

Which led to the grave sites, below.

In 1842, a colonel in the Dutch cavalry, JWC van Gorkum, married a woman known as JCPH van Aefferden. The union was controversial — van Gorkum was Protestant and van Aefferden was Catholic. Despite the prevailing culture at the time, the two remained married for decades, only separating when van Gorkum died in 1880. He was buried in a cemetery near the Dutch town of Roermond called Begraafplaats Nabij de Kapel in ‘t Zand (“the cemetery near the chapel in ‘t Zand”). Pillarisation was taken very seriously — each community had its own schools, media, and graveyards — and Begraafplaats was no different. It took this segregation literally, with each religion having its own section. Van Gorkum was buried in the Protestant section, as would any other Protestant during that era.

But when van Aefferden passed away eight years later, she couldn’t be buried with her late husband; even in death, Catholics needed to stay with their own. While alive, she made her wishes clear — she did not want to be buried in her family tomb, and, instead, wished to be as close to her husband as possible. The solution, seen above, is her grave site. (Here’s a bigger version of her tombstone, and here’s his.) The two tombstones, separated by a wall and by religions, feature a pair of hands connecting over the brick divider.

It’s an elegant workaround to an inelegant set of rules, and a workaround which outlasted pillarisation. The NVB was successful in changing Dutch culture by the mid-1960s.
Bonus fact: In 1935, a Romanian sculptor named Stan Ioan Patras took to a local cemetery and began sculpting graphical epitaphs on tombstones, demonstrating how the deceased died (often with a poem as well). The tradition continued on past Patras’ death in 1977 and the cemetery, located in the village of Sapanta near the Ukrainian border, is now known as the Merry Cemetery. Here’s a photo gallery. (And here is Patras’ self-created grave site.)  As the BBC reported in 2002, the cemetery has become quite a tourist attraction, with visitors often purchasing custom-made grave markers from the artists in residence. 

From the Archives: Scrambled City: How parts of the Netherlands and Belgium got mixed up with each other.

Not Related: Instead of linking to something about graveyards or tombstones (which would be terrible), here’s a reminder to check out AwesomeClaus.com, my site of fun gift ideas under $20.

Unless you’re lazy about it, it makes very little sense to counterfeit a one dollar bill. The cost of obtaining the paper, striking suitable minting plates, and sourcing the ink is just too large to warrant the payout. There are cheaper ways, but in most cases, they aren’t cheap enough to warrant the creation of fake ones. And regardless, walking into the Apple Store to buy an iPad Mini with a few hundred singles (counterfeit or otherwise) is certain to garner you attention — exactly the opposite of what you’d want in that situation. The most commonly counterfeited American notes are the $20 and $100 bill. 

But what if you were lazy? And, for that matter, not particularly greedy? In the 1930s, a Manhattan man fit that profile, making homemade $1 notes — and leading investigators on a manhunt which lasted nearly a decade. 

In November of 1938, a crude, clearly fake dollar turned up at a bank when a shopkeeper went to make his daily deposit. As the New York Daily News recounted, the bill should have never been accepted in the first place. It wasn’t made with the right type of paper. There was a solid black mark where George Washington’s left eye should have been. The writing was uneven and bordering on illegible. But the shopkeeper accepted the “currency” — the Daily News suggests that he simply did not look all that carefully. The bank reported the fake note to the Secret Service (their original purpose was to prevent the flow of counterfeit money) and the Secret Service opened up a file, number 880. Whether the Secret Service thought anything of the slipshod attempt to fake out a store owner is unknown — but soon, “Mister 880″ as he’d become known, was most certainly on the agency’s radar. More fakes of the same type began appearing throughout the area.

Over the next ten years, Mister 880′s fakes threw the Secret Service for a loop. He only used one at a time and, unlike most counterfeiters, rarely if ever returned to where he had used one. The counterfeits were still terrible, though — at one point, he misspelled “Washington” (he switched the “s” and “h”) — and appeared to be made on a hand-run printing press. Tracking down a low-tech counterfeiter seemed easy but was anything but, as Mister 880 left virtually no trail except that he was, generally, somewhere in uptown Manhattan. But so were a million or so others.

In 1947, though, fate stepped in. Fire struck the apartment of a 72 year-old widower named Emerich Juettner (better known in the neighborhood as Edward Mueller), destroying almost everything. The charred remains were dumped in an alley and left as trash, but they just sat there for weeks. In January of 1948, nearly ten years after Mister 880′s first bill appeared, some area youths went through the garbage looking for valuables and discovered some funny money and a pair of engraving plates. The boys’ parents alerted authorities, and Mister 880′s true identity was discovered.

Muller was an interesting kind of criminal. A junk collector by trade, he’d tell the court that he lived modestly but printed his own money on occasion simply to make ends meet — and typically, only to buy himself or his dog something to eat. In total, he minted only about $5,000 of fake money, buttressing this claim. The court sentenced him to one year and one day in prison, and he was out on parole in four months.

In 1950, 20th Century Fox made a movie about Juettner titled “Mister 880.” As the New York Sun reported, “Juettner made more money from the film than he had as a counterfeiter.”

Bonus fact: If you’re passed a counterfeit bill in the United States, the Department of the Treasury asks, among other things, that you report it to the Secret Service and not return it to the person who gave it to you, but rather to officials. The bad news? Treasury.gov spells it out: “There is no financial remuneration for the return of the counterfeit bill, but it is doing the ‘right thing’ to help combat counterfeiting.” (Sorry!)

From the Archives: Paper Trail: A creepy-slash-neat way that the Secret Service works with some printer manufacturers to prevent counterfeiting. And the bonus fact is arguably cooler.

Related: A 100 pack of $1 million bills. Buy ten, become a fake billionaire!

There are an estimated 60 million people in Myanmar. While most live along the accessible coastline, some reside within the Himalayas. A handful of that subset are a group of people known as the Taron; at an average height of under 4’3″ (130 cm), they’re regarded as the only pygmies native to Asia — at least for now. There are fewer than a dozen full-blooded Taron left. And before this century is out, there will be none.

Intentionally. But it’s not genocide. It’s their choice.

The Taron were first discovered by outsiders in the 1960s. At the time, there were four dozen or so Taron, and researchers believed that the population was large enough to sustain itself for at least a few more generations. But genetic disorders were very common, likely in large part due to the amount of inbreeding within the community. The population dwindled as the number of viable births plummeted. As one surviving Taron, a man named Dawi, told a wildlife scientist by the name of Alan Rabinowitz (through interpreters), “for many years the Taron only marry each other. But when we have babies, the babies have small brains and small bodies. It was no good.” That was in 2003 or 2004.

With birth defects the norm, the Taron leaders decided to simply stop continuing the ethnic bloodlines. Dawi continued: “We don’t want Taron babies anymore. Long ago, the Taron decided not to have babies with each other. Only with [a neighboring ethnic group called the] Htalu. [ . . .] There are few Taron left. Many die alone.” Dawi, the youngest pure-blood Taron in his village, 39 at the time of the interview, was likely to die alone — and likely to be the last of his people.

A photo of Dawi and Dr. Rabinowitz can be found here; photos from a 2011 expedition to the Taron community can be seen here.

Bonus fact: Myanmar is one of three countries which have not adopted the metric system as its official set of weights and measures, according to the CIA World Factbook. The other two are the United States and Liberia.

From the Archives: The Most Isolated People in the World: Intentionally (again).

Related: “Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia’s Forbidden Wilderness” by Alan Rabinowitz. This is the book which, among other things, recounts Dr. Rabinowitz’s meeting with Dawi and other Tarons. 13 reviews, 4.5 stars.

The Soup Nazi came to fame via a 1995 episode of Seinfeld. The character, known for his excellent soups but dictatorial obsession with maintaining order, had a strict rule set — violate it and he’d confiscate your soup and remove you from the store. His catch phrase, “no soup for you!,” spoken with a noticeable yet hard to place accent, permeated culture, becoming part of the late 90s parlance. 

The Soup Nazi character was based on a real person named Al Yeganeh, who at the time ran a restaurant in Manhattan called the Soup Kitchen International. Yeganeh did not take kindly to the comparison to the horrible German regime, understandably. Even if he had made it explicitly clear that he was the undisputed master of his restaurant’s domain, he wasn’t discriminating against customers due to their religion, for example. After all, who cares about the religion of the person eating your soup? 

Odile Bonnivard does. 

Bonnivard is the leader of Solidarite des Francais (SDF), a group which, in 2004, ran a Paris soup kitchen supporting indigent people and families. A noble endeavor, for sure, until one realizes that SDF’s stated objectives aren’t to help the poor — or, at least, not just anyone who is poor. The origins were innocent. In 2003, Bonnivard’s group began providing hot soup to Paris’ homeless population. The soup’s ingredients were understandably inexpensive but also traditional, and at the time, pork met both the requirements. But as the New York Times notes, that quickly changed. Bonnivard — who the Times describes as  ”a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc” — and her followers realized they had an opportunity on their hands to make a political point. The inclusion of pork in their soup recipes made it religiously impossible for observant Muslims or Jews to take advantage of the free meals, and this suited SDF just fine. As Bonnivard explained (per the Times), “the soup is meant to make a political statement: ‘Help our own before others.’”

The soup, called “Soupe Identitaire” or “Identity Soup,” contains pigs’ ears, feet, and tails (as well as smoked bacon), as well as a few vegetables. The idea spread somewhat, with Identity Soup also sprouting up in other areas of France as well as in Belgium, sparking fears of a trend. Police banned the practice and the court system in France, ultimately, upheld the ban.

Bonus fact: Soup kitchens were prominent in the United States during the Great Depression — often finding unlikely benefactors in support of their philanthropic causes. For example, one soup kitchen to benefit the unemployed, seen here, was bankrolled by gangster Al Capone.

From the Archives: Liquor, Sicker: Things Capone is more famous for.

Related: A bag of pig ears. Not meant for people, though.

When looking for a job, especially when the employment market is tough, it generally makes sense for a male job candidate to show up clean shaven and neatly dressed, preferably in a suit and tie. There are of course many exceptions to this, but conformity — at least in your choice of outfits and appearance — is probably a good idea. For example, let’s say you spend your evenings and weekends going to heavy metal concerts, dressed as one would be for such an event. It probably isn’t the best idea to take that same look with you into an job interview the next day — you may find yourself unable to find a job.

Which is why one Swedish man got himself a doctor’s note.

In 2007, Roger Tullgren, then-42-year old man from the Swedish town of Hassleholm, landed a job as a part-time dishwasher at a local restaurant. If you visited him at work, you may think he was lost. His boss allows him to “dress how he wants and play heavy metal music while washing dishes,” according to the Global Post – all because Tullgren has a disability. He is, officially, addicted to heavy metal.

Sweden’s English-language news portal The Local described Tullgren as having ”long black hair, a collection of tattoos and wears skull and crossbones jewelry.” He attends roughly 300 heavy metal concerts each year and himself is an amateur performer — he’s a bass guitarist for two bands. For most of his life, his love of heavy metal music has been all-encompassing to the point that he had a hard time holding down a job, and as such, he often received welfare payments. So he pushed the government to classify his apparently overwhelming interest in bands such as Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden as a disability. It took about a decade (and multiple visits to multiple psychologists, of course), but in 2007, Sweden finally agreed.

That means two things: first, he’s entitled to government disability benefits. Second, Tullgren can’t be discriminated against by potential or actual employers. So he can wear what he wants, listen to his music at work, and is afforded a flexible schedule which allows him to attend concerts. And he doesn’t have to dress up for interviews, either; he simply hands them a copy of a form officially noting his addiction and the limitations it causes him.

Bonus fact: As strange as Tullgren’s alleged addiction is, the map above may help explain some of it. It’s a density map — the number of heavy metal bands per 100,000 people. (Here’s a larger version, via The Atlantic.) As you can see, Sweden (and Finland) have an extraordinary number of metal bands relative to their populations.

From the Archives: The Swedish Solar System: How Sweden turned itself into a scale model of our small piece of the galaxy.

Related: Swedish Hitz Goes Metal. Amazon describes it as a “2011 collection of songs originally written by Swedish artists such as Abba, Roxette, Ace Of Base and others performed by Hard Rock/Melodic Metal musician Tommy ReinXeed, who has been called one of the most talented musician/vocalists in Sweden.” (Your guess is as good as mine.)

The city of Chicago was founded in 1833, on the coast of Lake Michigan and within the Mississippi River watershed. Its location — near rivers which lead south and adjacent to a conduit eastward as well — lent itself to rapid growth. Only 200 people were living in Chicago at its founding on August 12 of that year, but it quickly grew. By 1840, well over 4,000 people lived there; by 1860, Chicago had 112,000 residents. For its first century, it was widely regarded to be one of the fastest growing metro areas in the world.

But growth comes with a price, especially in a city which is just five hundred feet or so (182 m) above sea level. When it rained, it flooded. Everywhere. Chicago, into the 1850s, did not have a working municipal sewage system. So water just collected and collected. Where water sits, disease brews, as Chicagoans quickly learned. Typhoid fever, dysentery and cholera struck the city year after year. In 1854, a cholera outbreak killed as much as six percent of the city’s population. Fixing the problem, though, came with a problem unto itself — how do you build sewers where the buildings already are?

The solution: Raise the buildings.

No, not raze. Raise, as in to lift up. If the city could figure out a way to elevate four- and five-story (and larger!) buildings a few feet, they could install new foundations, allowing for the construction of a municipal sewage system. A few years later, they did exactly that. In January of 1858, the first building — a four story high brick structure weighing 750 tons — was placed on two hundred fifty jackscrews (this is what a jackscrew looks like) and successfully lifted more than six feet over its original height without damaging it.

Over the next decade, much of central Chicago was similarly lifted so that the sewage system could be constructed. Most impressive, perhaps, was the lifting of a row of buildings 320 feet (nearly 100 m) long on Lake Street — accomplished by roughly six hundred men over the course of five days. One hotel, the Briggs House, required dozens of men, as seen above (larger version of what appears to be an engraving here), and survived the lifting just fine. In other cases, the city also had to raise the sidewalk, roads, and anything else installed too low for a sewer system to run underneath.

In general, the lifting was successful; there are few reports of damage. (Ironically, many of the buildings lifted — including the Briggs House seen above — were destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1872). And the city took the lifting as an opportunity to do something else: it gentrified. Wooden frame buildings, which were looked at as lesser, poorer structures than the brick and iron ones, were lifted — and then removed, driven out of the city. As Wikipedia notes, the practice of putting these buildings “on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.”

Bonus fact: If you’re ever in Chicago, try the garlic and onions. The word “Chicago” comes from a Native American word, transliterated into French as “shikaakwa” (say it aloud), which over time became the term we know today. “Shikaakwa” means either wild garlic or wild onion, both of which were plentiful in the region before settlers of European descent arrived in the area.

From the Archives: Onion Ring: Why you can’t buy onion futures in the United States. (Blame Chicago.)

Related: A jackscrew. And, in most cases more useful, a book on the history of Chicago. 5 stars on six reviews.

Say you walk into an empty auditorium. A minute or so later, someone else walks in. Again making the assumptions above, there’s a 1 in 365 chance (0.27%) that this person shares your birthday. A second person walks in a minute or two later. The odds of you sharing a birthday with either jumps to about 0.55%. A third and a fourth and — you get the idea. When the 253rd other person walks into that room — it’s been a few hours at that point! — only then do you have a 50% chance of having the same birthday as someone else in the room. It isn’t person 182 or 183 because some of the first two hundred-something may share birthdays. So the number 254 (including you) should make intuitive sense — or, at least, not be terribly shocking.

But let’s look at it a different way. Again, you start off in an empty auditorium and again, every few minutes, someone new comes into the room. But instead of wondering if you share a birthday with anyone else in the room, let’s make this about everyone in the room. Let’s ask: “Do any two people in the room share a birthday?” The math starts off the same — with two people, there’s still a 1 in 365 chance. The third person? The odds aren’t 0.55% any more — now, there’s a 0.82% chance that anyone in the group matches someone else. Yes, you could share a birthday with either of the other two people — that’s the 0.55% — but they could share a birthday, too. That’s where the extra comes from.

How many people before we hit a 50% chance that any two share a birthday? 23. Not 230. Twenty-three. Here’s a graph, below, and in case you want to see the numbers, here’s a spreadsheet.

The odds go up very quickly because each new person can match every other person in the room, and as the number of people in the room grows, the gains are huge. At 57 people, there is just over a 99% chance of any two people in the room sharing a birthday. And, in case you are wondering, at 124 people, there is less than a 0.0000000001% chance of there not being a match. That’s one in one hundred trillion.

If that number doesn’t scare you, and you want to understand the math more, Wikipedia can help.

Bonus fact: Of course, birthdays aren’t random. Some months have more births than others, for reasons one can imagine (and you’d almost certainly be correct). Days of the week should be random — but, at least in the U.S, aren’t. Why not? As BabyCenter explains, Tuesdays and then Mondays have the highest number of births, because hospitals try not to schedule c-sections or induce labor on the weekends.

From the Archives: Happy Birthday (c): Why restaurants rarely sing the traditional happy birthday song. Or, February 30th. It existed, once.

Related: When math was simpler (and more colorful). 4.6 stars on over 100 reviews, although not as fun as this.

The first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 1968; the last new episode aired in 2001. If you or your children grew up in America and you’re reading this, there’s an almost 100 percent chance that you’ve seen at least bits and pieces of the show. You probably know about Fred Rogers’ habits — changing his sweater and shoes when he entered and exited his home, “traveling” by trolley to the land of make believe, feeding his pet fish, and speaking directly to the children at home as if they were visiting his house. For one of his millions of fans — a five year old named Katie — the fish feeding part was of particular importance. It was so important to her that she and her father wrote him a note with a simple request:

“Please say when you are feeding your fish, because I worry about them. I can’t see if you are feeding them, so please say you are feeding them out loud.”

Katie’s father explained. Katie was blind, and, in her father’s words, “she does cry if you don’t say that you have fed the fish.”

The story is recounted by Rogers in his book, “Dear Mr. Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood?: Letters to Mr. Rogers.”  The host of the Neighborhood also explains (in response to a question from “Meaghan, age 10″) why he has fish in the first place:

First of all, when we feed the fish, we’re showing that we “take care of” other living things, and being taken care of is something very important to children. They know they need grown-ups to provide them with food, like the fish in our tank need us to feed them. It does have a lot to do with responsibility, as you mentioned! Also, I like to watch anything that swims!

As for Katie’s request? In the book, Mr. Rogers tells readers that, since receiving the note, he’s “tried to remember to mention out loud that times that I’m feeding the fish. Over the years, I’ve learned so much from children and their families. I like to think that we’ve all grown together.” What else would we expect from a man for whom every day was a beautiful day in the neighborhood?

Bonus fact:  Mr. Rogers once stated in an interview that all of his trademark sweaters were knitted by his mother.

From the Archives: The Weight of Love: Mr. Rogers weighed 143 pounds. Here’s why.

Related: ”Dear Mr. Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood?: Letters to Mr. Rogers,” five stars on seven reviews, but only because you can’t give it six stars.

Like draining the Mediterranean Sea.

In the 1920s, a German architect named Herman Sorgel proposed creating a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, turning the area into a massive hydroelectric plant, creating enormous amounts of renewable energy. (That part of the plan is still, sometimes, suggested today.) But that wasn’t the main goal of the proposed eight-mile dam. Sorgel’s top objective was to stem the flow of water into the Mediterranean; over time, the water level would drop, creating more inhabitable land in both Southern Europe and Northern Africa. As seen by an artist’s conception of what the area would look like, below (larger version  here; map of the current Mediterranean here), Italy would become less of a boot as the Adriatic Sea all but disappears. Sicily would nearly double in size, connect to mainland Italy, and be accessible by bridge from Tunisia. Less obviously, low-lying lands would emerge basically everywhere, as hundreds if not thousands of square miles of habitable space would be reclaimed from the sea. Rail lines — not pictured — would connect Paris to Dakar, Senegal (via the Gibraltar dam) and Berlin to Tunis, Tunisia (via Italy and Sicily). Europe and Northern Africa would, effectively, merge.

Sorgel called this new, merged continent “Atlantropa.” Sorgel’s plan, unlike the Nazi’s plan of forced annexations, was kind to his fellow Europeans — but it was still not very peaceful. It explicitly called for the European colonization of Northern Africa and, implicitly, the eradication of native African cultures. But that concern was mostly ignored by Sorgel’s supporters and detractors alike, as were environmental concerns caused by a massive reworking of a major ecosystem. What got in the way? World War II. The Atlantropa Project’s support was strongest toward the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s, but waned as Hitler rose to power. In 1942, the Nazis banned Sorgel from publishing his plans further. Atlantropa was dead.

After the War, while the movement saw something of a revival. But the costs were too high for a continent requiring rebuilding and the political climate was not conducive to a pan-European project. Sorgel died in 1952, and soon after, any remaining support for Atlantropa died as well.

Bonus fact: In 1934, a New York City engineer proposed placing dams at the Hudson River at both ends of Manhattan and filling in the now-dry area between New York City and northern New Jersey. The engineer estimated that the project would add an additional 10 square miles to Manhattan (which is about 22.7 square miles as it stands) at the cost of $1 billion ($17 billion in today’s dollars). The proposal never went past the idea phase.

From the Archives: Eternal Vacancy: A small piece of developed but uninhabited land in the Mediterranean.

Related: A hydroelectric kit used for teaching about the energy source. Five stars from five reviews, but expensive.

Here’s a fun science experiment to try at home. You’ll need a cotton ball or a Q-tip (generic is fine), a lemon, some water, a bowl, a spoon, and some paper. You’ll also need a light bulb – incandescent, because you’ll need its heat, not its light (and a halogen will get too hot) — but that’s for the second half of the experiment. Squeeze the lemon juice in a bowl and add a little bit of water. Mix it up and then dip the cotton into the watered down juice. Take the wet cotton and write a message on the paper. (It doesn’t really matter what you write, but “Surprise!” gives this a nice touch.) Wait for the paper to dry. The message will disappear

Now, expose the paper to a small amount of heat, courtesy of that light bulb. (Be careful not to light the paper on fire!) Wait a bit, and your message should appear in brown. You’ve created invisible ink.

Here’s another experiment. (Please do NOT try this one.) First, rub lemon juice on your face. A lot of it, all over. Then, go to a bank, and write them a note — using real ink, as the teller needs to be able to read it even if he or she doesn’t have a light bulb nearby — which demands that they empty their cash drawer and hand the contents over to you, “or else.” Walk away scot free as your face, covered in the invisible ink-slash-lemon juice, makes it impossible for the police to figure out who you are. It’s the perfect crime!

The first experiment works. Lemon juice oxidizes when it is exposed to heat, and in doing so, turns brown.

The second experiment, though, obviously doesn’t work. Or, not so obviously, if you were Pittsburgh-area resident McArthur Wheeler, who tried to pull off that same crime in April of 1995. When he was arrested, he was surprised, apparently telling police “but I wore the juice!” as they showed him his picture on surveillance cameras. (Before the crime, Wheeler had taken a Polaroid of himself, and didn’t appear; police believe that the film was bad or that the acid in his eyes made him unable to correctly line up his shot.) Wheeler, of course, went to jail.

While Wheeler’s idiocy lends itself to an easy punchline, it also created the basis for one of psychology’s more fascinating theories, now called the Dunning-Kruger effect after the pair of researchers who came up with the theory. In 1996, a Cornell professor named David Dunning read about Wheeler’s crime and, to him (and virtually everyone else), incomprehensibly stupid strategy, and realized something. The New York Times summed it up brilliantly: “If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.” Working with his research assistant, student Justin Kruger, he co-wrote an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (available here). The article, leading with Wheeler’s crime, theorizes that where we know the least, we’re truly vulnerable, because we don’t realize how little we know. We therefore overestimate our abilities and are capable of believing nearly anything.

Just ask McArthur Wheeler.

Bonus fact: The term “scot free” isn’t a slight at people from Scotland. It comes from the Old English phrase “scotfreo,” with “scot” meaning “royal tax” and “freo” meaning “free.”

From the Archives: Miracle Berries: A fruit which makes lemon juice taste sweet and then turns you invisible. Okay, not the second part. But the first part is true!

Related: Invisible ink!

So he tried to help — by turning bottles into housing.

Mr. Heineken noticed that empty beer bottles were not making it back to bottlers; rather, they were ending up on beaches, as Laughing Squid recounts. This was in large part because the island was very poor and lacked the infrastructure and systems to return the bottles. So Mr. Heineken, then 40 years old, decided to do something about it. Fixing the structural economic problems which caused the litter was too much for one man and, for that matter, one beer company. But Freddy believed that Heineken could come up with a way to make discarded bottles more useful. He spoke with an architect, N. John Habraken, asking him to create “a brick that holds beer.” Habraken came up with the WOBO — the “World Bottle” — seen below.

The bottles, either 500ml or 350ml, are stackable like bricks. Each bottle’s neck was designed to fit within a recessed area in the bottom of another bottle’s base, creating rows of glass which, when stacked and layered with a cement mixture, could form a wall. The two sizes weren’t created to meet the desires of beer drinkers, but rather the needs of architecture, with the smaller (and therefore shorter) 350ml bottles acting as half-bricks, evening out rows. Roughly 1,000 WOBOs would be enough to create a small, 10 foot by 10 foot (3m by 3m) building. If the community drank enough beer, it could build a series of tiny houses. 

Unfortunately, the WOBOs did not turn out to be a viable product, and despite Freddy Heineken’s best intentions, never made it past the prototype phase. Only about 100,000 of the bottles ever existed and the vast majority were destroyed once it became clear that Heineken would not be continuing with their use. As seen here, there is a house made of them on the Heineken estate as well as a wall of WOBOs at the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam; any others are hoarded as collectors’ items.

Bonus fact: Soon after Freddy Heineken turned 18, his family ended up selling much of their stake in the company, even though his father (and later Freddy himself) were board members for years after. In 1954, Freddy pulled off a coup. He borrowed money and secretly purchased, on the public markets, a large enough stake in the company to make himself the majority shareholder, bringing control back to the family.

From the Archives: Power Play: How soccer can power third-world villages. Also, the bonus fact gives another great way to reuse bottles to help with third-world infrastructure.

Related: In 1983, Freddy Heineken was kidnapped, only released after his captors were given 35 million Dutch guilders (about $20 million; accounting for inflation, about $45 million). There’s a fictionalized movie about the kidnapping. (In reality, the five kidnappers were all eventually brought to justice.)

Herbert Vogel was a high school dropout, a World War II veteran, and, for most of his adult life, an evening-shift postal worker. Dorothy Vogel (nee Hoffman), his wife, was a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. Mr. Vogel’s salary, at its peak, was in the realm of $20,000; his wife’s, unreported, was likely not much more. They never had children, sharing their apartment with some pets (turtles and cats, mostly). Together, they lived in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan for nearly 40 years, until Mr. Vogel died on July 22, 2012. The news of his passing was major news — in the art world.

The Vogels, over their four decades together, had collected well over 4,500 works of art which, despite their meager means, were worth a fortune.

Herbert — Herb, as his friends called him — attempted a career as an artist into his late 30s or early 40s, but soon gave it up after, in his words, (per mental_floss) realizing he was “a terrible painter.” But his love of art didn’t disappear with his dreams of painting. He and Dorothy dedicated their lives to collecting art — even though they knew little, at best, about the world of art collecting. The mostly self-trained Vogels (Herb took a few classes in art history) relied mainly on their own tastes and intuition, with a significant focus on smaller, unknown artists. For example, during the first solo show (1965) of an early minimalist artist named Sol LeWitt, the Vogels became one of his first patrons. As ArtInfo reported in a lengthy obituary for Mr. Vogel, the couple purchased a golden, T-shaped sculpture — LeWitt’s first sale at his first solo show. LeWitt, as many art enthusiasts know, soon after became one of the most well known artists of his generation and genre.

Despite not having a lot of money, the Vogels had two things going for them. First, they collected for themselves and themselves only, and therefore were “investing” (to misuse a term — they were not in the business of reselling what they purchased) in things they liked, and not necessarily in artists whose work would appreciate over time. Second, they went direct to the artist, most often with cash. While typical art sales are made through galleries and brokers, those middlemen take a cut, and more importantly, take time to process payments to the artists. If you’re a so-called “starving artist,” cash in hand may mean the difference between making the month’s rent and not. When the Vogels showed up to your studio or show with a small pile of $20s, there’s a good chance that you’d sell to them.

Over time, the Vogels became known in art circles as the doyen and doyenne of the up-and-coming creative, further enabling them to find opportunities to add to their collection. As their apartment filled up, though, it became increasingly clear that the art needed to go somewhere other than under the bed, in drawers, and virtually everywhere else (except for the oven; they never stored anything there). In the early 1990s, they decided to donate their collection to the National Gallery of Art, because, in the words of Mr. Vogel (as recounted by the Washington Post), the couple “wanted to do something for the nation. The National Gallery doesn’t sell works they acquire. They’ll keep the collection together. And they don’t charge admission.” Some pieces of artwork were transported soon after; as the New York Times reported, “five full-sized vans were needed to move their art to the National Gallery.” Their collection was so extensive that the Gallery set up a “Fifty Works for Fifty States” program, placing fifty pieces of the Vogels’ in each of fifty museums across the country, one per state.

When Mrs. Vogel passes away, the remainder of their collection will enter the Gallery’s possession as well. Dorothy stopped collecting after Herb fell ill in 2008 or thereabouts; it was something they did together, and when he no longer could, she chose not to go alone.

Bonus fact: Art collecting can be serious business — and, also, less-than-serious business. In 2005, the Maspro Denkoh Corporation, a Japanese electronics company, looked to sell its art collection worth an estimated $20 million. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world-renowned auction houses, attempted to get that business. How did Maspro decide which auctioneer would run the auction — and, likely, collect well north of a million dollars in fees? A modified game of rock-paper-scissors. Each auction house sent a representative to Maspro’s offices, where they each wrote down their choice (in Japanese). Christie’s chose scissors, cutting Sotheby’s “paper.”

From the Archives: The Strategy Behind Rock Paper Scissors: In case you’re trying to win the rights to auction off a $20 million art collection.

Related: Herb & Dorothy: A documentary about the Vogels.

The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan is the sixteenth most populous in the state, with just under 75,000 people per the 2010 census. Like many Michigan municipalities, Kalamazoo has been shrinking, population-wise, over the last few decades; in 1990, it was home to over 80,000 people. (Detroit, the largest city in the state, was at 1.027 million people in the 1990 census; per the 2010 census, Detroit’s population is now just under 720,000.) In 2000, 24.3% of Kalamazoo’s population was below the poverty line, including 26% — more than one out of four — of those age 18 and under.

To help fix this, at the November 10, 2005 Kalamazoo Board of Education meeting, the board members announced something dramatic: free or drastically reduced college tuition to many of the city’s school children.

Called the “Kalamazoo Promise,” the program promises to pay the tuition — including mandatory fees (but not room and board) — to any of Michigan’s state colleges, for anyone who attends the Kalamazoo public school system for at least four years and graduates. Anyone who entered the school system in 9th grade receives 65% of their college tuition from the Promise, and for every additional year one spends in the system, that person receives an additional 5%. A child who goes to Kalamazoo’s school system from kindergarten through 12th grade, therefore, is eligible for 100% of their college tuition via the Promise. The Promise is backed by a group of anonymous donors, believed primarily to be comprised of members of the Stryker (of the Stryker Corporation) and Upjohn (of the Upjohn Company) families, and there are rumors that New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter (who grew up in Kalamazoo) is also involved.

The goals of the Promise are not just to encourage children to attend college (and to make that possible), but also to encourage families and businesses to relocate to Kalamazoo and keep a flailing city moving forward. (In fact, the New York Times asserted that the Promise is “primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy.”) As of October 2010, almost five years after the Promise was announced, enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools went up 3% from the year prior, bucking the state-wide trend. There are anecdotal reports of the school system improving and the real estate market rebounding; in the latter case, homeowners are regularly advertising their places as “Promise eligible, “Promise qualified,” or the like.

As of 2010, the Promise had paid out $18 million in tuition to roughly 2,000 high school graduates, with no signs of stopping. The effect on students has been mixed, but shows — pardon the pun — promise. As seen in the chart above and discussed by MLive.com (the source of the chart), Kalamazoo is seeing measurable and positive results at the high school level. However, roughly half of those students who received scholarships (through 2011) dropped out before completing their collegiate program. The Promise’s leadership is looking toward ways at better preparing eligible students for college.

Bonus fact: Derek Jeter almost never played for the Yankees — or, at least, he was almost drafted by another team, the Houston Astros. Jeter, fresh out of high school, was selected sixth overall in the 1992 Major League Baseball Draft by the Yankees. The Astros had the first overall pick but passed over him because they were concerned that he’d demand a higher-than-typical signing bonus. (Jeter had earned a baseball scholarship to the University of Michigan and could have used that as leverage.) Hal Newhouser, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Detroit Tigers from the 1940s, was working for a scout for the Astros at the time and is credited with discovering Jeter. Newhouser forcefully advocated for selecting Jeter, but the Astros failed to take Newhouser’s advice, selecting collegiate star Phil Nevin instead.  Newhouser, enraged, quit.

From the Archives: Pennies from Everywhere: One student’s novel way to create a scholarship for himself.

Related: A book titled “I Went to the Party in Kalamazoo.” It’s a children’s book and there’s a drawing of a zoo scene on the cover. There probably shouldn’t be, though; as Wikipedia notes, “[t]here is no longer a zoo in Kalamazoo. The Milham Park Zoo closed in 1974.”

Go to 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, look up, and you’ll see the Citigroup Center (the white building above), one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. At 59 floors, the tower is home to well over a million square feet of office space, and its sloping top makes it a distinctive part of the New York City skyline. Construction on the building began in 1974 and completed in 1977 at the total cost of just under $200 million. The Citigroup Center, like most other buildings, is designed to last for years to come.

Especially once the powers that be surreptitiously fixed the massive engineering mistake which would have otherwise doomed the skyscraper.

The Citigroup Center is, architecturally, different than most buildings. While the typical building has structural support columns at each of the four corners, the Citigroup Center’s columns are in the center of each of the four sides, allowing the building to cantilever over a neighboring church. Doing so required a special type of bracket, which the building’s structural engineer, William LeMessurier, designed for this specific purpose. As designed, the building could sustain a direct, straight-on hit from hurricane-level winds.

Unfortunately, the construction company never tested to see how the building would fare against winds which hit the building at a 45-degree angle, which would cause the winds to hit two of the four outer walls simultaneously. After this concern was brought to LeMessurier’s attention — and well after the building was finished — he tested the theory in a wind tunnel and determined that these “quartering winds” would cause significantly more load than anticipated. But because the building, as drawn up, was padded with a significant level of additional safety measures, this theoretical problem had few if any practical ramifications. Until, that is, someone mentioned to LeMessurier about a cost savings the builders had found. Instead of welding his special brackets onto the structural columns, the builders bolted them on. Welded brackets are less likely to fall prey to heavy winds. When faced with the same hurricane-level force, bolts have the potential to shear. And no one tested to see if the bolts could handle hurricane-level quartering winds. In theory? They couldn’t.

That June, LeMessurier determined that the type of winds capable of causing structural damage to the building hit Manhattan every 15 to 20 years. Having 59-story building in the middle of Manhattan which was at risk of such damage was, to say the least, a very big problem. Hurricane season was only a few months away. With a 5 to perhaps ten percent chance of a building-threatening storm coming that fall, fixing the problem was a priority. But admitting to it was an embarrassment, to say the least. Plus, telling the public would likely cause a panic by neighbors and office workers alike. So LeMessurier and Citicorp (as it was then known) agreed to do the repairs after-hours, and not tell anyone.

It took three months, but the secret workmen successfully welded metal steel plates over the bolted-on brackets. No one found out about the fix-up job for nearly two decades; the New Yorker broke the story in 1995. And no one was hurt by the faulty building.

Bonus fact: The angled roof of the Citigroup Center was not, originally, intended for simple aesthetics, but rather to provide a home for solar panels. There are no solar panels there, though, because the roof is positioned in such a way that it never receives adequate sunlight for solar panels to provide a worthwhile amount of power.

From the Archives: Underwater Repair Men: How New York is fixing its water system.

Related: A LEGO Empire State Building. (They don’t make a Citigroup Center.)

But at around age four, he refused to wear it. His reason? He told his mom that “superheroes don’t wear blue ears,” and therefore, neither would he.

That sounds like a job for a superhero to fix, or, at least, for Marvel Comics, one (with DC being the other) of the two major comic book franchises out there. So Marvel stepped in, and created a new character — one who wore a hearing aid. Meet the Blue Ear.

After Anthony’s complaint, his mother, Christina D’Allesandro, emailed Marvel hoping for assistance. She feared that the email would not get past Marvel’s spam filters, as a statement by the company pointed out, so she certainly did not expect the response she received. The comic book giant — after (very politely) telling her that an existing character, Hawkeye, made use of a hearing aid for a while — created the poster, seen above, for Anthony, as well as another one with a child-version of the character teaming up with Hawkeye (sketched here). The character, the Blue Ear, is named after Anthony’s aid, and wears a listening device just like Anthony does. The device gives the Blue Ear the ability to hear cries for help and respond in a timely, super fashion.

By all accounts, Marvel’s gambit worked. Anthony not only re-donned the hearing aid, but also carried around the pin-ups with him to school and virtually everywhere else. His preschool appreciated the idea so much that, according to Fox News, they instituted a “dress up like a superhero day,” allowing Anthony to become the Blue Ear for all of his classmates to see. And in March of 2013, Marvel teamed up with hearing aid distributor Phonak to create a PSA/advertisement featuring Iron Man, encouraging children to be tolerant and understanding of the needs of children like Anthony — and the ways technology can improve lives.

As for the Blue Ear himself? He won’t be appearing in any actual Marvel comics. But that’s OK — his work here is done. 

Bonus fact: Iron Man’s true identity (in the comic book sense; he’s a fictional character, of course) is Tony Stark, an industrialist who sold weapons to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War era. Why that back story? When Stan Lee created Iron Man in 1963, the country was increasingly anti-war and skeptical of those who profited from their business dealings with the military. Lee wanted to see if he “could take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.”

From the Archives: Mayor, Mock Us: Bogota, Colombia’s super hero mayor.

Related: A set of seven Marvel Christmas tree ornaments, including Hawkeye and Iron Man, but not the Blue Ear.

The Battle of Gettysburg is generally considered to be a symbolic turning point of the American Civil War. Seeing the opportunity to greatly weaken Northern resistance to Southern independence, Confederate General Robert E. Lee brought more than 70,000 soldiers — perhaps as much as 10% of the total number of men who would serve under the flag of the South — northward toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the late spring of 1863. Capturing Gettysburg, Lee surmised, would give the Confederacy a central point from which they could attack Philadelphia, Washington, or Baltimore; further, a successful encroachment into the area would provide the Confederate Army with supplies and farmland which would replace those lost from battles in Virginia. Further, many — Northerners and Southerners alike — believed that a Southern victory that far north would embolden peace advocates in the North, who were beginning to form a critical mass. But as we all know, the South lost the battle, and was unable to obtain these strategic gains. To the contrary, repelling the Southern attack gave the North confidence that they could successfully triumph over their erstwhile country-mates, and created a narrative of Northern resilience.

And it helped that there was a 69 year-old man who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Earlier in the war, a man named John Burns tried to join the cause of the Northern army. But he was turned away by Union enlistment officers, who said he — then in his late sixties — was simply too old to be of any use. Instead, he was sent to Gettysburg to act as a local constable, a peace officer. As the South advanced northward, many in service to the North deserted and others, not yet enlisted, forcibly refused to be drafted. But when the war came to Gettysburg, Burns, then age 69, did the opposite. He grabbed his gun — a flintlock musket, a weapon long surpassed by advancements in military technology — and went to the field of battle.

He was almost turned away again, but needing any support they could muster, the Northern military leadership found a role for him. And that turned out to be a lucky gamble, as Burns wasn’t just a random retiree with a decrepit weapon. Unbeknownst to Union leadership, he had served for the U.S. Army in the War of 1812 and was an accomplished sharpshooter. He ended up picking up a more modern firearm from a wounded Union soldier and joined up with the 7th Wisconsin Infantry during the battle. Of the 90,000-something troops who fought for the North in the battle, Burns was not, officially, one of them. But he quickly became a very famous one.

There is no count — official or unofficial — which totals up the number of Confederates Burns shot during the battle, and his achievements are mostly overstated. (The Confederates suffered more than 20,000 casualties during the three days; Burns simply could not have been responsible for a meaningful percentage of that.) But Burns’ alleged successes, whatever they were, quickly became legendary throughout the Union. One account claims that he managed to shoot a charging Southern officer, knocking him off his steed. Another told the tale of how Burns kept firing despite being wounded twice; only when he took a third bullet did he fall. And when Confederate soldiers picked him up, instead of summarily executing him (combatants not in uniform were considered bushwackers and not taken as prisoners), he told them that he was looking for his wife and got caught up in the crossfire. He was returned to the North where he became known as the “Hero of Gettysburg.”

To a large degree, Burns became the symbol of Northern grit and determination. American poet Bret Harte penned an ode to Burns’ heroism. Civil War photojournalist Timothy O’Sullivan, whose work covering the war is one of our few visual primary sources about its goings-on, made a point to visit Burns as he recuperated back in Gettysburg. (This photo of Burns sitting in his home may have been taken by O’Sullivan; the one of Burns above certainly was.) Burns’ celebrity made its way to Abraham Lincoln, who insisted upon the having the constable present when he gave the Gettysburg Address.

Burns lived until 1872, nearly ten years after Gettysburg. His legend persevered much further. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, a site upon which part of the Battle of Gettysburg itself was waged. Burns’s grave is one of two — the other being that of Ginnie Wade, the only civilian who died in the battle — which is allowed to fly the American flag above it at all times.

Bonus fact: The Battle of Gettysburg lasted three days, but one controversy around it still exists today. During the battle, a unit from Minnesota managed to capture a Confederate flag from a unit from Virginia. The troops took the flag back to Minnesota and, somewhere along the way, the flag ended up in the Minnesota Historical Society’s possession. Well more than 150 years after the war, Virginia demanded that it be returned, but Minnesota refused, even though all other captured battle flags still in existence have been returned to their original states. To date, the flag is in Minnesota.

From the Archives: McLeaned Him Out: A strange coincidence from the Civil War.

Related: A biography of John Burns.

During World War II, the UK and U.S. focused their air warfare plans on the use of strategic bombing, employing long- and short-range aircraft to lead the way and provide ground infantry with an upper hand. Much of the industrial war complexes of both these nations were focused on producing planes, and ensuring the safe return of an expensive, slow-to-produce bomber was a priority. After all, a plane that can make five or perhaps ten runs was worth much more than one which failed to return after a mission or two.

Of course, planes which came back often did so damaged. It made sense to repair those planes. The typical repair job came with additional armor added to the bullet hole-riddled areas of the plane, reinforcing the areas which took the most damage. And, in theory, it would also make sense to add additional armor in those places.

Until a statistician named Abraham Wald stepped in.

Wald earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1931, but, because he was Jewish, was unable to find a job in Austria. He managed to emigrate to the United States shortly after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, and ended up studying econometrics for the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, then based in Chicago. Either while at that post or shortly thereafter, he ended up on a data gathering project for the U.S. military. He was charged with looking at planes which had returned from battle, and recording where they had taken the most damage. As seen above (via the National World War II Museum), he put together a crude before-and-after diagram. The “after” image — the plane on the right — showed where the majority of the damage was, as indicated by the shaded regions. Wald determined that most of the plane — the wings, nose, and fuselage — had taken the worst beating, while the cockpit and tail were generally unharmed. Wald’s superiors suggested that the shaded areas receive additional armor.

Wald, though, objected. If planes were returning with damage to the shaded areas, then, Wald argued, the shaded areas needed the least reinforcement. After all, the planes were able to take significant damage to those areas yet still return. Wald theorized (and mathematically explored, in this pdf) that the fact that the planes lacked damage in the cockpit and tail was more telling. Certainly, the Axis’ targeting of Allies’ planes was both indiscriminate and imprecise; there was little reason to believe that the Axis forces were aiming for, say, the nose, and intentionally avoiding striking the tail. Some planes had to have taken significant damage to the tail and cockpit, and all of those planes had something in common: they, unlike the ones in Wald’s data set, did not return back to base.

On Wald’s advice, the U.S. military leadership reinforced the cockpits and tails on its planes.

Bonus fact: From 1964 until 1998, the U.S. Air Force used a plane called the Blackbird (seen here) as a recon plane. The Blackbird was designed to be somewhat more stealthy than most planes; its flat design and some other features made it difficult to pick up on radar. But even if an enemy did, in fact, spot the Blackbird, shooting it down was difficult at best. If an enemy launched a surface-to-air missile targeting the Blackbird, the Blackbird would simply accelerate and outrun it. During the plane’s thirty-plus years of service, not a single one was shot down.

From the Archives: Tanks for the Info: Another way the Allies used math as a weapon.

Related: A die-cast 1:144-scale model of the Blackbird.

Coca-Cola was invented by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886, with bottles of the bubbly elixir costing five cents. Nearly 150 years later, it’s still around, and arguably as popular as ever. It rarely comes in the glass bottles commonly found during its first 50 to 100 years, as glass has given way to plastic. A 20-ounce bottle will run you anywhere from $1.50 to $2.50, give or take, in the United States.

But as seen above, in an advertisement from circa 1905, a bottle of Coca-Cola (probably closer to eight ounces than 20, though) used to cost a nickel. And as seen below, in an advertisement from around 1948, it still cost a nickel nearly a half-century later. In fact, Coca-Cola bottles would cost a nickel until as late as 1959 — roughly seventy years after it debuted. Inflation alone should have caused the price to at least triple over that time, and the massively increased demand alone should have justified a significant price hike. What happened?

Blame the lawyers — and, maybe, President Eisenhower, too.

As reported by NPR, Coca-Cola was solely available at soda fountains early in its history. In 1899, a pair of Tennessee lawyers were interested in bottling the drink and approached Coca-Cola’s president in hopes of obtaining the rights to do so. For reasons unknown — NPR jokingly suggests that the Coke exec simply wanted to get the lawyers out of his office — the attorneys walked away with a lifetime deal to bottle Coke — at a very low, fixed price. For Coke, this turned out to be a big mistake, as bottled soda became a standby across the nation. If bottles of Coke sold for, say, 10 cents apiece, the two lawyers would make out like bandits, but the company wouldn’t make any additional money.

On the other hand, if prices stayed low, consumers may end up purchasing more than they typically would have otherwise. As Coca-Cola was getting paid a flat rate per unit of syrup, it therefore had incentive to increase the volume, not the price, of the drink. So it blanketed the country with ads saying things like “as always five cents;” “sold everywhere” with “5 cents” next to it; “in bottles, 5 cents,” etc. The ubiquity of the message made it impossible for retailers to raise their prices. So they didn’t.

In time, the bottlers and Coke itself renegotiated the syrup contract, and the price of Coke was set to rise. But then Coke realized it had a second problem — the vending machines which sold bottles of Coke could only be set to take a single nickel. And retrofitting them to accept a dime (which was probably easier than the mechanism needed to accept two nickels) would double the price of the soda overnight, something Coke was loath to do. NPR further reported that Coke asked the U.S Treasury and, ultimately, President Eisenhower himself, to create a 7.5 cent piece, specifically to get around this problem. The U.S. government did not oblige Coke’s wishes.

Of course, inflation can’t be avoided forever. In time, the cost of making a bottle of Coca-Cola approached and ultimately passed a nickel — by a dollar or two, so far.

Bonus fact: A can of Coke, in a tank of water, sinks. A can of Diet Coke, in the same tank of water, floats. (Here’s a brief, but old, video demonstration.) It takes a lot of sugar to make Coke as sweet as it is, but it takes a lot less aspartame (the artificial sweetener in Diet Coke) to accomplish a similar effect. But the extra sweetener in regular Coke makes the entire product denser than water, causing the can to sink.

From the Archives: From Abe to Zinc: Another thing that costs more than a nickel? A nickel.

Related: “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It” by Mark Pendergrast. 4.6 stars on 26 reviews. Available on Kindle.

The man pictured above is a dabbawala. The two dozen or so metallic cylindrical containers — most often made of tin or aluminium — are called dabbas. There are 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas riding around every alley and street of Mumbai, India, virtually every day, even during monsoon season. Collectively, the dabbawalas traffic as many as 200,000 dabbas each day.

But don’t worry. They’re delivering lunch.

Translated literally, “dabbawala” means “box person” or perhaps “one who carries a box.” A “dabba” is a box — in this case, a bit of a misnomer because the “boxes” used are clearly cylinders – while “wala” is a suffix for a doer, signifying that the person is one who does something with the item. In this sense, a dabbawala is simply a food delivery guy, which sounds like a rather pedestrian (pardon the unintentional reverse-pun) occupation. But in Mumbai, being a dabbawala isn’t just a job — it’s a skilled trade all to itself. And a highly successful one at that.

The dabbawala trade began in the mid- to late-1800s during the British Raj, the British rule of India. Many Britons who came to India did not enjoy the local cuisine and, therefore, wanted to eat a more familiar lunch (called “tiffins”) at work. But their offices did not have kitchens and carrying a lunch was either too cumbersome or simply beneath the generally aristocratic colonists. Transporting lunches from the homes of British colonists to their places of work became necessary, and a cottage industry cropped up. By 1890, a 100-person delivery company was running much of the lunch delivery business in the area, and over the course of the next half-century or so, the dabbawala industry formed a union, now known as the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust. Today, the business is still growing; in 2007, the New York Times reported that the dabbawalla industry was growing at five to ten percent annually.

Why is business so good? Mumbai’s traffic can be nightmarishly bad, making the trip from suburbs to city by car unworkable for most. Taking the train is a better option, but that makes it difficult to carry items, and the commute is so long that lunch would have to be prepared the night before. A small but meaningful percentage of Mumbai office workers chooses to let the network of dabbawalas handle the lunch part. Each day, one delivery person picks up lunch later in the morning, bicycles it and others on its route to the train, and another dabbawala transports the lunch the rest of the way. At 450 rupees per month — that’s about $8.25 — workers can get their home-cooked meals brought to them with nearly 100% reliability.

Yes, nearly 100%. The dabbawalas, who are often illiterate, navigate the roadways of Mumbai with incredible efficiency. As the Guardian noted, “Forbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.” And in 2011, when the team from Top Gear tried to beat a dabbawala delivery service by using a car instead of the train, they failed miserably.

The dabbawalas themselves earn 8,000 to 10,000 rupees per month (roughly $150-$175), or about 100,000 to 120,000 rupees annually. This is much higher than the per capita income in India — about 53,333 rupees (about $975) per year — but that’s not enough, many claim. Due to the higher cost of living in the Mumbai area, combined with recent upticks in inflation, the dabbawala union recently requested taxi operator permits for 2,000 of its 5,000 members.

Bonus fact: If Guy de Maupassant, a famous 19th century French writer, wanted his lunch delivered by dabbawala (putting aside that there are none in Paris, and certainly not when Maupassant was alive), he would have had them deliver the cooked meals to the base of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. But not because he liked the food at the Tower’s restaurant  The Tower, completed in 1889, was not immediately well-received by many, and especially not Maupassant. As the New York Times noted, Maupassant “saw the tower as an affront to his nation’s proud cultural heritage and dined regularly in its restaurant because that was the one spot in Paris from which he didn’t have to look upon ‘this giant and disgraceful skeleton.’” 

From the Archives: Allergic to Paris: An odd affliction which Maupassant would probably not enjoy finding out about.

Related: A three-tiered tiffin box. Not a bad way to carry one’s lunch.

The Jobbiks are small but significant political party in Hungary, holding 43 of the 368 seats in the country’s parliament, called (in English) the National Assembly. The Jobbiks describe themselves as a “radically patriotic Christian party” which aims to protect “Hungarian values and interests.” Critics often call it racist, fascist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. And in 2007, a young anti-Semite by the name of Csanad Szegedi (above) began his ascent in the party.

Fate hastened his descent.

Szegedi began his political career in 2003 at the age of 21. The Jobbik party formed that year and Szegedi signed up early on. In 2007, he showed himself to be even more radical than the nationalist party he subscribed to, founding a paramilitary organization called the Hungarian Guard. The Guard adopted the insignia and colors of a pro-Nazi Hungarian party from World War II known as the Arrow Cross, which itself killed thousands of Jews during the war. Szegedi, when elected to the European Parliament in 2009, took office wearing the uniform of the now-banned paramilitary unit.

Anti-Semitism invaded Szegedi’s words as well as his dress and associations. According to the Associated Press, the politician blamed Jewish artists for desecrating Hungarian symbols; stated that Jews were buying up land in Hungary in “massive” amounts in order to facilitate emigration from Israel to Hungary; and asserted that post-communism privatization efforts were driven by “people in the Hungarian political elite who shielded themselves in their Jewishness,” whatever that means.

In June of 2012, Szegedi — not even 30 years old — resigned from the Hungarian parliament and the Jobbik party. A rumor that began in 2010 had crescendoed and instead of ignoring it, Szegedi admitted its truth.

He was Jewish.

A technicality, sure — but it was enough for Szegedi to attempt to bribe the person who made this discovery. Per Jewish law, if your mother is Jewish, so are you. And if your mother’s mother was Jewish, therefore, you are too. And in 2010, someone (a “convicted felon” per most news reports) confronted Szegedi with documents demonstrating that not only were his maternal grandparents Jewish, but they were both Holocaust survivors. His grandfather had been assigned to a work camp while his grandmother had survived through the horrors at Auschwitz.

Someone recorded the conversation between the felon and Szegedi who, in the recording, seemed honestly surprised by the findings. This makes some sense, as Szegedi’s grandparents apparently hid their religion from their children. Nevertheless, the Jobbik aspirant believed this newfound truth to be detrimental to his career, and offered to pay off the felon to prevent him from going public with the information. The news leaked out regardless and Szegedi, on the urging of Jobbik leadership, resigned afterward. The Jobbik party’s official stance is that Szegedi was asked to resign due to the bribery, and not due to his bloodlines.

Bonus fact: Hungarian children born in the early 1980s — like Szegedi, for example (1982) — are referred to locally as the “DuckTales Generation,” a reference to the cartoon about uber-tycoon Scrooge McDuck and his three grandnephews.  On December 12, 1993, a news broadcast interrupted an episode of DuckTales to announce the death of Jozsef Antall, the country’s first democratically-elected leader after the fall of communism. For most Hungarian children of that age group, this was their first cultural touchstone when it came to politics, hence the “DuckTales Generation” label. Antall died of cancer just two and a half years into his four-year term.

From the Archives: The Last Jew in Afghanistan: Really.

Related: DuckTales Season 1. Pre-Gizmoduck, if memory serves.

George W. Bush was President of the United States from January 2001 until January of 2009, serving two consecutive terms. But during each of these terms, for about two to three hours, Bush temporarily handed control of the Presidency to his Vice President, Dick Cheney. In both cases, Bush was undergoing a colonoscopy, and the mild sedative required for his doctor to administer the test left him temporarily incapacitated. Citing Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Bush temporarily ceded control of the Oval Office to his running mate, only recouping the powers after the sedative wore off.

This seems strange, but it makes sense. The President, after all, is only human, and medical advice doesn’t come with an “out” simply because the would-be patient also happens to reside in the White House. And some medical procedures require that the patient, President or otherwise, be unreachable or otherwise incapacitated. It would be a bad idea for the Presidency to be left, effectively, vacant, as the President hurries off for some sort of required treatment. So we’ve created a workaround.

But what if the President didn’t have this temporarily ability to transfer power? Or even if he did, what if he didn’t want the nation to know about a physical ailment or disease? In 1893, that is exactly what happened — and the President managed to not only hide his potentially fragile health, but also the surgery required to fix it.

Grover Cleveland’s claim to fame is his role as the answer to a middle school trivia question: “who is the only person to serve two non-consecutive terms as President?” Originally elected in 1884, he lost his re-election campaign in 1888 (despite receiving a plurality of the popular vote) to Benjamin Harrison. Four years later, he and Harrison faced off again, with Cleveland winning back the White House. But less than two weeks before Cleveland’s second term began, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad declared bankruptcy. That incident is often cited as the first significant event in the economic downturn known as the Panic of 1893; Cleveland’s second term, therefore, came during troubled economic times.

In the summer of that same year, Cleveland went on vacation, setting out to sea on his friend’s yacht on July 1st. Despite the poor state of the economy, this wasn’t considered to be a very big deal — Congress was in recess anyway — and a four-day fishing trip was a perfectly reasonable respite. Most likely, no one would have thought anything of it, except that when Cleveland returned, he had a hard rubber dental prosthesis in his mouth. His doctors explained that the President had “two bad teeth,” and the false ones masked that.

The truth? Before the “fishing trip,” Cleveland’s doctors found a tumor in the roof of his mouth. Ulysses S. Grant had died from a throat cancer less than a decade before. As Futility Closet notes, Grant’s death “unsettled the nation.” With the economy in a fragile state, Cleveland did not want to cause any further concern (or so his advisors would later claim). So he had doctors set up a makeshift operating room on the yacht and, over the course of four days, underwent two surgeries. The first operation was to excise the tumor (which may not have been cancerous after all), which required the removal five of Cleveland’s teeth, his upper jaw, and part of his palate. The operation left the President disfigured and with slurred speech, so, a few days later, the doctors performed the second operation, outfitting him with the prosthesis.

Cleveland lived for more than a decade after this secret operation, passing away in 1908 at the age of 71. Knowledge of his oral surgery almost died with him, but In 1917, one of his doctors on the fishing trip wrote an article admitting the true nature of the “vacation.”

Bonus fact: Cleveland mostly stayed out of the political spotlight after leaving the White House, but he was known to occasionally make his views known on the issue of the day. For example, he was against giving women the right to vote. As Wikipedia notes, in 1905, he wrote an article for Ladies Home Journal arguing that “sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.”

From the Archives: Grandpa President: Check out the bonus fact. (Read the main story, too.)

Related: Fake teeth… kind of.

The brown tree snake, pictured above, typically grows to a length of about one to two meters — about three to seven feet. While venomous, they’re generally considered harmless to people (especially adults; children bitten by a brown tree snake may be at risk). Their typical diets consist of small rodents, some birds, lizards, and even bats. They are native to Papua New Guinea, some other islands nearby, and the northern and eastern coasts of Australia.  Populations of feral pigs and mangrove monitors (a type of monitor lizard) prey on the brown tree snakes, keeping their populations in check. They can’t swim or, thank heavens, fly (yikes!), so they are pretty much trapped in these areas.

Unless they get on a boat.

Guam is a tiny U.S territory in the western Pacific. The island has a population of about 150,000 people and is located about 1,400 miles (2,200 km) north of Papua New Guinea, with nothing but ocean between the two. By all rights, there should be no brown tree snakes there. But sometime in the 1940s or early 1950s, the reptiles started appearing on the island, most likely after finding accidental passage on a cargo ship. Guam doesn’t have any feral pigs or mangrove monitors, so there is nothing keeping the invasive snake population there unchecked. 

Given free rein, the snakes destroyed large parts of Guam’s ecology. As Science Daily reported, the snakes wiped out the most of the native bird population on Guam and may have even destroyed some species of trees. Because the birds ate spiders, Guam’s spider population is now also incredibly high — there are spider webs everywhere. And the damage isn’t limited to the island’s flora and fauna; the snakes have been known to attack pets and interfere with power lines, thereby causing power outages. As of 2008, per NPR, there are as many as two million brown tree snakes in Guam — ten per person with plenty to spare. The snakes’ presence on the island is often cited as one of the worst examples of a non-native species causing massive amounts of sometimes irreversible harm.

To prevent the snakes from boarding another ship (or a plane) and causing a second Guam-like disaster, authorities employ snake-sniffing dogs to ferret them out of cargo. In general, this has been successful, although snakes have been sighted on other islands (but typically are caught before they spread). But fighting the population on Guam itself? That’s proven tricky. The population is too large to simply use traps or other traditional means of population control, and bringing in a natural predator comes with its own risks. (As noted on these pages earlier, feral pigs are a problem throughout much of the continental United States.) Further, the snakes reside in trees — hence the name — and many would be able to outlast a temporarily-introduced predator.

But not all hope is lost. In February of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a new program. As reported by the Guardian, the USDA planned on spiking dead mice with acetaminophen (the active drug in Tylenol), which is poisonous to the snakes. Because acetaminophen is toxic to other animals as well, the USDA planned on outfitting the mice with little parachutes; this way, the little trap snacks would be more likely to get caught in the trees than fall to the ground.

Bonus fact: Hank Johnson is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, a position he has held since 2007. In March of 2010, the House Armed Services Committee invited Admiral Robert F. Willard, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, to a hearing regarding the opening of a Marine base on the island of Guam. During the hearing, Johnson asked Admiral Willard if doing so would put the island at risk, stating “[m]y fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” (Here’s a video; the statement is at about the 1:15 mark.) Willard, of course, stated there was no such risk of an island capsizing (?), and Johnson later stated that the comment was a deadpanned joke.

From the Archives: The Aptly-Named Snake Island: It’s not Guam. It’s scarier.

Related: “Problem Snake Management: The Habu and the Brown Treesnake,” book which may come in handy if you end up with a small amount of invasive tree snakes.

Until 1951, motion pictures were filmed on nitrocellulose  which is highly flammable. When it burns, it produces oxygen as a byproduct, so dousing it with water won’t put the fire out. In fact, when “nitrate film” catches fire, it is very hard to extinguish; film projection rooms, in order to keep the fire from spreading, were often coated in asbestos. On top of that, nitrate film, as it degrades, is known to spontaneously combust. All together, a lot of old films — especially silent films — are lost forever.

And many more would have been lost, except for an odd little quirk which sent them almost into the Arctic Circle.

If you want to watch the silent films Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), The Great Gatsby (1926), or El Apostol (1917, and the first animated feature film ever made), the sad truth is that you can’t. All three are widely agreed upon to be gone forever. The last known copy of El Apostol, for example, was in producer Federico Valle’s private collection, but — as you may have guessed — burned when Valle’s studio caught fire. This wasn’t a terribly uncommon occurrence, and because of this, many of the first significant films in motion picture history are long gone. Per one estimate, 85-90% of movies from the silent film era are gone.

But in 1896 a seemingly unrelated thing happened — someone found gold in the Yukon. The Klondike Gold Rush (better known as the Alaska Gold Rush in the United States) began as tens of thousands went north, settling at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. That area became known as Dawson City, Yukon, and was home to as many as 40,000 people that year. While the town’s population would quickly wane to 5,000 by the time the town incorporated in 1902, it was significant enough to warrant attention from the media and entertainment industry. Many silent films made their way to the town, but the cost and difficulty of transporting them to the icy northwest was considerable. Movies sent to Dawson City went there at the end of their tenures as actively featured films; the Dawson City library was the final intended destination of hundreds such films.

For some reason — this is speculation, but it’s probably a bad idea to have hundreds of highly flammable time bombs in a library full of (paper) books — many of the films were dumped into a condemned, empty swimming pool in 1929. An ice hockey rink was built above them, and they fell out of the memories of society, effectively lost like all the others. But in 1978, the city decided to build a new recreational complex on the same site, and a bulldozer digging a new foundation came across this treasure trove of film-making history. The permafrost had kept the movies in decent-enough condition, and roughly 500 films were saved.

Bonus fact: In 1939, an author named Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a 50,110 word novel titled Gadsby. The story is about a man, the protagonist John Gadsby, who builds up his small town of Branton Hills into a city of over 60,000 residents. The book itself, though, isn’t all that good, using some odd language and curious turns of phrase. This isn’t a knock on the author, though — the odd linguistics were intentional. Gadsby, by design, never uses the letter “e.”

From the Archives: Mickey Attempts Suicide: How a silent movie almost cost us Mickey Mouse.

Related: Gadsby.

In 1985, a man named Richard Paey was in a car accident outside of Philadelphia. The accident would result in his incarceration.

No one died in the accident; in fact, the only person significantly injured was Paey himself. He required surgery but the surgery went awry, and Paey’s spine was irreparably damaged; a few metal screws from the operation are still lodged in his body there. After the accident and operation, he required the use of a wheelchair to get around and, for years, was in constant, severe pain. He was given prescriptions for painkillers such as Vicodin, codeine, and Percocet, which he took in large amounts. This caught the eye of local authorities in Florida, who paid him a visit.

As 60 Minutes reported, that visit was a drug raid — five or six agents with “guns and ski masks.” Given the volume of painkillers, the Drug Enforcement Administration assumed that Paey was re-selling his medication, giving others a high off his bad luck. The DEA argued that there was simply no way Paey could be taking all the drugs himself — 25 pills a day, per 60 Minutes — and therefore, he had to have been selling some. Paey asserted he did no such thing, and pointed to the fact that the government, despite having him under surveillance for months (unbeknownst to him), had no evidence whatsoever of such sales. The DEA also accused him of forging prescriptions, which Paey also denied, saying that his doctor back in New Jersey had been sending him valid ones.

Florida offered Paey a plea bargain, which would sentence him to house arrest and avoid jail time, but also likely deny him access to the painkillers he so desperately wanted. He took his chances with the jury, fully expecting to be vindicated, but lost. The jury believed that he forged the signatures, and that’s all that mattered. As ABC News pointed out, in Florida, the illegal possession of more than 28 grams of painkillers — that’s less than two bottles’ worth — is, itself, enough to be found guilty of drug trafficking. The actual sale of the drug is immaterial. And the mandatory minimum sentence for the crime? Twenty-five years. Paey, despite any evidence that he was a drug dealer, was about to spend much of his life in prison.

He entered a Florida prison in 2004, still very much needing pain killers. Ironically, as both 60 Minutes and ABC News pointed out, his prison stay came with a massive morphine drip, one providing much more painkiller medicine than the his pills were providing. But that was relatively short-lived — for good reason. On the morning of September 20, 2007, Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, issued Paey a full pardon. He was released that afternoon.

Bonus fact: According to the CDC, in 2008, 36,000 Americans died of a drug overdose. Of those, 20,000 fatally overdosed on prescription drugs.

From the Archives: Half Baked: An absolutely proposed crazy anti-drug law.

Related: “Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict” by Joshua Lyon. 48 reviews, 4.3 stars. Available on Kindle.

Chiune Sugihara died on July 31, 1986, in Japan. To his neighbors, he was just another guy. He had worked as an exporter — he was fluent in Russian — and had also been a door-to-door lightbulb salesman. If they thought he had a claim to fame, perhaps it was his curious birthday — January 1, 1900. But when the Israeli ambassador to Japan and a large number of Jews from around the world showed up at Mr. Sugihara’s funeral, they started to find out his true story.

Chiune Sugihara saved 6,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Sugihara was born in Japan on the first day of the 1900s, and before World War II, joined the Japanese Foreign Ministry. In 1939, he was named vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, then the temporary capital of Lithuania. When war broke out in Europe, Lithuania was mostly untouched. Many Polish Jews, trying to escape the Nazis, fled to Lithuania looking for safety, and due to the sizable Jewish population then in Kaunas, were temporarily successful. But when the Germans turned on the Soviets, that changed. On June 15, 1940, the Nazis invaded Lithuania and began their occupation of the nation — and the mass slaughter of its Jewish population. By July, the foreign embassies in Kaunas were shuttered, per Soviet insistence, as the Germans were rapidly approaching.

Sugihara received a 20-day extension to remain in Kaunas, and for thousands of Polish and Lithuanian Jews, this ended up meaning the difference between life or death. While most of the world had closed its borders to war refugees, neither Curacao nor Suriname (both Dutch colonies) required entry visas. Regardless, the Dutch consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, was willing and able to provide entrance permits. Unfortunately, getting to those areas required an exit visa — a now-disfavored restriction on people who want to leave a country. The Soviet Union agreed to issue exit visas provided that the Jewish refugees would pass through Japan on their way to the Dutch colonies, most likely to ensure that the Jews did not remain in the USSR. But Japan refused — despite Sugihara’s three requests — to issue the transit visas. The Japanese, like virtually every other nation around the world, did not want to risk having thousands of poor refugees (especially those of a different culture and language) joining their population.

Despite these repeated orders to the contrary, Sugihara, with the help of his wife Yukiko, began writing visas — an estimated 300 each day for the next four weeks. Even as they departed for Berlin, Sugihara — a low-level diplomat acting in direct violation of the Foreign Ministry’s orders — was throwing visas out his train’s windows, per one account. There is no exact number of how many visas he issued and were, ultimately, used, but estimates range from around 3,000 to 10,000. The generally agreed upon amount, per the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, is about 6,000 lives saved. To give that number some context, it is about four to five times as many people as Oskar Schindler saved.

After the war, the Japanese Foreign Service relieved Sugihara of his duties, although that may have been part of a massive, post-war downsizing, and not due to his insubordination. Regardless, he’d soon become known as a hero to many. In 1968, one of the people he helped save took a job as a cultural attache at Japan’s Israeli embassy and tracked down Sugihara. Israel later honored the savior of thousands, granting him and his family perpetual citizenship of the tiny Middle Eastern nation.

Bonus fact: After World War II, the newly-formed United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Article 13, Section 2 of the UDHR states that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” — that is, a blanket rejection of exit visas. However, some nations still require exit visas, in spite of the UDHR. Per Wikipedia, that list includes Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Uzbekistan, and to a limited degree, Cuba.

From the Archives: Held in Check: How WWII changed the chess world forever.

Related: “The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust” by Martin Gilbert. 4.1 stars on 22 reviews, available on Kindle.

Every once in a while — less often than a few years ago — you’ll open a bag of potato chips and see one which isn’t like the others. It’s green-ish, especially around the edges, like the salty tasty snack chip above. And it is safe to eat.

Probably.

Potatoes grow underground and are shielded from sunlight — usually. Sometimes, parts emerge above ground, and those sections turn green as chlorophyll develops. And for this to happen, the light need not be natural light. Most green potatoes don’t make it to the stores — be it in the produce section or in crinkly foil bags — for a variety of reasons, but really, who wants to eat a green potato? 

That said, on occasion, a green-tinted potato may find its way into a potato chip factory and, eventually, a slice thereof may sneak into a bag of chips. (It’s less and less likely though, due to advances in technology. Here’s a video showing how potato chips are made in a large factory setting; if you fast-forward to about 2:50, you’ll hear about the cameras used to identify and reject flawed chips.)  Chlorophyll is non-toxic and harmless, but, as mental_floss points out,  ”in the process of a potato going green [. . .] conditions are also right for it to synthesize more of [ . . . ] poison called solanine.” Solanine, in large enough amounts, is really bad for you — it can cause “vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and even paralysis of the central nervous system,” per Snopes.

But don’t worry too much. One would have to eat about twenty or so green potatoes in a day to fall ill. A medium-sized potato yields about 36 chips, per the video linked to above; it’s safe to say that if you ate 720 potato chips in a day, you’re going to get sick, even if the chips aren’t of the green variety. So if you come across a green chip, you’re probably OK.

On the other hand, don’t eat the green sprouts or leaves from the potatoes themselves. As the Straight Dope recounted – a story which is likely apocryphal, but regardless, demonstrative — “during World War II some refugees broke into an abandoned house and found a quantity of old sprouted potatoes in the basement. The potatoes themselves were too dried out to eat, so the refugees made a stew out of the sprouts — and got incredibly sick as a result.”

So, for perhaps the only time ever, this is one case where a vegetable’s fried yellow chips are better for you than its green leaves.

Bonus fact: Ever wonder why, when you open a bag of chips, there’s all that empty space where extra chips could be? They don’t do that to rob you of snack food. Rather, the extra space is there to make your snacks taste better. As About.com explains, the space isn’t air like the air we breathe — there’s no oxygen in it. Chips exposed to oxygen will start to spoil, so instead, food packagers inject nitrogen into the bag, allowing the chips to bounce around freely without breaking and yet, not causing spoilage.

From the Archives: Headless Potato: The origins of Mr. Potato Head, and the part you had to provide yourself.

Related: A 20 pack of Uncle Raye’s Green Onion potato chips. At the time of this writing, they cost $1,211.93. That’s about $60 a bag.

The apex of chivalry — at least, in some sort of romanticized sense — occurs on a boat destined for the bottom of the ocean. “Women and children first” is the war cry — the idea being that lifeboats should go to them first, and that men, like the captain, should go down with the ship if need be. The ritual is so ingrained in our culture that we almost expect it as a plot element in any story, fiction or non-fiction, involving such a disaster. But where did it come from?

In 1852, a British frigate, the HMS Birkenhead, was charged with transporting troops from England and Ireland to South Africa as part of a decades-long campaign called the Xhosa Wars. Also on board were the wives and families of many of the officers on board, allowing them to stay with their husbands while they were stationed overseas. But the Birkenhead would never arrive at its intended destination. While making its way around Western Cape, the South African province which calls Cape Town its capital (here’s a map), the Birkenhead hit a submerged, uncharted rock and began to take on water. The captain ordered the soldiers on board to help pump the ship dry, but it soon became clear that the Birkenhead was doomed to plummet to the ocean’s bottom. The captain changed his order. Everyone who was able to swim was to jump overboard and swim to lifeboats now in the water. Everyone — man, woman, and child alike. Even the nine cavalry horses being transported were blindfolded and cajoled overboard, in hopes that they could make the two mile swim to shore.

But for the soldiers, the captain’s order was subordinate to their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Seton. Seton, likely fearing that a mad rush to safety would cause further harm (and put lifeboats at risk), ordered his men to stand pat, allowing the women and children to take to the lifeboats. Almost all the soldiers followed the order and stood on the boat as it broke up into the cold ocean water rapidly surrounding its shattering hull. Amazingly, some of the soldiers managed to swim to shore. Of the 640 or so people aboard the Birkenhead (we don’t have an exact number because the records sank with the ship), just under 200 survived. And so did eight of the nine horses.

The idea that women and children should be allowed to evacuate first became a maritime practice soon after, but the phrase “women and children first!” did not enter the naval parlance for almost a decade later. By the time the Titanic sank in 1912, the custom was well established. Nearly 75% of the women and more than 50% of the children aboard the doomed ship survived, compared to only 20% of the men.

Bonus fact: The Xhosa Wars are named after the Xhosa, indigenous people in South Africa who resisted British imperialism. In 1856, a teenage Xhosa girl by the name of Nongqawuse went to the cattle fields to scare away birds. While there, she’d report back, she allegedly was visited by three spirits. The spirits told her that to triumph over the British settlers, the Xhosa needed to kill all their cattle and raze all their crops. The prophecy made its way to the chief of Nongqawuse’s clan, who believed that the visions were real and ordered the slaying of an estimated 300,000 cattle. The cattle slaying resulted in a massive famine among the Xhosa, resulting in the death of roughly 40,000 of their people.

From the Archives: Richard Parker: A strange series of shipwreck coincidences.

Related: A 14′ inflatable iceberg. List price of $7,699.99, yours for only $2,999.99. It’s a bargain! (Right?)

The crime? Shoplifting. The criminals? The elderly. 

Japan is widely believed to have the oldest population, with 20 to 23% of all Japanese age 65 or older and with over 10% age 75 or older. (By comparison, about 13% of Americans are 65 or older.) The rapid gain of population share by the elderly is stark, compared to other nations (as seen here), and this transformation of the population’s demographics is called “koreikashakai,” literally “a high-aged society.” The reasons for this are varied. Japan has a low birth rate, with only 1.5 live births per woman as of the year 1993 and going down — it was 1.39 per the 2012 CIA World Factbook. (The replacement fertility rate — that is, the rate needed to maintain the population — in an industrialized country is typically around 2.1; 1.39 is incredibly low.) On the other hand, Japan’s mortality rate is low, leading to higher than typical life expectancies. The two rates are criss-crossing, leading to a shrinking and rapidly aging population.

As graphs go, that’s a scary proposition. And it’s also scary if you’re one of the elderly, who is finding fewer and fewer working-aged people able to provide elder care or companionship for you.

Which is why some of the elderly have taken up a life of petty crime. Many, such as the 50-something man in this BBC video, simply do not have enough money to eat. And he’s a rarity — he’s notably younger than most shoplifters. The store manager the BBC interviewed estimated that 80% of the shoplifters he comes across (five or six each week) are in their sixties if not older. An Associated Press reporter spoke with an inmate in his late sixties who was finishing up a three-and-a-half year sentence but did not want to be released: “I’m worried that there would be no work for someone like me.”  And the available prison amenities — to use the term loosely — aren’t terrible. Inmates get three meals a day and a “twice-weekly bath” as well as shelter in a generally safe environment.

But economic security isn’t the only reason for the theft-to-get-incarcerated movement. In 2009, the Japan Times reported on a study conducted by the Tokyo police which found that nearly a quarter of the shoplifting elderly were feeling lonely. Shockingly, 40% of those 65+ shoplifters surveyed by the police said they live alone and more than half said that they did not have any friends at all.

Bonus fact: Brazil, in an effort to combat illiteracy among prison inmates, offered a books-for-early release program in 2012. Per the Globe and Mail, reading a book (and writing a book report on it) could earn an inmate four days off his or her sentence, with a maximum reduction of 48 days earned each year.

From the Archives: Stealing One’s Own Work: A person who went to prison for stealing his own research.

Related: “The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting” by Rachel Shteir. 13 reviews, 4.1 stars, available on Kindle.

Graph via Wikipedia entry on aging in Japan.

 
Issei Sagawa’s Wikipedia entry lists his occupation as a “public speaker, commentator, actor, [and] writer.” But for the better part of the last two decades, this 60-something Japanese man has found a hard time finding work in any of these disciplines. 

That’s probably because he should be in prison. And that may be charitable. 

In 1977, Sagawa (above) went to Paris to study comparative literature at the Sorbonne. The PhD student spent over three mostly uneventful years at the academy. On June 11, 1981, Sagawa asked his fellow student, a young woman named Renee Hartevelt, to come over for dinner and to translate a German work for him. She agreed, but the invitation was a pretext. Sagawa, who at under five feet (1.52m) tall considered himself a “weak, ugly, and inadequate little man” (in his own words) sat Hartevelt down at his desk and and shot her in the back of the neck with a rifle. After sexually violating her now-dead corpse, Sagawa proceeded to do what he originally set forth to do — in his words, “absorb her energy.” He took out a butcher knife and started to dine on her buttocks. 

Authorities discovered Sagawa’s crime when he tried to dispose of part Hartevelt’s body in a lake but failed to do so undetected. A subsequent search of his home uncovered uneaten parts of Hartevelt’s remains in his freezer. He was kept in a French prison for two years while his case was being adjudicated. He never made it to a verdict — a judge ruled him to be insane, and ordered that Sagawa be placed in an institution. 

Japanese authorities demanded his extradition. Eventually France agreed, and Sagawa was sent back to Japan. The Japanese psychiatrists who examined him ruled him sane, and he was to be brought up on murder charges. But all the evidence was in the custody of French authorities, who refused to release it to Japan. Sagawa, now officially sane and not convicted of any crimes, was free to go.

Sagawa used his newfound freedom to become an expert on the worst parts of humanity. In 1989, Japanese authorities captured a serial killer named Tsutomu Miyazaki. As Sagawa told Vice, in the same interview in which he admitted to still having cannibalistic urges, the horrors displayed by Miyazaki were beyond explanation to most. So the media asked one person whom they knew would be familiar with the mind of a deranged murdered (and then some) — Sagawa. Sagawa later would pen nearly two dozen books, many discussing what goes on in the mind of such a person.

Sagawa’s fame has, thankfully, reverted to infamy. Since 1997, he has found it difficult if not impossible to find work, and is rarely, if ever, called upon for his “expert” commentary.

Bonus fact: Mount Mihara is an active volcano on the small Japanese island of Oshima. On February 12, 1933, a Japanese student named Kiyoko Matsumoto jumped into the lava, likely dying instantly — and, for some reason, starting a trend. A total of 905 people jumped into Mount Mihara that year. No one knows why so many others followed her lead, and the Japanese government has fenced off the volcano.

From the Archives: Eggplant, Rice, Bananas and Dog Food: A more funny than horrible story about a minor Japanese celebrity.

Related: A volcano making kit, because linking to anything related to today’s main story would be a horrible thing to do.

At the close of the 1977 Major League Baseball season, the Kansas City Royals sat atop their division with 102 wins to just 60 losses. They were led by Hall of Fame 3B George Brett, DH Hal McRae, 20 game winner Dennis Leonard, and outfielder Al Cowens (who finished second to Rod Carew in MVP voting that year). But while they finished well, they were slow to start. On July 9th, they left Minnesota on the way to a three game set in Milwaukee to take on the Brewers. They lost the Friday night contest, 4-3, then won Saturday’s game, 6-0, and entered Sunday’s rubber match a game under .500 and in fifth place, five games behind the league-leading Twins.

They’d lose Sunday’s game, too, by the score of 4-0. And if you were at the ballpark that day, you may have thought the Royals didn’t even bother to show up. No, not because of the score, but because of the uniforms. There were no Royals uniforms on the field that day.

They were stolen the night before.

As reported by the Milwaukee Sentinel the day after the game, the visiting team’s clubhouse at Milwaukee’s County Stadium was raided on Saturday night. The thieves took 52 jerseys (out of 60), 20 gloves, and a bunch of jackets, caps, and shoes. As the Sentinel pointed out, “for some reason, the Royals didn’t lose their pants.” But they had lost their shirts and a bunch of other stuff — and couldn’t cobble together anything which could be reasonably considered a uniform.

By rule, the Royals should not have been able to field a team; Rule 1.1 explicitly states (and then stated) that “no players whose uniform does not conform to that of his teammates shall be permitted to take the field.” That, quite simply, was impossible.

But the league office ruled that the show — or, in this case, ballgame — must go on. So the Brewers equipment manager sent over a few dozen Brewers jerseys. The home-team Brewers wore their white uniforms, while, as seen above, the away-team Royals donned baby blue Brewers tops with random numbers and the wrong names on their backs. Brett, whose jersey wasn’t stolen, donned his familiar “Kansas City” #5, while his teammate, McRae, also wore #5, but with “Brewers” on the front. Two players, outfielder Amos Otis and shortstop Freddy Patek, each wore #2, because that’s what the Brewers had lying around in their size. The Brewers’ starting pitcher Jerry Augustine, wearing #46, gave up a seventh inning single to Royals RF Cowens — also wearing Brewers #46. But they weren’t perfect doppelgangers. Because most of the batting helmets were left behind, Cowens had a “KC” on his helmet (see the KC helmet and Brewers jersey combo here) while Augustine’s cap had the Brewers’ logo on it.

The Kansas City equipment manager, per the Sentinel, estimated the cost of the stolen items to be about $3,500, or $12,000 in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation. The stolen items were never recovered.

Bonus fact: The Royals and Brewers also share a common origin — kind of. In the mid-1910s, the American and National Leagues (which now constitute Major League Baseball) were sued by the Baltimore Terrapins, members of an upstart league called the Federal League. The Terrapins claimed that by restricting players’ ability to re-join MLB teams after leaving to play in the Federal League, the American and National Leagues were violating antitrust laws. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Majors were exempt from antitrust laws, as baseball is a sport, not a business. But the Court left open the option for Congress to change that via legislation. 

After the 1967 season, the Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland. One of Missouri’s senators, Stuart Symington, was irate, and threatened to bring legislation to the floor removing baseball’s antitrust exemption unless Kansas City was awarded a new team. MLB responded by awarding teams to KC, Seattle, San Diego, and Montreal, to begin in the 1971 season, but Symington was not placated. He pushed for the teams to begin play in 1969, and was ultimately successful. Unfortunately, the Seattle team, the Pilots, wasn’t ready to start play. On Opening Day, their stadium, appropriately named “Sick’s Stadium,” only had 17,000 seats available (out of an expected 30,000), lacked a scoreboard, and had inadequate water pressure. The Pilots fell into bankruptcy at the end of the season and, just a few days before the 1970 season, were purchased by future MLB commissioner Bud Selig. Selig relocated the team to Milwaukee and renamed them the Brewers.

From the Archives: Numbers Racket: Baseball’s (and other sports’) market in uniform numbers.

Related: “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton. An absolute classic, must-read book for any baseball fan, which in part, recounts the Seattle Pilots’ only season in existence.

Image via here.

They even called it Razzle Dazzle.

“Razzle dazzle,” to ask Merriam-Webster again, is “a complex maneuver designed to confuse an opponent” and “a[n] often gaudy action or display.” Confusion — gaudy or not — can be just as effective as concealment, and that was what the British and American naval leadership were counting on in World War I and into World War II, as seen above. Traditional camouflage proved unworkable, because as the weather changed, the color and shape of the ships’ paint jobs would have to change as well, and that’s simply not possible to do while at sea. Starting from a blank slate, the British admiralty (we think — who originated the idea is disputed, with even Picasso once laying claim to it) came up with zebra stripes.

At the time, lookouts would use telescope-like devices called “coincidence rangefinders.” As Wikipedia explains, these rangefinders combined two images of the target into one. if the images matched, they’d appear clearly, and the technician operating the rangefinder could take a reading from the device, estimating the ship’s distance. Plot a few such points against a pre-established time increment and you could determine the ship’s speed and size as well. But what if the images never seemed to line up? The naval strategists behind the razzle dazzle designs believed that the chaotic patterns would make it difficult for the opposing side to determine how far away the ships were, thereby obfuscating their speed and size, too. And, as a bonus, each ship had its own unique pattern, making it impossible for the enemy to determine which convoy an individual ship was part of.

Or at least, that was the theory. Whether it worked is unknown, because there were too many variables to test. Stripes varied in number, color, locations, and width; add in the conditions of war (including, again, the weather) and it is nearly impossible to determine which factors mattered and which were superfluous (or even detrimental). By the end of World War II, razzle dazzle camouflage fell into disuse.

Bonus fact: Zebras are black with white stripes, not the other way around. That is, their underlying body color is black — although they’re always striped, so practically speaking, this is of little consequence.

From the Archives: The Phantom Menace: Another wartime art project.

Related: Zig-zag zebra tape, which could be used for decorating a boat, in theory.

Peter the Great was the tzar of Russia from 1682 until his death in 1725. During that period, Europe was undergoing what is now known as the Age of Enlightenment, marked by a rise in the employment of science and logic in philosophy and culture. Russia was more medieval than Europe at the time, and Peter wished to move his people in the direction his European counterparts were going. He encouraged European dress, formed the nation’s first navy, switched the nation over to the Julian calendar (moving the start of the new year from September to January) and tried to end Russia’s culture of arranged marriages (believing that it created incompatible couples and therefore increased domestic violence). 

And he taxed beards.

Peter saw facial hair — especially long beards — as a carryover from the days of Russian antiquity. In the late 1600s or very early 1700s, Peter ordered military officers to shave their beards, wanting to mimic what he saw as the more refined culture of the West. In 1705, that order applied to almost all men, from the Russian nobility (known as Boyards) down to the poorest peasant. (Clergy were excepted from the ban.) This was not well received, particularly by the Boyards, and Peter found a middle ground, mimicking a policy of Britain’s King Henry VIII from the mid-1500s. Peter instituted a sliding-scale beard tax, the price of which varied based on the class and occupation of the owner of the hair-adorned face. Pay it, and you get to keep your beard; otherwise, prepare to shave.

Taxpayers got to keep their hair and were also given a coin, pictured above, as evidence of their payment. The words on the front of the coin (above) mean “the beard tax has been taken” while the phrase on the back reads “the beard is an unnecessary burden,” as a parting shot against the pay-to-not-shave citizen. (An image of the other side can be found at the America.gov archive.) Members of the Boyards received silver tokens while the proletariat received copper ones; the tax amount for commoners likely didn’t allow for the investment by the state in a silver token.

The beard tax proved similarly unpopular, sparking citizen revolts while not deriving much in the way of revenue. It did not last past Peter’s reign. However, the goals of this reform — and the others, of course — were by and large achieved. As Peter the Great’s Wikipedia entry notes, the tzar was widely successful in modernizing Russia’s culture.

Bonus fact: Abraham Lincoln is generally depicted with a beard, which makes sense, given that during his four-plus years as President, he had one. But he did not start growing his beard until October of 1860, while on the campaign trail hoping to win election to the White House. (In fact, the image of him on WIkipedia’s page discussing the 1860 election shows Lincoln as clean-shaven.) What makes a 51 year-old Presidential candidate grow his first beard, just weeks before Election Day? In this case, all it took was a letter from an 11 year-old girl, seen here, who asserted, “[a]ll the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” Lincoln, apparently, agreed.

From the Archives: John Wilkes Booth’s Heroic Brother: Another story of Lincoln’s.

Related: “The Facial Hair Handbook” by Jack Passion. 31 reviews, 4.4 stars, and one incredibly long beard on the cover.

The image above — yes, an arrow — is actually, in this case, an optical illusion. In 1889, German sociologist Franz Carl Muller-Lyer devised the following test: Look at the arrow above and put a mark on the midpoint of the horizontal line. Without exception, his test subjects believed that the midpoint was further to the right side than it should be. The stylized arrowheads, Muller-Lyer believed, caused the illusion that the line extended further to the right than it actually did. 

Over the years, the most common version of the illusion has been modified to appear as it does above. Two additional sets of lines are bound by arrows, one with the arrows pointing out, the other with the arrows pointing in. The former should appear shorter than the latter. But as seen below, all three lines are actually the same size. 

We don’t know what causes this. The most common explanation is that our brains perceive a third dimension — depth, as seen in this image – and accounts for that dimension in its measurement estimation. Regardless, chances are that if you’re reading these words, you will “see” the illusion and require the red-lined image above to be convinced that the lines are, in fact, of equal length. But not everyone is susceptible to the visual trick. 

Some cultures don’t fall prey to it at all.

In 1963, a team of researchers decided to test the Muller-Lyer illusion among people in sub-Saharan Africa. While the illusion worked, without fail, among the Americans and Europeans (and South Africans of European descent) that were tested, they wondered if the same would apply to people of less developed societies. It didn’t. As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the researchers showed similar images to bushmen from various tribes in Angola and the Ivory Coast. Many of them did not see the illusion at all, and were able to correctly “see” that the lines were of the same size.

Why this happens is unknown, but it throws a wrench into the generally favored theory as to why the illusion occurs in the first place. Redoubling that doubt? A recent study focused on a computational model which modeled the visual behavior of those fooled by the Muller-Lyer illusion, and found that the computer was, also, fooled. However, the computer was not exposed to any three-dimensional models, suggesting that the common explanation referenced above is incorrect.

Bonus fact: In the year 756, China’s Tang and Yan Dynasties fought at the Battle of Yongqiu. The Tang Dynasty won the battle (and, while suffering large losses, would also win the war, known as the An Shi Rebellion), and resoundingly, with losses of only about 500 to the Yan’s 20,000. One of the tactics the Tang Dynasty used in this triumph involved mannequins, which were lowered down from castles. The Yan archers would fire at the mannequins, unsure whether the human-shaped targets were real or fake. In doing so, the Yan forces not only were depleting themselves of ammunition, but also replenishing the supply of arrows for the Tang soldiers.

From the Archives: Leaning Out: Another illusion.

Related: “The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions” by Al Seckel. 47 reviews, 4.6 stars.

Hello Kitty, above, was created by the Japanese company Sanrio in 1974. She’s become an international sensation since; according to a New York Times article from May of 2010, the Hello Kitty brand is worth $5 billion a year. Originally intended for young children, Hello Kitty has branched out to dozens of different products and places – airplanes (as in, passenger jets); restaurants; televisions, both shows and the actual TVs themselves; toaster ovens and microwaves, and even “personal body massagers.” The end to where and on what her likeness will appear is endless.

Just ask some Thai police officers.

In 2007, a man named Pongpat Chayaphan became acting head of the Thailand’s Crime Suppression Unit, an intelligence agency. Chayaphan was a believer in the broken window theory promulgated by American researchers James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982. The theory suggested that the aftermath of petty crimes (such as graffiti, litter, and, unsurprisingly, broken windows) acted as signals that crime was tolerated locally, and, therefore, more serious crimes would be as well. By greatly reducing petty crimes, Wilson and Kelling argued, the rate of more serious crimes would also drop. While there is a healthy amount of debate over whether the theory is correct, Chayaphan was a devotee.

So he started with his own little experiment.

Thai police have a checkered history of misconduct, ranging from minor items to extrajudicial killing and a laundry list of other ills.  Believing that the broken window theory would help put an end to that, Chayphan focused on the minor, easily prevented violations. But when zero tolerance for petty infractions is your policy, you need a “punishment” which fits the “crimes” you’re aiming to stop. Chayaphan, per the New York Times, wanted to eliminate tardiness among his officers, as well as other bad habits such as littering and parking in someone else’s parking spot. Chayaphan told Reuters (as reported by the BBC) that his goal was to build discipline amongst his ranks, as this discipline would carry over to the rest of their jobs and, ultimately, to the crime rates in Thailand altogether.  The punishment? Garish pink Hello Kitty armbands.

If an officer under Chayaphan’s command broke even the smallest of rules, they’d be subject to donning the armband — only in the office, thankfully, but for at least a day. The theory, per the AP, is that the armband would evoke feelings of guilt and shame by the person forced to wear it, disincentivizing them from committing these minor offenses a second time.

As of 2007, when the armband policy made the news, no one had yet committed an armband-able offense.

Bonus fact: In 2000, Singapore’s McDonald’s restaurants gave out Hello Kitty dolls adorned in wedding gowns. The promotion was so popular that people went to McDonald’s and bought more hamburgers than they’d intend to eat, discarding the meat to get the toys. Unfortunately, supply of the dolls didn’t quite reach demand, leading to a riot in one franchise. Due to the violence, area McDonald’s did something unheard of for a hamburger vendor — they limited the number of hamburgers that any one customer could purchase at a time.

From the Archives: False Arrest: The Czech Republic’s creative way to limit traffic accidents.

Related: All 62,581 Hello Kitty results on Amazon. (You may need to click “next” a few thousand times.) Surprisingly, they don’t seem to have the armband.

At the time of this writing, it is 9:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time in New York City. It’s therefore 6:01 PM in Los Angeles, 7:01 PM in Denver, and 8:01 PM in Chicago. We don’t have to call anyone in those cities to determine that, because about a century ago, the U.S. government promulgated the Standard Time Act. The act, enacted on March 19, 1918, standardized the time (and, temporarily, Daylight Saving Time) throughout the nation, as well as giving a government agency power to officially establish of time zones.

But before the Standard Time Act, time was anything but standard. Cities and towns set their own time (see the bonus fact here for one way), and therefore, it could be 12:32 PM in Chicago, 12:28 PM in nearby Milwaukee, and 12:35 PM in Minneapolis, even though they’re all in the same time zone (now). In general, this wasn’t a big problem, because commerce and communications were either local or slow, and in either case, a few minutes of difference would not matter much, if at all.

And then the trains came.

Railways — which, early on, weren’t linked with one another — were unlike any other mode of transportation until that point. As mass transit was limited to the tracks and stations upon and through which they ran, the trains needed to be at the right place at a precise time in order to pick up passengers and freight. There was no way for the trains to adjust their clocks for the variances of local timekeeping. This was especially true given that town clocks were hardly immune from losing or gaining time, depending on how well the official town time was kept. So each railway, copying what had been done in the United Kingdom, created its own standard time — colloquially, “railway time” — which was internally consistent.

But with many railways, the problem got worse before it got better. Not only did each individual town have its own “local” time as well as the “railway” time which often (if not almost always) varied, but each railway had its own time, too. On October 11, 1883, representatives of the U.S. railways gathered in Chicago to solve this problem, and adopted a consistent timekeeping method across most of their services; at the same time, they instituted the first known time zone system. About thirty-five years later, the U.S. government would codify this unified railway time, creating an official time for the whole nation.

Bonus fact: One great example of how unimportant standard time was before railways comes from France during the late 1800s. The city’s official time was kept via a series of tubes which would push out compressed air which townspeople could hook into. It took a few seconds for the air to pass through the system, more if you were further from the source of the air and fewer if you were closer. So, as one book notes, the official time varied by a few seconds depending on where you were.

From the Archives: Hey, Let’s Crash Two Trains Together: A really bad idea involving trains. Really bad.

Related: A clock which requires a little bit of math.

On January 25, 1848, a man named James W. Marshall discovered gold in Coloma, California. As news spread, as many as 300,000 people came to the greater San Francisco area in search of similar fortunes; the California Gold Rush was in full force. Quickly, the prospector culture overtook the area and had a lasting effect on the city writ large; even the local football team, established in 1946, is named the 49ers because of the impact that the gold rush had on the growth and development of the city. So in 1871, when two men came to a San Francisco bank with a bag of diamonds, curiosities were understandably piqued.

Those two diamond-bearing men were cousins from Kentucky named Philip Arnold and John Slack. Learning the lessons from the Gold Rush, the pair were quiet about their gems, and decided to clam up instead of explaining where their new-found riches came from. And that made everyone even more curious. Their reluctance to talk about their mine lent credibility to the apparent value of their claim, and only when financiers and businessmen tracked them down did the cousins agree to let anyone come and visit where they allegedly obtained the diamonds from. Even then, the only visitor allowed was a mine inspector, who was brought to the site blindfolded in order to protect its true location, and was only invited after a group of investors came aboard. (Those investors included Charles Tiffany, founder of jeweler Tiffany & Co., and Horace Greeley, who just a few months later would unsuccessfully run for President.) The expert reported back that there were diamonds to be had, and the group of investors forked over $600,000 — which, in today’s dollars, would be well north of $11 million. And for a brief moment, a diamond rush broke out in Wyoming, Colorado, and the rest of the western United States.

And, just as quickly, the rush crashed — because there were no diamonds to be found. Arnold and Slack had pulled off a year-long hoax.

During the Gold Rush, con artists used to employ something called “salting” to prime interest in could-be mines. Buy a bit of gold or silver, sprinkle the dust all over the place, and hope that the mark either doesn’t know about the scam or falls prey to it. Salting efforts at times were incredibly complex; one (likely fictional) account tells the story of some swindlers planting a dead snake just as the claim inspectors were about to take their sample, just so they could fire their weapons — which had gold dust in the chambers — at the land they were about to scoop up. By the 1870s, most everyone was aware of such scams, but the promise of riches led many down a wayward path regardless. 

With temptation and curiosity both still very powerful, the Kentucky cousins hatched a salting plan of their own. The played the role of rubes and led “sophisticated” investors to a diamond-salted mine far away from San Francisco. Their Wyoming-area mine was salted with gems original from South Africa, obtained as cast-offs from diamond cutters in London and Amsterdam, and (according to one report) some of the diamonds even had tell-tale jewelers’ marks. It’s unclear why the investor’s expert was fooled by the scattered diamonds, but that success was short-lived. Another expert by the name of Clarence King (who later became the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey) determined that the mine was a hoax, making headlines across the country. The swindlers by and large got away with the scam (although some former investors sued Arnold and recovered a small amount via settlement), and the brief diamond rush came to an abrupt halt.

Bonus fact: Lots of gold prospectors meant lots of people who needed stuff, so in 1853, a man named Levi Strauss and his family moved to San Francisco to open a dry goods store, known as Levi Strauss & Co., which sold combs, purses, bedding, and of course, clothes. In 1872, around when Misters Arnold and Slack were about to be uncovered as fraudsters, Strauss and business partner Jacob Davis introduced copper-riveted denim pants — what we now call blue jeans — to area workers.

While Levi’s jeans have persisted to this day, one part of them almost didn’t. The back pocket has a double arch design called. the “Arcuate,” seen here, over which the company holds a trademark. During World War II, the U.S. government ruled that the design served no practical purpose and was only decorative, and due to wartime rations involving cotton, did not allow the company to use thread in such a manner. To maintain the trademark (as the design needed to remain in use), the company painted the design onto the jeans.

From the Archives: Oil Baron: An even bigger hoax.

Related: Eight dollars and fifty cents worth of fake diamonds, numbering 800 in total, for your diamond mine-salting needs.

By and large, modern societies (especially Western ones) protect historical landmarks from the whims of individuals. While these buildings, over time, often find themselves owned by private individuals or corporations, these protection laws prevent the owners from haphazardly renovating or destroying these architectural pieces of history. After all, a building with historical significance in the middle of an bustling urban center may not be worth all that much to the owner, but the land it’s sitting on sure would be.

On the other hand, owning a historical landmark can be a very good thing — because of the tourists it can attract. But too many tourists? That may sound like a good business, but to some, it’s a pretty big annoyance. Which is in part why William Shakespeare’s final home no longer exists.

Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, but did not find success until he moved to London in his late teens or early 20s. By his early 30s, however, he was already considering what to do in his retirement. His son, Hamnet, had recently died, and in 1597, Shakespeare purchased a home in Stratford-upon-Avon called “New Place,” a sketch (from 1737) of which is above.  In 1610, he and his family moved into New Place, which would become Shakespeare’s last residence; he died in 1616.

New Place was originally built in the late 1400s by a merchant named Hugh Clopton. The house was probably something Shakespeare took notice of growing up, as it is now known to have been one of the largest homes in the town at the time. Shakespeare’s daughter Suzanne inherited the house after his wife Anne’s death in 1623, and Suzanne, in turn, bequeathed it to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth ended up marrying Thomas Nash, literally the boy next door. When Elizabeth died, for some reason (perhaps because Elizabeth abandoned it to move next door, although that’s pure conjecture), Hugh Clopton’s heirs took ownership of New Place. One of Clopton’s heirs restored the house and in time, sold it to a reverend by the name of Francis Gastrell in the mid-1700s.

By 1753, Shakespeare’s fame had grown far and wide, and Gastrell’s home became a well-known tourist attraction. Even a mulberry tree, allegedly planted by the Bard of Avon himself, was the subject of interest from transient visitors. Gastrell, however, wasn’t looking to sell tickets to people who wanted to peek in his bedrooms or trample his garden; if anything, as the BBC notes, he found these visitors unwelcome and annoying. So he chopped down the mulberry tree.

This, of course, made the problem worse. Townspeople and tourists alike retaliated, throwing rocks through New Place’s windows (which seems like a silly way to protest against the destruction of a historical landmark). The town government stepped in — but not in Gastrell’s favor. It declined Gastrell’s request to expand New Place’s garden and upped his taxes. In 1759, Gastrell fought back:

He burned the house down.

Gastrell left Stratford-upon-Avon soon after, becoming a persona non grata after destroying the last home of William Shakespeare (and besides, it’s not like he could still live in the rubble and empty foundation into which he turned New Place). In 1891, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (which was established in 1846 to buy the Bard’s childhood home, in part to prevent U.S. showman P.T. Barnum from buying it and shipping it, “brick-by-brick,” to the States), purchased both the remnants of New Place as well as Thomas Nash’s home. The site is now open to tourists, without threat of further destruction.

Bonus fact: The term “too much of a good thing” was originated by Shakespeare. He first coined it in the play As You Like It.

From the Archives: Building, Apart: A house in China which defied demolition.

Related: An antique print of New Place, purporting to be from 1855, which (given the above) is strange.

The video above is a 13 minute long compilation of traffic accidents and other oddities from Russia, all taken from the point of view of the driver. There’s a horse crossing at a crosswalk and sheep, well, not; drivers obviously going the wrong direction and other inexplicably reckless driving; explosions and flips, and, uh, this, this, and this. (And that all is only from the first four or so minutes.) The amount of sheer ridiculousness is astounding. But it also prompts a question:

Why do all these Russian drivers have dashboard cameras in the first place?

The answer is mixed. In a report from late 2012, Al Jazeera estimated that one million Russians — nearly one percent of the population — use dashboard cameras. Given that not all Russians drive (for example, children can’t — although given the video, who knows), that’s a sizable chunk. Russia’s population (141 million) is about 45% of that of the United States (313 million), but you don’t see nearly as many dashboard cameras here. One reason is that driving in Russia is simply a lot more dangerous. Despite the much smaller population and the lower population density in Russia, both countries have roughly the same number of motor vehicle deaths each year, at around 30,000 to 35,000.

The high mortality rate underscores the similarly high rate of accidents, as evidenced by the video. But while that explains why the dash cams can get all sorts of patently ridiculous stuff caught on video, it only partially explains the cameras — it’s not like the entire nation is collectively, intentionally, creating a real-life version of Grand Theft Auto. Rather, the cameras are there for security — from road raging motorists as well as the legal and insurance systems. One report sums it up: “Dash-cam footage is the only real way to substantiate your claims in the court of law.”

And we aren’t talking about fender benders or lazy police officers. The issue is much more nefarious. As Wired reported, many of the videos — none seen in the clip above, because YouTube policies disallow for such content — involve “profanity-laden fist-fights, massive crashes, and gruesome deaths,” any of which would easily make the news in the U.S. and most other places. If that does happen, and you’re the victim, proving it is tough. TIME notes that the courts there “won’t, apparently, take physical bruises as evidence of bodily harm.” Further, TIME reports, “dash cam footage helps prevent against bribery, police brutality and intimidation by traffic police, which 32 percent of Russians called the most corrupt institution in the country.”

Because of the distrust in the system and the rampant bad driving, insurance rates in Russia have gone through the roof — and denials of coverage have, too. Without the dashboard cameras, it’s easy for the insurer to decline to pay the injured insured; as Geek.com reported, “scams became so common that Russian auto insurance companies [were] denying claims with little reason.” And because very few people have anything more than basic liability insurance (that is, they’re uninsured unless they can show someone else caused the harm), a simple hit-and-run can become incredibly costly — unless you can demonstrate who hit you. So if you’re driving in Russia, you probably want that dashboard cam –  as one person told Wired, “you can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam.”

Bonus fact: One other benefit of Russian dashboard cameras? Capturing meteor explosions on video. When a meteor unexpectedly struck Siberia on February 15, 2013, no one knew to get the cameras ready — but thankfully (for science!) a few drivers had their dash cams running.

From the Archives: Eternal Flame Pit: After the meteor hit in Russia, a number of media outlets incorrectly reported a picture of a burning pit of fire in the country. This is what they were talking about. (It’s not related to the meteor, at all.)

Related: A wide variety of dashboard cameras.

That happened in Scotland in the early 1700s. But the medical students weren’t stealing stethoscopes. They were stealing something much less sterile: corpses.

We want our doctors to understand the human anatomy, and a great (albeit gross, to many) way to learn about how our bodies work is to look inside one. For good reason, we’d not allow for the dissection of a living person, so cadavers are used. This has been true for centuries. But Scotland’s cadavers were provided by the government, and only the bodies of executed criminals were made available. Students, unable to further their studies, turned to grave robbing.

The practice lasted for more than a century. The government knew full well what was going on, but not wanting to impede the advancement of medicine, by and large ignored the problem. But around 1816, the public tide turned. The dead’s bodies were believed to be sacred, waiting for the Resurrection; taking the bodies was heretical.

Instead of revolting, the deceased’s survivors put up defenses. Well-off Scots built mausoleums and even watchtowers for their dearly departed, but for most, the expense of these postmortem luxuries put them out of reach. In 1816, an invention, seen above, solved that. Called “mortsafes,” these devices were typically made of iron and, as one could imagine, weighed an immense amount. Buried, in part, within the grave, the mortsafes were difficult at best to remove by a single person working under cover of darkness. Further, they often involved some sort of locking mechanism, as seen below, thereby ensuring that only the deceased’s family, church, or trusted others could easily remove the mortsafe. And by making them removable, the costs went further down. After a few weeks (allowing the body to decompose and therefore lose value to body snatching medical students), the mortsafe was typically removed and rented out to another grieving family.

Because of this, few mortsafes remain on grave sites today. But they were not in use for long. About a decade or two later, in response to the public’s concern about body snatching, the UK passed the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed families to donate the bodies of the recently deceased to science.

Bonus fact: Like the mortsafe, the stethoscope was also invented in 1816. But the original one did not resemble the device we are used to today. As seen here, they were simply horns that were pressed (lightly, one hopes) against the patient’s chest to hear his or her heartbeat. Still today, a modified version of this device, called a Pinard horn, is used in some parts of the world as a way to measure a fetus’ heart rate during pregnancy — as an inexpensive alternative to an ultrasound.

From the Archives: Saved by the Bell: Do not mix the contraption discussed there with the contraption discussed here.

Related: “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. 587 reviews, 4.5 stars, which combined suggests it’s probably a pretty good read.

The airplane pictured above is a Supermarine Spitfire, a small aircraft used by the British Royal Air Force in World War II. The plane is decorated with black and white stripes — invasion stripes added for the D-Day invasion — and a small red, white, and black emblem on the tail, but is otherwise pink. This is not a common color scheme for the single-man fighter. Typically, Spitfires came with dark colors on top (often green, as seen here), in hopes of blending in with the terrain below in case an enemy plane, at a higher altitude, were to look in its general direction. And in the same vein, a pink plane would have the opposite effect — against the green backdrop of the ground or ocean below, the Spitfire above would be instantly noticed.

Usually.

World War II took place well before the era of spy satellites, drones, and other technological advances which make overhead intel much easier to gather. For the British to know what the Germans were up to, they needed to fly overhead and, literally, take pictures. Many in the Royal Air Force were tasked with photo reconnaissance missions, and the Spitfire — a small, one-man fighter — was, let’s say, able to penetrate (or evade) the Germans’ outer defenses. But that was only part of the goal. The Spitfire still needed to fly over the targeted areas, take its pictures, and return back safely. That required evading detection for much longer, ideally for the entire mission.

The Royal Air Force allowed photo recon units to experiment a bit with how to get that part done, especially when it came to painting the planes. Over the course of the war, the Spitfires were outfitted in all sorts of colors, with the pink seen above one of those ideas. The theory: use the sunsets, sunrises, and most importantly, the clouds as your allies.

As io9 explained, the cloud layer proved to be excellent cover for these planes. The Spitfires would run their missions at a relatively low altitude, hanging as close to the bottom of the clouds as possible. Enemy planes would have trouble seeing them through or against clouds, as would forces on the ground. The pink planes, which stood out on the ground, were much harder to detect when in air — which is where they were being used.

Very little more is known about these planes — the number made pink, the frequency of their use, etc. But given their spy missions, that seems reasonable.

Bonus fact: Planes weren’t the only things turned “invisible pink” during the war. A British officer, Louis Mountbatten, noticed that a ship still in pre-war lavender appeared to vanish against the horizon at dawn and dusk. Believing that this would give the Royal Navy an advantage, Mountbatten ordered that several other ships be painted in a similar color, a dark pink approaching gray now called Mountbatten pink (see the color here). Other naval officers similarly had their ships painted that color, starting a trend. But whether the color provided any actual value is unknown — it was never tested in any official, scientific capacity.

From the Archives: Invisible Ink: Totally unrelated to the above, but the titles are so close…

Related: Pinkalicious.

Google the phrase “magic of compound interest” and you’ll come up with about 4 million or so results. Compound interest — which Albert Einstein may have called ”the most powerful force in the universe” — is the simple idea that when initial money deposited into the bank (the principal) collects interest, and that interest is added to the principal, the interest itself begins collecting interest. The money builds upon itself, allowing the person holding the bank account or trust to, over time, build up a sizable war chest.

But what if you kept the money in an account, earning interest, for decades if not centuries? What would happen?

To answer this, all we need to do is go to Ben Franklin, who did exactly that.

In his will, the American statesman left 1,000 pounds each — the equivalent of about $4,400 at the time — to the cities of Philadelphia and Boston. But the cities were not given access to the money immediately. Instead, Franklin required that the money be held in trust for 100 years after his death. (Franklin died in 1790.) After that, the cities could remove a portion of the trust money to establish a trade school. But not all of the money could be withdrawn; some had to remain for another 100 years.

Franklin’s investment on behalf of the cities paid out handsomely. When he placed the money in trust in 1785, the 2,000 pounds combined was worth about $100,000 to $125,000 in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation. When the trusts became due in 1990, Philadelphia’s was worth $2 million — well outpacing inflation. Boston’s trust, which withdrew less money during the trust’s second century, was worth $5 million. Philadelphia used the $2 million windfall to provide scholarships for area high schoolers. Boston used the $5 million to fund the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, which was established out of the trust’s funds which were withdrawn 100 years earlier, after a bit of litigation.

One may wonder what would happen if America’s elder statesman had required that the trust remain for another century or so. In that case, however, the trust may be ruled illegal. As recounted by Lapham’s Quarterly, in 1938, a lawyer by the name of Jonathan Holden took $2.5 million and divided it into a series of trusts, each of which had 500 or 1,000 year locks on them. One of the trusts was given to the Unitarian Church; another to Hartwick College in the Catskills of New York, as two of his children and one of his grandchildren went there; and another was given to the state of Pennsylvania, as a way to honor Ben Franklin for inspiring the wonderful idea. (Holden’s goal was to make it so that the citizens of the state never had to pay taxes again — starting in the year 2938 or so.)

These trusts, soon known as the Holdeen Trusts (he would later change his last name to “Holdeen” in order to differentiate himself from other Jonathan Holdens), soon ran into a problem. The size of an ever-growing trust of that starting size and duration, could, economists feared, outpace the net worth of the known universe. Holden, himself, estimated that the trust for the Unitarian Church itself could reach $2.5 quadrillion (that’s 2.5 thousand trillions, or 2.5 million billions) by the time it became payable; that could outstrip the GDP of the country, if not the world, by the end of the 500 year trust lockup. And the 1,000 trusts? They’d be even more likely to overtake the global economy.

Litigation over the validity of the trusts hit full swing after Holdeen’s death in 1967. Perhaps surprisingly, even the would-be beneficiaries of the trusts were, by and large, not fans of how the trusts were set up; while a quadrillion or so dollars in the year 2430-something sounds great, immediate access to a few million bucks sounds much, much better. (After all, we don’t even know if the Vulcans or Romulans accept U.S. currency. And forget about the Borg.) The Pennsylvanian courts agreed, kind of. In 1977, a judge ruled that the trusts could remain for however-many centuries Holdeen required, but the interest could not be reinvested; rather, it had to be paid out to the beneficiary each year. Hartwick College, therefore, gets about $450,000 annually from their Holdeen Trust and, in or around 2936, will receive a lump sum payment of $9 million.

Bonus fact: Lawyers often have to hold money in escrow on behalf of their clients. For example, when someone purchases a house, the down payment gets put into escrow until the closing occurs typically 60 to 90 days later. While these relatively small amounts of money are put in the bank for a similarly small amount of time, the administrative costs of dealing with the interest would eat up any value provided. In 1983, the state of New York came up with a solution for these homeless dimes and dollars, setting up something called the IOLA Fund. IOLA — which stands for “Interest on Lawyer Accounts” — acts as a pooled bank account, allowing the administrative costs to be managed centrally. The interest from the fund is used to help defray legal costs for the poor, elderly, and disabled in the state. (New York is not unique here; other states have similar programs.)

From the Archives: Collecting Dust, Not Interest: A lot of money which isn’t experiencing the magic of compound interest.

Related: “The Wit and Wisdom of Ben Franklin,” a collection of 900 or so quotes.

Pictured above are the doorways to numbers 22 (left) and 23 (right) Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, London. In the 1930s, #23 made news when a handful of London’s elites showed up to the door, dressed in evening wear, for a charity ball — only to find out that no one was home. Or, more accurately, that 23 Leinster Gardens was no one’s home — and in, fact, it wasn’t a home at all. The door wasn’t a door. The windows weren’t windows. And if they had scaled the white-painted brick facade, they would have seen that behind this front wall was nothing at all.

23 Leinster Gardens isn’t a house. It’s a wall painted to look like one.

In 1863, London began operation of the Metropolitan Railway, a predecessor of today’s London Underground. It slowly expanded over the next few decades, and in 1868, the city transit system built tracks underneath Leinster Gardens. Specifically  the tracks ran under #23 and #24 Leinster Gardens, and the construction team determined that the railway system required ventilation in that area. So they aimed to tear down the buildings and left open-air tracks, below street level, exposed to the community. But that would leave an unsightly gap in a rather upscale area, so the interested parties came to a compromise: a fake front, with painted-on doors and windows and no means of entry to a house which doesn’t exist.

Behind the facade? As seen in the fourth and fifth images here, there’s not a whole lot. There is no structure behind the wall adorned with false windows and a door — just open space. A brick wall (see the sixth image on that link) obscures the rear view from the street, but get high enough and you can see the girders running above a two-track-wide gap. A train tunnel runs under Leinster Gardens (the street) itself, and where #23 and #24 would be, there is instead an otherwise unobstructed view (girders aside) of trains on the Underground’s Circle and District lines.

While the building (or lack thereof) is an open secret, it isn’t a well-known fact. Just ask the area pizza delivery joints. According to the Daily Mail, fake orders to 23 Leinster Gardens are a common occurrence, and all too often, unnoticed until the driver arrives at his or her non-destination.

Bonus fact: London isn’t the only city with tracks hidden under a faux home. New York has this too, in Brooklyn. In the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, there’s a brownstone which is really a ventilator for the New York City Subway. The home which was originally built in the 1800s is now a doorway into the subway system; unlike the Leinster Gardens building, the door actually works (but it leads to a stairwell leading down). More photos of the “home” can be found here.

From the Archives: The President’s Secret Train Station: Another secret of New York City’s transit system.

Related: An art print from the Museum of London from the 1866-1868 period, showing the construction of the Leinster Gardens train opening.

Before steroids and other “performance enhancing drugs” (in baseball parlance, “PEDs”) became the scandal du jour in Major League Baseball, batters were often accused of corking their bats — hollowing out the wooden insides and replacing it with lighter material such as a cork core (obviously) or rubber balls. The theory — which, as it happens, is wrong — is that the lighter bat allows the batter to swing the bat faster, and, therefore, allows him to hit the ball with more power.

Over the course of Major League history, dozens of players have been accused of corking their bats. Only six have been suspended, with Sammy Sosa the most recent, receiving an eight game league-mandated benching in 2003. In five of the six cases, the suspended player claimed that he didn’t know the bat was doctored because he was using someone else’s bat, or the batboy handed him the wrong one, or some other plausible-but-boring excuse for the infraction.

Albert Belle and the Indians had more style.

On July 15, 1994, Belle’s Indians faced off against the White Sox in Chicago. The two teams were neck and neck for the division lead. The White Sox’s manager, Gene Lamont, had gotten a tip that Belle’s bats were corked. He asked umpire Dave Phillips to confiscate one of Belle’s bats for inspection; Phillips, per the rule at the time, agreed, and brought the bat to the umpires’ locker room.

The Indians knew the truth: the confiscated bat was corked. All of Belle’s bats were corked. And Belle — a perennial Most Valuable Player award candidate — was all but certain to be suspended. But Belle’s teammate, relief pitcher Jason Grimsley had a solution — a lumber rescue mission he’d end up spearheading.

As he’d confess to the New York Times, Grimsley noticed that the visitors’ locker room and clubhouse had a false ceiling with removable tiles and, given that the umpires’ locker room was on the same floor, assumed that theirs had the same feature. While cinder block walls separated the rooms, Grimsley surmised that a person could go into the ceiling, travel over the walls, and end up in another room. With his teammates’ blessing, Grimsley and another person — not a player, but someone who worked for the team — grabbed a non-corked bat, used by first baseman Paul Sorrento, and a flashlight and went to switch out the incriminating evidence.

The mission took about an hour and had a couple of close calls — on the way there, they misjudged and ended up peeking into the groundskeepers’ quarters, and on the way back, just as Grimsley and accomplice were leaving, someone entered the umpires’ locker room. And while they succeeded in switching the bats, it was all for naught. Phillips, upon returning to the locker room, noticed that the bat had Sorrento’s name on it, not Belle’s.

The theft of the bat was not treated lightly. The White Sox called the Chicago police to investigate, who dusted for prints and were able to determine how the then-unknown bat burglar got into the locker room. The American League, which at the time was charged with doling out punishments to player for infractions such as corked bats, threatened to bring in the FBI to investigate. But instead, the league made the Indians an offer: provide the league office with one of Belle’s bats or risk further suspensions for the alleged bat swap.

The Indians agreed, and the league office x-rayed one of Belle’s bats and, in his presence and that of Cleveland General Manager John Hart, sawed it in half. The bat, as everyone knew, was corked, and Belle received a seven game suspension.

Grimsley, despite his confession five years after the “crime,” was never punished.

Bonus fact: Ever wonder how cork is made? Here’s how.

From the Archives: Swing and a Miss: The 17 year-old girl who struck out Babe Ruth — and then some.

Related: Cork, or, if you prefer, a secret agent costume.

This year, Daniel Day-Lewis (there’s a hyphen) became the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Actor three times. He joined Katharine Hepburn (who won four Oscars), Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Walter Brennan, and Meryl Streep as the only actors, to date, to take home three or more of the statuettes.

Unfortunately, he or his heirs may have to return the little golden men one day — if they try to sell them.

Each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (“AMPAS”) gives out Oscar statuettes — officially called the Academy Award of Merit — in a variety of categories, now numbering 24. AMPAS has been giving out Oscars since the 1929, and while there are not a lot of statuettes out there, there are certainly enough where a shrewd collector could find someone willing to sell one. And there have been many instances of such sales, as evidenced by the fair number of Oscars in the hands of non-winners; for example, magician David Copperfield reportedly purchased the 1943 Best Director Oscar, awarded to Casablanca, for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. (The award was later placed up for auction, by a subsequent owner, at a price near $3 million.)

But AMPAS, most likely in an effort to keep the winners’ circle (and accompanying statuette) exclusive, has put a wrench in such transactions. Since 1950, Academy Award winners must agree to give AMPAS first right of refusal if the honoree (or his or her heirs) ever try to sell their Oscar(s) to a third party. If they do so agree, AMPAS’s repurchase price is $1 — yes, one dollar. And if the honoree refuses to sign that contract, AMPAS similarly refuses to give them the Oscar they otherwise earned.

Enforcement of the clause isn’t unheard of, either. As Quartz reported, actress Mary Pickford won an Oscar in 1929 and another (an honorary one) in 1975. The 1929 award was not encumbered by the clause but the 1975 one was, and when her heirs tried to sell the former, AMPAS argued — successfully — that when Pickford accepted the latter statuette, she agreed retroactively to bind her first award to the $1 terms. On the other hand, in 2011, CNN reported that Orson Welles’ heirs put his award for Best Original Screenplay from 1941 on the auction block. AMPAS couldn’t prevent the sale, as Welles hadn’t signed the (at that point non-existent) agreement.

Whether the clause should be enforceable is a matter of debate by legal scholars and, practically speaking, enforcement is a difficult call to order regardless. Forbes estimates that roughly 150 Oscars have been sold since AMPAS began awarding them in 1929, and about half of them are “gray-market sales involving post 1950-statuettes”.

Bonus fact: Among the purchasers of statuettes are two multi-Oscar winners in their own right: Steven Spielberg and Kevin Spacey. Combined, the pair paid over $700,000 for the statuettes. But as Forbes reports, neither Spielberg nor Spacey purchased the Oscars for their own use. Rather, both donated the purchased awards to AMPAS, which now keeps them in a vault. AMPAS does not put repurchased or returned Oscars on display.

From the Archives: And the Oscar Doesn’t Go To…: How those involved with some movies avoid the “fame” that comes with it.

Related: A 12-pack of fake looking fake Oscars.

Celebrities — musicians, in this case — often get the reputation of being quirky and immature, expecting the world to kowtow to their every whim and demand. This is especially true — at least, per the rumor mill — when it comes to the backstage requests of singers and other performers. For example, rock band Van Halen is famous (perhaps infamous) for their 50-plus page “technical manual” from the 1980s which demanded, among other things, a dish of M&Ms — with, in all capital letters, a warning that the brown M&Ms be removed.

Crazy? At first blush, sure. But in reality, the M&M demand is a subtle and arguably brilliant way to prevent major carnage.

The full rider (it isn’t online, but here’s the page with the M&Ms demand) is mostly reasonable, even to the untrained eye. While a half-dozen or so pages are dedicated to the band and crew’s meal requirements, most of the document lays out the band’s technical needs in order to perform the show that the audience expected. As on-again, off-again lead singer David Lee Roth would later explain in a video, the Van Halen performances of the 1980s pushed the envelope of what was technically doable at the time, consisting of enormous light shows requiring more electricity than some arenas could handle, and setup instructions well beyond what typical show promoters were used to. Per Roth, the Van Halen rider was much larger than typical — a “Chinese phonebook” compared to a “pamphlet” — and it was of the utmost importance that the promoter read and execute on every single line of it, to the tee.

Checking everything the day of a concert would prove impossible, however, so Roth claims that he had the M&Ms requirement inserted as a way to make sure that no detail of the rider was overlooked. (Roth claims that the M&Ms demand was inserted as a non-sequitur, buried among actual technical requirements, but as the image above shows, that’s not quite the case.) Lots of brown M&Ms? It meant that someone, probably, made a mistake — and potentially, one much bigger than having candy with the wrong dye.

One such example? Roth, in the video above, talks about a New Mexico venue with a brand new stage — one which, unfortunately, could not handle the weight of all the equipment that the band brought with them, which was made clear by the rider. The stage sunk, doing what Roth recounts as nearly half a million dollars in damage.

Bonus fact: Actor Ben Stiller once told Total Film magazine (as relayed by New Zealand website Stuff) that he is addicted to peanut M&Ms: “The only thing I’m addicted to is M&M’s. I actually went to a hypnotist to get over M&M’s because I was eating a pound of peanut M&Ms a day. He helped me get off them in 1999 for six months, but it came back. So around 4pm in the afternoon, I have a packet of them.” (Whether Stiller was truly addicted to the candies is anyone’s guess — there’s a very good chance he was just deadpanning a joke. Total Film’s website makes no mention of this rather ridiculous “scoop.”)

From the Archives: Vodka and Cola: The bonus fact notes why peanut butter M&Ms are relatively new. (Van Halen fans will also notice something related to the band in that article, although they’re not mentioned.)

Related: Ten pounds of brown M&Ms. Price: About $200 to $250.

Bill Cosby and his fictional family dominated the sitcom world in the 1980s. Their 202 episodes of The Cosby Show ran for eight seasons. The show’s impact on American culture is hard to overstate. TV Guide credited the show with reviving the sitcom genre. The Cosby Show was one of the first shows centered around an African-American family, and even had an effect on the fashion world. Bill Cosby’s character, Cliff Huxtable, wore sweaters, and not just any sweaters, but garish ones. The sweaters were often multi-colored explosions of strange patterns and abstract shapes, which suited the quirky Dr. Huxtable well, but were a major departure from the generally buttoned-up wardrobe of the typical television protagonist of the day.

The “Cosby sweater,” as the style would soon become known, became a trademark of the show and of the comedian himself. And it was something which almost never happened.

The Cosby Show‘s camera direction required for a lot of close ups and, given the nature of television production, a lot of takes. But having Cosby wear a traditional sports coat and collared shirt caused a problem: collars move. As Smithsonian magazine explained, re-adjusting the collars after every take to keep them in the same place to provide consistency would be impossible, so the directors went with a total wardrobe overhaul. Cliff Huxtable became a sweater-wearing doctor. (Eventually, the wardrobe crew would sew Cosby’s shirts and sweaters together, to minimize movement even further.)

The designs for the sweaters, as Collectors Weekly explains, were similarly unintended — at first. A designer working with the show, Koos Van Den Akker, was asked to get a sweater for Mr. Cosby and spotted a women’s sweater in a larger size and handed it over. Per Van Den Akker, “[Cosby] put it on, and it looked great, and he had to go on camera right away so he kept it on, and that is how [the trend] began.”

Bonus fact: If you want an original, Bill Cosby-worn Cosby sweater, you can have one — for a price, and only after Mr. Cosby passes. In 2008, he told Seattle Weekly (jokingly — or, perhaps, half-jokingly) that his wife has them hidden in their house, and he has no idea where they are. He expects that his family will auction them off to benefit a charitable cause after his death.
From the Archives: Television Dreams: The advent of color television may have caused us to dream in color.

Related: The Cosby Show, the complete series, on DVD.

Soon after 9/11, American troops came to Kabul, Afghanistan, hoping to stop terrorists cells before they could strike again. Kabul has had an American military presence since, and, for the last eight years, some residents there have felt the economic effect of the troops’ presence.

Which is why, according to the Washington Post, some welcome the troops — and hope they stay longer.

American troops come with guns, tanks, and all sorts of other weaponry, but they also come with other stuff, like snacks and toiletries and various other sundries not typically found in Afghanistan. About eight years ago, a black market of sorts opened up in the capital city of this war-torn country, named the “Bush Market,” after George W. Bush, the president who ordered the troops to Afghanistan originally. The Bush Market has an estimated 600 shops and booths, selling everything from hair dye and acne medicine to Pop-Tarts and other goodies.

While those items are intended to be used by American servicemen, they often find themselves in the hands of Afghan vendors — sometimes via trade, but most often via theft. As the Post explains, while most of the items are stolen property, Afghan authorities leave the market alone unless the Americans ask — and that is rare. The U.S. tends to leave the Bush Market be unless something sensitive is believed to have ended up there. That hasn’t happened in roughly two years.

Despite the presence of armed men loyal to another nation, many of the vendors want the American troops to remain. The vendors figure that when the soldiers leave, so goes their shops’ inventory. One vendor interviewed by the Post even believes that reports of a troop pullout have a negative effect on the marketplace’s economy, given the uncertainty around the supply of available goods.

Until then? As one anonymous merchant told the Post, a lot of Afghan merchants, are, by Afghanistan’s standards, getting “very rich doing this.”

Bonus fact: The fact that Pop-Tarts are popular in the Bush Market shouldn’t be a surprise — but it should be credited to the United States as a success. In 2001, the U.S. began airdropping food (in the form of military rations called “meals ready to eat,” or MREs) in Afghanistan, hoping to feed some of the millions of people there who found food lacking. Many of the MREs contained Pop-Tarts, which were specifically included to “introduce Afghans to American food,” per the Baltimore Sun. Later reports suggested that the U.S. dropped well over two million Pop-Tarts in Afghanistan that year.

From the Archives: The Last Jew in Afghanistan: Self-explanatory.

Related: 96 blueberry-flavored Pop-Tarts.

Salty and sweet are distinct tastes which our taste buds are able to detect. But add some salt to pineapple and you’ll notice something strange — it doesn’t taste salty at all. In fact, the pineapple seems to taste sweeter when the salt is added than it does otherwise. What’s going on here? Just some neat kitchen chemistry.

Bitterness — another taste we can pick up on — and sweetness cancel each other out to some degree. One of the reasons it makes sense to add sugar to your coffee is because coffee naturally is bitter, and by doing so, you end up countering the bitterness more than anything else. And in this case, what’s true for coffee is also true for pineapples. Kind of.

Pineapples are inherently sweet but also have some bitterness to them. If we can neutralize the bitterness, it would follow that the pineapple would taste sweeter. Salt does exactly this. Salt, as any 8th grade science student can tell you, is NaCl — sodium chloride. And when it mixes with the pineapple, the salt splits up into sodium and chloride ions. The chloride is tasteless (and harmless in those amounts — or, no more harmful than it would be as salt) and our tongues ignore it. The sodium, on the other hand, bonds with the acids in the pineapple and forms a similarly tasteless salt once again. In doing so, the acids in the pineapple “disappear” from our tastebuds, and the bitterness goes with them.

All that’s left is the sweet-tasting sugars found in the fruit, and, with nothing to counteract that, these sugars take over. The salt doesn’t make the pineapple sweeter — at least not directly — but simply less bitter. Our palates aren’t nuanced enough to detect the difference.

Bonus fact: You may notice that a lot of salt for sale in grocery stores is termed “kosher salt.” It’s not because the salt itself follows Jewish dietary laws. Rather, kosher salt gets its name from a biblical rule which calls for the salting of meat in order to remove surface blood. The salt should more appropriately be called “koshering salt.”

Double bonus!: Yes, that picture above is how pineapples actually grow.

From the Archives: Schtroumpf: It’s about salt. Kind of.

Related: Pineapple salt and pepper shakers. Just make sure you grab the right one when eating actual pineapples.

“Christ is coming.”

Depending on the context, the above sentence can be anything from a benediction to a warning of impending Apocalypse. While often, the context makes the intended meaning clear, other times, it obfuscates the message. In Leeds, England, in 1806, the message was certainly clouded by the messenger.

The message appeared on the recently-laid eggs of a hen.

As retold in the book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” written by Scottish author Charles Mackay in 1841, details of the eggs caused a “panic[ked] terror” in the area as a “great number of visitors” traveled to Leeds to visit this allegedly prophetic chicken. And when they arrived, the promise of a hen laying eggs bearing the Apocalyptic message was delivered upon.

But of course, the world did not end in 1806. The eggs weren’t the word of a harbinger of doom, redemption, or anything else — because the eggs weren’t truly a message from the unknown. What happened?

The owner of the hen, per Wikipedia, was a woman named Mary Bateman, more commonly known as the “Yorkshire Witch.” Bateman, a repeated fraudster who would end up dying in the gallows for murder, had used some sort of “corrosive ink” (acid, perhaps) to inscribe the quote on eggs — and then re-inserted the eggs into the hen, so that they could be laid again. Her ruse was discovered one morning when a visitor to the “prophetic” hen caught her in the act.

Bonus fact: What was Bateman’s capital crime? Also in 1806, she convinced a husband and wife, complaining of chest pains, that they were cursed. She further convinced them that the curse could only be lifted by consuming some enchanting pudding she had concocted. But Bateman had laced the pudding with poison, perhaps in an effort to keep her clients from naturally recovering from the chest pains. The wife ended up dying from the poisonous pudding (the husband didn’t like the pudding and stopped the “treatment” earlier).

From the Archives: Seeing Red in the Hen House: It’s about murderous chickens wearing sunglasses.

Related: A book titled “Chicken of the Apocalypse,” proving that there’s a book about virtually every possible topic.

Redundancy and efficiency don’t go well together. We wear belts or suspenders, not and, because having both would be unnecessary and the extra cost or discomfort isn’t worth it. But sometimes, having a backup plan is a good idea, especially when the risk of failure is incredibly high. If you are operating a commercial airline, for example, it makes a lot of sense to have a pilot and a co-pilot, because if something happens to the pilot, you really need someone who can still fly the plane. Even if it ends up costing a little more.

Co-pilots are trained to do everything a pilot can, in case of emergency. But there’s one thing, for most airlines at least, that the co-pilot can’t do. He or she cannot have the same meal as the pilot.

The co-pilot’s job isn’t simply to be the backup plan — he or she assists in takeoffs, landings, and in a variety of in-flight duties, making sure that everything is being done properly and that the safety and best practices checklists are followed. While most modern planes can be piloted by one person if need be, that’s not a great idea, as people make mistakes (and in this case, mistakes can have massive consequences. In November of 2012, for example, the co-pilot of a Lufthansa flight from Newark, New Jersey to Frankfurt, Germany became ill, and an off-duty pilot for another airline, who happened to be a passenger, helped land the plane. (The plane diverted to Dublin, Ireland, due to the co-pilot’s illness.) While the passenger’s skills lessened the potential problem, it isn’t fair to say he prevented a disaster, though; the flight crew could have assisted the pilot sufficiently to land the plane safely — most likely.

It’s rare, however, that both the pilot and co-pilot will become incapacitated, save for something truly nefarious such as a hijacking. One exception? Food poisoning. As recounted by a New York Times article from March of 1984, numerous times, flights were put at risk by contaminated food. In 1982, for example, a flight from Boston to Lisbon had to return to Massachusetts after both the pilot and co-pilot (and six others) fell ill after eating bad tapioca pudding. And in 1975, roughly a third of a 364 person flight going from Tokyo to Paris became ill after eating eggs which contained staphylococcal bacteria. The only reason the pilot and co-pilot didn’t get sick? Their internal clocks were on a different schedule, and instead of eating breakfast, they dined on steak — dinner. The Times article advocated for rules which prevented pilot and co-pilot from sharing meals, something which wasn’t regulated at the time.

But as the BBC reported in 2009, that has mostly changed. That year, a Continental flight from Brussels to Newark made an ultimately safe trip to its destination despite the fact that the pilot died in mid-flight. As the BBC noted in that article, “the main reason for having two pilots is that something like this occasionally happens – though it’s less common for a pilot to die than to be incapacitated by something like food-poisoning.” And because of that concern, today’s airlines, by and large, require that the co-pilot not eat the same meals as the pilot.

Who gets first choice? That’s left unreported, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the head pilot gets that privilege.

Bonus fact: Making good tasting airline food is very difficult for, perhaps, a surprising reason. According to Alaska Airlines’ corporate chef Clifton Lyles (via NPR), at an airplane’s cruising altitude, our taste buds are about 25% less effective than normal. From the article: “as the cabin is pressurized and the humidity inside the plane falls, some of your taste buds go numb, and your sense of smell is diminished, too. Things that tasted great on the ground are now bland and boring.”

From the Archives: Flying Signs: The surprising physics behind the advertising banners airplanes sometimes have in tow.

Related: Astronaut Ice Cream: Kind of like airline food, except awesome.

Lake Peigneur is located in Louisiana, about 125 to 150 miles (200 to 250 km) west of New Orleans. If one visited it 35 years ago or so, you would have found a freshwater lake that, at its deepest, was only about ten feet (3 m) down, well-stocked with lots of fish appropriate for the environment. And if you were there on November 20, 1980, you would have seen a 150 foot high oil derrick disappear into a lake barely deep enough to sink a sailboat.

Texaco, an American petroleum company (since acquired by Chevron), was drilling in Lake Peigneur, hoping to find oil roughly 1,400 feet (430 meters) below the water’s surface. We’re not entirely sure what happened that day — when 150-foot structures disappear into ten feet of water, there will always be more questions than answers — but more likely than not, the Texaco engineers made a small mistake. Their 14-inch (.35 m) drill bit was off the mark, and went a bit sideways. Normally, that’d not be a big deal — it would just mean that the rig was not going to find any oil. But Lake Peigneur wasn’t sitting on an oil reserve — or, at least, not only on an oil reserve. About 1,400 feet below the surface of Lake Peigneur was the third level of a salt mine operated by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company. And the hole that the oil rig created led the lake’s water right into the mine’s ceiling.

If you’ve ever added salt to water, you know that the two don’t mix all that well — the salt dissolves, and pretty quickly. And if you’re operating a large-scale salt mine, it is a very, very bad thing to have an entire lake — 2.5 billion gallons of water, in this case — start flowing in through the crack in a ceiling. This is especially true in the above case, because the salt mine in question (and pragmatically, this makes sense for most salt mines) used salt pillars to support the ceilings against the weight of the levels above. When the water comes rushing in, everything collapses. Everything — including 150 foot oil rigs.

Within minutes, a whirlpool formed at the surface of Lake Peigneur as the water drained into the mine. The whirlpool began sucking everything in the lake into its ever-increasing vortex. Down went the drilling rig and its platform; a dozen boats, many of which were barges carrying things such as trucks; and, perhaps most incredibly, 65 acres of land, including an entire island. Delcambre Canal, which before that day was the lake’s outlet (ultimately) to the Gulf of Mexico, reversed course, bringing saltwater from the Gulf into the lake. For a few days, the reversed waterflow caused the creation of a 150 foot high waterfall (seen above) — easily the tallest in Louisiana at the time. When the bottom finally finished falling out of Lake Peigneur, the sixty-year old salt mine was gone, and the once-shallow freshwater lake was now a saltwater basin with a maximum depth of 200 feet.

Amazingly, the death toll from the Lake Peigneur disaster was zero. The fifty-five salt mine workers and all the people on the rig and in boats managed to evacuate in time.

Bonus fact: Salt and oil have a long history. Edwin Drake, credited with being the first American to successfully drill for oil (at the time to be used for lamps, as whale oil had become expensive), set up the historic rig in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1858. Since Drake’s drill was the first of its kind, he had to invent a way to explore what lay beneath. He decided to simply copy the well-established methods of drilling for salt. He also added a cast-iron pipe to allow him to drill through bedrock without water seeping into the drilling area, and with this innovation, the salt drilling method became the standard for early oil rigs.

From the Archives: Temple of Rock Salt: A Polish church made of salt. Also, this.

Related: A LEGO oil rig.

A four letter word meaning “one of the U.S.,” read the clue. The answer? “Utah.”

Five letters: “Red Indian on the Missouri.” That one is “Omaha.”

What do Utah and Omaha have in common? Not much, until you realize the context.

Those two clues were found in crossword puzzles published in the United Kingdom in May of 1944, while the world and, in particular, the British military, were in the throes of war. Themselves, the clues were at most an eerie coincidence portending the Allied D-Day invasion planned for early June of 1944 — an invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, in which troops would land on the beaches of Normandy, France, two of which were themselves codenamed “Utah” and “Omaha,” as seen above. But the coincidence would become increasingly suspicious.

The author of both crosswords, a schoolmaster named Leonard Dawe, had been interrogated two years prior by British intelligence for another coincidence. In August of 1942, one his clues — six letters, meaning “French port” — had the answer “Dieppe.” Two days later, Allied troops mainly from Canada raided that exact port, which was then controlled by the Germans, with disastrous results. Of the roughly 6,000 infantrymen who made it ashore, well over 3,000 of them were killed, wounded, or captured, and the Royal Air Force lost nearly 100 planes, mostly to ground-based flak cannons. Dawe was suspected of tipping off the enemy via the crossword puzzles, but the investigation suggested that this was a mere coincidence.

But when the code words of two of the Operation Overlord beaches appeared in the paper, attentions again focused on Dawe. By the end of May, two more code words would appear in his crosswords. Next was “Mulberry,” the code name for a floating harbor used in the Normandy landings. And then, incredibly, there was a clue demanding an eight letter word meaning “big-wig” — the answer was the term “overlord.” When a fifth clue — “Neptune,” the code word for the naval support component of the operation — appeared on June 1st, Dawe found himself the subject of an investigation once again.

A review of earlier crossword puzzles showed that Dawe had used the code words for the three other beaches — Gold, Juno, and Sword — over previous months. But Dawe staunchly asserted his innocence, claiming the clues to be a strange coincidence; when he was asked why he chose those terms, he protested with “why not?,” as if to say that in his view, there was nothing particularly unique to that set of words. In short, he claimed that the terms had no secondary meaning to him. He was never charged with any crime nor was he incarcerated.

The odd occurrence may not have been malicious, but there’s some evidence that it was not purely random. Per one account (see the footnote here), supported by this report in the Guardian, Dawe would regularly ask his students for interesting words for inclusion in his puzzles. During the war, many soldiers were quartered with these students’ families, and it’s likely that the soldiers were using the code words openly (after all, the whole point of the code word is to obfuscate the true location/meaning of the term), and the students picked up on the interesting words.

Bonus fact: Most areas use the familiar black-and-white box crossword puzzle style that you are probably familiar with, and certainly were in use in by Dawes and his British contemporaries. But in Sweden, a different style is used. Seen here, the clues themselves are embedded in the puzzle, with arrows pointing in the direction that the answer should be recorded; also, any dead squares are grouped toward the middle and not shaded in black.

From the Archives: Soothsaying Crossword: Another crossword which predicted the future, although in this case, intentionally.

Related: Crossword puzzle books.

In some contexts, elephants and people coexist peacefully. Until recently, some zoos afforded visitors the luxury of riding the back of an elephant around some of the grounds, but that practice has been largely discontinued due to concerns for the animals’ safety. Nevertheless, there are plenty of examples of elephants — the larger of the two species — leaving humans generally unharmed. 

But that isn’t always the case. Take parts of Africa, for example, where expansions in farmland have encroached on the habitats of elephants. The elephants, of course, do not take kindly to this intrusion, and have been known to raid the farms in search of food, destroying fields of crops in the process. Keeping the elephants out is a dangerous and difficult task, but one research has developed an elegant — and profitable — solution: bees. 

Elephants are known for their excellent memories. It is said that elephants never forget, and while that’s hyperbole, it is certainly true that the creatures have a good aptitude for recalling times and events that have caused them injury. And it’s likely that they also have some nuance in their trunk-blast driven language as well. In 2010, a researcher named Lucy King determined that East African elephants have a unique sound they make when they come across an area infested with bees. Bees are a particularly harmful pest to elephants, as the insects can sting the beasts near the eyes or from inside the latter’s trunks. The elephants’ calls act as an alarm, warning the other elephants to stay away.

A year or so later, King combined these two elements — the elephants’ fear of bees and their excellent memories — into a new theory: beehive “fences.” If farmers and the like could surround their land with bees, elephants which encountered the perimeters would not only learn to stay away, but communicate the danger to other pachyderms. Her pilot program, involving 34 farms in Kenya, was highly successful. When the elephants encountered the (actual) fences surrounding the farms, they shook them, disturbing the hives and releasing the bees. The elephants often fled the area.

As a bonus? The bees produce honey, which the farmers collect at a profit.

Bonus fact: The term “white elephant,” per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means “a property requiring much care and expense and yielding little profit.” The origins of the term date back to the 1800s, when the King of Siam used to make gifts of actual white elephants to those people in his service in whom he lost trust or faith. The recipients of these elephants risked financial ruin due to the creature’s care and upkeep.

From the Archives: Early Warning Lemurs: After a recent earthquake, an elephant at the National Zoo in D.C. hid. The lemurs? They felt it coming.

Related: A white elephant.

Every day, we throw out lots of stuff. Some if it is clearly waste — empty milk cartons, discarded apple cores, that shattered toy that’s now missing both arms and a leg. Other stuff, though, may be worth something to someone else, but it’s not worth our time and effort to find a new home for that item. It makes its way into the garbage pail and, ultimately, into the municipal sanitation system, just like that now-empty banana peel from breakfast.

When it gets there — if you’re in New York City, at least — it may catch the eye of a sanitation worked named Nelson Molina. And if it does, what you thought was destined for the landfill may actually be sitting in the second floor of a New York City Sanitation Department garage in Manhattan.

A dozen or so garbage trucks are parked at the garage on 99th Street between First and Second Avenues in the New York borough which is home to Central Park, Times Square, and many other well-known city locations. Up in that neighborhood, if you go a few blocks west to Fifth Avenue, you’ll hit what’s known as “Museum Mile,” a twenty to thirty-block long stretch featuring nearly a dozen museums, including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But to find the Trash Museum — unofficially named, of course — one need not get on the crosstown bus. Just go into the garage and up to the second floor.

Molina, a trash collector now approaching 60 years of age, picks up refuse in the neighborhood and has for years. A life-long sanitation worker, he decided in 1981 to bring some cheer to the locker room, decorating it with a few items he found along his route. As the New York Times reported, this started some sort of trend: “his colleagues on East 99th Street began to contribute, gathering up discarded gems they thought he might enjoy. As the collection grew, word spread, and workers from other boroughs started to drop off contributions from time to time. Next, building superintendents along Mr. Molina’s route started putting things aside they thought he could use.”

Over the course of two decades, Molina, the de facto curator, has collected somewhere in the realm of 1,000 items for the Trash Museum. (Many more things have been dropped off, but Molina is the ultimate arbiter as to what trash is worthy for inclusion and which items are, well, truly trash.) Items are grouped by some sort of common aesthetic, as determined by Molina, and there are no rules for inclusion — Molina told the Times that “he has no grand theories about what qualifies, [. . .] only his gut.” One assumes that there aren’t any half-eaten pastrami sandwiches, but there are plenty of baseballs, paintings, teapots, and more, as seen in this photo gallery.

The Sanitation Department’s rules prevent workers from taking anything discarded for personal use, but that apparently doesn’t apply in this case, as the museum’s collection is on display for the benefit and enjoyment of others, and not Molina himself.

Bonus fact: In 2010, the city of Cleveland, Ohio, outfitted curbside recycling bins with RFIDs – radio frequency identification chips — to allow them to determine how often a bin is brought out. Pickup is weekly, and if the bins aren’t brought out often enough, trash collectors can inspect the regular trash bins left by residents to see if recyclables are included. 

From the Archives: Garbage City: A city in Egypt that runs on trash.

Related: Want to become a New York City sanitation worker? You need to pass an exam first. This book may help.

In 1981, Nintendo released the video game Donkey Kong. According to the book “Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life,” the game was originally intended to be a snippet from the Popeye universe, with the protagonist Popeye charged with saving his girlfriend, Olive Oyl, from a brutish and less intelligent Bluto. But Nintendo failed to obtain a license for the game, and instead, the game’s lead designer changed the characters. Popeye became Jumpman, named for his one skill (jumping). Olive Oyl became Lady. And Bluto became Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong wasn’t, directly, named after the cinema sensation King Kong, although the character was certainly inspired by the movie monkey. While no canonical explanation behind the name “Donkey Kong” is widely agreed upon, one story has the word “Kong” coming from the Japanese word for “ape,” while “Donkey” stems from the fact that the animal of the same name is stubborn, making the video game antagonist a “stubborn ape” (or worse). Regardless, the seemingly obvious association between Donkey Kong and King Kong was enough for Universal Studios, company behind the King Kong movies. Universal was looking to break into the video game business, and saw this potential intellectual rights infringement as a quick way to gain entry.

While some of Nintendo’s partners settled with Universal or scuttled their plans to produce the game, Nintendo itself refused. On June 29, 1982, Universal sued Nintendo, aiming to stop production of the game and/or collect the profit of the game’s sale. Nintendo put up the typical defense, arguing that typical consumers would not see the oafish Donkey Kong as being confusingly similar to the menacing King Kong. But in case that didn’t work, Nintendo had another ace up their sleeve — Universal’s own arguments.

Universal’s King Kong movie debuted in 1976, but it wasn’t an original story. Rather, the movie was a remake of a movie with the same title made in 1933 by RKO General. The 1976 remake came with its own round of litigation, with many parties claiming to have at least partial rights over the name, characters, and plot of the movie. Universal, however, argued that no one did, and that the characters and plot were in the public domain. In the subsequent litigation with Nintendo, the court noted this inconsistency, using it as part of the basis for finding that Nintendo’s Donkey Kong game did not infringe upon Universal’s rights (if any) over King Kong. Nintendo prevailed, and, when Universal appealed, the next court admonished Universal for its inconsistent legal logic:

Universal’s conduct amounted to an abuse of judicial processes, and in that sense caused a larger harm to the public as a whole. Depending on the commercial results, Universal alternatively argued to the courts, first, that King Kong was part of the public domain, and then second, that King Kong was not part of the public domain, and that Universal possessed exclusive trademark rights in it. Universal’s assertions in court were based not on any good faith belief in their truth, but on the mistaken belief that it could use the courts to turn a profit.

Victory in hand, Nintendo was able to continue selling and marketing the Donkey Kong franchise. The fledgling video game capitalized on the success of this early triumph and became a gaming giant for decades to follow.

Bonus fact: The Jumpman character in Donkey Kong, seen above at the bottom right approaching a ladder, is now known as Mario, and easily recognizable as the main character of the Mario Bros. series of games. According to the book “Game Over,” which chronicles Nintendo’s emergence in the video game space, the character was named after Nintendo of America’s landlord at the time, Mario Segale. Segale, as the story goes, stormed into their offices one day demanding the overdue rent, and although Nintendo of America assuaged his fears, the outburst struck a chord with Donkey Kong’s game designers. Mario — Segale, that is — entered video game lore forevermore.

From the Archives: Cards, Love, and Mario: Nintendo’s non-video game origins.

Related: The two books mentioned above, “Power Up” (4.1 stars on 12 reviews) and “Game Over” (4.4 stars on 29 reviews).

There are a lot of so-called Black Days out there. “Black Monday” refers to a few dozen events, many of which are associated with stock market crashes, and the big Wall Street market crash of 1929 is “Black Tuesday.” “Black Wednesday” refers to a British currency crisis from September of 1992. Continuing with the pattern of financial markets having bad days brings us to “Black Thursday,” which has been used to refer to bad events leading to the Panic of 1873; to a prelude crash to Black Tuesday; and to similar events worldwide. Breaking the pattern is “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. It is described as such because of the spike in retail demand and the corresponding revenues derived by retailers — their books are “in the black.” (Perhaps comically, the Wikipedia entry for Black Friday notes that the “celebration” which occurs that day is, in a word, “shopping.”)

In South Korea, though, “Black Day” means something else. Something involving love and noodles — a lot of the latter, and not so much of the former.

February 14th is Valentine’s Day. But, as discussed in these pages previously, Japan and (in this case) South Korea have a different tradition — on that day, women give gifts to men. Men reciprocate a month later on “White Day,” March 14th, typically with a gift of (white) chocolate. But what happens if you don’t have anyone you are romantically involved with?

Enter “Black Day,” celebrated — to use the term loosely — on April 14th. The custom started developing in the early 1990s. Per Forbes, it is a day of mourning for “those who have not given or received a present [on White or Valentine's Day].” Single people, typically in their 20s and 30s, don black outfits and gather at restaurants. There, they dine on something called “jajangmyeon” (seen above), a cheap noodle dish, with pork, seafood, and vegetables, all slathered in a black bean sauce. The dish is difficult to eat without making a mess of oneself, but that’s probably okay for a Black Day participant. As one unattached diner told Reuters, “I had a miserable time on Valentine’s Day, felt even lonelier on White Day and now I’m crying over a bowl of black noodles.”

But for those seeking love — and, perhaps opportunistically, those looking to make a buck off that desire — Black Day can have its upside. Again, per Reuters, “Black Day events have snowballed, with a major matchmaking service this year [2008] providing an evening of speed dating where the dish of choice is sushi blackened by squid ink.”

Bonus fact: Even in pitch darkness, we don’t see the color black. We see a color called “eigengrau,” German for “intrinsic gray,” which is a very dark gray color (as you may have just figured out). Our optic nerves still send signals to our brains, even when there is no light, and the brain translates this into a deep gray.

From the Archives: Fandemonium: Why you shouldn’t bring an electric fan to a South Korean Black Day dinner.

Related: Want to make some jajangmyeon? These noodles are probably a good starting point.

Brussels sprouts are little buds from a type of cabbage which, themselves, resemble miniature cabbages. They’re edible, but if you are like millions of children worldwide, you’d probably not admit to that fact. There’s a reason for this. Brussels sprouts contain a chemical compound in them which triggers a response from the bitter-detecting taste buds on our tongues. And as Popular Science notes, we lose taste buds as we age, and the bitter taste therefore isn’t as strong as we get older. But children take the full brunt of the bitterness. Further, PopSci argues, children’s aversion to bitter foods isn’t just stubbornness, but perhaps evolutionary — the overwhelming taste signalling, perhaps, a toxin in the food being eaten. (It may be true, too: if you eat too much cabbage, your body may have difficulty absorbing iodine.)

But what about us grown ups who still don’t like Brussels sprouts? What’s our excuse? Turns out, it may be genetics.

As reported by the BBC, a typical person has “25 types of bitter receptors” on their tongues. But some people — “due to their genetic make-up,” as stated by Dr. Lisa Methven, a food and nutritional services professor quoted by the BBC — have more. Dr. Methven estimates that these people are super-sensitive to bitter foods — “they experience the bitter tasted up to 60 times higher than someone with an average number of taste buds.”  Understandably, these people typically hate Brussels sprouts.

But there’s a flip side. As reported by the Telegraph, some people have a genetic mutation which blocks the bitterness entirely. And the mutation is not all that rare. The Telegraph puts it at about fifty percent of the world’s population while DNA analysis startup 23andMe says that about 25% of people are, in their words, “taste-blind” to bitter tastes. So, yes, some people will gladly eat their Brussels sprouts — because they can’t taste them.

Bonus fact: Brussels sprouts aren’t unique here. Cilantro (also called coriander), an herb, evokes a different response from different people, based on the genetic makeup of the would-be eater. But in this case, it isn’t the taste buds which are causing the problem — it’s the nose. As NPR reported, a small but sizable group of people are able to detect the odor emitted by an organic compound in the herb (unsaturated aldehydes) which makes the cilantro “taste” like soap.

From the Archives: Telling Thyme: How herbs and spices can be used as a clock.

Related: Spicy Brussels sprouts in a jar. (Yes, spicy. Yes, in a jar.)

February 14th marks Valentine’s Day, an informal holiday where beaux and sweethearts share gifts with each other symbolizing their endearment for one another. (Okay, typically it involves one person buying flowers for another, and maybe dinner.) Historically, Valentine’s Day stems from the Feast of St. Valentine; Western Christian churches observe the feast on that date, although Eastern ones make it on July 6th. The saint, who died in around the year 269, had little to do with romance, and the holiday has roots in the 15th century.

Over the centuries, Valentine’s Day has become a mostly secular event, and has spread throughout the world. But in some places, the holiday is dramatically different — at times, by force — than what many of us expect.

Take, for example, Japan. Each year, on Valentine’s Day, girls and women give gifts of chocolate to boys and men, and not necessarily to those they are romantically linked to. The chocolate even comes with implicit messages. High quality chocolate, called “honmei choco” (literally “true feeling chocolate”), is given to the woman’s romantic interest; on the other hand, women give others something called “giro choco” — “obligation chocolate” — to friends and co-workers. Men, who are often the more heavily obligated gender in the U.S. when it comes to Valentine’s Day, do nothing but accept (and eat) the gifts, and perhaps deal with the unsubtle message associated with the quality of chocolate received.

But the women win out in the end. In 1978, Japan’s National Confectionery Industry Association came up with a marketing scheme called “White Day,” to be celebrated on March 14th, a month after Valentine’s Day. On White Day, men are expected to return the favor and then some — “sanbai gaeshi,” literally, “triple the return” is the rule of thumb — as they deliver chocolates, cookies, marshmallows, and even jewelry or lingerie to the women who showered them with chocolates a month prior. (The confectionery industry, unsurprisingly, began heavily marketing white chocolate in the late winter and early spring of 1978.) The good news for men? The White Day custom does not imply that a return-gift comes with specific romantic overtures, but simply a repayment of obligation — except, one assumes, in the case of things like lingerie.

Bonus fact: With its roots as a Christian holiday, some countries take exception to Valentine’s Day. Of particular note is Saudi Arabia. In recent years, the Saudi Committee for the Promotion and the Prevention of Vice, a government bureaucracy controlling the mutaween — religious police — enforced a ban on the holiday. Shopkeepers were barred from selling any red items commemorating the holiday, including but not limited to flowers and wrapping paper. As reported by the BBC, a black market for the goods developed, with one florist attesting to making deliveries of bouquets under cover of night.

From the Archives: Cupid’s Mailbox: How to get your Valentines postmarked with a Valentine postmark.

Related: Really cheap chocolate, in case you need to send obligation chocolate to anyone.

Nauru is the the third smallest country in the world by land area, after Vatican City and Monaco. It’s the second smallest by population, after only the Vatican. Located in Micronesia (it’s encapsulated in the red dot above), it is easy to miss. It is also much smaller — by both measures — than many other islands which are not sovereigns. But most other islands never had the bird guano that Nauru once had.

Yes, guano. Or, more colloquially, bird poop.

Agrarian societies want to maximize plant yields, and, since the mid-1800s, a great way to do that is to add fertilizer to soil. Fertilizer contains, among other things, phosphorus. Phosphorus doesn’t exist as a free element anywhere on the planet because it reacts quickly with other elements, making it hard to come by. But it can be extracted from phosphate rock. Nauru, for a long time, had a lot of phosphate rock, a byproduct of centuries of sea birds doing their business while taking a rest during a trip over the Pacific. 

This made Nauru very, very rich. When it obtained its independence from the a United Nations-established coalition of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in 1968, Nauruans were already strip mining the phosphate and selling it around the world. Unsurprisingly, especially given the low population, they were able to boast one of the highest per capita incomes of any nation in the world. This was true through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, but things quickly took a turn for the worse — to say the least — as the easily available phosphate rock ran out of the nutrients, with depleted limestone pillars left in their place. With no other natural resource and virtually no tourism industry — the island is hard to get to and it’s made out of rock — the government tried to establish a trust fund from proceeds of the phosphate trade. But bad investments doomed the fund. According to the Asian Development Bank, the fund had about 1.3 billion Australian dollars in it in 1991, but by 2002, the fund’s holdings fell nearly 90% to A$138 million.

And then things got worse. With no obvious source of income, Nauru became an intermediary for criminals; according to Bloomberg, the country was a prime money launderer for the Russian mafia in the early part of the 21st century. After significant international sanctions, Nauru stopped the flow of illicit funds through its banks in around 2007. Since then, it has struggled to find ways to provide goods (almost all of which must be imported) and services to its people. An Australian detention center for refugees held in abeyance operated on the island beginning in 2001, but was shut down by the Australians in 2007. (It reopened in late 2012.) The national bank is insolvent and the government — which does not collect personal income tax — has a difficult time, at best, in providing services to its people.

Only through leveraging their status as a UN member (with voting power) has the nation been able to eke on by. In 2002, the Nauruan government agreed to recognize China (over Taiwan) in exchange for roughly $130 million — only to then change its mind and recognize Taiwan (and keeping the money). In 2008, the island nation agreed to recognize a pair of self-declared republics which attempted to break away from the former Soviet (and now country) of Georgia, to the approval of Russia, which sent them $50 million in foreign aid. These funds, plus aid from Australia, have been the only thing keeping Nauru from abject poverty.

But it isn’t enough. Nauru’s future is bleak, and perhaps hopeless. A reported 97% of men and 93% of women are obese and roughly 50% have diabetes. The CIA World Factbook reports that 90% of Nauruans are unemployed, and the Economist notes that of the small percentage of those who are employed, 95% are on the government payroll.

Bonus fact: One of the bad investments made by the Nauruan trust fund was in a musical titled “Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love.” The musical debuted in London on June 3, 1993, but only lasted five weeks, ending its run on July 10th of that year. It was so bad that, reportedly, on opening night, most of the audience left early.

From the Archives: The Principality of Hutt River: Part of Australia which isn’t.

Related: 2.2 pounds (that’s 1 kg) of sea bird guano. Five stars on three reviews.

In general, cities and agriculture — of any kind, really — do not mix. You won’t find many, if any, orange groves in Manhattan. There are few (but there are, actually, a few) chicken coops in Brooklyn. And cows in Queens? Not happening. The last working Manhattan farm closed in the 1930s. 

But there are always exceptions, and beekeeping is one of them. There is a group of New York City beekeepers with over 1,700 members on Facebook.In March 2010, the city lifted a ban on raising honeybees, and per the New York Times, by June of 2012, roughly 100 people had registered nearly 200 hives with the New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene. And many other unregistered ones exist; in August of 2012, the city seized three million bees from a keeper who kept his hives too close to his neighbors’ residences. By and large, though, the bees of New York are rare and no more annoying than pests which are actually common to the urban landscape. And in one case, the city has been a nuisance for the bees, and not the other way around.

In 2010, groups of honeybees from hives in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood started producing honey — but not the amber stuff we’re familiar with. Their honey was, for some reason, red.

The Times, in a second article, explained the most likely cause. Red Hook is home to a maraschino cherry plant which, of course, makes the red juice which their maraschino cherries swim in. That liquid uses Red Dye Number 40. And the bees were most likely drinking the dye. As a Brooklyn beekeeping blog observed, “when honeybees find a source of high-density food, such as the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) used in the manufacture of maraschino cherries, they don’t think twice about whether the source is natural, safe, or convenient. They take it for what it is—a chance to make it to next year.” While the dye probably isn’t all that dangerous for the bees, it does tend to affect the honey, making it metallic-tasting (although still safe to eat).

Red Hook isn’t alone in this phenomenon, and honey can turn into more colors than just red. As Reuters reported in 2012, French beekeepers noticed that their bees were producing blue and green honey. The source of the color contamination? A nearby M&Ms factory.

Bonus fact: Red honey may look like cough syrup — and may actually be a good cough syrup alternative, too. In fact, all honey is. According to the Mayo Clinic, honey is as effective as a night-time cough suppressant as the leading over-the-counter cough medicines. (It shouldn’t, however, be used for children age one and under, as honey can cause botulism in infants.)

From the Archives: Radioactive Red: What if the bees had eaten this stuff? Or red M&M dye (check the bonus fact)? Also, The Buzzing Supercomputer: Bees can be really smart.

Related: Raw honey (and hopefully not red, blue, or green).

The island of Bali, in Indonesia (the green island above), is home to about 4 million people, of which roughly 90% are ethnically Balinese. It is a tourist haven and, if you ever visit, you may find a lot of people named Wayan — both men and women. There’s a reason for that. The Balinese people do not name their children after their parents, grandparents, or cultural icons. The names are, instead, culturally mandated to reflect one thing, and one thing only: the child’s order of birth.

In the Balinese culture, “Wayan” is the typical name used for the first born child, male or female, of the family. The second born is typically “Made,” the third “Nyoman,” and the fourth “Ketut.” If a subsequent child is born, the order repeats itself, sometimes with the word “Balik” added, which means “again.” So “Wayan Balik” would be the fifth born.

The names stem from a caste system which dates back centuries. The farmer/rice grower class, called the Sudra, wanting to make sure that the oldest receives his or her birthright of land, adopted the naming system as a living record — the one you called “Wayan” took the lion’s share (if not the totality) of the inheritance. Both the caste system and ordinal naming system have stood the test of time. And because the Balinese do not keep family names as surnames like we do in the West, there are a lot of Wayans in Bali.

Thankfully, over time, the culture has developed a way to distinguish between people as well as another way to identify gender. As noted by the WINS Project, a US non-profit which helps educate poor children in Bali, children “have at least one given name that will identify that person specifically.” People often go by these names or, more commonly, by other nicknames which develop organically over time. Further, boys adopt a “I” before their birth order name while girls don the word “Ni” before theirs, allowing correspondents to figure out their gender.

Bonus fact: While the Balinese naming conventions led to strange results, so do many other customs. For example, Pablo Picasso’s parents wanted to honor many, many saints and relatives. Because of this, as Biography.com notes, his full name was “Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso.”

From the Archives: Richard Parker: A common name with a common tale.

Related: “Everyday Balinese: Your Guide to Speaking Balinese Quickly and Effortlessly in a Few Hours,” by I Gusti Made Sutjaja. I don’t know anything about the book except that it’s written by a male who was the second born in his family.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union forever changed the course of human history, launching Sputnik 1 into orbit around the Earth. Sputnik 1 was the first such artificial satellite, and being a creation of the USSR, a disappointment for Americans. The U.S. rushed out an attempt to get a satellite in space, launching Vanguard TV3 on December 6 of the same year. But just a couple of seconds after launch, and having ascended only four feet off the ground, Vanguard TV3 crashed, further dampening American hopes of dominating the heavens.

Despite these setbacks, the U.S. government was not about to accept defeat. Just over a decade later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would become the first men — American or Soviet — to land on the moon. The successful moon landing boosted American interest and faith in the space program for decades.

But that took years, and before it happened, few ideas were off the table. The U.S. wanted to boost the morale of its citizens, and space seemed like a great way to do that. In 1958, the year after Sputnik 1 launched (and a few months after the U.S. got a satellite into orbit, in Explorer 1), the United States Air Force began the development of something called “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” or “Project A119.” The title was misleading. The goal of Project A119 was, simply put, to nuke the moon.

The theory behind the project was simple and, in retrospect, ridiculous. There was little if any scientific value to be gained from exploding a nuclear weapon on the moon’s surface. And that wasn’t Project A119′s intent anyway. The purpose of the project was to create a flash on the moon’s surface which was so bright, it’d be noticeable across the globe (assuming it was night time where you were). In an interview, one of the lead physicists on the project stated that it “was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth. The US was lagging behind in the space race.”

Other than the show of galactic superiority, Project A119 had limited purpose. The display of awesomeness — in the literal sense of the word — was the goal. The team behind the project (which included a doctoral student named Carl Sagan) was specifically charged with determining three things: the potential effects on the moon’s surface (including whether nuclear fallout there would prevent future exploration), any benefits to scientific inquiry, and, most importantly, how to maximize the mushroom cloud of dust to ensure peak visibility of the explosion back here on Earth.

Thankfully, the project was canceled well before anything nuclear exploded. Besides the fact that the idea was ludicrous, there were practical problems as well — for example, if the rocket failed, there was a chance that the bomb would have gone off on Earth. Regardless, a pair of treaties with the Soviet Union rendered any further nuke-the-moon investigation moot. The U.S. shifted its focus toward landing people on the moon, and of course, made history with the Apollo moon landings a decade later.

Bonus fact: We never ended up bombing the moon, but, in the name of the Space Race, we did once bomb Arizona. As the Atlantic reported, to prepare for the moon landings, NASA wanted a testing ground which matched the topology of where the astronauts were, hopefully, about to go. So they took a swath of land in northern Arizona and bombed fake craters into the surface, and use that area to test rovers and tools, and to help the astronauts become familiar with the area.

From the Archives: Thermonuclear War and Taxes: In case of the former, you’ll still have to pay the latter.

Related: A moon globe.

The most often shoplifted food item in the world, according to the Consumerist, is cheese. It can be expensive, it’s easily pocketed, and tastes good, too, but that’s not the only driving force. As the Huffington Post notes, the real reason for its theft is because its resale value is high, especially when restaurants enter the buyer’s market. (After all, do you really know where your cheese wholesaler obtained those one pound blocks of provolone from?)

This shouldn’t be surprising. Thieves try and make off with high priced goods for exactly this reason. So when stores started noticing that Tide — the liquid laundry detergent — was flying off the shelves courtesy of five-finger discounts, investigators weren’t looking for shoplifters who simply had a lot of dirty clothes. They figured that, for some reason, a black market for Tide had to exist. But outside of laundromats and commercial laundries (for example, the companies which wash all the sheets and towels used by hotels), there isn’t an obvious buyer for large volumes of stolen Tide. And to complicate matters, Tide’s price is fueled by a strong brand and excellent marketing, and not its actual in-washer power; it isn’t much more effective (if at all) than the cheaper alternatives such as Gain, Purex, or Cheer, so there’s little reason for legitimate businesses to buy stolen Tide when they can get legal detergent at the same price.

The answer? Tide was being used as currency — currency to buy drugs.

As reported by The Daily, officials tracked down a Minnesota man who, over the course of 15 months, made off with over $25,000 of the detergent. While each 150 ounce bottle retailed for as more than $20 in the stores, the crook can get $5 to $10 back on the street — in cash or in drugs. There were even some reports of dealers specifically asking that they be paid in Tide, with one saying that he would “hook [the buyer] up if you can get me 15 bottles of Tide.” U.S. News and World Report quoted an Oregon police detective who said that he had seen “people walking down the street with six, seven bottles of Tide.”

As the Atlantic explains, this was no two-bit operation. The Federal government sees this as a part of something called “organized retail crime,” where the shoplifters — known as “boosters” in the racket — start the chain of events which cause, in total, as much as $40 billion in retail losses each year, nationwide. One particularly crafty tactic? The booster will sell the item into a fencing syndicate which will try and return the Tide back to a store for 100% of retail price — plus sales tax.

To date, Tide is not regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Bonus fact: In March of 2010, a California man named Robert Ferguson was sentenced for stealing a $4 bag of cheese from a local grocer. His sentence? Eight years in prison. Why? Ferguson had two prior convictions, and under California’s three strikes law, the third conviction came with a mandatory 25 years to life sentence. His psychiatric history, which included a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, gave the judge leave to reduce the prison term.

From the Archives: Half Baked: The odd role of baking soda in the war on drugs.

Related: A two-pack of 150 ounce bottles of Tide.

Pictured above is something called a CAPTCHA — a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”  CAPTCHAs are used to allow real people into certain areas of websites — comment sections on blogs, for example — and to keep automated services, like spammers, away. With probably millions of blogs, forums, etc. around the Web, the CAPTCHA is probably the best method we have at keeping feedback from being overwhelmed with links to sites which claim to cure baldness and other (typically more insidious) such things.

But of course, some of the spammers have found a way past the CAPTCHA. When computers can’t get through, they turn to people.

The criteria for a CAPTCHA, per a team of U.C. San Diego researchers investigating how spammers weave their way though the gates (pdf here), is three-fold. First, the problem needs to be easily solved by people; after all, you want people to be able to leave their comments or thoughts. Second, the test has to be “easily generated and evaluated,” and practically speaking, by some sort of computer algorithm and database. This makes sense, as the number of, say, forum posts could easily overwhelm the forum owner if he or she had to create and/or evaluate each test by hand. Finally, the CAPTCHA cannot be easily solved by a computer, as the entire point is to weed out automated replies. (And the trick is not just to get readers to click. Because Google’s search engine treats links to a page as a “vote” for that page’s value, having a lot of links to your website may have a positive effect on your website’s rank in the search results.) 

The work-around, per the researchers, is something they call “paid solving.” They came across a blog post written in 2006 by an employee of computer security company Symantec, discussing an ad placed on a freelancer-finding job board. The advertiser was looking for someone to solve CAPTCHAs over a 50-hour workweek, and received 58 bids ranging between $30 and $1,000 within the first week. (The site canceled the advertisement thereafter.) The Symantec employee assumed that in 50 hours, someone could solve about 6,000 CAPTCHAs (at 30 seconds per puzzle), making the low-end bid come out to under two cents each.

Four years later, the New York Times delved deeper. A report from Mumbai, India noted that high-end spamming companies (yes, they exist) hired cheap laborers in India, Bangladesh, China, and in other developing nations where such labor is readily accessible. Those workers are asked to solve the cryptic-looking text, and, once through the door, sign up for accounts, post messages, or, as the Times so aptly phrases, “carry out other mischief.” For their trouble? Some students working on CAPTCHA-busting “typically work two and a half to three hours a day from their homes and make at least $6 every 15 days,” which sounds terrible, but isn’t bad relative to other wages; the Times further notes that “[u]nskilled male farm workers earn about $2 a day in many parts of India.”

While spammers may find these nickels and dimes well-spent on finding a solution, the advent of “paid solving” doesn’t bother Google, which makes some of the leading anti-spam/CAPTCHA software. As one engineer told the Times, “[o]ur goal is to make mass account creation less attractive to spammers, and the fact that spammers have to pay people to solve captchas proves that the tool is working.”.

Bonus fact: You may notice at the bottom right of the image above that the logo reads “stop spam. read books.” That particular anti-spam service, called reCAPTCHA (and now owned by Google), doesn’t just keep the spammers away. One of the words shown is used for that purpose, but the other isn’t. As reCAPTCHA explains, “reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR ["Optical Character Recognition"] is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.” With literally millions of reCAPTCHA attempts happening each day, the service is helping digitized old texts. (And at $6 every 15 days, spammers are helping, too.)

From the Archives: From Sheep to Books: Why are books the size and shape they are?

Related: Spam.

In 1989, the San Francisco 49ers and Cincinnati Bengals faced off in Super Bowl XXIII in Miami, Florida. Like most Super Bowls, the broadcast of the game reached far and wide. NBC held the broadcast rights to the Super Bowl, and an estimated 81.6 million people watched the game — and a bevy of 30-second commercials costing roughly $675,000 each — throughout the country and the world.

Most of those viewers were treated to an incredible game. With just over three minutes left on the game clock, the 49ers — lead by Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana — were trailing, 16-13, with the ball on their own eight yard line. The Niners marched down the field and, as seen above, and with only 34 seconds left on the clock, Montana threw a game winning touchdown to Pro-Bowl wide receiver John Taylor, giving San Francisco a 20-16 victory.

But some viewers had a different experience.

Century Southwest Cable, an NBC affiliate with, at the time, 100,000 or so customers in West Los Angeles, had an interruption which, unlike the six-figure ads, was unplanned, unanticipated, and unwelcome. During the first half of the game, per the AP, the theme song from The Jetsons started playing as an unauthorized audio message ran over the live action (and announcers). Two men, identities unknown, began talking about Bill Rosendahl, a vice president at Century Southwest. (Rosendahl was probably well known in the community; he had a weekly television show where he interviewed community leaders.) Per the JTA, one of the men then said “This is Century Southwest Cable with Bill Rosendahl. There are too many [expletive] Jews in the entertainment industry.” At that point, the other man told “Bill” that they had to cut him off “because you can’t say those things on TV.” And there, the hijacked broadcast ended, retiring viewers to the game’s official one.

The FBI was called in to investigate, especially given the large Jewish population in Century Southwest’s broadcast area — and because the next day, a (false) bomb threat was called into Century’s offices. But government and cable officials alike were stumped. The station’s studio was vacant throughout the broadcast and weekend, and the cable company’s broadcasting equipment was not tampered with. Rosendahl — the real one — told the JTA that “the piracy probably came from ‘a transmitter that beamed to our antenna’,” which would hardly be a pedestrian occurrence, especially for 1989.

The perpetrators — and their motive, other than ones implied by their stated message — were never uncovered.

Bonus fact: Super Bowl XXVII took place on January 31, 1993, in Pasadena, California. But it was originally planned to take place in Tempe, Arizona. In March of 1990, the NFL awarded the game to Tempe, under the condition that the state of Arizona begin to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. But later in that year, voters rejected the holiday via statewide referendum (by overwhelming majority — 76% against), and the NFL made good on its threat.

From the Archives: O Say Can You Sync?: Why the National Anthem at the Super Bowl is lip-synced.

Related: “The Ultimate Super Bowl Book,” at least according to the book’s title. 12 reviews, each of five stars, so maybe the title is right.

On February 5, 2012, the New York Giants and New England Patriots took to the gridiron in Super Bowl XLVI, a rematch of sorts from the big game contested just four years earlier. In one of the stranger plays in NFL history, the Giants took the lead, 21-17, with 57 seconds left in the game. The Patriots, then leading 17-15, realized that the Giants were almost certain to regain the lead (a field goal would have given the Giants an 18-17 lead) given that they had roughly a minute to score and were already on the Patriots’ six yard line. Wanting to preserve time on the clock, the Patriots engaged in a little bit of gamesmanship, and allowed Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw to stumble into the end zone (despite his best efforts to fall down on the 1). The Giants took the lead, but the Patriots were going to receive the ball back with enough time to put up a meaningful drive of their own. 

The Patriots started their drive on their own 20 yard line and, as seen above, they made it to their own 44 with 17 seconds left to play. Given the rules of the game, the Patriots had probably two plays left, and needed to get the ball into the end zone in order to win. Anything less would hand the Giants their second Super Bowl victory in five years. But something went wrong. The Giants had 12 players on the field, one more than is allowed. The play went on as usual, and the Patriots failed to connect on a pass, but the Giants’ infraction erased the play. Instead, the Patriots were awarded five yards, putting them on their own 49.

But this penalty came at a further cost — not for the Giants, but for the Patriots. The voided play took eight seconds off the game clock, leaving the Patriots with only nine remaining, and still needing a touchdown. Some wondered (example here) if the Giants did this on purpose — after all, having an extra man on the field would make it harder for the Patriots to score, and the five yard penalty was a more than fair price to pay to get the massive advantage from cutting the time remaining in the game in half. This turned out to not be the case. The extra player, labeled 12 above, was defensive end Justin Tuck, who was not only not the player you’d want on the field (you’d want a cornerback or a safety) but, more to the point, he was running off the field with his helmet off, hoping to exit the playing field before the Patriots snapped the ball. 

Still, just because the Giants didn’t do this did not mean they couldn’t. What would prevent a team from intentionally breaking the rules in order to prevent an outcome demonstrably worse than the penalty they’d incur? The NFL has a rule, 12-3-3, which allows referees to award the other team a touchdown in order to account for actions which are “palpably unfair.” Thankfully, that’s rarely if ever been used in the NFL. 

College football has a similar rule, and that one actually has been used — on New Year’s Day, 1954, in college football’s Cotton Bowl Classic. The Rice University Owls and Alabama Crimson Tide faced off and Alabama got on the scoreboard first when running back Tommy Lewis scored on a 2-yard touchdown run in the first quarter. (Alabama missed the extra point.) Rice’s own running back, Dicky Maegle, answered early in the second quarter, with a 79-yard touchdown run, giving Rice a 7-6 lead.

Maegle stuck again a few minutes later. He took off from his own five yard line and broke past the line of scrimmage, making his way down the right sideline. He had a mostly clear path to the end zone, and another seven points seemed inevitable, as seen above. But Lewis — on the sidelines, with his helmet off — took action. At around the Alabama 40 yard line, Lewis sprung from the sidelines and tackled Maegle, preventing him from scoring. Lewis’s gambit failed, however; the referees awarded Rice a touchdown.

As for Super Bowl XLVI? The Patriots failed to score on their final play and the Giants won, 21-17.

Bonus fact: The image above says Moegle, not Maegle, and it’s not a typographical error. Maegle was born Richard Lee Moegle, but his last name was pronounced in a way closer to “Maegle” than “Moegle,” and people kept mispronouncing it. He changed the spelling of his name to make it phonetically match the pronunciation.

From the Archives: Teddy Versus the Pigskin: How Theodore Roosevelt tried to take on another palpably unfair college football act.

Related: A handwritten note, to a fan, from Dicky Maegle, explaining that he changed the spelling of his last name when his children were born. The fan had sent Maegle a photo from a magazine and requested that the former college star (“Mr. Moegle”) sign it; Maegle, apparently, sent back a note correcting the fan’s error.

Norfolk Island, flagged on the map above, is a tiny island 877 miles (1,412 kilometers) east of mainland Australia and north of New Zealand. It is self-governing but part of the Commonwealth of Australia and its citizens — about 2,300 large — use the Australian dollar as currency. At about 13 square miles (34 kilometers squared), it is one of the smallest territories in the world. And because it is rather remote, there is not a lot of diversity, in any sense of the word, in its human population. And just about everyone knows, or knows of, everyone else.

But they don’t know each other’s phone numbers; at least, not off the top of their heads. So the people of Norfolk Island have something which most of us have heard of before: a phone book. Just like elsewhere in the world, the Norfolk Island phone book lists the names and numbers of people in the community. But unfortunately, not everyone knows each others’ names — or, at least, not their proper names. And to make matters worse, there are a lot of duplicate surnames on Norfolk Island. There are 18 “Adams” listed in the phone book, 37 “Evans,” eight “Taylor”s, a dozen “Buffett,” three dozen “Christian”s, and roughly 40 “Quintal”s. Finding the right number can be a fool’s errand.

So to make it easier, Norfolk Island adds something else to their phone book: nicknames. You may not know that Dar Bizziebee’s real name is “Darlene Buffett,” but that’s OK — she’s listed under the former as well as the latter. There are two Les Quintals on Norfolk Island, but if you want the one married to Jodie, you probably know him better as “Lettuce Leaf” anyway. Rob Adams is also listed as “Chinny,” George Smith as “Carrots,” and one of the two John Christian as “Moonie.”  You may not know who Stephen and Anne Gardiner are, but you may know the couple which goes by Cookie and Freshie.

But the system is, alas, imperfect. If you want to call Diesel — properly known as Damien Finch — you’ll find him listed under his nickname. But make sure you have the right guy; Diesel Adams, another person, may not appreciate the wrong number.

Thankfully, one doesn’t need to carry a phonebook around the island. The entire directory is online, here.

Bonus fact: Norfolk Island is far from Australia, but it is much, much further from the United States. Despite this, the island is one of the few places outside the U.S. which celebrates an American-style Thanksgiving each November. (Norfolk Island celebrates it on the last Wednesday of the month, and typically the one six days after the American holiday.) Why? As the International Business Times explains, American whaling ships would dock on the island, and, due to the (relative) frequency of such visits, the Norfolk Island inhabitants adopted some of the shipmen’s culture — including Thanksgiving.

From the Archives: Bugs on a Pyramid: The story of Lord Howe Island, one of the closest dots of land to Norfolk Island.

Related: A Norfolk Island Pine, a tree indigenous to Norfolk Island which apparently makes for a good Christmas tree. 

While double-yolk eggs are (while atypical) not uncommon, something like the above feels impossible. But the video above isn’t a hoax. It’s a rare phenomenon called “ovum a ova,” per the BBC, or colloquially, a “double egg.” And it is entirely real.

In another video, New Scientist spoke with Douglas Russell, the senior curator of birds (and therefore, the egg collection) at the London Natural History museum. He explains:

What generally happens is that as the egg is developing and being pushed down the oviduct, a series of abnormal contractions can occur which can push a developing egg back up the oviduct. What happens is that one egg will be surrounded by another egg. [. . .] Two complete eggs with yolks and albumens will be created.

As Russell notes, the double egg is extremely rare — everywhere, it seems, except on YouTube. Here are three more examples.

Bonus fact: As reported elsewhere by the BBC, in 2006, a group of biologists from the University of Manchester discovered a duck egg which seemed to have something odd moving around inside it. When they cracked it open, they found three live minnows — small freshwater fish — inside. To this day, there is no explanation as to how this occurred.

From the Archives: Inedible Eggs: The trick to hard boiling an egg. A normal, one-egg egg, that is.

Related: A “Hide and Squeak” egg toy set. As an owner of this, I can attest that children love it, but adults, not so much — the pieces get lost very easily. (But the children really do love it.) 

The confusion was simple: frozen fries come pre-prepared from the plant, where there is no obvious reason for any beef, chicken, or pork additives to be included. When they arrive at the restaurant, they go into the vegetable oil, and, while there is risk of cross-contamination, the fries were not intentionally subjected to the grill or anything else which would have an animal product in it. One can understand why customers would be misled; after all, and as seen below, McDonald’s own corporate communications team thought that the fries were one of a few “items which vegetarians can enjoy at McDonald’s” because “they are cooked in 100% vegetable oil:”

But there was beef in the fries. Beef tallow, specifically. A very small amount — McDonald’s would later use the word “minuscule” in a 2001 statement to CNN – was added to the fry-making process in the plant, and always had. McDonald’s further told media outlets that it never claimed that the fries were vegetarian, although the letter above says otherwise.

On the basis of this letter and the press release, lawsuits followed. One attorney, a Seattle-based man named Harish Bharti, took the error personally. Bharti, born in India and a practicing Hindu, maintained a vegetarian diet for religious reasons, and filed a lawsuit on behalf of a class of plaintiffs in similar situations. His demand? That McDonald’s be transparent in their processes insofar as animal products are used, make the fries truly vegetarian, and pay millions in damages to the “billions and billions deceived,” per ABC News. Bharti noted that the recipe for Hindu-friendly fries should not be a difficult one for McDonald’s to implement in the United States, as they already had such a recipe in place in India and in countries with large Muslim populations as well.

In the end, McDonald’s settled the claims of Bharti’s clients and others, paying $10 million to a variety of religious and vegetarian non-profits. But to date, the fries still contain that minuscule amount of beef in them. Per their official ingredients list (a pdf of which can be found here), the fries have a “natural beef flavor” which, in brackets right after, is described as “wheat and milk derivatives.” As this can be confusing — is it beef? or is it milk and wheat? — in 2011, Doris Lin, a writer for About.com on animal rights topics, investigated further. Mickey D’s reply? In part: “any customer in the U.S. who contacts McDonald’s USA to ask if they contain beef flavoring is told “yes.” For flavor enhancement, in the U.S., McDonald’s French fry suppliers use a very small amount of beef flavor as a natural flavoring during the par-frying process at the potato processing plant.”

Bonus fact: Disneyland has a railroad, appropriately named the Disneyland Railroad, which gives tours of the amusement park by steam locomotives. In 2008 or 2009, the locomotives switched away from petroleum and, now, use something else for power: recycled cooking oil, previously used to make the french fries (and other fried foods) at the Disneyland Resort. This saves, per Disney, an estimated 200,000 gallons of petroleum diesel fuel a year.

From the Archives: Regal Potatoes: How reverse psychology made Germans into potato eaters.

Related: A play McDonald’s fries container. Probably not vegetarian; certainly not edible.  

The image above (much larger version here) doesn’t look like much, but the item has been somewhere you haven’t — the moon. And there’s a very good chance that it shouldn’t have gone to the moon in the first place, and the fact that it did may have cost a couple of astronauts their jobs.

Apollo 15 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 26, 1971. Its lunar module landed on the moon’s surface four days later. The spacecraft carried three astronauts — Commander David Scott, Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin, and Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden — and 641 postage stamp covers, like the one seen above. Of those 641, 243 were authorized by NASA, a common practice for space missions at the time. (Most likely, 250 were authorized, but miscounting or damage to some covers reduced the authorized amount actually brought into space to 243.) The other 398 — 400, minus two which were damaged and therefore discarded — were smuggled aboard.

A German stamp collector named Herman Sieger, before the Apollo 15 mission launch, found out about the 243 NASA-authorized stamp covers and saw an opportunity. He connected with a German man (and naturalized American citizen) named Walter Eiermann, who was well-known in the area around Kennedy Space Center and had many contacts within NASA. He convinced the three astronauts to bring the extra 398 stamp covers aboard the flight with them, offering them $7,000 for their troubles, and giving them an extra 100 covers for their own purposes. Scott, who was travelling with an authorized cancellation stamp (for the 243 pre-approved covers), was to cancel the 398 contraband covers upon the mission’s return to Earth.

That part of the plan went without fail. The stamp covers made the trip without issue and were returned to Sieger, who had originally agreed to not sell any of the stamp covers until after the final Apollo mission came to a close (which, as it turns out, would be another year and a half or so). But Sieger failed to keep up that part of the bargain. As reported by the Spokesman-Review, he started to sell them almost immediately after, receiving $1,500 for each. In total, he earned roughly $300,000 (about $1.6 million in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation) — which, of course, caught the eye of critics far and wide. Even though what the astronauts did was not illegal, many objected, seeing the noble heroes become nothing more than profiteering opportunists. (Irwin, per some reports, would later say that he was simply trying to earn enough money to pay for his children’s college educations.) Congress ordered NASA to take action. NASA re-assigned the astronauts to non-flight roles, prompting their resignations, and confiscated their 100 remaining covers.

A few years later, in 1983, NASA and the U.S. Postal Service partnered to put 260,000 commemorative stamp covers on the STS-8 Challenger shuttle mission. Noting that what they did was not very different, the Apollo 15 crew took legal action to regain their own stamp covers. According to Worden’s autobiography, they settled with NASA and the covers were returned. As recently as 2011, one of the covers (listed but not shown as item number 391 here) sold at auction for $15,000.

Bonus fact: Worden has two claims to fame due to the Apollo 15 mission. On August 5, 1971, he made the first walk in deep space, 196,000 miles from Earth; from that vantage point, he was able to see both the moon and Earth, as he told CNN.  Second, Worden holds the record for the most isolated known person in human history. While Scott and Irwin were on the moon’s surface, Worden was in orbit above the moon, alone, and at one point was 2,235 miles away from the two men on the surface below. (That’s roughly the distance from Barcelona to Moscow.)

From the Archives: Lunar Art: Another thing the Apollo 15 crew smuggled aboard their spacecraft — but in this case, it’s something they left behind on the moon.

Related: “Falling to Earth,” Alfred Worden’s autobiography. 4.7 stars on nearly 50 reviews. Available on Kindle.

In other words, there is almost no reason, whatsoever, for most of us to read it. Put bluntly, we wouldn’t understand it. Which makes the fact that it was once for sale for over $23 million, as seen below, difficult to explain.

The price, of course, has nothing to do with the book. And no, there’s no reason to think anyone actually purchased a copy for $23 million, and not because there was another version available at $18 million and change. (During this whole process, there were likely multiple copies — probably used ones — available for $30.00 or so.) What happened? Blame a couple of competing algorithms.

As noted by Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley (who grabbed the screenshot above), a few days before the books hit these absurd prices, they were at similarly absurd yet much cheaper price points, at about $2.2 million at $1.7 million, respectively. Eisen spent those few days tracking the prices, and a pattern started emerging. Every few hours, the higher-priced seller, “bordeebook” on Amazon, would boost its price to about 1.27 times that of the second-highest, in this case, “profnath.” And a few hours later, profnath would respond, boosting its price to about .998 times that of the highest. The strategy employed by profnath seemed straight-forward — slightly undercut the highest seller in order to increase the likelihood of a sale, while still ensuring that it received an amount negligibly close to the peak price. But what’s going on with bordeebook?

Eisen floated a theory. Why profnath probably owned the book, bordeebook most likely did not. Instead, Eisen suggested, bordeebook “noticed that someone else listed a copy for sale, and so they put it up as well – relying on their better feedback record to attract buyers. But, of course, if someone actually orders the book, they have to get it – so they have to set their price significantly higher – say 1.27059 times higher – than the price they’d have to pay to get the book elsewhere.”

As of this writing, there are eight new copies of the book available on Amazon, with the cheapest selling for a much more reasonable $86.80 (plus $3.99 shipping and handling). However, the problem could occur again. One of the sellers — and not one of the two mentioned above — has a copy listed for $7,000.

Bonus fact: Three years ago — and more than two years before the “Making of a Fly” debacle came to light — a guy named Brian Klug found a CD-ROM for sale for $2.9 billion (!) on Amazon, and, as seen here, attempted to purchase it. Amazon canceled the order a few days later and, as he recalled on reddit (here), called him to discuss the order. The Amazon representative, per Klug’s reddit post, “made it clear they treat the shopper’s experience with the highest regard and they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.”

Double bonus!: In the early days of Amazon, consumers could get rich another way, with nothing more than a credit card and a dash symbol. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained in a video (here) discussing his company’s acquisition of Zappos, “customers could order a negative quantity of books, and, we would credit their credit card with the price and [. . . ] wait around for them to ship us the books.” (That bug is fixed.)

From the Archives: A Fly on the Urinal: These exist. Why?

Related: A book which teaches the reader how to make money selling stuff on Amazon. It’s about retail flipping, but probably does not suggest that you try and sell one book for a cool $23 million (or $2.9 billion for that matter).

Image via Michael Eisen’s blog post, linked above.

The European front of World War II ended in May of 1945, but, of course, the fighting did not simply end in an instant. And more importantly, the victorious armies did not magically disappear from the battlefield. As seen above (much larger version here), on May 10, 1945,, there were still troops throughout Germany. This was especially true for the Soviets, whose armies stretched from north of Berlin south, past Prague, and into northern Yugoslavia. For the Western Allies — primarily Great Britain in this case — the position of the Soviet armies and the history of the conflict to date posed a threat. The UK and the Soviets were allies of convenience, not ideology. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the two sides agreed to divide Eastern Europe up amongst themselves (mapped out here); further, the Soviets subscribed to Communism while the Western governments eschewed it.

With Germany’s military neutralized, it was unclear what would happen next between the Soviet Union and the West — and this uncertainty was discussed months before the German surrender. Poland’s independence was specifically at risk, although subsequent ills may have befallen the rest of Europe if Poland were to fall once again. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that the British armed forces come up with a plan, codenamed Operation Unthinkable — a plan to strike the Soviet troops.

Churchill’s original intention was leverage the element of surprise in hopes of breaking the Soviets quickly, using the available British, American, and Polish troops in the region, as well as re-arming 100,000 German troops. Per the strategy document itself, declassified in 1998 (and reprinted here) the stated objective was “to impose upon Russia [a term used interchangeably  if incorrectly, with the USSR] the will of the United States and the British Empire.” While that statement sounds rather imperial and, perhaps, was intended to be so, the document further clarifies: “Even though ‘the will’ of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it.”

“Total war,” advisors warned, wasn’t just a disfavored outcome, though — it was a likely one, and not a good one for the British Empire. At the time of the German surrender, Soviet troops in Europe outnumbered the Western Allies 4:1 and the Soviets had twice as many tanks. Furthermore, the American troops in Europe were being re-assigned to the Pacific for a potential invasion of Japan. Senior military leaders advised against turning against the Soviets, and Churchill reluctantly agreed.

Bonus fact: Go on a guided tour of London and you’ll see a statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, and you may be told that there’s an slight electrical current flowing through it in order to keep pigeons off it. (Here are two sites mentioning this “fact.”) As the story goes, Churchill didn’t want his likeness to become a latrine for the birds, to the point that he preferred that he not have a statue at all. (A similar statue of Churchill in Toronto has exactly that problem.) This “fact,” though, isn’t true, despite the lack of guano suggesting otherwise. What keeps the birds (and bird poo) away? According to a 1973 issue of New Scientist, the electrical current idea was rejected and, instead, a pin-cushion of sorts was installed. The statue is mostly free of pigeon problems.

From the Archives: Invading Canada: The United States’ now defunct and declassified plan to take its neighbors to the north, just in case.

Related: A miniature statue of Winston Churchill, which for some reason has two reviews. (Both reviewers give it five stars.)

Imagine that you’re at the beach hoping to get tan. The sun emits ultraviolet (UV) rays which, via a pair of processes (described here) causes tanning, but, depending on your skin type, may also lead to sunburns. Most people can avoid sunburns by applying sunblock which, as the name suggests, blocks many UV rays. But leave part of your body untouched by the sunblock and the UV rays get through, causing burns.

A nuclear bomb explosion works in a similar way. The explosion acts as the sun does in the example above, except that instead of emitting UV rays it emits thermal radiation. The radiation will bleach anything it ends up hitting, much like the UV rays cause sunburns. But anything that gets in the way — including a soon-to-be-vaporized body — will soak up those rays, effectively shielding whatever is behind it from the bleaching effect. In a real sense, the dead acted as a form of nuclear sunblock. The result is the “shadow” imprinted on the stairs pictured above.

The Trinity Atomic Web Site, a site dedicated to chronicling the history of nuclear weapons, has a video showing one of the shadows, etched forever on a bridge.

Bonus fact: Eating tomatoes may help stave off sunburns. According to a report by Prevention magazine, the fruit’s (or vegetable’s, it’s both) high lycopene content gets the credit; the BBC notes that lycopene is a very effective antioxidant and therefore useful in this regard. Per one study, as cited by Prevention, a group of volunteer subjects ate five tablespoons of tomato paste daily for three months, and in the end, showed a decreased rate of sunburns than the general population.

From the Archives: Beating the Bomb: On August 6, 1945, he was in Hiroshima. He survived. Three days later? He was in Nagasaki.

Related: Three bottles of sunscreen which, at the time of this writing, cost a bit over $2,000. Huh?

On January 8, 1880, Emperor Norton I (pictured above) collapsed on his way to a lecture at a local university. He died before help could arrive. His death made front page news in the largest newspaper of the area, under the headline “Le Roi Est Mort” — “The King is Dead,” with a similar headline published in the second largest newspaper of the locale. At his funeral two days later, thousands — perhaps as many as 30,000, despite the city’s population being only about 200,000 — came to pay their respects. The newspaper reported the next day that within hours, the line to do so was out the door, hundreds of people long.

But his empire wasn’t real. Joshua Abraham Norton — or his Imperial Majesty, Norton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, was a delusional (or at least, eccentric) pauper with a flair for grandeur. And the city of San Francisco seemed to love him for it.

The United States, of course, has never had an Emperor, let alone one who was also the Protector of Mexico (the Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding). But that mattered little to Norton. Born in England in the early 1800s, he inherited a large sum of money upon his father’s death and moved to San Francisco (from South Africa) in 1849. Over the next few years, he’d successfully invest in real estate in the area, and was worth a reported $250,000 in the 1850s — the equivalent of well over $6 million today, accounting for inflation. But he would soon lose his fortune. A famine in China led to rice shortages in San Francisco, and a rapid increase in prices looked like it was on the horizon. Norton started buying up rice coming in from Peru at twelve and a half cents a pound, expecting to corner the market, but other shipments from Peru made it to the city — and the price fell to about three cents a pound. Norton lost money not only on the transaction, but also on litigation to try and void the contract. In 1858, he left San Francisco, bankrupt.

He returned to the city at some point in 1859, but was no longer interested in the rice or real estate businesses. Instead, Norton fancied himself as some strange kind of political activist, and on September 17, 1859, he sent a letter to various area newspapers proclaiming himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. At first, the newspapers took it as a strange joke from a formerly well-known well-to-do citizen, but it soon became clear that Norton had lost more than his riches in the rice deal gone bad. In October, the self-crowned Emperor issued his first decree, abolishing Congress. (When Congress did not vacate, Emperor Norton ordered the Army ”to procede with a suitable force to clear the Halls of Congress.”) And he instituted what may be the world’s first swear jar, when he called for a $25 fine for anyone who used a certain F-word — “Frisco.”

Despite his apparent madness, Norton was eminently likable, and well-received by the community. A local Army post gave him the uniform he is seen wearing above — a gift befitting a commander of a real army, not just the one in his own head. Norton, being a sovereign, issued his own currency – here’s an example – and local citizens and businesses used it in day-to-day transactions.

Norton is now buried in Colma, California. His gravestone, seen here, memorializes him as “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico,” just as he lived.

Bonus fact: Norton I isn’t the only person buried in Colma, California — also buried there are Joe DiMaggio, William Randolph Hearst, Wyatt Earp, and Levi Strauss. The town, founded in 1924 (Norton’s remains were moved there in 1934), was designed to be a necropolis — it is made up mostly of cemeteries or land designated to become cemeteries in the future. The residents of the town take their role in life (and death) with humor. In 2006, the mayor of Colma told the New York Times that the city “has 1,500 above-ground residents and 1.5 million underground,” while the town’s official website reads “It’s Great to be Alive in Colma.”

From the Archives: The San Francisco Bushman: Allegedly homeless, definitely loved.

Related: Three different books on Emperor Norton.

Resignations from the U.S. House of Representatives happen somewhat often. For example, on June 21, 2011, Anthony Weiner resigned from the House after being ensnared in scandal, having sent explicit photographs of himself to six different women via Twitter. About a year later, on July 6, 2012, Representative Thad McCotter resigned after election officials discovered that his ballot petitions were comprised of fraudulent signatures. A few weeks after that, another House member, Geoff Davis, also resigned, citing health reasons. And there are certainly others as well in the last two year election cycle alone. In this case, it’s a job like any other –if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can quit. Sure, you won’t get paid, and yes, there may be other consequences, but if you don’t want to (or, effectively, can’t) do the job anymore, in almost all cases, you can stop doing it.
Resignations from the UK House of Parliament, though, are very rare. There’s a reason for that: Members of Parliament are not allowed to resign. (But don’t worry, there’s a work around.)

To some, representing your community is not just a job, but a matter of public trust. Such an appointment, the logic follows, should not be taken lightly — and should not be dispensed with at a whim. In 1624, the United Kingdom decided to make this belief into an enforcable rule, binding MPs to their Parliament seats. The rule has morphed into more of a tradition, but regardless, has been in effect ever since.

But in 1701, a second rule conflicted with this. The Crown had the ability to appoint people into something called an “office of profit” — basically, a ministerial office, working on behalf of the reigning monarch, which comes with a (typically perfunctory) wage. Offices of profit are virtually unknown today in the UK, but were relevant enough in the 18th century that Parliament saw this job as conflicting with the duties of an MP — the MP would necessarily have to choose, at some point or another, whether to act in the benefit of his constituents or to the benefit of his employer, the King. So if an MP accepted appointment to an office of profit, he was required to vacate his seat in Parliament.

As executive power has shifted from the Crown to Parliament as the parliamentary system has developed, in modern times, offices of profit under the Crown have almost entirely disappeared. But two positions remain, called the Crown Stewards and Bailiffs of Chiltern Hundreds and the Manor of Northstead, respectively. Neither position has any substantive duties, but the officeholders of both receive a tiny salary from the Crown. The sole purpose of these positions is to create the conflict described by the 1701 rule so that an MP can leave office without violating the no-resignations custom. 

Bonus fact: The U.S. Constitution makes three references to offices of profit, but those rules rarely are in issue. One recent exception? Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states in part that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.” And in 2008, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize committee is empowered to award the honor by the Parliament of Norway, and approximately $1.4 million is given to the honoree. Some argued that this was a “present from a foreign state” and therefore unconstitutional for the President to accept without Congress’s OK. In the end, though, the argument was more partisan bluster than anything else; regardless, President Obama donated all the money, splitting it up among ten different charitable organizations.

From the Archives: Representation Without Taxation: What happens when Scotland gets to decide on how England is taxed?

Related: “How to Land a Top-Paying Federal Job,” 4.9 stars on 12 reviews.

Office space in Manhattan is pricey, to say the least. And for over a century, companies have been looking for ways to find more offices, even if it means building new buildings. On New Year’s Eve, 1903, the New York Times threw a midnight event at the site of its soon-to-open new headquarters, the Times Tower, located the intersections of Broadway (then Bloomingdale Road), Seventh Avenue, and 42nd Street in Manhattan — then called Longacre Square. The next April, Times publisher Adolph Ochs convinced the mayor, George B. McClellan, Jr., to rename the area “Times Square,” as it is called today. And for the next ten years, the Times would call One Times Square, pictured above, its home.

A century later, no one does. One Times Square’s office space is vacant, by design.

In 1913, the Times moved its headquarters to West 43rd Street, leaving behind a handful of offices in Times Square, and in 1961, the Times sold the building. Over the next century, the building would shed its original facade, as seen here, and transform into a concrete-and-marble canvas for the advertisements for which Times Square is now well known. And that advertising is worth a lot. In 2007, Reuters reported that One Times Square’s owners receives $20 million annually from the advertisers, and going up. There are 19 spots for ads, and just last year, at least two of the ad units were rented out for about $3.5 million a year –  about the same price as a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl.

That money makes the building valuable, even if the office space is unoccupied. Which it is. While the retail space has Walgreens as a tenant (after years vacant but paid for, thanks to a broken lease by the Warner Bros. Studio Store which previously leased it), the 20-something stories above it are empty.

In 1996, real estate investment companies Jamestown Properties and Sherwood Equities purchased One Times Square, noting the unique value of its advertising space. The building’s interior had not been renovated in over thirty years, however, and was no longer up to code. Updating the wiring, heat, venting, air conditioning, and mechanics would be a costly investment. Further, because the building is on the intersection of three roadways, each floor is oddly shaped, resulting in very little floor space relative to typical office buildings. Finally, while the building was the second-tallest in Manhattan when it was constructed, at 395 feet, it is relatively short for a modern skyscraper — and its larger-than-average ceiling heights further reduce the amount of leasable floor space.

Taken as a whole, it made more sense to leave the building’s office space unoccupied than to ready it for rental.

Bonus fact: Every New Year’s Eve, a million or so people gather in Times Square and count down to the new year together as a ball, now made of crystal triangles, descends down the flagpole of One Times Square. This tradition began with the Times’ party in 1903 (which attracted 200,000 people) but didn’t involve the ball yet — that was added in 1908 — and (except for 1942 and 1943, to conserve energy to support the wartime efforts) has occurred since. But where did the idea come from? According to TIME, ball drops were commonplace in the U.S. — not for New Year’s, but hourly, as a way to keep everyone on schedule: “For decades, residents of U.S. cities would synchronize their pocketwatches using a giant globe that would descend from a pole in a public space to mark the exact hour.”

From the Archives: The President’s Secret Train Station: Just down 42nd Street from Times Square and up a few blocks is another hidden piece of New York City.

Related: Times Square as a 1000-piece puzzle.

Dartmouth College was founded in 1769, well before the advent of football, basketball, baseball, or most other team sports still played by colleges today. And while some other colleges from that era adopted mascots — Yale (1701) is the Bulldogs, Princeton (1746) the Tigers — Dartmouth athletes officially go by the name “Big Green.” And there’s no animal or other creature which represents that color and size combination.

And where there is no official mascot, unofficial ones are likely to sprout up. Dartmouth’s current unofficial one? An anthropomorphic beer keg, known as Keggy, as seen below.

Dartmouth has never had an official mascot, but in the 1920s, sports journalists in the Boston area started to refer to the teams as the “Indians,” for reasons unclear. In time, the college’s sports teams adopted a caricature of a Native American as the de facto representation of the sports teams (see a collection of football program covers here), and for about fifty years, the Indian was the all-but-official mascot of the school. But in 1974, the college’s board of trustees requested (or perhaps, insisted) that the informal “Indian” mascot no longer be used. According to DartmouthSports.com, the trustees believed that the “use of the (Indian) symbol in any form to be inconsistent with present institutional and academic objectives of the College in advancing Native American education.”  And with that, Dartmouth was left mascot-less once again.

Over the years, students have proposed a few ideas. In 2003, the student body put a slate of possibilities up for a campus-wide vote and “Moose” got the most votes. But in a follow-up poll, “no mascot” received more votes than “moose,” keeping the status quo intact. This lent itself to comedy, and a pair of students associated with the campus humor magazine, the Jack o’Lantern, came up with a goal: to “create a mascot that wasn’t racist or sexist, yet entirely unacceptable,” per one of the two students. And from this, Keggy was born.

Keggy has made appearances at football games and other events in the years since, although not without controversy. He was denied access to a 2006 hockey game, citing fire code concerns, and was not allowed to take the field during the halftime show at that year’s Homecoming game. In 2008, the costume was stolen, but a refurbished one was developed in 2009.

To date, Dartmouth still has no official mascot — so Keggy is as official as it gets.

Bonus fact: Perhaps the most famous Dartmouth graduate to write for the Lantern was Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. In honor of Seuss, Dartmouth treats its first-year students to a breakfast of green eggs and ham at the conclusion of the annual orientation wilderness retreat.

From the Archives: Fifty Word Masterpiece: More about Seuss, with a Dartmouth-centered Bonus Fact.

Related: A kegerator.

We all know how the story goes. Darth Vader kills Obi-Wan Kenobi, who turns into a ghost. Luke Skywalker, with encouragement from Obi-Wan’s ghost, blows up the Death Star, trains to become a Jedi with Yoda, confronts Vader. Luke and Vader fight, above. Vader cuts off Luke’s hand and tells Luke he’s his father. Luke returns to Yoda, talks to Obi-Wan’s ghost, who confirms that yes, Vader is Luke’s father even though he originally told Luke that Vader killed his father. That depends on one’s perspective, Obi-Wan argues.

Again, we all know how the saga plays out. And when it was filmed, so did Luke (Mark Hamill) and, obviously, the guy who actually says “No, I am your father!” (James Earl Jones). And George Lucas, who came up with trilogy and wrote The Empire Strikes Back, well, he obviously knew that. So did director Irvin Kershner and, if you believe the bonus features on the re-released DVDs, no one else did. Not even the guy in the Darth Vader suit.

As Entertainment Weekly recounts, the surprise twist was not just a surprise to viewers, but also to the cast and crew of Empire itself. But, when David Prowse — the guy in the Vader suit — spoke the lines (before the producers had James Earl Jones dub over them), he didn’t say that Vader was Luke’s father. Instead, per the DVDs, he told Luke that Obi-Wan had killed the elder Skywalker. Hamill was given the true line and was instructed to carry out the scene as if Prowse had said the  ”I am your father” line, not the one he actually spoke. As the story goes, the rest of the cast and crew found out when the rest of us did — when the film premiered in theaters.

Maybe.

The official story has one flaw — a flaw only Darth Vader himself could conjure. In 1978, a year after the first Star Wars movie but two years before Empire debuted, Prowse appeared at a mostly-overlooked event event in Berkeley, California, playing host to about 1,000 fans. Per a newspaper account of the event (via Slashfilm), Prowse “offered the crowd a glimpse of a possible plot for the second sequel [implying this would be in Return of the Jedi, not Empire]. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker [. . .] are hooked up in a do-or-die light saber duel when Luke learns that Darth is, in fact, his long-lost father.” 

Bonus fact: Despite his apparent loose lips, Prowse ended up playing Vader — well, the physical embodiment of him, while in costume at least — in all three movies. (Prowse isn’t the actor seen when Vader reveals his face to Luke toward the end of Jedi; that role was played by Sebastian Shaw. And Prowse also didn’t do the actual lightsaber battles; that was done by Olympic fencer and master sword choreographer Bob Anderson.) And you’d expect him, therefore, to be a pretty rich man — after all, Jedi grossed over $300 million domestically, putting it 15th all-time per Box Office Mojo (adjusted for inflation). But if Prowse is well-off, it isn’t because of residual payments earned from Jedi. As of 2009 — more than 25 years after Jedi‘s release — he hasn’t been paid a single residual from the movie. Why not? Prowse was a victim of something called “hollywood accounting,” where studios creatively book income and expenses in order to reduce such payments.  As Slashfilm reported, Prowse’s contract entitles him to a share of net profits, not gross profits, and per the former measurement, Lucasfilm claimed that Jedi hadn’t yet made money. 

From the Archives: London Tube Time Machine: Why did Vader kill Obi-Wan? The bonus fact explains a behind-the-scenes reason.

Related: Quite simply, the best Darth Vader toy ever made.

Hong Kong has a population density of over 16,000 people per square mile (about 6,500 per kilometer-squared). This puts the region as the second most dense sovereign state or dependent territory with a population of at least one million people. (Only Singapore is more densely populated.) And for that reason, real estate in Hong Kong gets pricey, and quickly. From 2010 through 2012, housing prices soared 50%, per CNN, making an affordable home a pipe dream — and sparking fears of a future recession spurred by a “bubble” of overvalued real estate popping.

To combat rampant housing price increases, the Hong Kong government issued a series of taxes increases aimed at foreign purchasers, hoping to soften demand until the housing supply caught up. This left many investors on the sideline, looking for other places to put their money. And one type of real estate left untouched by the aforementioned regulations found itself the object of all this cash.

And that’s how one guy ended up with two parking spots valued at roughly $640,000 — each.

Given that a typical parking spot in Hong Kong will run the car owner about $750 a month, that’s a huge price — it’d take over seventy years before the monthly fee caught up — the whole idea seems doubly outlandish. But the man who owns the spot would know. He is Jacinto Tong, the CEO of a real estate development group called the Gale Well Group. As CNN notes, Tong — dubbed “the tycoon of parking spaces” in Hong Kong — owns a pair of spots which, due to their location within a sought-after commercial building (“you can go straight to the office and the elevator,” notes Tong, “only 20 steps — 20 steps!”) can fetch an exorbitant price if they were put up for sale. Tong, who has used his spaces for the last decade, claimed not to be eager to sell, but apparently had the value of the 100 or so square feet of concrete appraised nonetheless.

While the price seems outlandish, even if Tong were to receive north of half a million dollars for each spot, that may not be a record — perhaps not even close. As the New York Post reported, there’s a spot in Manhattan with an asking price of $1 million.

Bonus fact: As well-publicized, Google is working on a self-driving car. (Here’s a video of a prototype in action.) While some of the advantages of such a creation are obvious, Google’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page told Fortune about one that is less so: it helps save on parking costs. Not for the drivers, though, but for their employers. Fortune, citing Page, says that Google’s headquarters “is short on parking, and quotes for new garages have come in at $40,000 per car.” As Page notes, a self-driving car would allow for a virtual valet service, eliminating the need for nearby parking, and allowing for a dramatic reduction in the cost of parking.

From the Archives: No Parking: How Singapore deals with parking demands.

Related: “Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking” by Eran Ben-Joseph. Two reviews, one of 5 stars and one of 4.

Photo above (larger version here and much larger version here) of the Hong Kong skyline from December 13, 2007, by David Iliff, used under a Creative Commons license.

In 2005, former big league slugger Jose Canseco released the book “Juiced,” detailing his account of the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball. Canseco accused a half-dozen former teammates of using the same drugs he had, naming, among others, Mark McGwire. Five years later, McGwire would admit to taking steroids as early as 1989.

McGwire was a century behind the times.

Charles Edward Brown-Sequard was a Mauritian-born, French-trained doctor in the mid- to late-1800s. While best known for a syndrome in which a spinal cord injury results in paralysis and impaired motor function, Brown-Sequard was interested in something else: monkey testicles. In 1889, Brown-Sequard published a paper (pdf) titled “The Effects Produced on Man by the Subcutaneous Injections of a Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals,” investigating whether the hormones could help humans become stronger and more virile. Specifically, Brown-Sequard believed (and reported) that, eating an extract from monkey testicles could result in improved performance in the bedroom.

Almost immediately, people were using the soon-called “Brown-Sequard elixir” as a muscle-building supplement. An August 23, 1889 article in the New York Times (pdf) titled “Doctors Who Disagree” discussed how the elixir was dividing the medical community; some believed that the testicle extract was helping reverse the aging process while others refused to buy into what they saw as nothing more than snake oil. (The latter doctors were right; the elixir was, at best, a placebo.)

Among those of the elixir’s early users was a man named James Galvin, better known by his nickname, “Pud.” Pud Galvin (pictured above) was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, a team which would, two years later, change their name to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Even in an era defined by workhorse starting pitchers, Galvin was a standard-bearer. His just over 6,000 innings pitched and 646 complete games are second all-time (behind Cy Young in both cases), and he is the only pitcher in Major League history with 70 or more complete games in two or more seasons (72 in 1883 and 71 a year later). But all this work took a toll on the short, stocky pitcher.

According to NPR, Galvin turned to modern medicine for help, in the form of Brown-Sequard elixir, thereby introducing foreign hormones into his body. He did so openly; the Washington Post even used his on-field performance to extol the virtues of the elixir, stating “if there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir, they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record in yesterday’s Boston-Pittsburgh game. It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.” Given this, one shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Galvin was never punished for his attempts to use drugs to enhance his performance. In fact, in 1965, he was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Bonus fact: Pittsburgh’s baseball team was named the Alleghenys after the Allegheny River and the city of Allegheny, the town across that river from Pittsburgh, in which they actually played. Pittsburgh annexed in Allegheny in 1907, but the annexation was controversial. Prior to 1906, Pennsylvania state law allowed for municipalities to combine, but only if a majority of voters in both towns approved such a merger/annexation. But in 1906, the state legislature changed the law, requiring one collective vote encompassing voters from both towns; if a majority of this combined group voted for the combination, the merger could go forward. As Pittsburgh’s population topped Allegheny’s 2:1, the vote to combine passed easily, even though most Allegheny citizens were against it, citing Pittsburgh’s municipal debt and Allegheny’s relative prosperity. A group of Allegheny citizens sued to prevent the annexation, even reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. But the court ruled in favor of Pittsburgh, and the two cities combined peaceably.

From the Archives: High and Outside: Is LSD a performance enhancing drug? Probably not, but don’t tell that to former pitcher Dock Ellis.

Related: A book on the history of Allegheny City. Also, “Ghosts in the Gallery at Cooperstown: Sixteen Forgotten Members of the Hall of Fame” by David Fleitz. Doesn’t include Galvin, so with the above, it’s 17!

At times, sitting around, listening to the radio, seems like a great, relaxing idea — if you’re at home, on the couch. But in a car? That means you’re probably sitting in traffic, and traffic jams are a simply terrible experience.

But by and large, traffic jams aren’t very long. Sitting in traffic for an hour is rare; sitting in a jam for six hours virtually unheard of. The exception? The Beijing-Tibet Expressway in China, in August of 2010. How bad of an exception? The traffic jam went for well more than six hours. It lasted more than ten days.

On around August 14, 2010, traffic started to gather on the Expressway over a 100 kilometer stretch — and failed to abate. Use of the highway had been steadily increasing for years, with the number of automobiles using this specific roadway increasing nearly 40% year over year. At the time, the road was 60% over capacity. With the increased use, the Chinese government understandably made expanding the Expressway’s capacity a priority, and, per the Wall Street Journal, began roadwork on August 13th of that year. But while the long-term effect of such construction would be to alleviate traffic, as anyone who has attempted to drive through a construction zone knows, the short-term effect is an increase in traffic.

And then things got worse. As reported by the Financial Times, all the little things started to happen — traffic accidents, broken-down vehicles, and the like — each one adding another minor slowdown, and collectively, making the terrible traffic jam unimaginably long. Many drivers were only able to travel one kilometer a day, and while officials tried to get cars off the main road and onto alternative routes, for some, this meant sitting on the Expressway for as many as five days.

With so many travelers (especially long-haul rigs carting coal from Mongolia to urban centers around China) effectively stranded together, an economy and subculture started to spring up. Drivers complained that residents of nearby towns were coming to the highway with instant noodles for sale, but at exorbitant prices which took advantage of the captive customer base; bottles of water, typically costing 1 yuan (about 15 cents) were being sold for 10 yuan. Per the Guardian, some were “passing the time with games of chess or cards,” while others “requested concerts be performed on roadside verges” — outlandish, perhaps, but no more so than sixty miles of automobiles collectively going nowhere.

By the end of the month — ten days, maybe even a few days long after the jam began — traffic abated quickly. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, the by the twelfth day, traffic on the Expressway “vanished”  with only “garden-variety” backups still occurring.

Bonus fact: If sitting in traffic seems like torture, moving right along may be worse — just ask comic-magician duo Penn and Teller. In 1995, the pair was set to release a video game for the Sega CD consisting of six mini-games, one of which was called “Desert Bus.” (The six game pack was never released because the publisher went out of business before copies shipped.) Desert Bus, striving for realism, had simple rules: You were a bus driver. Your bus has a slight alignment problem, drifting right, and you had to drive your passengers on a straight, scenery-free road from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada (about 360 to 400 miles) at a constant speed of 45 miles per hour. To “beat” the game, one needed to drive the bus, without pausing, for the eight hours straight.

From the Archives: Red Light, Green Light: How North Korea deals with traffic (even though it has very little private car ownership in the first place).

Related: Penn & Teller’s How to Play in Traffic: The book has 4.3 stars on 18 reviews.

Image via LaughingSquid.

Sharks have a reputation of being vicious killers, feasting on whatever animal comes into their domain. Some of their reputation is undeserved — while movies like Jaws create the illusion that sharks prey on people, that’s hardly the case. According to the University of Florida, there have been fewer than 2,500 unprovoked shark attacks on humans since 1580. (Yes, 1580.)  But regardless, one thing is for sure: all sharks, regardless of specific species, are carnivorous.

All, that is, but one. Meet Florence, above.

Florence is a tropical nurse shark, who lives at the Birmingham National Sea Life Centre in the United Kingdom. She was brought there in 2009, from Weymouth Sea Life Park in southern England, where she had just been one of the first sharks to undergo out-of-tank surgery. Florence, at the time, had stopped eating and had grown “pale and listless” per the BBC, and an ultrasound found the culprit: a rusty fishing hook lodged in her jaw. The surgery, successful, removed the hook from her jaw and restored her appetite, but for some reason, Florence lost her taste for meat. She became the world’s first known vegetarian shark.

Kind of. It is probably more accurate to call her the first would-be vegetarian shark, if her caretakers did not step in. As reported by Treehugger, Florence’s diet isn’t ideal, her being a shark and all. While she will eat lettuce, cucumbers, and other vegetables, these foods lack the nutrients she needs to survive and thrive. The scientists at the Sea Life Centre sneak bits of fish into Florence’s otherwise-vegetarian diet. And “sneak” is the operative word there — if Florence notices the meat in her food, she won’t eat it.

Bonus fact: As noted above, fatal shark attacks are very rare. According to Popular Mechanics, only four Americans died from shark-induced injuries from 2003 to 2008. As Popular Mechanics further points out, cows are more dangerous — over the same time period, 108 Americans died from cow-inflicted injuries.

From the Archives: In Utero Fight Club: How Florence (and other grey nurse sharks) fought her way into existence.

Related: “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals” by Missy Chase Lapine. 356 reviews, 4.3 stars. Available for Kindle, probably not good for tricking sharks.

Image via the Birmingham National Sea Life Centre

According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, roughly 36 million people worldwide suffer from dementia (see page 5 of this .pdf) and, as populations get older, that number is expected to nearly double in two decades. Caring for those with dementia is taxing and emotional. There are innovative new drugs and therapies, coping strategies for families and loved ones, and elder care facilities, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. With the number of dementia patients rapidly increasing — and, per the same source, the annual, aggregate cost of disease nearing 1% of global GDP — creative solutions to managing the lives of those suffering with the affliction are being explored around the world.

One such idea? In the Netherlands, there’s a village made up, entirely, of elderly people with dementia.

About a half-hour drive from Amsterdam is the town of Weesp, a town of about 17,000 people. About 150 of them live in a 23-unit gated complex called Hogewey. All of them suffer from Alzheimer’s or similar conditions. But unlike the typical elder care facility, Hogewey does not try to get its residents to adjust to a new reality. Rather, Hogewey crafts a reality around their residents’ delusions. As the Guardian reports, one of Hogewey’s goals is to create “an almost-normal home where people are surrounded by things they recognise and by other people with backgrounds, interests and values similar to their own.” While typical dementia patients find every aspect of their news lives restricted and their former activities, by and large, reduced to a fleeting memory, Hogewey wants its residents to continue on with their “regular” lives. Again per the Guardian, Hogewey “encourages residents to keep up the day-to-day tasks they have always done: gardening, shopping, peeling potatoes, shelling the peas, doing the washing, folding the laundry, going to the hairdresser, popping to the cafe.”

In fact, Hogewey is designed like a regular village, complete with ordinary amenities such as “a small supermarket, a theater and a restaurant and cafe “ as recounted by the New York Times. Roughly 250 paid healthcare professionals (as well as an unknown number of additional volunteers) assist the residents with most aspects of their lives, but they aren’t in traditional lab coats or scrubs, but in regular street clothes. But of course, the cognitive abilities of those who live at Hogewey, in the end, define the community. As Spiegel notes, “Residents venture outside without coats in the winter and wear two in the summer. They feel the rain on their skin and leave their umbrellas at home. They drink coffee before bed and eat chocolate for breakfast. They cross the street in a rage and sing to themselves down hallways.”

Bonus fact: While many of us often call the Netherlands “Holland” as if the two terms can be used interchangeably, the two are not one in the same. The Netherlands is the entire country, consisting of roughly 16 million inhabitants; Holland is only two western provinces (North Holland and South Holland) within the country of the Netherlands, with roughly 6 million people therein. But don’t feel too bad if you keep erring here. Except for non-Hollander Dutch, it is a pretty common mistake; in fact, the official website of the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions isn’t TheNetherlands.com but Holland.com.

From the Archives: Scrambled City: A village in the Netherlands in Belgium.

Related: “The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss” by Nancy Mace and Peter Vabins. 4.9 stars on 87 reviews. Available on Kindle.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus, better known as HIV, is the virus which causes AIDS. As its name suggests, HIV only affects humans. But other species have counterpart diseases; for example, cats can become infected with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, or FIV, which causes AIDS in them. And a relatively new procedure, involving genes from monkeys and jellyfish, may provide hope for future cats in the war against FIV (and by extension, for people tackling HIV).

And as an intended side effect, the process makes the cats glow green, as seen above.

As reported by Reuters, the team of scientists working on the experiment injected the foreign genes into not-yet-fertilized feline eggs, and induced the eggs to incorporate the genes into its cells via a “harmless virus.” The monkey genes, researchers hoped, could cause cells to block FIV, thereby preventing a later AIDS infection. Further, a cat with the monkey gene-enhanced cells could pass that genetic improvement to its offspring. Unfortunately, while the theory behind that hope made sense, testing it proved difficult. The scientists needed to be able to check their experiment, and it would be difficult to see which cells came with the mutation induced by the harmless virus noted above. The solution: the jellyfish genes.

Jellyfish contain a protein which causes them to glow when exposed to blue light. This protein has been introduced into other animals a few times over the years in an effort to get these animals to fluoresce. In 2000, an artist introduced the protein into a rabbit named Alba, creating a green-glowing bunny and living piece of performance art. (Alba died in 2002, and there’s some question whether the protein actually worked in her case.) According to the BBC, in 2006, a team of Taiwanese scientists produced three green-glowing pigs. And commercially, there are glowing zebrafish known as GloFish available for purchase.

The FIV research team realized that, by including the proper jellyfish gene in the “harmless virus” carrying the monkey genes, they could easily identify the “infected” cats — simply by shining a blue light on them. If the cat glowed green, the cat carried the jellyfish genes; and because the jellyfish genes travelled with the monkey ones, the green hue meant that cat also had the monkey genes as well. And the green-glowing cats were showing a resistance toward FIV.

While researchers have hopes that advances in fighting FIV can help in the battle against HIV, that may not be true. As Science magazine notes, the two viruses “are different enough that cats can’t catch HIV and people can’t get FIV.” But it is probably a significant step in the right direction.

The full paper involving the green glowing cats is available here.

Bonus fact: Glowing foxes were almost used by the U.S. military in World War II. But they weren’t going to be infused with jellyfish genes — just slathered in paint. According to the book “Psychological Operations American Style” (excerpted here), foxes, “when illuminated,” were considered “a harbinger of bad times” by many Japanese. The Office of Strategic Services (a CIA predecessor), as a test, painted thirty foxes with glow-in-the-dark paint and released them in Manhattan’s Central Park. When New Yorkers reacted with fear and horror, the OSS decided to run a full-scale operation in Japan. But the war ended before the ghost foxes could be unleashed there.

From the Archives: Hug Me Dot: Want to know if you can hug a Mensa member? Look for a green dot.

Related: A 5-gallon fish tank made specifically for GloFish; it comes with 15 blue LEDs installed to enhance the fluorescence of the fish.

Image via Science magazine, originally here.

Pictured above is a little robot, only a few centimeters in any direction. It looks like a robot to us humans, and isn’t anything that would make us gag or stand up on a stool to avoid it as it scurries across the floor. But to cockroaches, the robot above, called the Insbot, is one of them. Hopefully.

The Insbot is the creation of the Leurre project, a collaboration between researchers in various universities in Belgium and France. The project aims to create artificial beings — robots, basically — which can interact with animals in a meaningful, social way. The researchers would ideally work with ants, which are highly social, but the current state of robotics doesn’t allow us to make robots small enough to interact with them. Cockroaches, on the other hand, are roughly the same size as what we can build, so Leurre has created the Insbot in hopes of interacting with the pests.

Per the Age (Australia), the Insbot is programmed to behave like a cockroach, and is outfitted with pheromones which further convince actual cockroaches that the box-shaped robot is one of their own.  In an interview with the Discovery Channel’s “One Step Beyond” (viewable here), Leurre’s Dr. Jose Halloy discusses the Insbot, explaining that it is programmed to identify cockroaches and, when one of the bugs gets near, to pause. Cockroaches are herding animals, and will naturally collect around the largest nearby group. So the Insbot, properly programmed, can gather up a large group of pests and lead them to traps or other pest-removal solutions.

More photos of the Insbot, including the one above, are available here.

Bonus fact: The American cockroach — the one the Insbot is designed to interact with — is the most common type of cockroach, and found throughout the Americas. But it is not endemic to the Western hemisphere; rather, it is originally from Africa.

From the Archives: Artificial Intelligence: The story behind a game behind a story about robots.

Related: A dozen novelty roaches. Fake, of course, but still gross.

Text messaging has quickly become a major way for people around the world to communicate with each other. And where there is a communications channel, for those people living outside Western societies especially, there is almost certain to be censorship.

And in Pakistan, the censorship of text messages borders on the absurd.

Like many other nations, Pakistan has a constitution which guarantees freedom of speech. But these protections — codified under Part II, Chapter 1, Paragraph 19 (“Fundamental Rights: Freedom of speech, etc.”), as republished below, have significant limitations:

Every citizen shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression, and there shall be freedom of the press, subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defense of Pakistan or any part thereof, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, [commission of] or incitement to an offense.

And these limitations have led to de facto restrictions. As the Guardian reported in November of 2011, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority issued guidelines (a misnomer, given that they are hardly optional) for mobile carriers which includes a list of approximately 1,100 terms which should not be allowed to be transmitted. While some of the terms are predictable — anything involving the f-word or a few choice slang terms for various body parts are forbidden — some are a bit surprising. For example, the terms “flatulence” and, strangely, “deposit”  are both banned, so it may be hard to text your spouse about what you did with your last pay check — or what you thought about last night’s dinner. It also includes words found in other religions, typically Christianity, such as “devil” and “Jesus Christ,” and work-arounds for some seemingly innocuous terms; “idiot” is barred as is “id10t.”

The complete list, via PC Magazine, is available here – but please don’t click that unless you want to read a lot of things which you’d probably not use in polite company.

Bonus fact: Texting while driving is dangerous, as most people know. But texting while walking also can be. According to the New York Times, “[s]lightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms [in the U.S.] in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text.” And of course, the problem isn’t limited to the United States. A directory services company in the UK wrapped lamp posts with branded padding in order to protect distracted pedestrians (while, of course, advertising their product).

From the Archives: Feeling Buzzed: Ever feel your cell phone vibrate in your pocket, only to check it to see that it never vibrated at all? Here are some reasons why this happens.

Related: Texting gloves. Keep your hands warm while calling your friend an “id10t” via SMS, all at the same time.

The two comic frames, above, were originally published in October of 1930, part of a two week story line. And yes, that’s a gun in the second frame. Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s iconic creation, is distraught, and looks to take his own life — a huge departure from the Mouse we know today.

It’s supposed to be comedy.

Mickey’s suicidal saga spanned a few days — four of them can be seen here. The plot: On the first day, Mickey catches Minnie cheating on him and, as seen above, decides to take his own life. For the next three days, he tries three different methods — shooting himself using a Rube Goldberg-esque setup to fire the rifle; jumping off a bridge; and poisoning himself with gas from his radiator (below) — and all three times, Mickey fails in what is intended to be a comical fashion. The rifle shot is interrupted by a cuckoo clock, with Mickey realizing that he’d be cuckoo to try and shoot himself. Mickey’s dive off the bridge lands him on a boat, where he becomes a de facto stowaway; the captain threatens to throw him overboard, and Mickey ironically begs him not to, as he can’t swim and will certainly drown. And Mickey’s asphyxiation fails when a squirrel-like character tries to fill a balloon with the gas, waking Mickey (who thinks he has just been shot). The humor is likely lost on modern audiences, but apparently, the depravity did not seem to concern audiences contemporary with the strips’ publication.

According to io9, the idea here was farce, not fatalism. A decade before the above comics ran, Walt Disney saw a silent movie, Haunted Spooks, which centered, comically, on the protagonist’s failed attempts at ending his own life. Disney thought the same joke would make for a good series of comics, and asked cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson to take a crack at it. Gottfredson initially objected, assuming that the newspaper publishing syndicate wouldn’t allow for such content, but Disney wanted to try it anyway.

Disney was proven correct. Not only were the comics published, but there’s no evidence that readers took any issue with the morbid storyline.

Bonus fact: Mickey’s failed attempt to drown himself in the gas of a leaky heater would, unfortunately, be a harbinger of things to come in Walt Disney’s life. In 1938, Walt and his brother Roy struck riches when their animated movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, grossed $8 million (well over $100 million in today’s dollars) in its first release. The brothers bought a new house for their parents, but their mother, Flora, complained about the furnace not working. Walt had it fixed, but the repairs were inadequate, and on November 6, 1938, Flora Call Disney died of asphyxiation from the furnace’s fumes.

From the Archives: Mickey Mask: How Mickey Mouse helped the Allied cause in World War II.

Related: Volumes 1 and 2 of classic Mickey Mouse cartoons, 624 pages. Want more? Volumes 3 and 4 are also available as a box set, adding another 560 pages of Mickey.

Drive to virtually any American fast food establishment and you likely have the option to place your order and receive your food without ever leaving your car. Typically, the drive-thru experience involves a hard-to-understand speaker surrounded by a large glowing menu, shouting your order into a microphone, driving up a bit further to a window through which an employee hands you your order and you hand back the cash. The entire process takes only a few minutes, but some view using the drive-thru — especially for fast food — as laziness, even going so far as to suggest taxing it. After all, the person taking your order is only a few steps away.

Maybe.

Drive-thru fast food is serious business — with serious money involved. While each individual item may cost only a few dollars, the National Restaurant Association (per MSNBC) estimates that the fast food industry grossed $168 billion in the U.S. in 2011, and 70% of that came in through the drive-thru window. So it only makes sense that these companies experiment with potential optimizations. One such idea? In late 2004, McDonald’s began implementing a centralized call-center in Santa Maria, California, a three hour drive from Los Angeles, which handled drive-thru orders placed around the country, even in Hawaii. So while you, the Chicken McNugget-ordering customer, think you are speaking to someone in the building right next to you, the person asking if you want fries with that may in fact be hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

In 2006, the New York Times chronicled the experience of one such call-center worker. Some early results suggest that the centralized call centers, while problematic at times (such as when local dialects make orders difficult to understand), can shave seconds off of each transaction. And when processing in excess of one order per minute at peak times, such improvements are significant. Since the Times story, other companies have experimented with centralized call centers as well; according to a 2010 article in the Roanoke Times, both Wendy’s and Pizza Hut have used the system. (Strangely, in the aforementioned Times article, a Wendy’s exec is quoted, saying that the organization wasn’t yet ready to try call centers — they hadn’t given it “any serious thought.”)

Not all fast food joints have employed the system, though. In MSNBC article linked above (and for ease of navigating, here – it’s worth reading the whole thing) discusses, in depth, Taco Bell’s attempts to improve their drive-thru order fulfillment process. Not only does Taco Bell not have centralized call centers, but the author pans the process as “yesterday’s big idea.”

Bonus fact: Taco Bell’s menu purports to be some variety of Mexican food, but don’t tell that to people actually living in Mexico — they probably won’t believe you. The company launched its first Mexican restaurant in 1992, but as another MSNBC article notes, within two years, all of them had gone out of business. The company (or, more accurately, its parent company, YUM! Foods) tried to re-enter Mexico, calling their offering “American” food, but those stores went under by 2010.

From the Archives: McHotdogs: You can get a fried fish sandwich at McDonalds, but you probably can’t get a hot dog. Here’s why.

Related: A 6″ plush Taco Bell dog.

There are many Christmas traditions around the world, and most of them (if one excludes mass carnage at U.S. retail locations on Black Friday), are imbued with the spirit of giving and community. And Gavle, Sweden (here’s a map) has a tradition which, kind of, fits this mold. Every year since 1966, an association of merchants come together and build the Gavle Goat, a 13 meter (43 feet) tall, 7 meter (23 feet) long yule goat made out of straw, as seen above.

And just about every other year, someone else burns in down, as seen below.

The goat avoided a similar fate in 1967 and 1968, but again, on New Year’s Eve 1969, the goat was set ablaze. In 1970, the goat did not even make it to New year’s Eve —  it was torched just a few hours after its construction. The merchant group took 1971 off, but a smaller goat was built by a school — it, too, was destroyed. The merchants took the cause back over in 1972 and since, and the goat was destroyed again – Cityguide Europe calls it “sabotage. ”

In the forty years since then, the goat has been burnt many times over, smashed, struck by a car, and attacked with fireworks. Most efforts to stop the destruction clearly failed, but it was not due to lack of trying. For example, in 1985, local soldiers were tasked with guarding the goat, but were unsuccessful, as it was burned down in January. More recently, organizers have turned to technology to protect the goat — via a web cam. People around the world can “tune in” to see the goat whenever they want, and officials hope that the 24-hour surveillance will deter arsonists.

But all the web cam seems to do is capture its seemingly inevitable destruction on video. Take, for example, this past Christmas season. The goat lasted only ten days, until the video above happened.

Bonus fact: According to the New York Times, goat meat is the most commonly eaten type of meat (by people) in the world.

From the Archives: Google’s Lawn Mowing Goats: Greener than a lawnmower, I guess.

Related: Roughly six-and-a-half pounds of straw. At about $25, it’ll only cost you about $30,000 to build a really big goat.

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, ringing in over a decade of fascist rule in his country and for much of Europe. William Dudley Pelley, seen above in a wanted poster from 1939, used that as an opportunity to start a fascism movement in the United States. That same day, Pelley announced the formation of the Silver Legion of America, a fascist-friendly organization based in the United States. For the rest of the decade and into the next, Pelley would criss-cross the United States recruiting people into his organization. The group, colloquially called the “Silver Shirts” (a reference to Nazi Brownshirts), adopted many of the Nazis’ bigoted ways, including but not limited to promoting white supremacy and anti-Semitism.

And then they decided to build Hitler a castle just outside Hollywood.

In 1935, using Nazi-given money, Silver Shirt members Norman and Winona Stephens, under the pseudonym “Jessie Murphy,” purchased 55 acres of land in the Los Angeles hills from American celebrity Will Rogers. The Silver Shirts then used that land to build a palace for Hitler (seen below, years and layers of graffiti later), intended to be the Fuhrer’s home away from home — or, perhaps more accurately, a West Coast, Nazi-version of the White House. According to the Daily Mail, Hitler intended to use the complex as his hub of operations for Nazi-controlled North America – assuming his brand of fascism would take over the world, including the United States.

Known as the “Murphy Ranch,” the building, per the Mary Sue, was both stylish and practical. The self-sufficient complex had its own “diesel power plant, 375,000 gallon concrete water tank, giant meat locker, 22 bedrooms and [. . .] a bomb shelter,” and a planned “five libraries, a swimming pool, several dining rooms, and a gymnasium.” At the cost of $4 million (about $65 million in today’s dollars), the Fuhrer would be able to live like the king he aspired to be.

But with war underway — even though the U.S. had not yet joined it — the Silver Shirts were hardly the most welcome people in America, and for good reason. Many of them were charged with treason and sedition, and the secluded palatial bunker made for a great hiding place. But on December 8, 1941 — the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor — U.S. authorities raided the compound. The fifty or so Silver Shirts who lived there were arrested, and Hitler thankfully never made it to town.

As of March, 2012, the Murphy Ranch still stood. But that would likely be temporary. According to The Week, the Los Angeles authorities intend to bulldoze the complex and turn the area into picnic area for people hiking in the hills.

Bonus fact: Pelley’s attempts to bring fascism to American were not limited to cockamamie schemes like building palaces for self-declared despots. He had plenty of other cockamamie ideas as well. One notable one: In 1936, he founded the Christian Party, the political wing of the Silver Shirts, and ran for President of the United States under that banner, in an explicit effort to bring fascism to America via the ballot box. He failed miserably. He only managed to get on the ballot in one state, Washington, and earned fewer than 2,000 of the over 650,000 votes cast. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who easily won re-election (he gathered over 60% of the popular vote nationwide and won all but two states), earned over 450,000 votes in Washington state alone.

From the Archives: Hitler, One Night Only: What if you tried to make Hitler’s life into a sitcom? It’s been tried.

Related: “William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism And the Occult,” by Scott Beekman. The only apparent biography of his life, five stars but on only one review. The cover has a picture of him in his Silver Shirts uniform.

Image of Murphy Ranch by kode_name on Flickr (original here), and used under a Creative Commons license.

On June 7, 1998, a 49 year-old African-American from Texas man named James Byrd, Jr., was brutally murdered by three men. While Byrd was still alive, the perpetrators tied his ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for three miles; Byrd was decapitated in the process. Byrd’s murder resulted in a series of legislation, both on the state and federal level, which address criminal activities which are typically called “hate crimes.” Two of Byrd’s three assailants were sentenced to death, with the third sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Of the two given the death penalty, one still sits on Death Row. The other, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was executed by the state of Texas on September 21, 2011.

Brewer’s ritual “last meal” was Texas’ last such “last meal.”

The tradition of serving the condemned a “last meal” of his or her choosing — a final rite of passage before the inmate’s final passing — has origins lost to antiquity. But most U.S. states with the death penalty still allow those about to be executed a special meal beforehand (albeit not always as their true “last” meal) of some sort. Texas, until Brewer, was no exception. Some requests were basic but extravagant, with at least two men (Ronald Clark O’Bryan in 1984 and Dennis Bagwell in 2005) asking for, and receiving, feasts centered on steak and french fries. Other requests were just plain strange.  In 2001, a murderer by the name of Gerald Lee Mitchell requested that the state give him a bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers as a last meal; this request was granted. In 2000, a man named Odell Barnes asked for “justice, equality, and world peace.” And in 1990, James Edward Smith requested a lump of dirt used for voodoo rituals, as a way of marking his body for the afterlife. His request was denied, and he was given a cup of yogurt instead.

Brewer’s request? Per the New York Times, he asked for:

two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.

The state provided him with this meal, costing hundreds of dollars and consisting of thousands of calories. And Brewer, claiming he was not very hungry, ate exactly none of it.

The next day, state legislators asked that the Department of Criminal Justice end the tradition of “last meals,” with one law maker stating that ”it is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It’s a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim.” The Department of Criminal Justice chairperson agreed, and the tradition ended. Since then, per the Houston Chronicle, “last meals will consist of whatever is on the menu for all prisoners” — with no special adjustments for those about to be executed.

Bonus fact: In 2007, Tennessee executed a man named Philip Workman. For his last meal, Workman requested that a vegetarian pizza be donated to a homeless person (not one person specifically), but prison officials, per CNN, denied that request, telling the news agency that “they do not donate to charities.” Nevertheless, Workman’s last wishes were carried out, many times over. Per the same CNN article, donors from around the country rose to the occasion, donating hundreds of pizzas to Nashville-area homeless shelters.

From the Archives: Contraband Confection: A piece of candy which condemned inmates can’t request as part of their last meal, at least not in the United States, because it’s illegal to import it.

Related: “Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals from Death Row” by Ty Treadwell, 4.8 stars on 14 reviews. Published in 2001, it predates Brewers’ meal by a decade. Also, what would fifty famous chefs make for their own “last meal?” This book aims to answer that question.

World War II ended, unofficially, on August 14, 1945, when Japan surrended to the Allies. The announcement reached people far and wide, and the effect was overwhelming. For example, the iconic photo (seen here) of a sailor dipping and kissing a woman in Times Square happened when the Japanese surrender was announced in New York. For someone involved in the war to be unaware of its end seemed impossible.

Seemed — but wasn’t. Just ask Hiroo Onoda, pictured above, who carried the Imperial Japanese cause forward until 1974. Yes, 1974.

In late 1944, Onoda, an intelligence officer, was deployed to the Philippines. He was a saboteur of sorts, ordered to find and carry out ways to hamper Allied (typically American) attacks on the island before they could happen; Wikipedia describes his tactical obligations as including “destroying the airstrip and the pier at the harbor.” He was also instructed to fight to the death, or, more accurately, Onoda was ordered to neither surrender nor take his own life. His commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, vowed to Onoda that “whatever happens, we’ll come back for you.” Onoda took that order and promise quite literally.

Onoda, a lieutentant, was in charge of a small group of soldiers, most of whom did not survive more than a few months in the Philippines or, perhaps, were captured; the details are unclear. What we do know, however, is that when Japan surrendered, many of its soliders kept waging war, with Onoda the most notable of the bunch. In October of 1945, two months after the Japanese surrender, Onoda was leading three other Japanese soldiers in a guerilla campaign against American-supported Filipinos. In his autobiography, “No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War,” Onoda would explain that early on, the fact that Japan had surrendered was at best unclear. The only such evidence he and other groups of Japanese holdouts had was the word of the Filipinos they were fighting against (Onoda makes reference to a leaflet saying “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”) which, for good reason, was not the most trustworthy source.

Two of Onoda’s three men continued to carry out their mission of forceable resistance, perhaps in expectation of reinforcements arriving. (The third surrendered to locals six months in.) Over the next three decades, the other two would die in what they believed to be the line of duty, but along the way, they killed multiple people, destroyed significant amounts of property, burned crops, stole rice, and caused havoc generally. They were still at war, even if no one else was.  And in one sense, Onoda wasn’t anything more than a ghost: In December of 1959 Onoda was officially, but incorrectly, declared dead by Japanese officials. At this point, Onoda was stuck in a paradox of his own making; he was waiting for orders from superiors to stand down, but those superiors no longer believed him to be alive.

Had a Japanese student (or, more correctly, dropout with wanderlust) not happened upon Onoda in February of 1974, the solider would have likely lived out his final days somewhere hidden in the Philippine wilderness. Yet Onoda, finally having someone trustworthy inform him that the war was, indeed, over, still held firm to his orders. He refused to come out of hiding unless and until his commanding officer Taniguchi, now a bookseller in civilian life, came to relieve him of his duties.

Japan and Taniguchi complied with the request. On March 9, 1974, Taniguchi, in person, told Onoda to stand down, finally bringing one of the final World War II soldiers out of combat.

Bonus fact: “One of the final” but not “the final.” That “honor” goes to a man named Teruo Nakamura. Nakamura, a private, held out until December of 1974, but his story is typically overshadowed by Onoda’s, for reasons unclear, but likely due to Nakamura’s background as an aborigine from Taiwan who never learned Japanese or Chinese.

From the Archives: Japan’s First NHL Player: Only barely related to the above, but interesting!

Related: As linked above, “No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War,” Onoda’s memoir.

The video above (click here to view it) was uploaded to YouTube on February 1, 2010, and in under a year, has amassed over two million views. It features five North Korean students, each with his or her own accordion, playing a version of A-ha’s “Take on Me” as a quintet. If you’ve seen the original video for that song – it’s here, and it’s brilliant — you immediately know that there’s no obvious explanation as to why there’d be a quintet of accordion players ever playing the song. But then again, this is North Korea. It has its own calendar and has a lackluster electrical grid. Its former leader expelled short citizens and, officially, never pooped. Traffic lights are people and would-be leaders are exiled if they dare visit Mickey Mouse. In general, it’s fair to say that North Korea’s cultural quirks (to put them gently) defy explanation — or, at least, are incomprehensible to our Western brains.

But like many other things North Korean, there is more to the story than revealed by the video above. Just ask Barbara Demick.

Demick, a journalist, is the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and was formerly serving that same role but in Korea. As such, she has had unique access to over a hundred North Korean defectors, and in 2009, she collected interviews with these refugees into a book titled “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” The book focuses on the lives of a handful of these defectors, one of which was a young woman who Dernick referred to by the pseudonym Mi-Ran.

Mi-Ran’s opportunities in North Korea were limited; she was the daughter of a South Korean prisoner of war and, therefore, was ineligible for many of the country’s more prestigious professions — as well as generally being treated as second-class when it came to virtually everything else. (North Korea has a caste-like system, called “songbun,” where one’s dedication to communism — going back generations — is the key factor; those whose lineages lack a commitment to communism are often repressed both politically and economically.) Mi-Ran ended up becoming a school teacher in her local mining community.

Per Dernick’s book, excerpted by the Telegraph, Mi-Ran’s experience as a teacher were troubling. She recounted the abject poverty in which her students — five and six-year-olds — lived, wondering if they were attending the school as much for the free meal (“a thin soup made of salt and dry leaves”) as they were the education, if not more so. And the “education” was closer to indoctrination than anything else. Per the book:

The school day started at 8am. Mi-ran put on her perkiest smile to greet the children as they filed into the classroom. As soon as she got them into their assigned seats, she brought out her accordion. All teachers were required to play the accordion – it was often called the ‘people’s instrument’ since it was portable enough to carry along on a day of voluntary hard labour in the fields. In the classroom teachers sang, ‘We Have Nothing to Envy in the World,’ which had a singsongy tune as familiar to North Korean children as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’

The North Korean affinity for the accordion is not limited to teachers, either. When Kim Jong-il died in late 2011, his son, Kim Jong-un, took his place. But the younger Kim was (and is) considered young and inexperienced for the position, and his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, is widely regarded to be his top advisor. (Some believe he is the de facto ruler of the nation, with Kim Jong-un a puppet.) When Jang rose to power, Reuters noted his qualifications in an article headlined “Handsome accordion player is North Korea’s kingmaker.”

Weird Al Yankovic, call your agent.

Bonus fact: A-ha’s version of Take On Me was the #1 single in the U.S. and nine other countries in 1985, and their pencil-art video linked above won six MTV Video Music Awards and was nominated for two others, including Video of the Year. But that all almost never happened. The song that topped the charts was a re-release of an earlier version that the band released in 1984, and that version failed to make it into the top 100 singles on the U.S. Billboard chart. The pencil-art video is widely credited with giving the song the necessary boost. The original video? Seen here, it was hardly innovative, but rather generic and very 80s.

From the Archives: In case you missed the few sentences above: North Korea has its own calendar and has a lackluster electrical grid. Its former leader expelled short citizens and, officially, never pooped. Traffic lights are people and would-be leaders are exiled if they dare visit Mickey Mouse.

Related: ”Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Barbara Dernick, as noted above. 4.8 stars on over 350 reviews and a finalist for multiple book awards; there are rumors that it will be made into a movie, too. Available on Kindle. For something a little lighter, here’s a book and CD set to teach yourself how to play accordion. Today, a polka band; tomorrow, a prestigious leadership position under Kim Jong-un. (On second thought, just stick with the polka band.)

In 1889, George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak company in order to produce and market his invention — spool-wound photographic film. Kodak would become the leader in that market for generations. For more than a century since, the company has been researching new ways to innovate; over the years, the company developed dozens of different products and was granted hundreds of patents.

And along the way, the company also built itself a nuclear reactor.

Yes, nuclear reactor — as in a machine which took weapons-grade uranium and churned out a controlled, sustained nuclear reaction. The machine, as reported by the Democrat and Chronicle, had three-and-a-half pounds of “highly enriched uranium [ . . .] the stuff that nuclear bombs are made of [and which] terrorists covet” in an underground research laboratory in Rochester, New York. For Kodak, the nuclear materials were used as part of research into a theory called “neutron imaging” — the process of using subatomic particles to create an image of a material without damaging the material being imaged. (Why they wanted to do this is anyone’s guess.) In 1974, the company required a small reactor to investigate this process further, and, over the three decades after, found other, non-warfare uses for the machine as well.

While the reactor was never a secret — the Democrat and Chronicle learned of it when a Kodak employee mentioned it in passing — it was also, perhaps, the best kept non-secret in the area’s and company’s history. City officials told the Democrat and Chronicle that they were wholly unaware of the tiny nuclear threat in their own jurisdiction, and a company spokesperson told the paper that she “wasn’t sure whether the company had ever notified local police, fire, or hazardous-materials officials.”

But that isn’t to say that no one knew. Federal regulators were informed of the facility and, when Kodak shut it down in 2007, the Feds were involved in safely removing the radioactive materials and waste. And while details on the Kodak nuclear lab are scant, there is no evidence of any leaks, thefts, or any other scary things.

Bonus fact: Due in no small part to the emergence of digital photography, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in early 2012, and has until February 2013 to come up with a turn-around strategy; otherwise, it will likely have to liquidate its assets. But to say that the company failed to innovate — especially in spite of extensive research and development such as the nuclear program discussed above — is incorrect. As the New York Times reported, Kodak invented one of the world’s first “film-less” digital cameras — in 1975. Various reports suggest that Kodak killed the project as it threatened their core business of selling film.

From the Archives: The First Photograph of a Person: Self-explanatory, but likely unintentional.

Related: Uranium ore. Build your own Kodak-style R&D lab.

The Super Bowl is annually one of the most watched events on television. In recent years, over 150 million people worldwide (and over 100 million in the U.S. alone) have tuned in to watch the NFL’s championship game. The game comes with a lot of fanfare — a celebrity-studded halftime show and, typically, a superstar singer opening the festivities by singing the Star Spangled Banner. And with fanfare at times comes controversy.

Before Super Bowl XXV in January of 1991, Whitney Houston sang the anthem in such an inspiring way that the single ended up going platinum (selling over a million copies) — except that the live performance wasn’t actually live. Houston was singing into a dead microphone and the NFL had, instead, used a pre-recorded version of her rendition. The pre-record was created as a backup (say, if Houston had lost her voice), and organizers had chosen to use it in order to remove the risks inherent with a highly produced and coordinated performance.

The fall out from Houston’s performance was so widespread that at least one future performer refused to do a pre-record — or so the rumor mill suggested. Two years later, NFL and the Super Bowl broadcaster, NBC, offered country star Garth Brooks the opportunity to usher in the big game. He, of course, accepted, but under the condition that he perform live, with no pre-recorded safety net. The NFL agreed. And it would be the last time they’d do so.

In late 1992, Brooks released the song We Shall Be Free, a song about ending oppression which he wrote and recorded after the Rodney King riots swept through Los Angeles that spring. The music video (watch it here) for the song featured a number of celebrities including four star quarterbacks. Per an ABC News report, less than an hour before the game, Brooks asked NBC to play the video before the Super Bowl. NBC refused, concerned that the audience at home would be upset by the clips from the riots and other graphic images in the video. And regardless, the broadcast had already begun, and there was no time before kickoff to squeeze the video in.

But Brooks wasn’t taking no for an answer. He refused to go on stage (and per one account, left the stadium entirely), causing havoc. The NFL and NBC, having not insisted on the pre-recorded version, were stuck without an audio track and without a performer. Everyone scrambled for a solution. A producer noticed that another performing artist, Jon Bon Jovi, was in the stadium as a spectator; he was asked to perform in Brooks’ place if need be, and, apparently, agreed. Meanwhile, the league and network figured out how to push kickoff back a few minutes, edited together a less graphic version of Brooks’ video, and offered to run that.

Brooks performed and the viewers both at home and at the stadium had no idea about the above. The NFL and television executives, however, were not willing to be put in the same position again. Since then, artists who agree to perform at the Super Bowl are required to pre-record their performances.

Bonus fact: Even if you’re not an American, you probably have heard the Star Spangled Banner and could recognize it as the national anthem of the United States. But can you recognize the national anthem of Kazakhstan? If not, you’re not alone. In March of 2012, Maria Dmitrienko of Kazakhstan took gold in an event at the Arab Shooting Championships in Kuwait. The organizers played the Kazakh anthem during the medal ceremony — or so they thought. As reported by Yahoo! Sports, they accidentally played the parody version of the anthem from the movie Borat. 

From the Archives: Behind the Music: The voice behind the songs in many famous musicals.

Related: An autographed 8×10 print of Garth Brooks’ Super Bowl performance.

In 1992, Canadian singer Celine Dion released a single titled “Love Can Move Mountains.” The song, which peaked at 36 on the Billboard U.S. Hot 100 chart and at #8 overall on Canada’s equivalent, probably should not have its title taken literally. But no one bothered to tell that to a Indian laborer named Dashrath Manjhi.

Manjhi, pictured above, hailed from a small village in the northeast of India near the city of Gaya (here’s a map). Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s — sources differ on the exact date — his wife, Falguni Devi, fell ill, and required medical care. But, according to DNA India, between Manjhi and Devi’s village and the nearest hospital stood mountainous terrain, with no road running through them. The couple travelled around the mountain — a 45 mile (75 km) trek, and by then, it was too late. Devi died, and Manjhi thereafter committed himself to making sure no one befell a similar fate. So he started tunneling.

For the next two decades, Manjhi worked day and night, carving a road from his village through the mountain; according to the Hindustan Times, he used only a hammer, chisel, and nails. By the time he completed the project in the 1980s (again, sources differ on the end date), Manjhi had built a tunnel 360 feet (110 meters) long, 25 feet (7.5 meters) high, and 30 feet (about 9 meters) wide. Residents of his community could, due to his tireless work, now get through the mountain, which was no small victory. Manjhi’s road cut the required travel distance from his area to the neighboring one dramatically, from the aforementioned 45 mile (75 km) distance to only about half a mile (1 km).

Unfortunately, that was only half the job. Connecting the mountain pass to the main roadway required a public works project, and while the local government originally agreed to fund that project, the project was put on hold in 2007. Manjhi died later that year and received a state funeral in honor of his work, and it is unclear if work on the road has resumed. But another project, perhaps more fitting, is underway. According to the Indian Express, the local government is building a hospital, named after Manjhi, near his village.

Bonus fact: After decades of false starts, Manhattan re-started construction on a subway line beneath Second Avenue on April 12, 2007. The project, running from 125th Street down to 63rd, is expected to take at least until 2020 and will cost over $17 billion, per New York magazine. The total distance of the tunnels? 8.5 miles (or about 13.6 km).

From the Archives: Eight Miles Down: What happens when you dig as deep down as you can? Literally, not metaphorically speaking. In the 1970s, the Soviets tried to answer that question.

Related: A stone carving set (with “a convenient roll-up pouch!”). Nine pieces, but only 3.5 stars, so it may not be suitable for twenty years of digging through a mountain.

On December 6, 1865, Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and in doing so, completed the ratification process. From that point forth, slavery has been illegal in the United States. The next two amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870 respectively, made these freed slaves into citizens and protected their right to vote. But for decades after, whites, particularly in the American South, took action — sometimes violent action — to prevent African-Americans from becoming part of the “of the people, by the people” government of the land.

And in one case, they even overthrew a local government.

Wilmington, North Carolina is the seventh or eighth most populous in the state, with just over 100,000 residents. Population-wise it is a far cry from Charlotte, the state’s largest city (with about 750,000 people) or the state capital, Raleigh (just over 400,000). But at one point, Wilmington was the state’s largest city — with about 10,000 residents per the last pre-Civil War census in 1860. When the war ended, Wilmington was a large, diverse city, and African-Americans were among community leaders.

While the Republican party temporarily gained control of the North Carolina legislature following the war, that was short-lived. In 1871, Democrats retook the state house and used their legislative powers to suppress voting by African-Americans. But by the 1890s, a resurgent Republican party gained control again, and made it easier for recently freed slaves to vote. In 1898, this fact would be critical in Wilmington’s local elections.

Despite pressure from a white supremacist paramilitary group called the “Red Shirts,” the majority-black city elected what Wikipedia called ”a biracial fusionist government to office,” noting that “the [newly-elected] mayor and 2/3 of the aldermen were white” but the remaining third were black. The reaction from the Red Shirts and other white supremacist groups was swift and violent. Wilmington was home of the only African-American-owned newspaper in the state, the Daily Record, and a group led by failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate (and Red Shirt) Alfred Moore Waddell, pictured above, demanded that the paper’s publisher be kicked out of the city. Not receiving a response, Waddell’s group of 1,000 to 1,500 men stormed the paper’s office, destroying it, just a few days after Election Day. Waddell soon lost control (no surprise there) and the mob proceeded to attack blacks throughout the city. By the time the violence had subsided, as many as 90 people had died, all black, according to NPR.

The riots were one of the worst of the Southern race riots of that era, and had they ended there, would have been a notable historical event regardless. But the mob — this time, with Waddell again leading — was not done. According to a report by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (pdf here), Waddell and a band of others carried out the true intent of their plan: overthrowing the newly-elected city government, as they “worked to facilitate a coup d’etat to overthrow the Republican mayor, Board of Aldermen, and chief of police.” By 4 P.M. that day, the government had capitulated and the Democrats took power. Waddell took over as mayor, a position he’d hold – via further threats of violence – through 1905.

To date, this is generally considered to be the only coup d’etat in U.S. history.

Bonus fact: Wilmington is also home to something else with a taste for blood — the Venus Flytrap, one of the few carnivorous plants. It is only found, natively, in a sixty-mile (about 100 km) radius centered roughly on the city. 

From the Archives: Washington’s Ides of March: When then-General George Washington was almost on the wrong side of an attempted coup.

Related: “Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook” by Edward Luttwak. 4.8 stars on ten reviews. Not a how-to guide (although in theory, if one were going to attempt a coup, this would probably be required reading) but more of a look at what made post-World War II coups succeed or fail. The book “demonstrates that scholarly analysis can be good social science and at the same time fun to read” per the Virginia Quarterly Review. Originally published in 1979 and not available on Kindle.

There are, annually, ten public Federal holidays in the United States, in which federal employees are given the day off. One of these is December 25th, or Christmas Day, which was designated as a federal holiday in 1870 by Ulysses S. Grant. Alabama became the first state to make it a legal holiday 34 years earlier, in 1836, and it is now a state holiday in every state. But for a while, Christmas was not only not an official holiday in the Boston area, but celebrating it was explicitly forbidden.

Boston was founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England, as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony existed until 1692, when it joined with neighboring colonies to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which would later become the state of Massachusetts. But during the first six decades of the area, Puritan religious views dominated the culture, including the legal system. And, according to American Heritage magazine, on May 11, 1659, the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the celebration of Christmas:

For preventing disorders arising in severall places within this jurisdiceon, by reason of some still observing such ffestivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great dishonnor of God & offence of others, it is therefore ordered … that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by for-bearing of labour, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.

In short: Celebrating anything Christmas-y would result in a five shilling penalty — accounting for inflation, that would be worth sixty pounds ($100) today — per offense. As The Day (New London, CT) recounted in 1971, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans took offense to the use of sacred names for such “festive occasions,” buttressing American Heritage‘s claim that the Puritans “regarded [Christmas] as pagan revelry.”

The ban lasted until 1681, for reasons unclear; American Heritage claims that it was done in deference to the King Charles II, who wished the colonies to have the same laws as England; The Day asserts that a Puritan commission decided in 1665 to strike the penalty, but it remained (for reasons left unexplained) for another 16 years. Regardless, the holiday was not immediately popular in the area; Massachusetts was one of the last states to make Christmas a legal holiday, only doing so in 1856 — twenty years after Alabama became the first.

Bonus fact: If you click on The Day article linked above, you’ll see another headline — “Two Women Join All-Male Postal Service.” On December 15, 1971, Jane W. Currier of Texas and Janene E. Gordon of California became the first two female members of the Postal Inspection Service, despite the organization’s 234 year history to that date. Both women (and the 22 men in their graduating class) were trained to use both karate and firearms during a 12-week course.

From the Archives: Two Christmas customs Boston (and others) are probably better off without: Krampus and the Caganer.

Related: Coal, straight from the North Pole. (Okay, not really; as one curmudgeonly Amazon reviewer notes, “I don’t think there is a land mass under the North Pole. Its all ice, and floats. Therefore there can’t be any coal ‘from the North Pole’.”) Regardless, this is the perfect gift to have on the ready in case a 1650s Puritan comes over for the holidays.

Image above, the Christmas tree at Boston Common from 2009, originally by Lizard10979 on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

In July 1993, America Online (now AOL) embarked on an aggressive direct marketing campaign in order to become the dominant market leader in providing Internet service to households across the country and, later, much of the world. For over a decade, the company did whatever it could to get a free AOL floppy disk, and later, CD (and with it, an offer for dozens if not hundreds of free hours of access to the service) into the hands of customers. A 2002 CNN article noted that ubiquity of the discs; they were regularly found “in magazines, at the movies, in the mail and at parties.” In 2007, just months after AOL stopped the direct marketing program, PC World estimated that the company had set over a billion promo CDs into the wild over the course of the 13 year campaign.

The sheer number of discs was mind boggling. And the truth even more so.

Various former AOL employees and executives took to online Q&A site Quora to discuss the costs and benefits of the company’s strategy to blanket the universe with the CDs. Steve Case, the co-founder and former CEO of the company, explained that each subscriber stuck on the service for just over two years and was worth about $350 in revenue, and the company would spend 10% of that to get a new user. With $35 available, therefore, to gain a new customer, the company had the opportunity to produce a whole lot of CDs. The company’s former chief marketing officer (and, as she described herself, “carpet bombing queen”), Jan Brandt, posted that AOL spent over $300 million on the program and that “[a]t one point, 50% of the CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it.” Amazing — and only half the story. Reggie Fairchild, a product manager for AOL’s version 4.0 release in 1998, responded with this amazing (and probably exaggerated) claim:

When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production for several weeks. Think of that. Not a single music CD or Microsoft CD was produced during those weeks.

While the strategy created a lot of waste and, therefore, complaints, it was very successful. Brandt noted that at the peak of her “carpet bombing” campaign, AOL was signing up a new subscriber every six seconds. Fairchild stated that before AOL 4.0, there were 8 million AOLers; a year later, there were 16 million. And Steve Case told Quora readers that in 1992, before the CDs became ubiquitous coasters, there were only 200,000 members, but “a decade later, the number was in the 25 million range.”

Bonus fact: With broadband Internet access now nearly as universal as the AOL CDs once were, it seems strange to think that many people are still AOL Internet subscribers. But a lot are. According to AOL’s third quarter 2012 earnings report, 2.9 million people still use the service as paid members (or as one of two exceptions: users in a free trial period or reduced-fee members in hopes of retaining their business). But the trend is dramatic: that 2.9 million number is down from nearly 3.5 million in quarter three 2011 and just over 4 million in quarter three 2010.

From the Archives: Stupid Google Tricks: Fun things you can do with Google, no CD or membership required.

Related: In 2000, AOL’s Online Advisor (to consumers), Regina Lewis (no relation), wrote a book titled “AOL Wired in a Week: Master the Internet in 10 Minutes a Day.” It’s still available, here, and is interesting only as a historical relic. But it comes with a free CD, of course!

A typical door opening is about 6’8″ (2.03 meters) high. And if you’re an American who is too tall to get through one without ducking, there’s a very good chance that you’re going to play basketball. Perhaps embarrassingly so, others simply assume it.

But that assumption is not entirely unwarranted — especially if you hit the magic seven foot threshold.

From 1992 until 2011, the NBA had a total of 88 players who were born in the United States and claimed a height of at least 7’0″ tall. The vast majority — 62 of the 88 — are exactly seven feet, so there’s a chance, as one blog investigating the question speculated, that some may be rounding up. But even so, even fifty 7’0″-plus guys doing the same thing would be a lot. Because there aren’t a lot of them out there.

We don’t know how many seven-foot Americans there are, simply because no one collects that data. But we do know that 7’0″ and above is an extreme height. According to the Centers for Disease Control, per a report by Sports Illustrated, only five percent of adult American men are 6’3″ or taller. Using the CDC data, SI further estimated that “fewer than 70″ men ages 20-40 born in the United States are seven feet or taller. SI claims that such a man has a 17% chance of being an NBA player.

And that seems low, given the list of 88 linked above (which covers a twenty year range, although probably a significantly wider age range). It’s likely that more than half of the seven footers in the U.S. end up playing NBA basketball, even if only for a minute or two.

And while this seems like a pretty neat destiny, it’s limited to basketball. While being super tall has obvious problems — ducking through doorways being the least of them — it also doesn’t come with a ticket to success in any other pro sport, at least not in the United States. Only one seven footer (Richard Sligh) has ever played in the NFL; a defensive tackle, he lasted eight games in 1967, and never registered a tackle. The tallest player in Major League Baseball history, Jon Rauch, is “only” 6’11. (There’s a 7’1″ in the high minors, but he isn’t finding a lot of success there.) And the tallest NHL player, Zdeno Chara, is a pedestrian-seeming 6’9″.

Bonus fact: Being incredibly tall isn’t great if you’re a baseball player, but being rather short has an advantage — you come away with a very small strike zone. On August 19, 1951, St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck put a 3’7″ performer by the name of Eddie Gaedel in as a pinch hitter, wearing uniform number “1/8.” The opposing pitcher, finding it nearly impossible to throw a strike, walked Gaedel on four pitches; Gaedel was then removed for a pinch runner. This would be Gaedel’s only time at the plate, as the next day, the league office voided his contract, calling Veeck’s move a “mockery of the game.” The league also subsequently passed a rule to require that the Commissioner’s office review and approve all contracts before a player can take the field.

From the Archives: Shaq Attack: How Shaquille O’Neal, the 7’1″ former NBA star pictured above, found a second career — in law enforcement.

Related: Kazaam, the 1996 movie, starring Shaq. 3.4 stars on 49 reviews, but most of the positive ones are sarcastic. For an honest review, try this one, which notes:  “You can pick up a previewed VHS copy here on Amazon.com for $0.85. I find it funny that a blank VHS tape will run you $1.00. I saved myself some money by buying a few copies of Kazaam instead of blank tapes and used them to record ‘Small Wonder’ reruns.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, or so the (historically difficult to attribute) saying goes. In one famous case, however, necessity had passed, and the parent of this particular invention was remorse or, perhaps, the hope that nothing of the sort would happen again. That invention? The Morse telegraph.

Samuel Morse was born in 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. His father, a Calvinist pastor, invested in his education at a young age, and Samuel ended up attending Yale University, from which he graduated in 1810. During his time at Yale, Samuel Morse painted; his paintings were so good, he was able to sell many as a way to earn a living while studying. After graduation, he was invited to continue his studies — as an artist — at the Royal Academy of Art in London. His first great work, Dying Hercules (seen above), was the first of many which would establish him as a budding superstar in the art world at the time.

By 1816 he was invited to paint a portrait of former president John Adams (seen here) and in 1825, the city of New York commissioned him to create one of Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette. That painting was an honor for Morse, and it paid well — $1,000, or nearly $20,000 in today’s equivalent — but it turned out to be a curse of sorts as well.

While Morse was in Washington, D.C. painting Lafayette’s portrait, his wife and mother of their three children, Lucretia, fell ill. But Lucretia was back in New Haven, Connecticut, where Morse then lived. Morse’s father sent him a message – per Wikipedia, the entirety of the message was “Your dear wife is convalescent.” But the message came by horse, and by the time it reached Morse and he could get back to New Haven, it was too late. Lucretia had died and was already buried.

Over the next decade, Morse would slowly transition from a life as an artist to one as an innovator in the world of electromagnetism. According to About.com, in 1832, while traveling back from Europe, he found himself in a conversation about the alacrity with which electrical signals travel over wires. He soon realized that this could be used as a way to send messages, in real-time, over long distances — a solution which would prevent other husbands from falling the same fate he did with his late wife. By 1837, he had developed the telegraph, and with his unheralded assistant Alfred Vail, Morse Code. (This telegraph was not the first, however; British inventors created similar devices a few months before Morse did. But Morse did invent his independently and without knowledge of the others.)

On January 11, 1838, the Morse sent the first telegram in the United States, over a two mile long wire in New Jersey. By December of that year, he gave up painting altogether, focusing on his new invention. He would spend the next decade travelling around the United States and Europe, demonstrating his invention, obtaining various patents, raising capital for the expansion of telegraph wires, and promoting the development of infrastructure for its use.

Bonus fact: In 1845, Morse’s invention finally achieved its intended purpose — getting a message to the intended recipient when time was of the essence. A woman named Sarah Hart was found murdered in her home in the UK town of Slough, outside of London. The assumed culprit was a man named John Tawell, a married man with whom she was having an affair. Tawell fled by train to London, and would have likely escaped — except that authorities used Morse’s invention to send a message ahead, describing the accused. Tawell was apprehended, convicted, and ultimately, hanged; he is widely considered to be the first criminal apprehended due to advancements in telecommunications.

From the Archives: Senior Citizen: Why Lafayette’s American legacy will last for generations — guaranteed by the state of Maryland.

Related: A Morse Code box kit.

If you’re feeling sharp aches or a burning sensation in your knees or other joints, you maybe suffering from osteoarthritis, or OA. OA, according to PubMed, is “the most common joint disorder” and occurs “due to aging and wear and tear on a joint.”  As the Mayo Clinic notes, the condition affects millions worldwide and there is no cure. But there are some treatments available. And about a decade ago, 180 people underwent surgery to alleviate some of the pain. Eutimo Perez, Jr., was one of them, as retold by ABC News. Before the procedure, Perez described his pain as off the charts. Two years after? He claimed to be pain-free.

Which is pretty incredible — especially because Perez’s procedure was a sham.

Perez and the 179 others were part of a study conducted jointly by the Department of Veteran Affairs and the Baylor College of Medicine. According to ScienceDaily, the 180 patients were divided into three groups, at random, with each group receiving a different “treatment,” so to speak:

One group received debridement, in which worn, torn, or loose cartilage is cut away and removed with the aid of a pencil-thin viewing tube called an arthroscope. The second group underwent arthroscopic lavage, in which the bad cartilage is flushed out. The third group underwent simulated arthroscopic surgery; small incisions were made, but no instruments were inserted and no cartilage removed.

Perez was in group three. And like most others in his group, the procedure “worked.” The research was published in the July 11, 2002 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Dr. Bruce Mosely, the paper’s lead author, told ABC News (as linked above) that “[t]he groups were all reporting improvement; it’s just there was no greater benefit in any of the groups compared to the placebo. [ . . .] I think that if you believe in something, you can get well.” Mind over matter.

It also may show that patients — even those involved in medical studies — also are optimistic and hopeful (or perhaps, that they fail to read the fine print).The study specifically noted that participants “may receive only placebo surgery” which “will not benefit [their] knee arthritis.” The patients weren’t told which group they were in during a two year, post-procedure observation period, so not only did they have to believe that the surgery worked, but they also had to believe that they had surgery in the first place.

While some doctors still perform arthroscopic surgery ostensibly to relieve pain due to osteoarthritis, it’s not easy to justify given the 2002 study. This is especially true because in 2008, another set of doctors repeated the 2002 study and came to the same conclusion.

Bonus fact: One of the other myths out there about knees is that babies are born without kneecaps. That’s not exactly right. As Emory University doctor Matthew Hoffman explains on WebMD, babies have knee caps — they’re just made of cartilage, not bone. Bone starts to form at around age 3 to 5, and, by adulthood, “almost all the cartilage” is replaced by bone.

From the Archives: Getting High Off Other People’s Blood: A sickeningly dangerous way to get a drug hit — which may just be a placebo of sorts.

Related: Placebo pills, with a sketchy label and all. Best avoided, most likely.

The map pictured above was generated from Wikipedia data. (Here’s a much larger version, and it’s not quite right — apparently, the creator’s program misidentified some points at the Equator and Prime Meridian.) Many Wikipedia entries have geographic coordinates on them; you can find the coordinates on the upper-right of the page for nearly anything with a static physical location. This is true for towns, landmarks, and even some trees. But not all notable trees make the cut. Take, for example, Hyperion, the world’s tallest known living tree — and, for that matter, the tallest known living thing at all. Its Wikipedia entry doesn’t have any geographic coordinates on it. Because its location is kept a secret.

The Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP) encompass over 100,000 acres on the Pacific coast of northern California. Hyperion is located somewhere therein. At 379.1 feet, it’s the tallest of all the world’s trees, as far as we know. The second and third tallest trees, named Helios (at 376.6 feet) and Icarus (371.2 feet) respectively, are also at RNSP. All three are coast redwoods, similar to the ones pictured below.

Except they’re much taller. For example, here’s a picture of a very tall coast redwood, but at 369 feet, it doesn’t crack the top three.

Unfortunately — and for good reason — the powers that be have decided not to publicly state where Hyperion is located. Publishing its precise location would certainly bring tourists, who, as the San Francisco Chronicle notes, would be risking their well-being in doing so, as the area is “over steep slopes, downed trees, and thick vegetation.” And perhaps just as importantly, it’d put the trees and forest at risk; as the tree’s (geolocation-less) Wikipedia entry notes, “[t]he exact location of the tree has not been revealed to the public for fear that human traffic would upset the ecosystem the tree inhabits.”

And as things go, humanity has a pretty bad track record when it comes to notable trees. As recounted in these pages previously, an allegedly drunk driver managed to kill a tree surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert nothingness, for example. But a more notable example is the unfortunate death of Prometheus, a tree in Nevada. In 1964, a graduate student, working with members of the United States Forest Service, cut it down for research purposes — they wanted to know how old the tree was. 

What they discovered?The recently-killed Prometheus was old – 4,862 years old, at least — making it the oldest known non-clonal organism in the world until they figured that out.

Oops.

Bonus fact: The world’s tallest living person is Sultan Kosen, a Turkish farmer who will turn 30 on December 10, 2012. He became the world’s tallest, officially, on August 25, 2009, when Guinness measured him at 8’1″ (2.47m), according to his Wikipedia entry (which also lacks geographic coordinates, but in this case, that’s because he can move). A year and a half later, he was measured at 8’3″ (2.51 meters).  His height, caused by a tumor on his pituitary gland, would have probably kept climbing, but in 2010, he underwent treatment to control the gland’s output, halting his growth. 

From the Archives: Circus Trees: Sometimes, when people and trees mix, the end result is something pretty cool.

Related: A Shrinky Dink Christmas Tree set. It’s a tree, and it gets smaller over time.

In 2008, Kevin Costner produced and starred in a movie titled Swing Vote. In the movie, Costner plays a New Mexico guy who, improbably and implausibly, ends up having the opportunity to cast the deciding ballot in the U.S. Presidential election. It’s a work of fiction, clearly, but over a century earlier, a man named David Davis (pictured above) was cast in a similar, non-fiction, role.

The 1876 U.S. Presidential election was one of the nation’s strangest. New York Governor Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate, received nearly 4.3 million votes nationwide, good enough for 51% of the popular vote. Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, received a hair over 4 million, accounting for just under 48%. (A handful of third party candidates made up the other three percent.) Tilden also looked like he’d win the Electoral College vote — the vote which, ultimately, is the one which matters in American Presidential elections — 196 to 173 — by virtue of the fact that he swept the southern states other than South Carolina . . . maybe.

In three southern states — South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida — both sides started to allege that the other engaged in voter intimidation and fraud. At the time, it was customary for parties to provide ballots with the preferred candidates’ names already written in. This was done, in part, because not all voters were literate, especially in the South. (One Wikipedia entry states that about 25% of whites in South Carolina were illiterate, as were 70% of blacks across the South.) The parties would put some sort of symbol on the ballots to express which party had issued them.

As recounted by the BBC, Hayes’s supporters alleged that Democrats in these three states had placed pictures of Abraham Lincoln on these pre-written ballots. Lincoln’s image, being an icon of the Republican Party, suggested to illiterate voters that they were voting Republican when they were, in fact, voting Democratic. Regardless of whether this concern was valid, the political realities took hold. The Republicans controlled the state government in all three states and discarded a number of ballots for Democratic candidates, including votes for Tilden. Suddenly, 19 Electoral votes were up for grabs. A 20th vote, from Oregon, would also join the controversy when one Hayes elector was deemed ineligible by the state’s Democratic governor, and was replaced by a Tilden supporter. With these 20 votes now unassigned, the nation had a major problem. Tilden had 184 votes to Hayes’ 165, but the Electoral College requires that a successful candidate receive a majority of the votes — or 185.

In order to solve the problem, the House of Representatives created an “Electoral Commission” — five Representatives, five Senators, and five Supreme Court justices — to decide how to allot the 20 outstanding votes. Originally, the Commission was to be comprised of seven Republicans, who were certain to support Hayes; seven Democrats, who similarly were certain to support Tilden; and one independent. That independent was Supreme Court Justice David Davis from Illinois, who, per one historian (as quoted by Wikipedia), was truly unaffiliated: “No one, perhaps not even Davis himself, knew which presidential candidate he preferred.” With little doubt, Davis was in the unique position of being able to decide, effectively on his own, who would be the next President of the United States.

But Davis’ apparent independence did not preclude the parties from continuing with politicking. Democrats controlled the Illinois state government, and, in an attempt to curry favor with Davis, elected him to the U.S. Senate. (Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, Senators were not elected by voters directly, but rather by the state governments.) Davis, instead, used this election as a way to avoid being the swing vote to end all swing votes. He accepted the Senate seat and resigned from the Supreme Court, and, therefore, was ineligible to serve on the Commission.

With few choices remaining, the House placed Justice Joseph Philo Bradley — a Massachusetts Republican — on the Commission. Bradley, unsurprisingly, joined his fellow Republicans in awarding Hayes all 20 Electoral votes. Hayes became President, Davis became a one-term Senator, and Bradley received death threats. Tilden himself did not contest the outcome further. Per Wikipedia, he left politics altogether, stating: “I can retire to public life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”

Bonus fact: Tilden made a fortune for himself as a lawyer and investor, and died in 1886 with $7 million to his name — over $170 million in today’s dollars. He bequeathed the lion’s share of that to a trust, called the Tilden Trust, to create and maintain a library in New York City. The Tilden Trust helped fund the founding of the New York Public Library, whose landmark main branch has Tilden’s name engraved above its main entrance.

From the Archives: Vice President . . . Who?: Hayes’ victory resulted in William Wheeler becoming Vice President, and Hayes figuring out who Wheeler was.

Related: “Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876” by Roy Morris, Jr. Originally published in 2004, it is one of the few books on the controversial election. 3.6 stars on 25 reviews, with a handful of negative ones concerned that the author is one-sided.

The Trobriand Islands are an archipelago, part of Papua New Guinea, about 100 miles northeast of Oceania, where most of Papua New Guinea is located. The area is inhabited by about 12,000 people native to the islands for generations. These people have modernized over the years, welcoming advances in medicine and other innovations into their lives. But, by and large, they have managed to retain their cultural anachronisms.

And all these cultural quirks have a common denominator: yams.

Yams are the staple food of the island, making them a big part of everyday life, as expected, but also into milestone moments. There is no traditional marriage ceremony on the Trobriand Islands. Instead, according to Wikipedia, the man and woman’s courtship becomes serious when they spend the night together (denotatively; whether the connotative meaning is also true is left unsaid) and, the next morning, the bride’s mother brings cooked yams to the fledgling couple. If a couple divorces, the man can try and woo his ex-wife back by bringing an offering of yams to her family. And even pregnancies are yam-related; the Trobriands believe that pregnancies are caused by a dead spirit called a baloma, and not the male in the relationship. That belief, per Wikipedia, stems from the fact that yams are the food staple of the island, and yams have slight contraceptive value, making the otherwise obvious cause of pregnancy a lot less obvious.

The yam is exalted to a status well beyond that of any other vegetable; each family has a festival yam exchange each year, as described by Wikipedia: 

At the beginning of the yam harvest, the yams stay on display in gardens for about a month before the gardener takes them to the owner. The owner is always a woman. There is a great ceremony for this every year. The yams are loaded into the woman’s husband’s empty yam house. Young people come to the gardens dressed in their most festive traditional clothes early on the day the yams are delivered to the yam house. The young people are all related to the gardener, and carry the yam baskets to the owner’s hamlet. When they get to the owner’s hamlet, they sing out to announce the arrival of the yams while thrusting out their hips in a sexually provocative motion. This emphasizes the relation between yams and sexuality. A few days later, the gardener comes and loads the yam house, and the man is now responsible for the yam.

The culture on the island is matrilineal and, according to one anthropological case study, a girl’s uncle, not her father, is the one charged with providing her with food and material wealth — in both cases, that means he gives her yams. In fact, there is very little money on the islands. Instead, as one could probably guess, the Trobriands use yams as currency. This is true even after death, when those who help bury the recently deceased are compensated for their work in the ubiquitous tubers grown on the island.

Bonus fact: In the U.S., sweet potatoes are often called yams. They are, however, two different vegetables, as noted by the North Carolina Sweet Potato Association (which, shockingly, exists). The Association further notes (in the form of a yam vs. sweet potato pop quiz) that yams are originally from Africa and are rarely sold in the U.S., so if you’re in America and think you’re eating a yam, you probably aren’t.

From the Archives: The Most Isolated People in the World: Another group of indigenous people on a small island, but in this case, they’re not focused on yams — but instead, on being left alone. At times, by force.

Related: A six-pack of canned candied yams . . . or so the label says. Look carefully, though, and you’ll see the truth in smaller print: “cut sweet potatoes.” Unreviewed.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, pictured above, is not a household name, but, if history meandered a little differently, he’d be known by every schoolchild in America, if not the world. Langley, a pioneer in the field of aviation, spent over a decade in the late 1800s exploring manned flight. By 1898, his models had shown so much promise that both the War Department and the Smithsonian issued him grants, totalling $70,000 (nearly $2 million in today’s money) to create what the Smithsonian would later describe as “the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard.”

He failed, spectacularly — twice. On October 7, 1903, and again on December 8 of the same year, Langley’s plane, the Aerodome, attempted to take flight over the Potomac River in Maryland. Both times, the plane, after being catapulted into the sky (that’s how it took off), immediately crashed down into the river. Its pilot, Charles Manly, was unhurt, but Langley and team probably could not say the same for their egos. The public thought Langley’s ideas to be a farce, and had no trouble saying so.

Which turned out to be the actual farce.

On October 9, 1903, two days after Langley’s and Manly’s first failed attempt at flight, the New York Times penned an editorial (pdf here; scroll down for its start) headlined “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” poking fun at their attempts. The paper made light of Manly’s cork jacket (which ended up becoming an unintentional life preserver), noted that the airplane “gradually curved downward until it disappeared, ‘plunk,’ as a small boy would say,” and called the entire attempt a “ridiculous fiasco” which was “not unexpected” except by Langley and his team. The Times was so certain that Langley’s failure was inevitable — even though another attempt was forthcoming fewer than two months later — that its editors made the following prediction:

Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one with started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years–provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if the effort might be employed more profitably. [emphasis added]

On December 8th, Langley briefly proved the Times correct, as the Aerodome crashed again. But the Times‘ prediction was short-lived. On December 17 — about nine weeks after the Times‘ editorial – Orville and Wilbur Wright took to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with their plane, the Wright Flyer. They successfully took to the skies four times that day, including a flight over 800 feet lasting nearly a full minute. For the Wrights, they became the household names across the world. For the Times? A prediction which lasted not much longer than the Wrights’ first flights.

Bonus fact: As bad as that prediction was, it may not be the Times‘ worst one when it comes to flight. Also in the running is an editorial from 1920 titled “Topics of the Times” (reproduced and archived here) which poked fun at inventor Robert H. Goddard for outlining his ideas for rocket-based flight into space. The Times chastised Goddard: “That Professor Goddard [. . .] does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” Of course, the Times was wrong; rockets work just fine in the vacuum of space. On July 17, 1969 — the day after the Apollo 11 mission launch — the Times issued a correction (available here), noting just that.

From the Archives: In the Year 1982: How did predictions about computing from thirty years ago hold up? Better than you’d think. (And certainly better than the Times did above.)

Related: A model rocket kit for under $10. Not intended for flight outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Over the last decade or so, cell phones have become as important to our everyday lives as any other object. And as one thing thrives, another wanes — in this case, the street-side pay phone. Once a staple of urban (and even suburban) life, coming across a pay phone now seems like a rare occurrence.

But in the mid-1990s — well before cell phones were common, let alone ubiquitous — the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo found pay phones disappearing for another reason: someone was stealing them. Before long, 900 of the pay phones went missing, totalling about a quarter of those provided in the area by the local phone company, Telekom Malaysia.

The mystery of the stolen pay phones was strange to say the least, baffling authorities. Detached from their bases, the phones could not longer be used to place a call, and, therefore, were not obviously useful.  And with no clear motive, Telekom Malaysia could not take decisive action in hopes of stemming the tide of thefts.

But in time, the culprit turned up — and the fishing industry was to blame. Some fish have been known to be lured in by sound as much as, say, chum or worms. According to the Independent, Malaysians sometimes bang bamboo sticks together underwater as a method for attracting a catch, and in the UK for example, the sound of a fly hitting the water has been known to attract fish, not scare them away.

For the Borneo fishermen, it turned out that the pay phones’ handsets made for good sonic fish bait as well. The fishermen were detaching the handsets, connecting a high-powered battery, and placing the handset near (or in?) the water. Also according to the same Independent article, the resulting sound attracted tilapia, grouper, and snapper to the phone, where the fishermen’s nets awaited them. (How the fishermen figured this out in the first place is anyone’s guess.) The bait worked better than worms or any other food.

How Telekom Malaysia prevented the theft of further phones — if at all — was left unreported.

Bonus fact: In 1990 — again, an era before cell phone ubiquity, and also, before the real-time information-on-demand we’re accustomed to today — finding out what happened at a baseball game (or any sporting event) outside of your local media market required waiting for the evening news broadcast or the next day’s newspaper. Pay phones helped change that, becoming a key ingredient in a scheme to get up-to-the-minute baseball scores, as recounted by Baseball Prospectus. In June of that year, Beckett Baseball Card Monthly magazine asked its readers to mail them with the phone numbers of pay phones at stadiums, ideally with a view of the scoreboard. In October, just in time for the playoff races, the magazine printed its findings. The idea? Fans at home could call the pay phones hoping that a fan in the stadium would pick up and read the scoreboard to them. 

From the Archives: The 411 on Area Codes: New York City has 212. Across the country is 213, in Los Angeles. How did this come to be?

Related: A replica 1950′s pay phone, in red, with working coin slot. No idea whether it can attract fish, but it can probably be used to call someone to find out the score in a baseball game.

Thank you to technology and culture historian Edward Tenner, author of “Why Things Bite Back” and “Our Own Devices,” for helping me track down a source for this story.

Pictured above is the Elizabeth Tower, home of the famous clock bell, Big Ben. On the left, the angle of the photograph makes it look like the tower is leaning to the right. And in the picture on the right, the tower appears to be leaning to the right even more so. The higher you go up the tower, the more pronounced the deviation in the lean.

Or so it seems. In reality, the two towers are leaning the exact same amount — guaranteed by the fact that the two photos are actually the same photo, just repeated a second time. The illusion works for any pair of identical images where the object appears to get further away as our view of it progresses. And of course, it works for the Leaning Tower of Pisa as well, as seen below.

What’s going on here? It’s a great example of our brains outsmarting ourselves, as described in a paper by three researchers at McGill University (pdf here, which contains a photo of tram lines, when paired, which makes the effect absolutely astounding). When we look up at parallel buildings — say, while standing on a Manhattan street corner — the buildings seem to converge as they reach toward the sky. However, our brains realize that this is just the view from our immediate perspective, so it corrects the image and “returns” them to their true, parallel state.

But when the buildings are parallel and do not seem to converge — and note that the leaning towers above do not seem to do that — our brains still issue this “correction,” and bend them apart. But without the perceived convergence, the images instead appear to diverge. All because our minds can’t always trust what our eyes believe to see.

Bonus fact: Big Ben’s tower is, in fact, leaning. According to Reuters, at its peak, the clock tower leans leftward about 46 centimeters (about a foot and a half). But don’t worry about it turning into another situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Reuters estimates that it’d take 10,000 years for that to happen.

From the Archives: Temporary Blindness: Another way our minds trick us into not seeing something which our eyes otherwise detect. Also, the self-explanatory Why Pisa’s Tower Leans.

Related: A Leaning Tower of Pisa 3-D puzzle.

Thanks to Futility Closet for teaching me about the illusion and to Richard Wiseman to the Elizabeth Tower/Big Ben photo.

Imagine you’re at a bar and another patron offers you the following wager. He’s going to flip a coin — a standard U.S. penny like the ones seen above — a dozen or so times. If it comes up heads more often than tails, he’ll pay you $20. If it comes up tails more than heads, you pay him the same. There’s no hidden tricks. It’s a fair bet — safe to take, if you’re looking for a 50/50 chance.

Now, imagine the same offer, except that instead of flipping the coin, the other patron tells you he’s going to spin it. In fact, he’ll even let you provide the penny, just to guarantee no funny business is going on. Twenty-five spins, and if it comes up heads more often than tails, he’ll give you $20 again. But if tails comes up more often, you owe him twenty bucks.

Fair bet? Not if Persi Diaconis is right.

Diaconis is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University and, formerly, a professional magician. While his claim to fame is determining how many times a deck of cards must be shuffled in order to give a mathematically random result (it’s either five or seven, depending on your criteria), he’s also dabbled in the world of coin games. What he and his fellow researchers discovered (here’s a .pdf of their paper) is that most games of chance involving coins aren’t as even as you’d think. For example, even the 50/50 coin toss really isn’t 50/50 — it’s closer to 51/49, biased toward whatever side was up when the coin was thrown into the air.

But more incredibly, as reported by Science News, spinning a penny gives even more pronounced odds — the penny will land tails side up roughly 80% of the time. The reason: the side with Lincoln’s head on it is a bit heavier than the flip side, causing the coin’s center of mass to lie slightly toward heads. The spinning coin tends to fall toward the heavier side more often, leading to a pronounced number of extra “tails” results when it finally comes to rest.

Because the coins typically pick up dirt and oils over time, trying the experiment at home may not yield such a large percentage of “tails” over “heads” — but a relatively new coin should still give you noticeable results.

Bonus fact: Pennies are good for estimating lengths. A U.S. penny is about .061 inches in thickness and 0.75 inches in diameter. That means that 16 pennies, stacked, is about an inch tall, while the same 16 pennies, lined up tangentially, is about a foot long.

From the Archives: From Abe to Zinc: Pennies cost more than they’re worth. Really.

Related: A pound of pennies.

The day after Thanksgiving has a special moniker in the United States: Black Friday, which is now commonly a reference to the accounting gains made by retailers during the Christmas shopping period which informally begins on that day. But Black Friday is a boon for another business as well: the emergency plumbing trade.

As reported by the Holland (Michigan) Sentinel, according to nationwide plumbing service Roto-Rooter, emergency housecalls on that day are the highest of any day of the year, and 50% higher than any other Friday. But don’t get grossed out thinking about millions of Americans overeating and then, collectively, clogging hundreds of thousands of toilets — that’s not the cause. The uptick in house calls comes from two factors, neither of which involve a visit to the porcelain throne.

First, the huge amount of food leads to a bunch of waste — grease and bones and a bunch of other stuff which washes off dishes into the sink. And all this stuff collects in the basin, with the notably dense grease causing a particular problem. The grease and other waste gets caught in the kitchen sink pipes, causing a nice clog, and, of course, preventing any further clean up until it’s fixed. So the plumber gets called.

Which leads to the second problem. Like most Americans, plumbers celebrate Thanksgiving, and would rather not work on that day. So they typically charge a lot extra to leave their Thanksgiving meal to come out to your house and unclog your drain. Many families therefore wait — if they can — until the next day. As a result, the plumbers get two days’ worth of holiday calls in the same day, and, as Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, there are a lot of people celebrating it.

So what should you do with your grease? The New York City Department of Environmental Protection suggests taking all the liquefied fat, oil, and grease and putting it into a container — and then throwing out the whole thing. And as the city points out, putting that stuff down your drain can not only require a visit from the plumber, but also gunks up the municipal sewage system.

Bonus fact: The final episode of M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, and was watched by 125 million viewers. The impact of the show was so dramatic that, according to the book “The Last Days of MASH,” New York City’s sanitation department saw a significant spike in water usage after it ended, as many New Yorkers waited until after the show to go and use the toilet.

From the Archives: How Turkey Got Its Name: The bird, not the country.

Related: “The Last Days of MASH” by Alan and Arlene Alda. Five stars on eight reviews.

Espionage can be dirty work. And as American, French, and British spies learned during the Cold War, espionage can be really dirty work. So dirty, in fact, that step one was simple, straightforward, and disturbing:

Deprive the Soviets of toilet paper.

At some point during the US/Soviet power struggle, the United States and its allies realized that they were able to obtain Soviet garbage pretty easily, especially in and around (then East) Germany. In general, though, trash is just that — trash — and lacks any sort of value, especially to someone looking for information. After all, Soviets aren’t going to simply throw out a confidential document (and, knowing this, aren’t likely to care what happens to the stuff in garbage). The Western powers had an opportunity, though — if they could somehow induce the Soviets to throw classified documents into the garbage,  Enter Operation Tamarisk.

By depriving the Russians of toilet paper, the theory went, the soldiers etc. would have to wipe with something else. There typically were not a lot of options, so many just used an official document or two sitting idly by. And because these documents weren’t water soluble, they also weren’t flushable — at all. The Russians would wipe and toss the classified document-turned-toilet paper into a nearby garbage can. And that’s where the Western spies came into action. By searching through trash.

What they found there, of course, was more than just secret documents (covered in “stuff” or otherwise) detailing the covert operations of the Soviet military industrial complex. As Wikipedia notes, the Western counterintelligence agents found much more than paper-and-feces. They also found amputated limbs among the trash and, when they complained to their superiors, their superiors took action. But instead of calling the mission off, they ordered the agents to dig further, and investigate the types of shrapnel the Soviets were using.

Despite the gore and overall grossness, the plan was a success — often considered one of the most successful intelligence missions of the Cold War.

Bonus fact: In general, intelligence agencies destroy classified documents as necessary — that’s where the term “burn after reading” comes from. The CIA does exactly that, and does so in a way to also conserve energy. According to TPM, the exhaust from the incinerator used to burn the documents is used to heat water at headquarters.

From the Archives: Pig Toilets: Where the people do their business, pigs play and eat.

Related: Emergency toilet paper.

A lot of times, authorities had to track the alleged criminals by foot. So to avoid capture, some moonshiners changed their shoes. Specifically, they put on cow shoes, like the ones seen below, via the New Yorker.

A 1922 article from a now-defunct St. Petersburg, Florida newspaper called the Evening Independent described their use: 

The cow shoe is a strip of metal to which is tacked a wooden block carved to resemble the hoof of a cow, which may be strapped to the human foot. A man shod with a pair of them would leave a trail resembling that of a cow.

The ruse was discovered in Tampa when one runaway moonshiner accidentally left his behind, somehow. As the Evening Independent noted, officials believed that the cow shoe was inspired by a villain from the Sherlock Holmes universe. As the blog TYWKIWDBI discovered, in “The Adventures of Priory School” (available free, here) the villain outfitted his horse with faux cow hooves in order to avoid detection.

Bonus fact: Cows can be used illegally. “Cow Chip Bingo” is a game of chance where a numbered grid is drawn on a field and a cow is left to roam the area. Contestants each buy a numbered box, typically with the lion’s share of the revenue going to charity. The rest of the money? That’s determined by wherever the cow does its business, so to speak. If the cow “goes” in your box, you win the pot.

As this can be considered gambling, some jurisdictions regulate the game. For example, in 2011, in the closing days of the legislative session, the Connecticut state government debated how to best handle the game. They ended up requiring that the organizer of a cow chip bingo event fill out a form (see page four of this .pdf file) in order to obtain a license for the game. Some things organizers need to tell the state: the “dimensions of the cow-chip raffle land area,” whether the plots will be numbered consecutively, and whether each plot is the same size.

From the Archives: Liquor, Sicker: Another tale from Prohibition.

Related: Cow shoes, of course. (Fleeing from the law while wearing these is not advised.)

In 1992, with an incredible amount of fanfare, Pepsi announced Crystal Pepsi, a clear cola beverage aimed at revolutionizing the soft drink world. The drink did well initially and even spurred Coca-Cola to come out with its own clear cola product, called Tab Clear. Neither beverage would survive commercially for very long. Crystal Pepsi was off shelves in the United States by the end of 1993; one of the executives behind the concept would later admit that the product didn’t taste good. Tab Clear, somehow, persevered into the middle of 1994. Its marketing was suspect — for some reason, it was only sold in a can, a curious choice for a beverage whose main selling point was the fact that it was translucent.

Given these failures, one would assume that these massive soft drink companies had never attempted to make a cola which wasn’t caramel colored. But well before Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear came another different-colored cola, informally called White Coke.

In the 1940s, the Marshal of the Soviet Union (the de facto highest rank in the Soviet military), a man named Georgy Zhukov, took a liking to Coca-Cola. But Coke was symbolic of America, of capitalism, etc., and Zhukov — given his position of prominence — couldn’t be seen drinking the stuff. He, through his American counterpart General Mark W. Clark (who in turn took the question to President Truman), asked that the Coca-Cola Company develop a cola which, visually, resembled vodka. This way, as reported by the New York Times, he could be seen drinking it whenever, without risking the ire of Joseph Stalin. (Apparently, it was OK for Soviet military leaders to grab a vodka and a smile.) Coke complied.

For years, Coke provided the cola to Zhukov, and somehow managed to avoid most of the red tape which defined importations into the USSR during that period. The cola was never introduced to consumers in the States.

Bonus fact: In 1990, the Mars candy company introduced PB Max, a cookie topped with peanut butter, with the whole thing covered in milk chocolate. Like Crystal Pepsi and Tab Clear, PB Max did not last very long — it was discontinued a few years later. But unlike the colas, PB Max was a commercial success. Why was it discontinued? According the an anonymous executive cited by the best-selling book “The Emperors of Chocolate,” the Mars family has a distaste for peanut butter and opted to take PB Max out of their product line, despite its additions to the family’s coffers. (This makes sense; Mars’ peanut butter M&Ms, while common now, are relatively new compared to Reese’s Pieces.)

From the Archives: Cola Enforcement Agency: Coca-Cola’s cocaine problem.

Related: “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It” by Mark Pendergrast. 4.5 stars on 23 reviews. Available on Kindle.

In January of 897, Pope Formosus was put on trial. He was tried for various violations of papal law, including serving as a bishop while actually a layperson. During the trial, he sat, propped up on a throne, silent and motionless. And when he was convicted, he remained stoic.

In most cases, defendants on trial have trouble controlling their emotions. But for Formosus, this was easy. He was dead, and had been for about eight months.

The 9th and early 10th centuries were a difficult time for the papacy; Wikipedia calls it ”a period of political instability in Italy.” For the century beginning with the death of Pope John II in 882, nearly twenty different men ascended to the title of Pope. Some, like Formosus, lasted five years — but really, five years as Pope was a long time during the era. His successor, Boniface VI, only lasted a few weeks, and four different men would be Pope in the year 897 alone. One of them, Pope Stephen VI, is responsible for putting the corpse of Pope Formosus on trial, in an event now called the Cadaver Synod.

The exact reasons behind the trial are not entirely clear, as historical sources from that era are few and far between. Most likely, the Synod was politically driven. Formosus tried to install new leadership in the Holy Roman Empire which some previous and subsequent Popes objected to. But in any event, Formosus’ body was exhumed (despite the fact that it was, by then, somewhat noticeably decomposed), propped up on a throne, and a deacon was assigned to defend him. That defense, of course, failed, especially in light of the fact that the accused was long departed (although when the Pope puts you on trial, whether you are alive or dead may not matter all that much). Per one historian, Formosus’s punishment cost him all of his acts as Pope — they were reversed — and the three fingers he used for consecrations, which were cut off.

Eventually, Formosus’s body was thrown into the Tiber River, never to be thought of again. But the rumor mill took over, and many disapproved of Stephen VI’s decision to try the deceased. Subsequent Popes overturned the Synod, and Formosus was reburied in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Bonus fact: According to Wikipedia, it was once traditional to gently tap a recently-deceased pontiff on the head with a silver hammer, three times, in order to ensure that he had, indeed, passed. (This was not done following the deaths of the most recent two Popes.)

From the Archives: The Scientist Pope: A Pope who was also the leading scientific mind of his time.

Related: “The Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History” by John Vidmar. 4.5 stars on 26 reviews.

Such fears were, sadly, not unfounded. In the 13th century, a highly regarded philosopher/theologian, John Duns Scotus, was rumored to have been buried alive; as the story goes, his body was found next to his coffin, arms and hands bloodied from an attempt to claw his way out. (The story is probably a myth.)  A book on the subject (titled “Buried Alive,” even) tells the tale of London butcher named Lawrence Cawthorn, who, in the 1660s, fell ill and was “hastily buried” by his “wicked landlady.” When mourners visited his gravesite, they heard “a muffled shriek from the tomb and [. . ..] frenzied clawing at the coffin walls.” By the time Cawthorn was disinterred, he was dead.  And according to another book on the subject (“The Corpse: A History“) in 1905, British businessman William Tebb (best known as an anti-vaccination activist), cobbled together over 300 cases of live burials and near misses.

To combat these fears, coffin makers came up with a solution: the “safety coffin.” Popular in the late 1700s and into the subsequent century, the safety coffin typically involved some sort of way for the accidentally buried to to notify those above him or her about the mistake. One example (schematic seen above) involved a long tube and cord running many feet (more than six!) upward from the coffin. At the top was a bell, such that a wrongfully-interred person could shake the cord, ring the bell, and ideally, have others come with shovels to save him from a horrible end to his existence. Other methods included pyrotechnics, flags, and even escape hatches. An early one involved a lock with a keyhole inside the coffin; the body was to be buried wearing a coat with the key placed within an inside pocket. There is actually a lot of innovation around the problem — and a similarly large number of patents.

Were these safety coffins successful? Probably not — there are no known examples of a safety coffin rescuing a buried-alive person. There are, however, a few examples of false positives. If, when interred, the body was holding the cord, natural decomposition could cause the cord to tense up and, therefore, ring the bell. To prevent “small” movements from causing these false alarms, in 1897, one Russian inventor created a system which detected more significant movements and signalled that someone was alive to outsiders. The only problem? When he demonstrated it by “burying” one of his assistants, alive, the motion detection system failed. The assistant emerged unharmed but the safety coffin failed to find many buyers.

Bonus fact: George Washington was interred at Mount Vernon, where his tomb remains today. But if the United States Congress had its way, he would have been buried in the Capitol. As Wikipedia notes, in December of 1800, a year after President Washington died, the House of Representatives appropriated $20,000 ($2.6 million in today’s dollars) for a marble pyramid with a 100 square foot base to act as a mausoleum for him. But the plan failed to go further when Southern states objected, requesting that Washington’s body remain in Virginia.

From the Archives: Die Hard: If anyone was likely to be buried alive, it was this guy — who was incredibly hard to murder.

Related: The Relaxman Relaxation Capsule: Kind of like a coffin, only (a) not for dead people, (b) not intended for burial, (c) probably more comfortable, and (d) $50,000.

Tromelin Island is a small dot of land — about a third of a square mile, or .8 square kilometers — situated about 220 miles east of Madagascar. (It’s where the red flagged “A” is in the map above.) It is mostly sand; its original name was Ile de Sables, or “island of sand.” It is administered by the French government and claimed by the French as their territory, although both Madagascar and the Seychelles also lay claim to it. No one lives on the island, and getting there is tricky — it is surrounded by coral reefs, making it difficult at best for ships to drop anchor there. Which is a lesson that a slave ship, back in 1761, learned the hard way.

That year, a French ship, the Utine, travelled from Mauritius toward Madagascar, carrying a few dozen sailors and in excess of 150 slaves. But the Utine ran into the reefs and began to take on water. An untold number of sailors and slaves, believed to be nearly 100, went down with the ship. But an estimated sixty slaves and a handful of the ship’s crew made it ashore to the flat, sandy beach later named Tromelin Island. The crewmen fashioned a raft out of the wrecked ship and sailed back toward Mauritius. They promised to return to rescue the five dozen slaves they left behind, but when they arrived, safely, the officials on Mauritius refused to send out a rescue party — saving slaves wasn’t deemed to be worth the risk. The sixty or so slaves were left behind to die.

Most of them did. Not all, however. According to the Independent, the group of slaves subsisted on a diet of birds, turtles, and shellfish. They built a communal oven, repaired copper utensils, and used the coral to create shelters. They — or perhaps the sailors –started a fire from the wood from the wreckage; regardless, the slaves kept that fire burning until help arrived. And help did, in fact, arrive — in 1776. Fifteen years after the Utine crashed down off the shore of this isle of sand, a French warship arrived on the island to find seven women and one eight-month-old baby alive, barely, living there. The captain, surnamed Tromelin, brought these eight people back to Mauritius, and was honored by having the island named after him.

The fate of the slaves was lost to time, but we know that they gained their freedom upon their arrival at Mauritius. The new governor there noted that the slaves on the Utine were purchased illegally and, therefore, were to be set free.

Bonus fact: Slavery is now illegal throughout the world. In 1981, Mauritania (not Mauritius) became the last country to ban the practice. (And until 2007, one could own a slave there without facing criminal penalties; now, the penalty for enslaving someone is up to 10 years in prison.) Per one estimate from 2004, there are as many as 24 million slaves in the world, more than any other time in human history.

From the Archives: Free Shipping: The slave who mailed himself to freedom.

Related: A sea turtle night light. Barely related, admittedly, but I own multiple of these. (Really. They’re great.)

The first issue of Marvel Comics’ The X-Men hit shelves with a publication date of September, 1963. Over the X-Men’s nearly fifty years of history, mutants — born of typical humans but genetically mutated — struggle to fit in with the rest of humanity. Some, such as the protagonist hero Professor Charles Xavier (or Professor X), led mutants into working with “normal” humans; he and his followers hoped to earn the trust of the greater population, with the goal of humans and mutants being treated as one and the same. Others, such as antihero/supervillain Magneto, believe that regular people would never treat mutants as “human;” therefore, he advocated, mutants should consider themselves non-humans (and superior at that) and should take control of their own collective destiny — violently, if needed.

For fans of the comic, this struggle over the fate of mutant-kind — relative to us regular humans that is — is core to the saga. But for a company named Toy Biz, Marvel’s toy division, the question was simple. Magneto was right. Mutants aren’t human.

The U.S. government levies tariffs on many imported goods. But there is not one standard tariff rate — instead, different items are taxed at different amounts depending on how the items are classified. For example — relevant to this matter — “dolls” are taxed at 12% while “toys” have a 6.8% levy. The Professor X action figure pictured above — and, for that matter, the rest of the X-Men line — could be considered either, depending on one’s interpretation of the terms “toys” and “dolls.” As Slate noted, The U.S. Customs Service declared them to be “dolls,” which were defined in part as items “representing only human beings and parts and accessories thereof” instead of toys, defined as items “representing animals or other non-human creatures (for example, robots and monsters) and parts and accessories thereof.”

Toy Biz sued. Their claim was simple: Magneto and company were “mutants” and, therefore, “non-human creatures” subject to the 6.8% rate. The government took Professor X’s side, arguing that no, the X-Men were humans like anyone else. The whole thing was ridiculous, except for the fact that the distinction would result in a multi-million dollar difference to both Toy Biz/Mattel and to the U.S. government’s tax coffers, as noted in a RadioLab interview with some attorneys involved.

But the adjudication of the question was not so straightforward — the matter bounced around in the legal system for about a decade. Along the way, a series of laughable arguments came up. Per RadioLab, the criteria for “human” (insofar as Customs is concerned) involved having “a head, a mouth, eyes, nose, hair, arms, torso,” etc. Most of the X-Men have some, but not all, of that. But one — an early victory for Toy Biz/Mattel — had all of those features. That character was Beast, seen here, is the X-Men’s doctor and, per Wikipedia is “a brilliant man of the arts and sciences; he is a world authority on biochemistry and genetics.”  The winning argument? As one of the lawyers told RadioLab, Toy Biz asserted “that human beings do not have blue skin.” (Long-time readers of Now I Know will note that this isn’t always true.) In 2003, the court, finally, agreed.

Not everyone was happy, though. USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review quoted the proprietor of an X-Men fan site, who called the decision “unthinkable” and argued that the super heroes “are supposed to be as human as you or I.” And the question is now moot — as of the close of 2011, the tariff on toys and dolls is the same.

Bonus fact: In Toy Story, Andy, the child who owned the toys, appears, as does his mother. But his father never does. Why? As one Pixar camera artists explained, “human characters were just hideously expensive and difficult to do in those days and, as Lee mentioned, Andy’s dad wasn’t necessary for the story.”

From the Archives: Turkey and Chickens: Another tariff workaround.

Related: A Professor X doll… er, toy.

The headline read “Flesh Descending in a Shower.” It could have meant a few things — summing up a grisly murder in a bathroom, perhaps. But when the New York Times ran a short item using that headline on March 10, 1876, it involved no such thing. Rather, the story was about a freak occurrence when meat fell from the sky.

The day before, a small town in Bath County, in the northeastern part of Kentucky, was experiencing blue skies and typical weather. Then, suddenly, over a 5,000 square yard (4,000 square meter) area, it began to snow… or rain… or, well, something. The Times, paraphrasing a woman who lived at the scene, described the precipitation as being the size and character of “large snow flakes.”

And upon further inspection, what had fallen from the sky was clearly meat. Fresh meat, at that. According to another witness (who arrived in the area on the following day), there were, per the Times, “particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground.” When two others tasted (!!) the meat, they concluded that it was either mutton or venison.

The taste-testers were, almost certainly, wrong. As reported by Scientific American, a pair of scientists observed some of the meat under a microscope and concluded that the meat was “lung tissue from a human infant or a horse,” which are apparently very similarly looking at that level. But don’t worry — the meat was most likely from a horse, by way of buzzards. As locals in Kentucky had observed back in those days, buzzards would regularly ransack horse carcasses, feast, and then take back to the air. And as Scientific American further noted, when one buzzard upchucked his recent meal, the others would follow suit. Unfortunately for the bystanders in Kentucky that one March day, they (probably) happened to be just below a wake of buzzards.

Bonus fact: Yes, a “wake” of buzzards. According to an Audubon Society chapter in Southern California, that’s the collective term for a group of such birds. Some other surprising group names? Some favorites: a “conspirancy” (yes, with the extra “n”), “storytelling,” or “unkindness” of ravens; a “parliament” or “wisdom” of owls; a “murder” or a “storytelling” (again) of crows; a “murmuration” of starlings; or a “deceit” of lapwings.

From the Archives: Faux Meat Trap: A plant which smells like rotted meat.

Related: Canned Unicorn Meat: It has wings, but probably won’t fall from the sky. “Magic in Every Bite!,” though.

In 1946, the Parliament of Canada promulgated the Canadian Citizen Act, creating, arguably for the first time ever, Canadian citizens. Before 1947, when the Act became effective, anyone living in Canada was considered a British subject; Canada, in this sense, did not have its own citizens yet.

Under the Act, most anyone who could have possibly imagined him or herself to be a Canadian citizen became one. If you were a British subject who was born in Canada (and had not emigrated), you became a Canadian. If you had lived in Canada as a British citizen for a requisite number of years, and were still living in Canada at the time, you were henceforth a Canadian citizen. If you were born abroad to but your parents were Canadians, so were you. And there were many other ways as well.

But the list of criteria was not exactly exhaustive — as Jackie Scott and many others learned decades later. These people — citizens in every sense of the word except for the official one — are called the Lost Canadians.

Ms. Scott’s story is typical of many of them. She was born in England just after World War II, but before January 1, 1947. Her father was a soldier in the Canadian Army serving in England; her mother was an English national. Jackie was born out of wedlock, but her parents married and, by 1948, moved (back?) to Canada. According to the London Free Press, Scott lived her entire post-immigration life in Canada and, in 2004, went to obtain a passport. Her request was denied. The Citizen Act, until it was amended in 1977, snared Scott in a loophole which resulted her not being a citizen.

Under the original wording of the Act, a baby born abroad was only made a citizen if his or her father was a Canadian citizen, assuming that the child was born in wedlock.  (At the time, wives and children were still considered, to a large degree, property of the father/husband.) If the child was born out of wedlock, then the child’s mother had to be a Canadian citizen. Scott’s parents weren’t married when she was born, and her mother wasn’t a Canadian citizen — so neither was she.

When Scott and others objected, claiming that the basis for such a distinction was ridiculous at best and discriminatory at worst, the immigration office stood its ground with a new theory. According to the National Post, the immigration office argued that Scott’s father, at the time of her birth, was not yet a Canadian citizen — no one was. As the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism told Scott, “[soldiers like her father] were not legally Canadian citizens. They didn’t have citizenship. They were [British] subjects … They would have regarded themselves as subjects. Everyone was.”

Scott is not alone — not by any means. A website dedicated to regaining the lost citizenship of these people, LostCanadian.com, asserts that there are thousands of people in similar predicaments. Many of them were un-lost in 2009, when the Canadian Parliament passed another reform aimed at closing the loophole, but that bill was incomplete, leaving Scott and others as people without a country. Officially, that is.

Bonus fact: On March 1, 1781, the American colonies adopted the Articles of Confederation, a document creating a “perpetual Union” among the colonies called “The United States of America.” All thirteen colonies were a party to the Articles of Confederation, but the Articles allowed for expansion. But unlike the Constitution, which lays out the framework for new states to join the Union, the Articles of Confederation were more specific. Article 11 stated that “Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.”

From the Archives: Senior Citizen: A strange way to become a citizen of the United States (but if you’re born already, it’s too late).

Related: Want to become a Canadian citizen? Here’s a 500 question and answer book with seven practice exams.

Space travel can be taxing, especially if one’s destination is the moon. For no one was this more true than Jim Irwin, depicted above, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 15. Like the other men to walk on the moon, he had to remain awake for 23 or more hours while carrying out all sorts of activities on the moon’s surface. But unlike the rest of those dozen men, Irwin almost did not make it back.

Irwin and his fellow Apollo 15 moonwalker David Scott were on moon’s surface for about 67 hours, with 19 of those hours spent outside the lunar module. The pair was the first to explore the moon’s surface in a motorized vehicle, later dubbed the “moon buggy,” and are credited with discovering and retrieving the Genesis Rock, a rock sample believed to be roughly 4 billion years old. (For perspective’s sake, the Solar System is believed to be roughly 4.6 billion years old.) For Irwin, the trip sparked another journey — one of religious introspection. As he’d say in his 1973 autobiography, his time on the moon awakened something inside him: “I sensed the beginning of some sort of deep change inside of me.”

But he also felt something else. During his time working on the lunar surface, Irwin’s heart developed an arrhythmia — a series of abnormal heart beats. The heart problems were serious. According to Wikipedia, Dr. Charles Berry, a flight surgeon monitoring the astronauts from back here on Earth told leadership at the Manned Space Center (MSC) that Irwin’s heart problems were “serious” — “If he were on earth, I’d have him in the ICU being treated for a heart attack.”  But of course, the MSC could not do anything to assist Irwin.

That was the bad news. The good news is that the doctors in the MSC didn’t have to do much. Berry pondered the issue and came to a realization: “In truth…he’s in an ICU. He’s getting one hundred percent oxygen, he’s being continuously monitored, and best of all, he’s in zero g. Whatever strain his heart is under, well, we can’t do better than zero g.”

Irwin survived the voyage and the trip home; by the time the Apollo 15 crew splashed down back on Earth, his heart rhythm was normal. He suffered a heart attack a few months later but survived for another two decades. His heart condition did, finally, cause him to die on August 8, 1991, almost two decades from the day he left the moon. He was the first of the dozen men to walk on the moon to pass into the other great unknown.

Bonus fact: Not all health problems in space are as serious as Irwin’s was, of course. For example, astronauts can get itchy noses. And that’s a problem, because you can’t simply doff your helmet to scratch it. But don’t worry — NASA thought of that. According to Universe Daily, astronaut helmets come equipped with a tiny piece of Velcro, specifically to be used as a nose scratcher if the need so arises.

From the Archives: E.T.? No Going Home: Above, Dr. Berry extolled the ICU-like virtues of space. But note that he did not claim space to be a sterile environment. This story, perhaps, is why.

Related: The NASA mission reports from Apollo 15.

In May of 2009, a well-to-do 20-year-old named Hu Bin struck a working-class pedestrian while drag racing. While others rushed to help the victim, Hu and his friends, according to the Wall Street Journal, joked and smoked cigarettes until an ambulance arrived. Ask a random person if Hu committed a crime and the answer would be yes. But the police and prosecutors did not, at first, treat Hu’s crime as anything serious. Rather, what they did looked like a cover-up — especially to those who could identify with the victim. After a minor uprising, the police took a second look at Hu’s crime and prosecuted it as such. But even then, as Slate noted this summer, “Hu received a three-year prison sentence, an exceptionally light punishment in a country where drunk drivers guilty of similar accidents can receive the death penalty.”

This relatively light punishment further provoked the rank-and-file Chinese, adding an additional layer of distrust in the authorities. But what probably happened next — in China, the facts are at times hard to come by — sounds like something out of a dime store novel. Hu, as the story goes, did not go to jail. Someone else did instead. Someone he hired.

As Slate recounted in the link above (from this summer), the hoi polloi alleged that Hu hired a lookalike to serve out his sentence. The government, of course, denied the allegations, but the rumor mill took over. But while this switcheroo is seemingly impossible — a DNA test or even a fingerprint sample would easily disprove the rumors — no such evidence to the contrary was offered. The rank-and-file’s cynicism was left unshaken.

And perhaps for good reason, as the notion that such a switch could happen is not so outlandish, at least not in China. The act of hiring a patsy to go to prison for you — called ding zui, literally “substitute criminal” — is a well-known secret there. The Slate article detailed some of the often spoken-of examples:

In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail.

Hu Bin’s case is just another alleged “body double” matter — and, if an even more recent case is evidence, ding zui may be even more common than thought.

In August of this year, a woman named Gu Kailai was accused of murdering a British man named Neil Heywood. Gu’s husband, Bo Xilai, was formerly a leader of the Communist Party, but Xilai was ousted after a wiretapping scandal. Both Bo and Gu were business associates of Heywood’s, and, for reasons unclear, Gu likely murdered Heywood. When brought to trial, she did not contest the charges and was given a “suspended death sentence.” She is to serve the next 14 years to life in prison, but, if she commits another crime in the next two years, she is to be executed.

But many Chinese citizens looked at the woman being sentenced and found it strange that she’d not put up a defense, given the severity of the crime and of the punishment. The ding zui theory came into the collective mindset, and many, comparing her to the woman in the news a few years earlier, saw someone different. As the New York Times reported, Gu “appeared to have gained considerable weight, and a relative expressed shock, saying her face had changed dramatically since they had last met.” Slate, in another article on ding zui, published the two photos above. And the BBC noted that Chinese citizens took to the Internet to speculate that the woman on trial was not, in fact, Gu Kailai.

But these conspiracy theories — or, at least, the online chatter around them — were about to be simultaneously fanned and extinguished. As reported by the China Daily Mail, soon after the theories emerged, the Chinese government began to block all online conversations on the topic.

Bonus fact: About ten years ago, someone put up a parody “mirror image” of Google’s search engine called “elgooG,” showing everything Google shows but in reverse. (The site is still up at elgoog.im.) In September of 2002, New Scientist discovered that the joke site had a practical, serious use — Chinese users could access it in spite of government censorship, and therefore, search the web using Google (given some proficiency in reading text backwards). The powers that be, for some reason (probably ignorance of elgooG’s existence), had not blocked the service.

From the Archives: To Kill a Sparrow: An (old) Chinese policy with really poor results.

Related: Body Double, the movie, from 1984. Over 100 reviews averaging 3.7 stars, but a lot of people hated it — including this one reviewer who called it a “sloppy mess” which “might be the worst movie [he's] ever seen.”

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission crew made its descent to the moon. Neil Armstrong exited the lunar lander and took the first step onto the piece of rock orbiting 225,000 miles above the Earth. As he did, he proclaimed words which will be repeated for time immemorial: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The Apollo 11 mission was a flawless success.

Okay, nearly flawless. There was one notable error: Neil Armstrong flubbed his line.

Armstrong knew that his now-famous quote, which one can listen to here, would become an iconic part of the lore of space exploration, and indeed, humanity. We don’t know, exactly, when he came up with the words he intended to use upon landing; what we do know is that that intended to say “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Yes, there’s an “a” before “man.” From a linguistic approach, the intended statement makes more sense. “Man,” without the article “a,” is synonymous with “mankind,” and therefore, the quote as spoken is apparently contradictory. While Armstrong probably wasn’t worried about such things while taking the first steps on the moon, such concerns did come to him upon his return.

Upon returning to Earth and finding that the quote did not have the “a” in it, Armstrong, as reported by the New York Times (pdf), offered a correction and explanation: 

When Armstrong saw the quotation [. . .] in the mission transcript after his return to earth, he said it was misquoted, it was reported yesterday [July 30, 1969].

There should have been the article “a” before “man,” the astronaut said.

The “a” apparently went unheard and unrecorded in the transmission because of static, a spokesman for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston said in a telephone interview.

(Strangely, if you read the full article linked to above, you’ll find that the Times flubbed the “corrected” quote — twice. They have it as a “giant step,” not “leap,” for “makind,” not “mankind.”)

Yet this attempt to change the course of history — or, at least, of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations – did not succeed. The recording is much clearer than the excuse offered by NASA would allow, and few believed Armstrong’s claim that the transcript was incorrect. Over time, Armstrong came around to the truth — the recording and transcript were accurate, and he simply omitted the word accidentally. In 2005, he told James Hansen, the author of a biography of Armstrong titled First Man, “It doesn’t sound like there was time for the word ["a"] to be there. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said – although it might actually have been.”

But even with that, the controversy raged for a few years. In 2006, a hobbyist used off-the-shelf voice editing software and, while reviewing the recording, “[his] audio analysis was able to find the signature of the missing word” per the BBC. (Armstrong briefly held out hope that this test was correct, calling the conclusions “persuasive.”) Unfortunately for Armstrong, a 2009 study by a linguistics expert — the “most detailed analysis yet of Neil Armstrong’s speech patterns,” per another BBC article – concluded that Armstrong proclaimed his walk to be a “small step for man,” generally, and not “a small step for a man.”

But given that Armstrong had been rocketing through space, awake for 24 hours straight and, by the way, was walking on the moon, we think he deserves a pass, regardless.

Bonus fact: Apollo 12 landed on the moon on November 19, 1969. Its commander, Pete Conrad, became the third person (after Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from Apollo 11) to walk on the moon. Conrad’s first words on the moon? Per NASA: “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” Conrad spoke that less-than-poetic quip in order to prove to an Italian journalist that NASA did not script Armstrong’s (or his) lines. In doing so, Conrad won a $500 bet with the journalist, but he never did collect on his winnings.

Double Bonus!: When the Apollo lander touched down on the moon, Armstrong radioed to NASA mission control with what would become another famous quote: “The eagle has landed.” As Futility Closet points out, this quote and Armstrong’s (intended) first steps quote are, coincidentally, linked. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” is an anagram of “An eagle lands on Earth’s moon, making a first small permanent footprint.”

From the Archives: Mission to Nowhere: The bonus fact discusses how Neil Armstrong almost missed out on the opportunity to become the first person on the moon.

Related: “First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong” by James Hansen. Four stars on nearly 100 reviews. Available on Kindle.

College tuition is expensive, at least in the United States. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for example, charges an estimated $31,000 to in-state students who live on campus, and that price shoots up to over $54,000 per year if you happen to hail from outside of California due to a “non-resident supplemental tuition.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I) has a similar price tag, with a base tuition of $24,000 for out-of-staters (and just under $11,000 for in-state students) plus an estimated $16,000 for room, board, and other expenses. That comes to about $27,000 for in-state students or $40,000 for non-residents, per year.

So you could see why someone from Illinois would prefer to go to U of I than, say, UCLA. Out of the gate, they’re saving roughly half the cost. But $27,000 a year for four years is still a lot of money. Even with grants and scholarships and student loans available, that’s a significant expense for almost anyone. In 1987, a U of I freshman named Mike Hayes figured out a neat way to cut his costs. He asked a columnist at the Chicago Tribune to help him find donors to back his education — one penny at a time.

That year, Hayes wrote to columnist Bob Greene with his novel idea. If Hayes could get 2.8 million people to each send him one penny, his tuition, room, board, and the like would be paid for in full. (For a current U of I student, that would be one year’s fees. For Hayes, that was for all four years.)

It was an outlandish request, sure, but it perhaps it played on Greene’s sense of ego. (Greene, in 2002, would resign from the Tribune in disgrace, having “an extramarital sexual relationship 14 years earlier with a high school student,” according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia expands on the topic, quoting a CNN personality saying that Greene was “famous for using his position as a columnist… to try to get women into bed.”) On September 6, 1987, Greene wrote a column-slash-call-to-action, hoping to get those 2.8 million pennies for the young Mr. Hayes. They realized that the challenge was, likely, foolish:

Mike Hayes knows-and I know-the real dilemma here.

Right now, every person who is reading this column is thinking, “That`s a pretty funny idea. I think I`ll send the kid a penny.”

But the vast majority of you won’t. You’ll chuckle, and maybe shake your head, and if someone else is in the room you might mention this to him or her. But then you`ll just turn the page and forget about it.

It’s not that the penny means anything to you. It`s just that getting out of your chair, finding an envelope, addressing it, putting a stamp on it and remembering to drop it in a mailbox is a lot of trouble.

Well . . . not a lot of trouble. But more trouble than you`re willing to deal with.

Twice in the article, Greene posted Hayes’ PO Box address. And when Hayes graduated in 1991, Greene did a follow-up piece. The result: Hayes did not end up getting 2.8 million pennies. He ended up getting far fewer than that — but, to make up for it, he received a bunch of nickels and quarters and even some paper currency and checks. People from all fifty states and a few places overseas sent small donations to Hayes. Most of the money — $23,000 of it – came within the first few weeks. And during that short time period, the postmaster of Hayes’ hometown estimates that Hayes received roughly 70,000 pieces of mail, meaning the average donation was in the 35-cent range, plus another 22 cents for postage.

In the end, he collected $29,000 — more than enough to cover his education. As for the leftover $1,000, Hayes decided to pay it forward:

Mike plans to give the extra $1,000 to a deserving college student from one of the families that sent him pennies. “I’m not going to be real scientific about it,” he said. “I’m just going to stick my hand into those 90,000 letters we saved, start calling people whose names are on the envelopes I grab, and ask if there`s a person in their family who needs $1,000 for college. I`m going to trust them-I`m going to count on them to tell me if they don`t really need the college money. If they don`t need it, I`ll move on to the next envelope.”

That’s 100,000 pennies, in case you’re counting.

Bonus fact: At the base of the Grand Canyon live a tribe of Native Americans known as the Havasupai. In order for the United States Postal Service to deliver mail to the Havasupai, the USPS puts mail carriers on mules. Each mule carries approximately 130 pounds of mail and packages down the eight mile trail daily, totalling about 41,000 pounds each week, per the USPS. 2.8 million pennies weighs about 77 tons. It’d take about 26 or so days for the USPS to deliver 2.8 million pennies to a college student living there.

From the Archives: From Abe to Zinc: It costs 1.62 cents to make a penny and get it into circulation.

Related: One pound of old pennies.

But in one case, the McDonald’s/mansion mix may be reversed. That situation? The McDonald’s in New Hyde Park, New York, pictured below. The mansion is a McDonald’s.

The New Hyde Park Mickey D’s is located on Jericho Turnpike (here’s a map) and has been around since 1795 — not as a hamburger joint, of course. The building was originally a farmhouse owned by the Denton family, whose forefather Richard Denton founded a town in the area. Around the 1860s, it was converted into a Georgian-style mansion, and it remained a family homestead through the rest of that century. A family biographer reports that the Denton House, as the building is called, was converted into a (non-McDonald’s) restaurant in the early- or mid-1910s. But sometime between World War I and when McDonald’s purchased the property in the mid-1980s, it was abandoned and derelict.

McDonald’s had no interest in owning a mansion; after all, anything more than two (or perhaps three) bathrooms is overkill, and bedrooms are totally unnecessary. But Jericho Turnpike is a great location for a fast food restaurant, and the McDonald’s franchisee figured he’d just tear down the disused home and build a cookie-cutter Golden Arches. But the townspeople of New Hyde Park had a different plan. They petitioned their government to give the homestead landmark status, thereby preventing its destruction. If McDonald’s wanted to open a restaurant there, they’d have to restore the building.

And that’s exactly what they did. As seen on ScoutingNY (with many excellent photos), the owner of the franchise found a picture of the building from 1926 and restored its facade to that state — and then opened it up as a McDonald’s. (As an accepted departure from the 1926 look, the owner also added a drive-thru window.) Inside, the food is the same as any other McDonald’s — as one reviewer notes, “go for the novelty; you’ll receive a happy meal.” Most of the interior has been gutted, but as seen at the ScountingNY link, at least there’s a circular, glass-enclosed dining area and a majestic staircase leading to more seating upstairs.

Bonus fact: Most McMansions aren’t what many realtors would consider “mansions.” As Wikipedia notes, a typical McMansion has about 3,000 square feet (or more) of living space, but “U.S. real estate brokers define a mansion as a dwelling of over 8,000 square feet.”

Double Bonus!: Here’s what the original McDonald’s looked like.

From the Archives: McHotDogs: Why McDonald’s doesn’t typically sell them.

Related: A McDonald’s playset (the “drive-thru” version) and Barbie’s Dream House. Make your own McMansion!

Image via Chung Chu on Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license

The Parthenon, pictured above, is perhaps the most recognizable relic from ancient Greece. From top to bottom, its white stone exterior reinforces that idea that the art and architecture of the time period was reserved and understated, preferring nothing more than the natural marble undertones to colorize, somewhat, an otherwise black-and-white motif. But as archeologists Vinzenz and Ulrike Brinkmann theorize — with the science to back it up — this is anything but true.

The Brinkmanns’ take? The art of the ancient Greek world featured gaudy, rainbow-colored statues and sculptures, as seen in the portrayal below.

In around 1815, according to the Harvard Gazette, the community of those studying ancient Greece suggested that the almost entirely white relics from ages past were, when created, also painted. But by and large, any serious scientific investigation into that theory laid dormant for over a century. In the 1970s, the Brinkmanns started to change that. For over two decades, the husband and wife has been investigating the colorful history of these creations. As Smithsonian magazine described in 2008, some of the tools they use — “high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals” all make the list, and many of them were not available a century and a half earlier. The Harvard Gazette shares further methods, such as “the use of raking light to reveal incised details as well as subtle patterns caused by the uneven weathering of different paints on the stone surface” and “techniques such as X-ray fluorescence and infrared spectroscopy to analyze the types of pigments employed.”

The couple is not simply writing up their findings in a journal of scholarly papers. Rather, they re-created the work of generations ago, using the same paints as would have been found back in ancient Greece. Smithsonian continues: “[Mr. Brinkmann] has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.”

Today, the Brinkmanns’ work travels from museum to museum, often next to the original creations from the Greece of centuries past. For example, in early 2008, the exhibit was at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum on the Harvard University campus. A Sackler Museum curator, Susanne Ebbinghaus, adroitly summed up the power of the Brinkmanns’ work: “”The exhibition corrects a popular misconception. What you would have seen when you walked through an ancient city, cemetery, or sanctuary would have been colorful sculpture: painted marble, colorful bronze, gold and ivory cult images. It completely changes our picture of the ancient world.”

Bonus fact: Sculptures predate ancient Greece by millenia. The oldest known sculpture, the Venus of Hohle Fels (Wikipedia entry here), was discovered in Germany in 2008. It is believed to be 35,000 to 40,000 years old.

From the Archives: Tiny Sculptures You Can Write With: Really tiny. But definitely useable as a writing instrument (although it’d ruin the sculpture).

Related: Paint your own turtle in the motif of the Greek art, above.

In March of 2012, a three year old child in Oregon swallowed over three dozen magnet spheres. Each sphere measured only a few millimeters in diameter. But these magnets, known as neodymium magnets and marketed under the brand Buckyballs, were incredibly strong – per Wikipedia, neodymium magnets are the strongest type of permanent magnet made. As TIME reported, the magnets punctured the young girl’s stomach and intestines, requiring her to undergo surgery. She was luckier than others — the 2006, per TIME, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) reported that at least one child had died from ingesting similar magnets in the preceding three years.

Since then, Buckyballs have been somewhat controversial. In July, the CPSC requested a recall of Buckyballs, but the company is fighting that recall, arguing that they’ve  been clearly marketing the product to adults and eschewing opportunities to sell or market to children. But what’s bad for children may be OK for adults — and may be necessary for cows.

Yes, cows.

While humans are careful about what they eat, cows, well, aren’t. Put some hay or grass or anything else to graze on in front of them, and they’ll mindlessly start eating. They don’t do a very good job when it comes to figuring out what they’re eating, exactly; as Wikipedia notes, “they do not use their lips to discriminate between materials and they do not completely chew their feed before swallowing.” That’s not a problem if everything in front of them is digestible, but of course, that’s not always the case. Nails, wire, staples, etc. can get mixed up in the cow’s feed. When a cow accidentally ingests something metal, those metal pieces can get stuck in a part of their stomachs called the reticulum — and, over time, puncture holes in the lining. This condition, called “bovine traumatic reticuloperitonitis” or “hardware disease,” is painful for the cow and often leads to a dramatic reduction in the cow’s ability to produce milk. And no rancher wants that.

To fix this? Magnets.

Pictured above is a cow magnet, measuring about 8 centimeters long and 1 cm in diameter. The magnets are designed to sit in the cow’s rumen (here’s a chart of sorts) — it’s small enough to get there, but too large to pass further. And it sits there collecting stray metal before it can cause the cow pain. The magnet remains inside the cow for the life of the animal (and apparently can be reused afterward), and the presence of the magnet and the attracted metal in the rumen apparently has no effect on the cow’s health or lifespan.

Bonus fact: Cows are in tune with magnets in another way — they’re apparently somehow aware of the location of the magnetic poles of the Earth. As reported by the Guardian in 2006, when grazing or at rest, cows tend to stand facing north. The same is apparently also true for deer.

From the Archives: eMilk: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk online, with three or four day shipping?

Related: A cow magnet. $5. The image on that page has the magnet next to a penny, probably so that you can get a sense for how big the magnet is.

Corny jokes and bad puns are a calling card of many people, even if their sense of humor induces more groans than laughs. But by and large, those who employ such repartees can, if they so choose (and as we all know, they rarely do), refrain from doing so.

But there are some out there who cannot control themselves. Discussions of livestock result in udder failure. Conversations about geometry always end up going on some sort of tangent. Trips to the bakery are a piece of cake — but camping trips are in tents. These people insist that North Korea is evil (it doesn’t have a Seoul), wonder why Ireland is so small (as its capital is always Dublin), and if you’re Russian, argue that you best not be Stalin.

For these people, puns aren’t just a character trait — they’re a neurological disease called Witzelsucht.

Witzelsucht, as summarized by a team of Taiwanese researchers in a paper (pdf here) published in 2005, is marked by “a tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes.” Wikipedia, citing another study, notes that a Witzelsucht patient has an “uncontrollable tendency to pun,” finding the jokes “intensely amusing.” These tendencies are caused by an injury to the person’s brain, specifically in his or her right frontal lobe, often caused by stroke. One neurologist, who told MSNBC that he sees several Witzelsucht-afflicted patients each year, described a particularly “dramatic” case: “[He] appeared to be attracted to my reflex hammer. After I checked his deep tendon reflexes and put my hammer down, he picked up the hammer and started to check my reflexes, while giggling.” The humor, of course, was lost on the doctor — and would be to any outside observer as well.

The Taiwanese study speaks of a 56-year-old stroke victim who punned uncontrollably — using a lot of “witticisms and quips,” as the paper describes. The sheer volume of the jokes also interfered with patient’s physicians’ ability to examine him; as the study notes, the man “was euphoric, outspoken, prankish, and was so talkative that an interruption was usually needed to pull the conversation back to the topic or to complete a test.” But like many with the condition, the man was not responsive to the jokes of others.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for Witzelsucht. Io9 notes that some behavioral therapies may be able to blunt the punning, and various medicines may help calm the afflicted down, but in the end, the allure of another pun will certainly prevail.

Bonus fact: In 1987, the world was introduced to the first book in the Where’s Waldo? (originally Where’s Wally? in the UK) series. The book features Waldo, clad in a red-and-white striped cap and shirt, hiding in a scene; the reader’s goal is to find Waldo among the masses. Why does Waldo wear stripes? Because he doesn’t want to be spotted, of course. (!) This was especially true at some U.S. schools and libraries, which decided to remove the book from their shelves. Apparently, one scene in an early version of the book has a woman lying face down on the beach, topless. According to World.edu, that small part of the scene (seen here), as well as other “inappropriate and seditious hidden imagery,” prompted so many complaints that Where’s Waldo? ended up on the American Library Association’s most challenged books list for the 1990s.

From the Archives: Tanganyika’s Laughing Epidemic and Laughing to Death: Two cases where laughter was the symptom, and no puns were needed.

Related: Where’s Waldo? – the 25th anniversary edition.

But if you ask a couple of farmers in the United States, there’s a good way to make everyone happy: a pizza farm.

As seen above, a pizza farm is a parcel of farmland subdivided into eight slices. Each subdivision is responsible for an ingredient in what, after a bunch of processing and cooking, becomes a pizza. The wheat is used to develop the crust, the “dairy” section (like the “beef”) is where cows graze, the tomatoes provide the sauce, and the rest can later become toppings. And much like school lunches, these pizza farms enrich the educational process. Perhaps even more so.

The pizza farms, of course, can’t produce a lot of peppers or pepperoni, certainly not enough to make a dent in the overall diets of American schoolchildren. But what they can do — and what they’re designed to do — is attract elementary school students via field trips. One Illinois second grade teacher told USA Today in 2005 that her class had visited The “R” Farm every year since it opened.  On these trips, students (and their chaperone parents) learn about the food services industry, and, perhaps more interestingly to the children, where all the parts of a pizza come from.

There are not a lot of pizza farms out there — there’s the above-mentioned one in Illinois, one in Colorado, another in California, and probably a half-dozen others (including, perhaps, one in the UK; it’s unclear if that farm is actually shaped like a pizza pie). Visiting one is, therefore, difficult, so you may want to grow your own. (No pigs or cows there, though.)

Bonus fact: Pizza farms aren’t the only way that farm owners are trying to attract tourists. Corn mazes — quite literally, human-navigable mazes cut out of acres and acres of corn fields — are common throughout much of North America and the United Kingdom. But sometimes, they can be tricky. In October of 2011, a family with two children under five years old in tow got lost in a Massachusetts corn maze. When dusk fell, they panicked, and called 911. The police, replete with a K-9 unit, came to the scene to help the family find the exit.

From the Archives: Thirty Minutes or Less: How eating pizza every day saved a woman’s life.

Related: A pizza kit which advertised “just add your favorite toppings,” in case you grow your own after all.

Seen above is the Morning Glory Spillway in Napa County’s Monticello Dam. The dam creates Lake Berryessa, a 1.6 million acre-foot (about 2 million cubic meter) man-made body of water which serves as a recreational site featuring swimming, boating, fishing, hiking, and other outdoorsy activities. To make sure that the surrounding roads and area do not flood, there’s a spillway. When the water level goes over the spillway’s lip, it instead ends up flowing, rapidly, down the hole and into the drainage basin below. At the base is a hydroelectric power plant whose three generators provide electricity to the San Francisco area.

Which is nothing special. There are many spillways out there, designed to do basically the same thing the Morning Glory Spillway does. What makes the Morning Glory Spillway particularly interesting is its size. An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds roughly 88,000 cubic feet (or about 2,500 cubic meters) of water. The Morning Glory Spillway can drain that in under two seconds.

The spillway is effectively a very large funnel. Its mouth is 72 feet in diameter (seen above, dry) and runs 400 feet, tapering to a diameter of about 28 feet at the bottom opening. When it is dry, it serves a secondary purpose — as an illegal skate park for skateboarders, as seen here. The only problem? Even when the spillway itself is dry, the drainage basin typically is not, so the skateboarders need to take a raft to get there.

Bonus fact: There is a very rare cloud formation known as the Morning Glory cloud. It is a roll cloud — a horizontal, tube-shaped one — which is only known to appear regularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria north of Australia. Seen here, these clouds can be 1,000 kilometers long, a kilometer high, and move at 60 kilometers per hour. The cause of these clouds is unknown.

From the Archives: In Super Mario’s World, Clouds Are Bushes: It has to do with clouds, like the bonus fact does. It’s also the only Now I Know which is (almost) entirely an image. It is from the very, very early days — issue three, I think — when I was still trying to figure out what I was doing here. Not to say that I’ve figured it out yet, but I won’t be doing that again.

Related: A lit waterfall spillway. Not sure what it does or why it costs over $130 — nor why it looks like a dustpan.

Getting from Westray to Papa Westray, or back, seems like it would be a chore. Google Maps puts the trek at one hour, 27 minutes, including a seven mile ferry ride. But there’s an easier way. Both Westray and Papa Westray have tiny airports which connect these outer islands to Kirkwall, the largest town in the Orkneys (with a population of just over 8,500). These airports are serviced by Loganair, the Scottish airline, which includes Loganair Flight 353. That flight connects the two Westrays as a twice-daily shuttle which takes about two minutes.

In fact, one can watch a full Loganair Flight 353 trip, below:

(If that video doesn’t work, click here to watch it.)

The flight, of course, is the world’s shortest regular-scheduled commercial flight. The airline plans on the trip taking, on average, about a minute and a half to two minutes, but with favorable winds, it can be completed in about 45 seconds from takeoff to landing. (Taxiing on the runways probably accounts for multiples of that.) And the puddle jump is not just some sort of tourist thing — there is at least one major practical reason for the flight. As noted by the Daily Mail in an article from 2009, Papa Westray lacks a high school, and therefore, any students living on the island need to commute to Westray to get to class. When the ferry service between the islands needed repair, Loganair flew six such students over on Flight 353 — bringing them to Westray on a Tuesday and returning them on Thursday (after two nights staying with a host family) for most of the academic year.

Bonus fact: The Orkney Islands are also home to a breed of sheep called the North Ronaldsay, which are not allowed in the main area of the island in order to maintain the grasslands. The sheep are limited to foraging for food on the coasts, and, according to Wikipedia, eat primarily seaweed, which their bodies have adapted ways to digest. 

From the Archives: Going the Distance: Perhaps the world’s longest migration.

Related: Not one, but two photo jigsaw puzzles from the Orkney Islands, one from Westray and another from Papa Westray.

Superman, the iconic superhero from the planet Krypton, made his comic book debut in the first issue of Action Comics, dated June 1938. Seen above, it pictures Superman, draped in his trademark red cape, lifting what appears to be an exploding car as businessmen cower and flee in terror. Action Comics #1 contained only thirteen pages of Superman comics out of a total of 64 pages. It featured nine other stories such as “The Adventures of Marco Polo” and “Scooby the Five Star Reporter” (which has nothing to do with Scooby Doo). Roughly 200,000 copies of Action Comics #1 were printed, and it retailed at a cover price of 10 cents, which, even accounting for inflation, would only be about $1.50 or so today.

But of course, a copy of Action Comics #1 is hard to come by, as most of the original 200,000 were discarded or otherwise set aside and lost over the succeeding decades. Comics Buyers’ Guide notes that prevailing wisdom estimates that only about 50 to 100 copies still exist, and only a small percentage thereof are in decent condition. Issues graded as being in top conditions have sold for princely sums. In February 2010, a copy fetched $1 million. A month later, another copy sold for $1.5 million. And in 2011, a copy sold for $2.16 million, easily a record in the comic book world. But a sale of a less-well kept copy — a 5 (on a scale of 10), compared to 8s and up for the million dollar ones — may have been more fitting of the Superman name.

As reported by ABC News, in the summer of 2010, an unnamed family somewhere in the American South was packing up their house in anticipation of a move when they came across a copy of Action Comics #1. They got in contact with ComicConnect.com, a marketplace and auction house which brokered the deals for the million dollar comics, which agreed to auction it off and noted that the comic could fetch a price as high as $250,000. While most anyone would be ecstatic to hear that they just found as much as a quarter-million dollars (before taxes, naturally) sitting on a shelf, collecting dust, for this anonymous family, the discovery was more than just a windfall.

The reason they were moving? Their house was in arrears and the bank was about to foreclose. Until Superman appeared, that is.

Bonus fact: The $2.16 million paid out when the record-setting copy of Action Comics #1 was sold did not go to a homeowner at risk of foreclosure. Most likely, it went to an insurance company. In 2000, a copy of Action Comics #1 owned by actor Nicolas Cage was stolen; it turned up over a decade later, in 2011. The auctioned-off copy is believed to be the same one as the comic stolen from Cage, but Cage wasn’t on the receiving end of the $2.16 million. After the theft, his insurance company paid him a settlement estimated to be approximately $1 million; it’s likely that the insurance company took possession of the recovered comic and sold it to recoup that cost (and then some).

From the Archives: Spider in the Attic: Another story about finding something unexpected in your often-unpatrolled storage areas.

Related: In 2011, Action Comics retired the first volume of comics, which had been running since 1938, and started volume two, called “the new 52.” The first issue of that volume is also called “Action Comics #1.” That comic? It’ll cost you about $5.

Disneyland, the iconic theme park in Anaheim, California, officially opened its gates for the first time on July 17, 1955. The park quickly became a cultural touchstone around the world. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, visited the United States and requested to visit the park; this request was famously denied. A few years later, the Shah of Iran visited the park and rode the Matterhorn roller coaster with Walt Disney himself. (There’s even a video of the ride, replete with campy music, available here.) Disneyland bridged cultures in a way few others have.

Perhaps realizing the future value of an association with Disneyland, Charles Elmer Doolin, the founder and then-CEO of the Frito Company, sought to open a restaurant at the park just months after its opening. That restaurant, named “Casa de Fritos,” strived to introduce Mexican cuisine (loosely defined) to a world of tourists (and to a lesser degree, locals) who typically did not have an opportunity to experience such food. The restaurant was probably more a marketing scheme than itself a moneymaker. Fritos-brand corn chips were the ubiquitous snack at the Casa – according to a tribute site called “DaveLand” (which has many historic photos of the restaurant) there was even a “Fritos Kid” vending machine selling Fritos for a nickel. Doolin and company hoped that Casa de Fritos would introduce a new generation of consumers to their corn chips, and Fritos would be the one “Mexican” thing tourists would continue to purchase when they returned home from vacation.

As any Mexican restaurant would, Casa de Fritos sold tortillas. They did not make them on-site. Rather, they purchased them from a local food distributor named Alex Foods. It is a fool’s errand to try and guess exactly the right number of tortillas needed for any given day, and one does not want to run out, so Casa de Fritos regularly purchased more than needed. According to OC Weekly, at one point in the 1960s, one of the Alex Foods salesmen saw the wasted tortillas at Casa de Fritos and suggested that the chefs cut them up and fry them, turning them into chips. The chefs took the salesman’s advice, added some Mexican seasonings, and gave them to customers.

They were a hit. By the mid-1960s, Arch West, then Fritos’ Vice President of Marketing, noticed the popularity of the chips and approached Alex Foods about making them at scale, intending to produce them as a regional snack food. West and his team came up with a name for the chip — a Spanish word meaning “little golden things” — and found that their successes as Casa de Fritos were not only replicated, but exceeded. In 1966, these chips — which we now know as Doritos — were a hit nationwide.

Today, Frito-Lay sells roughly $4 to $5 billion worth of Doritos each year.

Bonus fact: Pringles, produced by the Kellogg’s company, sells about $1 billion in product each year. They are probably best known for their packaging, consisting of a tube in which saddle-shaped chips are stacked. One of the inventors of the chip and tube, a researcher named Fredric J. Baur, passed away in 2008. He was very proud of his invention, even to his death. Per his request, some of his ashes are stored in a Pringles can-shaped urn.

From the Archives: Sandwich Law: Wrap some meat and vegetables in a tortilla. Is it a sandwich? Here’s the story of a court that had to decide exactly that.

Related: $100 of Doritos. Roughly 24,000 calories of them, too.

The phrase “XOXO” is a not-uncommon way to close a letter, email, text message, or, in the case of TV’s Gossip Girl, an episode. It means “hugs and kisses,” although that’s reversed — the Xs are kisses and the Os hugs. But there’s no obvious link between these two letters and their associated acts. Where do they come from?

The X-as-kiss most likely has origins from the Middle Ages. According to HowStuffWorks, due to low literacy rates at the time, many people were unable to write even their own names. For them, the X became a convention used as a signature. With the X also signifying the St. Andrews’ Cross (and, perhaps, the Greek word for “Christ” as well), it also therefore established the signature as one carrying an oath of significant meaning to the signer. At the time, one further affirmed his vow by kissing the X, signifying a connection with the signature beyond mere words. Over time, the “X” therefore came known as the kiss symbol. (And, most likely, the term “sealed with a kiss” has the same origin.) According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the first known use of “X” to mean “kiss” dates back to 1765, although the specific source goes unnamed. 

While most agree that the above is why “X” means “kiss,” there is no consensus around the origins of O-as-hug. Most agree that the shortcut developed in the United States, most likely around the late 1800s or early 1900s. Some believe that Jewish immigrants to the United States, unwilling to use the cross, adopted the “O” instead, but the evidentiary basis for that is weak. (Given that tic-tac-toe developed at around the same time, perhaps the two are related, but that is entirely speculation.) We don’t know the true origins of the “O” hug, and, most likely, never will.

Bonus fact: If you played tic-tac-toe recently — and you aren’t still a young child — chances are you played to a draw. A basic understanding of tic-tac-toe strategy will almost always guarantee that outcome. (If you need strategy help, click this.) But what if you played randomly? There are 255,168 different possible tic-tac-toe outcomes (if we do not remove games which are repeats due to rotating or reflecting the board), according to Wikipedia. Of those, 131,184 (51.4%) result in a win for X (assuming it goes first), 77,904 (30.5%) result in a win for O, and the remaining 46,080 (18.1%) result in draws. 

From the Archives: Hug Me Dot: How to know if you can hug a Mensa member.

Related: Twenty-five dollars of hugs and kisses.

Elvis Presley’s first major record label album, self-titled, was released by RCA Records on March 23, 1956, just a few months after his 21st birthday. The King, as he’d soon be known, had a few other tracks recorded by Sun Records beginning in 1953, but by and large, Elvis’ childhood was anything but regal. His Wikipedia entry recaps his early years, noting that he was shy, referring to him as a “loner,” and as the target of bullies who called him a “mama’s boy.” On the side, he practiced guitar under the guide of various mentors, but in large part, kept those studies to himself. It was not until his junior year in high school that others took notice of him, and even then, it was mostly due to his blues-inspired wardrobe and emerging sideburns, and not for his music. In April, 1953, at the age of 18, he performed at a school talent show, and only then did his classmates realize that he was a talented musician.

But by then, the die had been cast. Elvis Presley, who would later become a magnet for women, was anything but during his high school days. And there’s no better evidence of that than the awkward date night that was his senior prom.

Elvis, then 18, asked a 14 year-old blonde named Regis Wilson to be his prom date. She accepted — hardly the fait accompli one would imagine in retrospect — and spent just under $15 (now the equivalent of $120, accounting for inflation) on a pink gown, per mental_floss. That was a lot of money, especially for Wilson and her family, so Elvis’ would-be date had her hair done, free, at a local beauty school.

As Wilson recounted in an interview with the Sun Sentinel, Elvis picked her up in a rented Chevy, using money he earned as an usher at a nearby theater, and brought her a pink corsage. Unlike most of the men at the ball, he wasn’t wearing a tuxedo (as seen above, via the same mental_floss article) but rather a dark suit and a narrow tie. He had his soon-to-be trademark sideburns, and, Wilson notes, that he wasn’t wearing leather tuxedo shoes; she claims (and apparently, isn’t joking) that he donned a pair of blue suede shoes. The two made their way to the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, to dance the night away.

Except they never danced.

Elvis, it seems, did not know how to. Wilson told People that “When we entered the Peabody Hotel through a gigantic heart-shaped door and the band was playing, I expected we’d join the other couples dancing. But Elvis told me he didn’t know how to dance. So we sat and talked and drank Cokes all night.” Apparently, pelvic thrusts and hip swivels were not yet in Elvis’ repertoire (or, perhaps, not yet considered “dancing”).

The date was, by Wilson’s account, PG-rated. It was not their first time out together, but all they did was kiss. She told People that “Elvis gave me long kisses prom night. You could say we made out. But he never tried to go farther. He wasn’t like that” and that things never went any further — “Elvis was the only child of two strict parents.” And soon later, their relationship ended. There was no tearful breakup, though — Wilson left in the dark of night, never saying goodbye to her rock-a-bye beau. Her family, a single-parent household run by her divorced mother, needed to move in order to get by financially. Wilson never told Elvis, and moved without him ever knowing why.

For decades, Wilson kept the story to herself. She did not keep her prom picture and therefore, she figured, no one would believe that she once dated Elvis Presley. But Elvis saved his. His mom shared the picture above with the press, and Wilson’s story gained national attention.

Bonus fact: Regis Wilson isn’t the only 14 year old girl who Elvis took a liking to. In 1959, the then-24 year old rock star took a liking to a 14 year old named Priscilla Beaulieu (born Priscilla Ann Wagner; Beaulieu was her step-father). The two would marry on May 1, 1967.

From the Archives: Taking a Bullet for Your Client: The main article is unrelated to this one, but the bonus fact is about sideburns.

Related: Self-described as “The king of rock and/or roll in stylized urban vinyl form,” this is probably the coolest Elvis doll out there.

Fred Flintstone and George Jetson are iconic comic characters from the Hanna-Barbera universe. While Fred is a pre-historic guy with a pet dinosaur and George lives in the year 2062 (and has a flying car!), they’re nonetheless similiar in other ways. Both are only moderately competent at their jobs, are typically well-meaning, and find themselves in hysterical situations stemming from their own mistakes.

And, by design, neither has a visible neck. And it isn’t just them. The same is true for most Hanna-Barbera characters at the time. Take, for example, Yogi Bear (and Boo Boo) and Huckleberry Hound:

It’s borderline absurd. Perhaps it’s a coincidence with Flintstone and Jetson, but the anthropomorphized bears and dog? They’re wearing ties for some strange reason — and they’re not even wearing shirts! What’s going on here?

It’s an animation trick — one designed to save animators a lot of time and a lot of money, too. Think about how your torso, arms, legs, etc. change when your expression changes. When your face is smiling, the rest of your body reacts in kind, and while not the thrust of your physical expression, it is still definitely noticeable. For animators, this causes a problem, because every time a character’s demeanor, mood, or action changes, the whole body has to be redrawn. When producing dozens of television episodes, such an investment is simply a non-starter.

However, if the animator can somehow trick the viewer’s eyes into separating the faces from the rest of the characters’ bodies, they can save themselves a ton of work. According to Escapist Magazine, the cartoon’s collars do exactly that. (There’s a video behind that link, which includes a segment about another creepy way early TV animators strived for realism — by superimposing real mouths on otherwise still images.) By breaking the image up into two parts — the head, one, and the body, two — animators could concentrate on animating the characters’ faces, which makes sense because the face is the characters’ most expressive area. There was no need to re-draw the body each time. Instead, animators would take a pre-drawn body pose from a repository of a dozen or so, and match it as best as possible to get the desired expression.

The “no necks” rule, while a shortcut, was by no means absolute, however. When a character required some neck to be shown, the animators obliged. Take, as examples, Wilma Flintstone and Jane Jetson, pictured below. 

Hanna-Barbera decided to give these characters’ necks some added visibility (perhaps because they are female?). But even then, their necks are clearly separated from the rest of their bodies — Jane has a high collar and Wilma a stone pearl necklace. Both Wilma and Jane were, like their husbands and the majority of other Hanna-Barbera characters, able to be animated by mainly redrawing changes to their heads.

As seen above, this trick has become a hallmark of the cartoon TV character, extending into contemporary shows. South Park‘s Stan, Kenny, Cartman and Kyle don’t just lack manners — they’re also lacking necks.

Bonus fact: There are 75 total episodes of The Jetsons created over three seasons. The first season debuted on September 23, 1962, and contained 24 episodes. The second season did not debut until over twenty years later, airing for the first time on September 16, 1985.

From the Archives: Christmas Poo: South Park comes to real life.

Related: The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones: A made-for-TV movie special. This is the DVD version. 4.5 stars on 20 reviews, and wonderful in any event.

But the Mason-Dixon Line doesn’t hail from the Missouri Compromise. It predates it by nearly a century, when the then-colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland could not figure out how to play nicely with one another.

In the early 1720s, Pennsylvania and Maryland were in the midst of a border dispute. Pennsylvania’s charter established its southern boundary “by a Circle drawne at twelve miles distance from New Castle Northward and Westward unto the beginning of the fortieth degree of Northern Latitude, and then by a streight Line Westward to the Limitt of Longitude above-mentioned.” The problem was that North Castle was about 25 miles south of the 40th Parallel, and, therefore, the 12 mile arc designated by the charter would never intersect with the rest of the border thereby established. This created a question as to where the true border should lie.

Maryland opted to ignore the reference to the circle altogether, and claimed that Pennsylvania’s southern border (and therefore Maryland’s northern one) extended eastward across the 40th Parallel to the Delaware River, as seen in the map above. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, argued that the Crown’s intent was clearly to put the border further south, and therefore placed the border at about 39 degrees and 36 minutes north, also noted above. Britain, via a royal proclamation in 1724, instructed the two to come to a compromise.

But a compromise was not going to come easily. Philadelphia, then the capital of the colony of Pennsylvania, was situated south of the 40th Parallel, and both colonies wanted that city within its borders. Despite the Crown’s mandate, Pennsylvania created Lancaster County, clearly extending south of the border as claimed by Maryland. Maryland responded in May of 1730. The colony authorized a frontiersman named Thomas Cresap to start a settlement where the 40th Parallel intersected with the Susquehanna River; Cresap did so with a “band of armed followers” per the Lancaster Country Historical Society (LCHS). According to Wikipedia, Cresap began selling land to Pennsylvania Dutch settlers and collecting fees from them, which he remitted to Maryland as a tax paid by these settlers.

But not all Pennsylvanians were so welcoming to Cresap and his gang — nor was Cresap so nice to his other-colony neighbors. In October of 1730, two Pennsylvanians raided Cresap and a workman on his ferry, casting both into the water. And while warrants ordering the assailants’ arrests were, eventually, issued, at first, the PA judge refused to do so, citing Cresap’s loyalties to Maryland. And Cresap and his men, for their part, were no better. Per the LCHS, Cresap’s gang “menaced their Pennsylvania neighbors,” destroying fences and even killing a horse which entered Cresap’s property. What would later become known as “Cresap’s War” had begun.

In 1732, leaders of both colonies agreed to a border roughly where the current Mason-Dixon Line is, but in 1734, the Governor of Maryland reneged on the agreement, claiming that some agreed-upon terms were omitted. And with that, all of Cresap’s malicious activities resumed. Hostilities escalated, and over the course of the next two years, both colonies sent their militias into the disputed areas to quell uprisings or, perhaps, start them. And Cresap kept raiding farms, now often burning them. On November 25, 1736, the sheriff of Lancaster County formed a posse and set out to arrest Cresap. Wikipedia describes this ordeal:

Unable to get him to surrender, they set his cabin on fire, and when he made a run for the river, they were upon him before he could launch a boat. He shoved one of his captors overboard, and cried, “Cresap’s getting away”, and the other deputies pummeled their peer with oars until the ruse was discovered. Removed to Lancast