Tuesday, December 30, 2014

THE BRAZILIAN WANDERING SPIDER--THE TOUGH TREATMENT FOR E.D.

Photo by João P. Burini (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


One of the deadliest arachnids in the world is the Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria fera), so named because it wanders from place to place instead of building a web or digging a burrow. Its venom is eighteen times more toxic than that of the black widow. The spider is often found in houses, is extremely aggressive, and can jump large distances. 

Male human victims, if they survive the neurotoxin from the attack, are often afflicted with a persistently painful plus potentially permanent priapism. The venom is being investigated as an alternative to Viagra®.

Spiders have to have fangs in order to puncture through the tough chitin exoskeleton of insects. The Brazilian wandering spider has refined exoskeleton puncturing to an ultimate degree. Specifically, its fangs are interspersed with and hardened by copper, iron, magnesium, and zinc atoms. The older the spider, the higher the metal content. The tips of the fangs, where the main action takes place, are almost pure metal.

In the event that you do not live in South America and are thus complacent because these spiders are nowhere near you, don't be. These guys are often called "banana spiders" because of their proclivity for hiding in bunches of bananas. They are, as a result, sometimes unknowingly imported with the fruit where they could then pop up at your local supermarket or kitchen counter.

Monday, December 29, 2014

THE VERSATILE JAWBONE OF AN ASS--IT'S NOT JUST FOR SLAYING PHILISTINES



The Lombards were a Germanic tribe which hung out for about a thousand years until the 11th Century. For a period of time, they ruled large parts of Italy, and the Lombardy region in northern Italy was named after them.

One of their greatest accomplishments was the perfection of the craft of kephalonomancy as a tool for criminal investigations--especially those involving theft. In a trial based on kephalonomancy, the accuser would take the head of a donkey (or sometimes a goat) and roast it on a bed of coals. The accuser would then read out loud a list of suspects while sprinkling carbon on the head of the animal. If the jaw of the animal appeared to move (or the skull cracked or a crackling sound erupted) during the reading of the name of a person, then that individual would be found guilty.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

HOW TO HIDE NOBEL PRIZE MEDALS FROM NAZIS

Danish physicist Niels Bohr (pictured below) was a noted anti-Nazi crusader and assisted various Jewish scientists and other refugees who were being persecuted by the Third Reich.  

Nobel laureates James Franck (a Jewish physicist) and Max von Laue (an outspoken critic of Hitler) were Germans who were concerned in the 1930s that their gold Nobel Prize medals would be seized by the government. They smuggled them to Bohr in Denmark for safekeeping. In doing so, they violated a German law prohibiting the export of gold out of Germany.  

Unfortunately, the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940. Bohr realized that his reputation as a Jewish sympathizer would put his house and laboratory at the top of the Nazi "Places to Search Today" list. Were the Germans to discover in Bohr's custody the Nobel medals with the names of the recipients engraved on them, Bohr and the two German Nobel laureates would all pay the ultimate price for their outrageous auric audacity.

Hungarian physicist George de Hevesy was working in Bohr's lab at the time. He took the two Nobel medals and placed them in aqua regia, which is one of the few solutions which can dissolve gold. Unfortunately, it is a very slow chemical reaction, and de Hevesy and Bohr spent several nervous hours watching the gold slowly disappear while waiting for the sound of jackbooted footfalls.

The footfalls finally did arrive, but by the time they did so, all that remained of the medals was a bottle of innocuous orange liquid. The Nazis left empty-handed, and the bottle of dissolved gold remained on Bohr's shelf until after the war.  

In 1950, de Hevesy reversed the chemical process and gave the resulting gold back to the Nobel Committee, who minted replacement medals for Franck and von Laue.  

Bohr was himself no stranger to Nobel Prizes, as he had won one in 1922. De Hevesy followed suit in 1943. It appears that you could not swing a dead cat in Bohr's lab without hitting a Nobel Prize winner, and it is not surprising that they were smart enough to know about the properties of aqua regia.  

To see a video (preceded by a short commercial) of aqua regia in action dissolving a gold coin, click here.


Saturday, December 27, 2014

THE MONSTROUS EFFECTS OF MOUNT TAMBORA

The year 1815 saw a massive eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora. The huge ash cloud spread across the earth and was a major contribution, in 1816, to what was called "The Year Without a Summer." In 1816, temperatures in Europe and America were lower than normal, resulting in widespread crop failure, famine, and cold, drizzly weather.

As a result, in the summer of 1816, several spoiled English yuppies (including Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and his paramour and future wife Mary) were cooped up inside Byron's vacation villa in Switzerland warming themselves around the fire. They decided to have a competition to determine who could pen the scariest ghost story. Eighteen-year-old Mary, after reading about galvanism, had a dream at around 2 AM on June 16, 1816, about a corpse being reanimated by a scientist with an electrical engine. She wrote her thoughts down in the form of a short story, which she then expanded into the novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. This book is considered by most experts to be the first example of science fiction.

Because the novel was written by a girl, it was originally published anonymously.

In the course of the tale, the monster is repudiated and rejected by his creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein even runs away from the creature when it first comes to life. This passage was actually autobiographical. In 1815, Mary had a kid who was two months premature. Percy, the father, abandoned the infant and his mother and left them so that he could have a torrid affair with Mary's half-sister, Claire. The child died two weeks later.

One of the other yuppies who participated in the contest was John Polidori, Lord Byron's 20-year old physician. Polidori penned for the competition a novel, which was eventually published in 1819, called The Vampyre. This was the story which launched the vampire genre--not, as is commonly assumed, Bram Stoker's 1897 best-seller Dracula. Unfortunately for Polidori, The Vampyre was published without his prior knowledge and was credited as being the work of Lord Byron (who by all accounts was something of an self-centered pooperhead). As a result, Polidori committed suicide at the age of 25 by ingesting cyanide.

In short, the Indonesian volcano not only provoked the death by starvation of millions of people, it also led to the creation of two of the most beloved Halloween monsters of today.

For more information about the disastrous effects of the Mt. Tambora eruption, please click here.


Friday, December 26, 2014

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

It appears that the public now has a chance to watch the Sony movie The Interview. However, there is another film which is almost virtually certain never to see the light of day.That movie is The Day the Clown Cried, and its censorship has nothing to do with cyber-terrorism.

The Day the Clown Cried is the brainchild of Jerry Lewis, noted slapstick comedian and host for 45 years of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. It is not a comedy. In fact, it is a real downer. It is a tragic and poignant story about a professional clown (played by Lewis) who gets into trouble with the Nazis and is sent to a concentration camp. At the camp, his job is to wear a homemade clown costume and act as a Pied Piper to the children to lure them into the gas chambers.

Inexplicably, after a rough cut of the movie was finished in 1972, it was never distributed. Many theories abounded as to why.  One hypothesis was that the movie was so bad that Lewis was loathe to release it. Others speculated that the movie was so amazingly good that Lewis was waiting for the perfect time to introduce it to the world. There were other rumors that some of the film's financing was from Iran and that resulting legal complications put it into limbo forever.

Lewis himself was very enigmatic about why the movie was under wraps and for decades would broach no discussions concerning the reasons. Finally, on January 12, 2013, when asked a question by a fan, Lewis provided a clue when he stated that he was "embarrassed" and "ashamed of the work." He further indicated that it was "bad...bad...bad..."  and that "it could have been wonderful but I slipped up."

This version is supported by an earlier interview with Harry Schearer, one of the purported seven persons in the world who actually have seen the film.*  Schearer's opinion of the quallity of the movie was less than enthusiastic.

I was never a great fan of Jerry Lewis's comedies, but I do have to admire his philanthropic work as well as his willingness to go outside of the box and attempt to do a meaningful film about a very serious topic. I also admire the fact that he was willing to take down his tent when he realized that he gotten it wrong. It is depressing enough to watch high-quality films about the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List or The Grey Zone; it would be absolutely ghastly to have to endure one which was not well done.

*Despite the fact that allegedly only seven people have seen the film, 188 persons have rated the movie on the Internet Movie Database--perhaps they are basing their opinions on the script, which IS readily available).


Thursday, December 25, 2014

A CHRISTMAS SEAL

Americans are urged to prepare for their Christmas dinner well ahead of time by ordering a ham or turkey a couple of weeks prior to the holiday. In Greenland, the preparation of the traditional Christmas meal, kiviak, requires even more advanced planning.

Although the process of making kiviak is time consuming, the ingredients are simple.  Here is the recipe.


INGREDIENTS:

1.  1 dead seal
2.  300 to 500 dead auks (a flightless bird kinda like a penguin)

PREPARATION:


1.  Skin the seal.  Eat the skinned seal if you wish.

2.  Fill the seal skin with dead auks.  Do not cook, clean, defeather, debone, eviscerate, or do anything else to the auks except stuff them into the seal skin.
3.  Sew up the seal skin and seal the seam with blubber.
4.  Scoop a hole in the permafrost, throw into it the seal/auk "turducken," and cover with a boulder.
5.  Allow to ferment for three to eighteen months.
6.  Dig up the seal skin, slit it open, and invite your guests to pull out the dead auks and eat them raw and whole, bones and all, after plucking off the feathers. Many kiviat aficionados affirmatively enjoy biting the heads off and sucking out the liquefied entrails.

Fans of the TV series Frasier will recall Episode 6.08 (The Seal Who Came to Dinner) where a putrescent pinniped proved to be a particularly pungent party-pooper. Specifically, snobby Niles Crane suffered major social opprobrium when the presence of a malodorous dead seal proved to be a distraction while Niles was hosting a fancy dinner at a beachfront cottage. The writers of the show were correct in representing that the smell of dead seal is not a mild one.  Add to this scent the odor of several hundred fermented birds, and you will understand why kiviak is traditionally consumed outdoors.


Kiviak was developed by the Inuits thousands of years ago in response to the fact that their land was not honeycombed with Piggly Wiggly supermarkets or verdant pastures filled with herds of Black Angus cattle. On those months each year in the frigid north where there was virtually no other source of protein or fat, kiviak was literally a lifesaver.

Finally, kiviak preparation is not a task for amateurs. In 2013, some Greenlanders made kiviak but substituted ducks for the auks and lined the interior of the seal skin with plastic.  The result was death by botulism.





Wednesday, December 24, 2014

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE

At Flanders Fields in Belgium one hundred years ago in December of 1914, German troops were bogged down in trenches as close as sixty yards to British forces (along with some French and Belgian) in their own trenches. The fighting was fierce. Pope Benedict XV proposed a truce for Christmas day, but leaders from both sides roundly rejected the idea as absolutely impossible.

On Christmas Eve, the Germans started erecting miniature trees on the top of the trenches and singing carols. The British initially fired on some of the trees, but then held back to see what happened next. The Germans then propped up handwritten signs along the order of "YOU DON'T SHOOT; WE DON'T SHOOT." Eventually, both sides crawled out of their trenches, exchanged gifts and meals, buried their dead, and played soccer.

The German and British brass were incensed by this conduct and ordered their men to start fighting again. The soldiers did so in a desultory, token manner by occasionally firing rifle rounds into the air. Finally, the officers started threatening court-martials with severe penalties if the carnage did not resume, and, right around New Year's (and unfortunately, perhaps earlier in some parts of the lines), the combatants reluctantly shook hands and returned to their respective trenches to "sing a slaying song tonight" and get back to their killing.

Attempts to repeat the Christmas Truce in the subsequent years of the war failed miserably.

For an extraordinarily well-researched and thorough examination of the Christmas Truce, go to the Operation Plum Puddings website.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

ZOMBIE CHICKENS


In 2006, Petaluma, California survived an invasion of zombie chickens. The hens involved had reached menopause and were no longer laying eggs. They were humanely(?) euthanized by suffocating them in a box filled with carbon dioxide and then buried in a landfill.  

Citizens were shocked later to see brain-damaged chickens dig themselves out of their landfill graves and stagger around, well, like zombies.

The Pentagon actually has a detailed plan ("CONOP 8888") on how it should respond should there ever be a zombie epidemic. One of the contingencies addressed is specifically that of "CZs" ("chicken zombies").

Parenthetically, "zombies" actually refers to dead persons who are raised from the grave by practitioners of Caribbean voodoo and are under the control of a live human.* They on their own are very placid. The aggressive cannibalistic walking dead which have been a staple of movies since 1968 are technically "flesh-eating ghouls" (which is actually somewhat redundant, as ghouls traditionally are flesh-eaters by definition).

*Watch this video link to hear what Bob Hope compared to zombies.

Monday, December 22, 2014

THE HANDY-DANDY CORPSE CUPBOARD

If a passenger dies mid-flight on a crowded aircraft, his seatmates on most airlines will have no choice but to remain strapped next to his bloated carcass until the plane lands. Singapore Airlines, however, on its Airbus flights, provides a handy corpse cupboard where that pesky dead body can be stored conveniently out of sight and out of mind. 

For information on other items which may be riding with you on a passenger jet, click here.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

OPERATION BERNHARD




Probably the most ambitious incident of counterfeiting currency that ever occurred was during World War II under “Operation Bernhard.” Operation Bernhard was a scheme initially devised by Reinhard Heydrich, who was Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man and whose more notorious contribution to the Nazi war effort was the formulation of the “Final Solution” to murder all of the Jews in Europe. Under Operation Bernhard, the Germans planned to drop from airplanes huge quantities of counterfeit Bank of England notes over the United Kingdom with the goal of devaluating the English currency and destroying that country’s economy.

At that time, notes issued by the Bank of England were printed only on one side with black ink and had the same basic design since 1793. A casual examination of an example would cause one to believe that the currency was fairly simple and primitive and that it would be ridiculously easy to counterfeit. However, in reality, the money was extremely difficult to duplicate. The inked design and the watermark in the paper had hundreds of microscopic security devises incorporated within them which would be apparent only to a knowledgeable bank official with a magnifying glass.The paper was a special flourescent blend made from fibers from plants from the far East. The serial numbers were not randomly generated but were instead specially coded to other features of each bill.

It took Heydrich’s technicians, working with the best brains of German industry, three years to come up with the right recipes for the paper and ink and the correct formula for generating authentic serial numbers. Finally, in 1942, he turned the project over to SS Major Bernhard Kruger to actually start making the money.

Kruger carefully selected Jewish prisoners (eventually, up to about 145 of them) to manufacture the plates and the notes in Barracks No. 19 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside of Berlin. In order to maintain strict secrecy, Barracks 19 and its occupants were isolated by barbed wire and Kruger’s hand-picked guards from the rest of the camp. Relatively speaking (and the key word here is “relatively”), the prisoners in Barracks 19 were treated more leniently than the rest of the camp inmates and had access to luxuries such as food, warm clothing, a radio, and playing cards. However, they still were quite confident that they would be executed once the project was done, and this awareness tainted their whole experience.

The prisoners eventually manufactured some trial notes which appeared reasonably authentic. Kruger arranged to have samples sent to leading Swiss bankers with a fictional story about their source and an inquiry as to whether or not they were counterfeit. The bankers assured him that they were genuine. His crew then printed approximately 9 million bills with a total value of about 135 million pounds in denominations of 5, 10, 20, and 50 pounds (a 10 pound bill would be the equivalent of about $300 today). The counterfeits were incredibly well done, and contained only a couple of extremely minute errors (which the prisoners most likely intentionally put in, at considerable personal risk). The prisoners also folded the notes and rubbed dirt on them so that they would look realistically circulated. 

Due to pressing obligations elsewhere, the Luftwaffe never dropped the currency over England per the original plan. However, much of the money was used to pay spies and purchase materials from other foreign countries willing to accept British pounds. Eventually, some of the bills did make it into circulation in England.

Instead of shredding its old worn-out notes, the policy for centuries for the Bank of England was to file them by serial number in big leather books. One day in 1943, one of its officers attempted to file a counterfeit note only to discover that its slot had already been filled by a retired genuine bill. The Bank freaked out when it realized how exquisitely realistic the counterfeit was. The Bank immediately, but without public fanfare, began to withdraw all of its notes of 5 pounds and greater from circulation and did not re-introduce the denominations until decades later.

Kruger’s crew was too efficient in making the notes, and Kruger told the prisoners to slow down production so that the project would linger on and they would not be executed. In an effort to buy more time, he convinced his bosses that his group should also make U.S. currency. The crew in fact was about to print thousands of high-quality $100 bills, but the end of the war intervened.

When the Sachsenhausen camp was about to be captured by Allied troops, the SS transported the prisoners in Barracks 19 to other camps for execution; however, the prisoners were liberated before they could be killed. The SS dumped the vast majority of the fake money and the counterfeiting equipment into Lake Toplitz in Austria. Some of the money at the lake floated to the surface and washed ashore, where it was used by nearby villagers for kindling or toilet paper. A lot more of the ersatz cash was recovered by divers in 1959.

Kruger escaped but was eventually captured. He did not stand trial for war crimes, primarily because of his “benevolent” treatment of his charges and the fact that he slowed the project down so that they would not be killed. Some of the prisoners themselves were not as charitable, and they pointed out that the completion of the project would have also meant that Kruger himself would most likely have been transferred to the Russian front. They also questioned his humanity and motivation when he allowed six ill prisoners to be shot rather than being taken to the infirmary of the camp where they could have spilled the beans about the project. The naysaying prisoners further were not impressed by Kruger's altruism when he routinely took the best quality examples of the counterfeits for his own personal use.

Operation Bernhard was the subject of the 2007 movie The Counterfeiters, which won the Oscar for the best foreign language film. It was based on the memoirs of Adolph Berger, who was one of the prisoners involved in the countefeiting project. It is worth seeing. 

Today, a genuine counterfeit note (sounds paradoxical, doesn't it) by Bernhard's crew is highly collectible.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

DIRTY BIRD! DON'T WASH THAT TURKEY!

According to the USDA, you should NOT rinse raw poultry or other meats in an attempt to wash off the bacteria. There will still be plenty of germs imbedded in the flesh, while the remaining salmonella, listeria, or E. coli will become suspended in a cloud which will settle over every square inch of your kitchen and any exposed utensils—similar to the toothbrush-contaminating fecal mist which you generate every time you flush the toilet. Instead, you should get the fowl straight into the oven with the minimum amount of handling possible. Heat is the only way you will get your turkey sterile.

The fact that your grandmother washed her turkeys for years and never got sick from the process is not proof that she was right--only that she was lucky.

For further tips on preparing a healthy Christmas turkey, check with Food Safety News.



Thursday, December 18, 2014

TOKEN SUCKING

One of the many venerable professions which has been rendered obsolete by advances in technology is that of "token sucking." The craft of token sucking originated in the subways of major cities where passage to the trains was obtained by depositing a coin-shaped metal token into a slot in a turnstyle. A TS ("token sucker") would stuff paper into the slot so that a token deposited by a rider would not pass into the guts of the machine. After the frustrated rider would move onto a different turnstyle, the TS would clamp his mouth on the slot and suck the token out. On busy days, a dedicated TS could make a decent amount of change, especially when tokens were as much as $1.50 apiece.

Frustrated transit employees would try to thwart the practice by pouring chili powder or mace on the turnstyle slots. A TS plying his trade was also subject to arrest for fraud against the transit authority. Because a TS would be putting his lips on an object which thousands of persons a day would be touching with germ-laden hands, you would think that being a TS would put one in the prime of health due to the immunities one would have to be developing. Unfortunately, the opposite was usually the case.

Because of the extensive exposure to the sordid side of microbes, token sucking was perhaps the second-skankiest occupation in New York. The skankiest of all was probably that of the poor cop who had to wait around to collect a token as evidence whenever a TS would swallow one upon being arrested.

For additional information on the demise of the grand art of token sucking, please check out the New York Times article here.