A BALLSY MANUEVER

Photo by Lenore Edman (Flickr: SB 206) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1960s, Wham-O was manufacturing more than 170,000 SuperBalls (those hard rubbery toy balls which have a high coefficient of restitution and which, as a result, bounce incredibly well) a year. Wham-O, as a publicity stunt, made an extra-large SuperBall the size of a bowling ball. One day, during an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, the sphere fell out of a 23rd story window, hit the ground, bounced back up to the 15th floor, and finally crashed into a parked convertible on the 2nd trip down. The ball was unscathed, but the automobile was totally demolished. 
  

The owner of the vehicle probably had difficulty explaining to his insurance company that his car was destroyed by a toy rubber ball.

You may recall that the SuperBall's other claim to fame is that it served as the inspiration for the name of the Super Bowl.

THE CASE OF THE PROFOUNDLY PROFANE PARROT

Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, had an African Grey parrot with the unimaginative name of “Pol.” After Rachel’s demise, Jackson personally took care of Pol until Jackson’s own death. Pol was initially present at Jackson’s funeral but was quickly ejected after screaming various creative and obscene phrases in English and Spanish which he had previously learned from the President.

THE DULLES VERSION OF THE BATPHONE

John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, liked to unwind on Duck Island, which was a remote spot on Lake Ontario without landlines or even electricity. And, of course, cell phones were a thing of the future. His opportunities for telecommuting were thus quite limited. Therefore, as a precaution, he had made arrangements for his office to call CBS if he was needed in the event of an international crisis. If Dulles heard on his transistor radio the phrase on World News Roundup "[T]his story is of special interest to Secretary of State Dulles...", he knew that he had to take a boat or plane back to the mainland immediately so that he could get to a telephone.

PRURIENCE AND MINIATURE GOLF

View image | gettyimages.com

Minature golf was invented in 1867 at the prestigious Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in Scotland. The club members wanted to provide a sport for their wives and daughters but could obviously not have the females play regular golf.  After all, it would be intolerable to permit women to raise their clubs past their shoulders on the backswing, as it could then cause their breasts to bounce around on the downstroke. The Club thus provided a two-acre course called the Ladies Putting Green which could be played in full modesty with just a putter.

Times have changed since then, as evidenced by this 2011 Kia commercial featuring Michelle Wie.

THE BARLEY MEN

View image | gettyimages.com

Fans of classic loincloth movies such as Spartacus, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and the Terror of Rome versus the Son of Hercules are led to believe that gladiators were lean, mean, fighting machines. These combatants are usually portrayed  with wiry, sinewy bodies with sculpted six-pack abs and arm muscles like steel cables covered with bulging veins.

There is little doubt that most gladiators were skilled and savage fighters and not someone you would want to offend. They were without question well-muscled. However, for the most part, these muscles were concealed under a thick layer of fat. Gladiators were generally stout individuals and looked more like John Belushi than a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The cause of this phenomena is simple. The warriors were fed primarily beans and cheap grains. In fact, they were nicknamed "barley men" as a result of their diet. The high amount of carbohydrates really bulked them up. In order to obtain the necessarily calcium and other minerals required for their heavy physical regime, they consumed a primitive sports drink comprised of plant ashes dissolved in vinegar. They rarely ate meat except on the night before a match.

The diet was intentionally chosen on its merits and not just for the fact that it was inexpensive. The adipose actually served as protection so that an injury would be inflicted on the padding of fat instead of on vital organs. In addition, such superficial wounds bled dramatically and added greatly to the theater of the occasion.

For further information on feeding barley men, please click on this article on the Archaeology website.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S SALARY

George Washington's Presidential salary was $25,000 a year, which would be about $700,000 in today's money. He led a lavish lifestyle, including spending on liquor about 7% of his net earnings (which was the same as his gross salary, as back then there were no income taxes or Social Security withholding). He also pimped his ride by buying leopard-skin robes for his horses.

HONGEO

View image | gettyimages.com

One of the most highly-prized food delicacies on the Korean peninsula is "hongeo." Hongeo is specially prepared skate (a fish similar to a ray). The preparation consists of letting the fish rot in a refrigerator for two months or so and then eating it raw. Prior to the invention of refrigerators, the fish was stuffed in a pile of hay during its period of fermentation.

Cartilaginous fish (i.e. rays, sharks, and skates) do not excrete uric acid through a bladder like most critters. Instead, it seeps out through their skins. Hongeo, therefore, is essentially fish which has been pickled in its own concentrated urine. Diners who have eaten this stuff in a restaurant report that the stench of ammonia is burning and overwhelming, follows them home on their clothes, and infiltrates their houses. The ammonia level is so dense that it can cause intoxication. Perhaps the only substance which is more vile is hongeo juice, which is the liquid which seeps out of the fish when it is decomposing. It is collected for drinking by truly devoted conno-sewers. 

Hongeo is not readily available in grocery stores in the USA. Please do not accuse me of xenophobia if I assert that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

THE DIALECT OF COWS

Cows have local dialects. Cows of one herd will low in a different fashion than cows of another herd, even if the species are identical. The reasons are the same as with people--one speaks with the same accent as his parents and other folks with whom he is raised.  

And yes, I know that strictly speaking, "cow" refers only to a mature female bovine. I am obviously using the term here in the common informal sense of describing anything which goes "moo." At least I am not portraying bulls with udders like Paramount Pictures did in Barnyard.

Embed from Getty Images

THE FOWL BEHAVIOR OF HARRY POTTER FANS

When the Harry Potter books were being released, numerous fans in the United Kingdom obtained pet owls. Now that the series has been over for awhile, many of these same fans in Britain have grown bored with their charges. As a result, a large number of pet owls have been "escaping" out of open windows.

British officials do give a hoot and are concerned that the sudden influx of large quantities of predatory birds can have detrimental effects on local ecosystems. The officials have pledged to enforce the laws against illegal owl-releasing, which include up to six months imprisonment and up to a $7,000 fine.

Embed from Getty Images

THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP NAMED AFTER A TOY

In the 1950s, Lamar Hunt attempted to obtain a license from the NFL to start a professional Dallas football team. He was turned down, so he went home with his ball and formed the American Football League, which proved quite successful after it first took to the field in 1960. Several years later, the two leagues decided to join together. Prior to the consummation of the union, the two leagues planned, as a transition event, to hold a few annual championship games between the leagues which, like the World Series in baseball, would bring the best team from each league together.

The first such game was scheduled for January 15, 1967 and was officially called the "First AFL-NFL World Championship Game." Hunt and other football kingpins were sitting around in the summer of 1966 trying to come up with a catchier nickname. Finally, Hunt, inspired by his children's obsession with their Wham-O Super Ball, (which had garnered intense popularity with the toy crowd when introduced in 1965), blurted out the phrase "Super Bowl." The football barons started using it, and the media followed.

The football tsars did not intend "Super Bowl" to have any staying power; the name was supposed to be only a placeholder until they came up with something better. They held a contest in 1969 for a new designation, but the judges were not impressed with any of the entries, including the "Ultimate Bowl" or the "Premier Bowl."

For more information on the naming of the Super Bowl, go to the History Channel website. If you would rather instead see a commercial which may be dropped from the Super Bowl because some folks claim it uses subliminal sex to market the product, go here.

Embed from Getty Images

NON-SUICIDAL LEMMINGS

View image | gettyimages.com

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide by stampeding over a cliff into the sea. This legend acquired legs in 1958, when Disney released a film called White Wilderness. The director imported some lemmings which had been captured by Inuit children, drove them off of a cliff (the lemmings, that is), and used trick photography to vastly increase their numbers in the movie. According to the film, the lemmings were not intentionally committing suicide, but merely died from exhaustion and drowning in a futile attempt to swim to the opposite shore of the ocean.

However, as revealed by Snopes, these much-maligned mammals do not hurl themselves by droves into the water for any reason, although a few may fall in accidentally.

Lemmings do have large fluctuations in numbers, but so do many wild animals. Lemmings handle the problem of overpopulation through the more traditional means of starvation, epidemics, being eaten by predators (including other lemmings), and migration. 

THE ELEVATED BABY CAGE

View image | gettyimages.com

In 1922, Emma Read invented the baby cage. This handy device simplified the lives of urban apartment dwellers by providing them a way to stash their infants in pens hanging in the fresh air outside the window while freeing up valuable floor space. This was at a time when outside air was considered a panacea for all sorts of diseases and an alternative to miasma.

A parent could also put a child in one of these cages for "time out" punishment, where it literally would be a suspended sentence.

Eleanor Roosevelt acquired one of these pens in 1923 to imprison her daughter, Anna. Mrs. Roosevelt was gobsmacked when she was threatened with child abuse charges if she were to actually employ the enclosure.

The cage was popular in some English cities but lost its appeal when the air became filled first with German bombs and then later by killer smog.

The cage was just what every mother needed--a device to teach her toddler to climb out of a window.

ÅLE'S WELL

View image | gettyimages.com

In August of 2014, Tomas Kiellman of the Swedish fishing village of Brantevick invited some friends over for a crayfish party.  His guests requested to see Åle, who was a European eel who had lived in the well on Kiellman's property since prior to the purchase of the real estate by Kiellman's father in 1962. Lamentably, Kiellman discovered the corpse of Åle at the bottom of the well, and it smelt pretty bad. 

European eels rarely survive past the age of seven, so it is fairly impressive that Åle was at least 52 upon his demise.

However, what is even more impressive is that Åle was actually at least 155 years old when he died. There is ample evidence that Åle was tossed into the well in 1859 by Samuel Nillson, in accordance with the custom in the 19th century for rural Swedes to keep an eel in their drinking water to eat bugs. There is further documentation that Åle was passed down through the several generations of property owners.

In addition, in 1959, the Swedish press reported Åle's 100th birthday. Throughout the years, Åle has often been the subject of various news stories and even a book.

Scientists have opined, based upon the fact that another eel lived to age 85 in an aquarium and that Åle's cold well was probably an ideal locale to practice longevity, that Åle could well have been around when James Buchanan was President. They are examining Åle's remains at the Freshwater Institute in Stockholm to seek further confirmation of his age. Their findings were expected to be available by August 25, 2014, but I have been unable to ascertain whether or not the report was ever released. Something may be a little fishy.

There is another eel in the well on the Kiellman property. However, it is only 110 years old. As all second-born children are aware, it is the first-born who hogs all of the glory and gets all of the attention. This poor guy has been around for over a century and still doesn't even have a name.

FERRET LEGGING

A sport more likely to emphasize the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory is ferret-legging, which originated in England but which had also taken hold in parts of Virginia and Manitoba. In ferret-legging, a male contestant dons trousers without underwear and drops in two ferrets (although some more liberal non-traditional competitions now allow just one animal). The rules require that the ferrets must be able to travel from one leg to the other inside the britches but that the waist and cuffs of the trousers must be sealed so that the ferrets cannot escape. The ferrets cannot be sedated and must have their full set of teeth and claws. The winner of the contest is the person who goes the longest without releasing the ferrets.

The natural reaction of a confined ferret is to bite tenaciously and claw viciously anything (and I mean anything--remember, there is no underwear) it encounters, so the duration of the contests was originally fairly short and was generally measured in seconds and not minutes. However, the current record now stands at five hours and thirty minutes--still short of the magic time of six hours, which is the equivalent of the four-minute mile in the sport of ferret-legging. One world champion, Reg Mellor, wore white trousers so that all of the bleeding wounds were clearly visible. According to Outside Magazine, he described ferrets as "things that live only to kill, that'll eat your eyes out to get at your brain."

Ferret-legging was parodied in the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, except that the contestants used squirrels instead. Parenthetically, for reasons too many to enumerate here, Cape Feare was and is clearly the best episode of The Simpsons ever.

Despite its resurgence in the early 21st century, the sport appears to be dying out, with fewer and fewer individuals seeing the allure of having their bathing suit areas shredded bloody by ferret tooth and claw.

Embed from Getty Images