NOBODY KNOWS THE TRUFFLES I'VE SEEN

The population of wild boars has been increasingly dramatically in Germany recently. And these are not just any old wild boars. Many of them are highly radioactive. Regular wild boars are bad enough without one having to deal with radioactive wild boars. In fact, about the only thing worse would be a rabid radioactive wild boar.

The source of the radioactivity is caesium-137 which escaped from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 and was absorbed by truffles deep in the ground. The hogs are now devouring the truffles and incorporating the caesium. Hopefully, if they acquire superpowers as a result, they will use them only for good, not evil, but that seems unlikely.

In Saxony, hunters are required to have their slain boars tested for radioactivity, and the hot ones are confiscated. The government will give hunters the equivalent of about $200 US as compensation for each adult boar that cannot be eaten because of the contamination. As one out of every three boars is unfit for consumption because of the radiation, the total amount of payments has been massive.

Original photo By Jerzy Strzelecki (Own work)
 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html),
CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons and subsequently modified

ASSESSING PRIORITIES

In forty out of the fifty states comprising the USA, the highest paid public employees are coaches--either football, basketball, or, in the case of Vermont, hockey. In the remaining ten states, they are either university presidents or affiliated with medical or law schools.

The highest paid public employee in the country is University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, at 6.95 million dollars--over 17 times the salary of the President of the United States.

If you want to see how many of your tax dollars are going to the lucky public employee in your state, click here.

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SLEEPING LIKE A KING

Four-poster beds in the past generally consisted of a huge honking oak frame with a canopy (called a "tester") on the top and drapes on the sides. These beds originated in the 15th Century and were use primarily by the aristocracy and royalty. Although the canopy and drapes did protect the sleeper from drafts to a certain extent, their primary purpose was to keep insects and bird feces off of the bedclothes. Remember, the average palace was not well insulated, and the various windows (many without glass), archers' slits, chimneys, and gaps between the stones provided easy access for all sorts of winged and non-winged beasties.

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58% SHADES OF GRAY

If you wish to improve your night vision, instead of eating carrots, play Call of Duty instead.  A University of Rochester study shows that people who participate in first-person shooting video games improve their ability to distinguish shades of gray by 58%.

Screen shot from Call of Duty United Offensive
copyright Activision--all rights reserved

THE WANDERING WOMB

For thousands of years in various societies, women had been considered by many non-women to be crazy. In fact, during that time, "female hysteria" was the general diagnosis for a wide variety of symptoms on the part of women, including, but not limited to, nervousness, emotional outbursts, and sexual urges (after all, normal healthy women were not supposed to have libidos). For centuries, physicians believed that  female hysteria was caused by a "wandering womb" which did not remain fully affixed in one place in the body. It is not coincidence that Hippocrates coined the term "hysteria" from the Greek word "hystere," which means "uterus."

The cure for the form of female hysteria which resulted in sexual urges was for the physician to massage the pelvic area of the patient until she achieved a "hysterical paroxysm," a phenomenon now known today as an orgasm. Doctors in the Victorian era made fortunes by masturbating their female patients.The first vibrators were developed as a medical tool for this purpose.

We now live in more enlightened times (or at least some of us do), and the healing arts professions dropped "female hysteria" as an official medical condition around 1950. 

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#421--THE BLEW WHALE

It was a dark and smelly night in the seaside town of Florence, Oregon, on November 12, 1970. An eight-ton (7,300 kg) 45-foot (14 m) long sperm whale had beached itself outside of the town and died. The Oregon Highway Division (a/k/a the Department of Trails and Whales) was in charge of Oregon beaches at the time. The OHD, upon reflecting that not disposing of the decomposing carcass could cause community chaos, concluded that removal of same would be desirable. After consulting with the US Navy, the OHD decided that using dynamite to explode the whale into half-dollar sized gobbets of flesh which would quickly be consumed by seagulls would be the cat's meow.

The OHD engineer in charge of the operation had little experience in blowing up leviathans--he in fact was not the first choice for the job, but his boss, the District Engineer, was off hunting somewhere. Figuring that "more is more," he opted to use twenty cases of dynamite for the task, even though a military veteran with explosives training had advised him that only twenty sticks would be quite adequate.

It was a carnival atmosphere on the day of detonation. Curious bystanders, news crews, and photographers (some seeking, no doubt, the prints of whales) eagerly assembled around the site. The engineer set off the charges. In a scene reminiscent of the Hindenburg disaster and the infamous WKRP turkey bombing episode, outbursts of enthusiasm ("Thar she blows!") quickly transformed into shrieks of horror.

The whale did explode--but not into little gobbets of flesh. Huge hundred-pound boulders of rancid, decomposing blubber and putrid viscera rained down upon the crowd, lending a new dimension to the term "blowing chunks." The stench was simply offal. Ironically, the brand new Oldsmobile belonging to the above-mentioned military veteran with explosives training was in the line of fire and was crushed by a slab of cetacean (even more ironically, the car was acquired in a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion through a local dealer). Miraculously, no one was killed or seriously injured, although attacks of severe nausea ran rampart.

Strangely enough, the sound of a half-ton of exploding dynamite did little to attract the seagulls.

Much of the whale carcass remained behind, and the OHD finally buried it on the site.

Twenty years later, Dave Berry did a humorous article on the topic of exploding whales. This article, as well as videos of the event, can be found on the world-renowned Exploding Whale website.

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THE SORDID STORY OF JACK GRAHAM

EditorASC at en.wikipedia
[CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Back in the days of my youth, commercial air travel was a rare and exciting adventure, and usually the experience of getting there was more fun than the destination itself. Unlike today, security issues were virtually non-existent, and passengers were not funneled through chutes and long lines like cattle at a stockyard.

Such was the case on November 1, 1955, at the Stapleton Airport in Denver, Colorado, where Daisy E. King excitedly boarded United Airlines Flight 629 to Portland, Oregon as the first leg to her hunting vacation in Alaska. Crammed in her luggage, quite legally at the time, was ammunition to use on her pursuit of caribou. Clutched in the hands of her son, Jack Graham, who had driven her to the airport, was a policy for $37,500 which Graham had purchased out of a vending machine insuring the life of his mother. This by itself was not at all unusual, as the selling of life insurance out of airport vending machines was a ubiquitous practice at that time. Also crammed in Daisy's luggage, but unknown to her, was a deadly combination of a dry cell battery, blasting caps, dynamite, and a timer.

Eleven minutes after takeoff, the DC-6 exploded and killed Daisy, 39 other passengers, and five crew members. The FBI was called on the scene and, after a thorough investigation, as detailed here, concluded that Graham had blown up the plane containing his mother for financial gain. The FBI obtained a federal warrant for sabotage in his part in destroying an aircraft which could serve as a "national-defense utility" (there were no federal statutes at the time which directly stated that blowing up planes for money was a federal crime). Ultimately, the feds were quite happy to have the State of Colorado use the evidence uncovered by the FBI to try Graham on the straight-forward charge of murdering his mother--an offense which carried an automatic death penalty.

Graham was a highly unlikable individual, even before people knew that he was a mass murderer. He throughout the years had been guilty of a variety of lesser offenses, including the heinous and unspeakable act of destroying a 1955 Chevy for insurance proceeds by leaving it in front of a train. He asserted an insanity defense at his trial, as the huge amount of evidence compiled against him (including several detailed confessions) made the argument that he simply did not plant the bomb untenable.

The verdict was quick and predictable, and Graham was executed in the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City on January 11, 1957 (the gas chamber is now a popular tourist attraction at the old prison in Canon City).

Graham's misbehavior provoked, in a large part, the eventual elimination of life insurance policy vending machines at airports. His trial was also the first one ever televised. His story also served as the first chapter in the very popular 1950s book The FBI Story as well as the first segment of the 1959 movie of the same name. According to these works, Graham, after his murder conviction, stated, "In case I get any mail, you can send it to Canon City Prison for the next month or so. After that you can send it to Hell!"

Ironically, Daisy had never signed the life insurance policy, and it was therefore worthless from the start.

GRAHAM'S PENULTIMATE DESTINATION

URSINE AGGRESSION UNVEILED

A common misconception is that black bears are generally timid and docile and will not usually molest humans except when a sow bear believes that she needs to defend her cub. In reality, however, over 70% of the black bear attacks on humans are from predatory males. "Predatory" specifically means that the bear is not defending himself or others but is instead attacking the human because he believes that the human will be tasty.

For more info on a study of the phenomenon as reported in the Alaska Dispatch News, click here.

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THE ENIGMA OF THE CHESHIRE CAT

One of the most familiar characters in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice in Wonderland is the quirky Cheshire cat, who has a sardonic rictus which remains behind while the rest of the feline slowly disappears. There is no cat breed called a Cheshire, and many folks (or more honestly, probably just a few folks) have wondered and speculated about the origin of the term.

The most likely explanation is that there was a cheese sold in Cheshire, England, which was produced from a mold which formed it into the likeness of a smiling cat. The cheese cat was often cut from the tail end first, so that the piece remaining at the end after the rest of the cat disappeared would contain the cat's mouth.

THE DODGETTE

Fans of The Simpsons will recall the episode where Homer acquired a "Canyonero," which was a monstrously-sized SUV weighing more than two Sherman tanks. These fans will also recall that Homer immediately gave the vehicle to Marge when his coworkers pointed out to him that it was the "F" (for female) model which had a lipstick holder instead of a cigarette lighter and that he would be stigmatized as less than a man if he drove it.

While not as lavish or large as the Canyonero, the 1955 Dodge La Femme would have been equally disfavored by Homer. In order to appeal to the ladies, Chrysler created this special model with a pink and gray two-tone exterior as well as pink floral-patterned upholstery. Also included were two special boxes built into the passenger compartment to hold the factory-provided pink raincoat, umbrella, and handbag. The handbag, shaped like a chevron and bearing a large metal clasp to be engraved with the name of the owner, contained a compact, lipstick case, comb, cigarette lighter, cigarette case, and change purse. These items were created by Evans of Chicago, which apparently was some hoity-toity designer. 

Poor sales caused Chrysler to drop the model after 1956. For reasons lost in history, Chrysler apparently never featured it in print ads or TV commercials, and it is quite possible that a lot more women (or chauvinistic husbands) might have paid the extra $143 to buy this particular model if they had simply known about it.  

By Dyno Tested at English Wikipedia
 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

NO PAIN NO GAIN

Congenital analgesia is a rare syndrome where the patient is unaffected by pain. In one variety, the person with the disorder does not undergo pain at all (although he will detect sensations such as something brushing against his skin or changes in temperature); in another version, the individual feels pain, but it simply does not bother him.

Although this condition could be beneficial if you are prizefighting, being tortured, or babysitting my daughter's vicious cat, it generally is not a good thing to have. Victims of this disorder, especially when they are young, often suffer exacerbated injuries or fail to have diseases timely diagnosed simply because they are unaware that anything is wrong. A child with this affliction can often be found with the tip of his tongue bitten off or foreign objects in his eye or parts of his body without him even being aware of it.

Nearly 40 cases of the syndrome have been reported in Gallivare, a small town in Sweden. 

For a first-hand report by someone inflicted with this syndrome, please click here.

View image | gettyimages.com

THE CASE OF THE DUBIOUS DOLLARS

We have already discussed how in the mid-1960s the price of silver moved upward and the US government was losing money every time it minted a coin whose face amount was less than the value of the silver contained within it. Prior to that time, banks throughout the country had vaults stuffed full of silver dollars (informally called "cartwheels" due to their large size)--a coin which generally did not circulate except in a few areas in the West and a coin which had not even been minted, due to lack of demand, since 1935. However, once silver prices soared, people flocked to the banks to exchange their paper currency for silver dollars.

What would be the logical response of the government when it was put in the position of selling coins for a $1 apiece which nobody had wanted for decades until they suddenly contained more than a dollar's worth of silver? Why, of course, simply make more silver dollars for people to hoard. In August of 1964, Congress passed a bill which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson authorizing the minting of 45 million more silver dollars. While there was considerable opposition to this bill, Congressmen from silver-producing states in the West were able to push it through. President Johnson ordered immediate production of the coins, and the Denver mint started churning out silver dollars based on the same design (i.e. the "Peace dollar") as the ones produced from 1921 through 1935. Eventually, the silver dollar naysayers convinced the President that the government using up enough silver to mint 45 million dollar coins would only drive up the price of the metal and result in even more intensive hoarding by the public of the silver dimes, quarters and half-dollars which were normally employed in everyday commerce. Johnson ordered the production of the dollars halted after only a total (including thirty trial pieces) of 316,106 of the cartwheels were minted.

How much is a 1964 silver dollar worth? Hard to say. In theory, they were all destroyed before any were released for general circulation, so the question is, in theory, an academic one (the photo below is actually of an earlier dollar with an altered date). However, in reality, the issue remains open. In 1970, the Treasury discovered two of the thirty trial pieces, which had been circulated among government officials, and destroyed them. Where are the other 28? In addition, mint employees were given an opportunity during the striking of the coins to substitute an older silver dollar in exchange for one with the 1964 date, as at the time, the Treasury just needed to come up with 45 million more silver dollars, and it would not really matter if a few of them were not dated 1964. After the production was halted, the workers were instructed to bring any such 1964 coins back for melting, but who knows if all of the dollars returned to the fold. Further, the 1964 coins were not individually counted or inspected prior to melting--just weighed in mass. A devious employee could have thrown an older silver dollar (which, of course, would weigh the same) into the pile and retrieved a 1964 one, and no one would have known the difference.

Well, if there is a surviving 1964 dollar, why has it not surfaced? The answer is clear. In 1933, a handful of twenty-dollar gold pieces of that same year were released into circulation after President Roosevelt had taken the country off of the gold standard and made the private ownership of gold illegal (with a few minor exceptions). The Secret Service aggressively pursued and seized, without compensation (except for one bizarre and unusual situation which may be addressed in a later Factoid), any and all 1933 twenty-dollar gold pieces whenever they appeared. It is fairly obvious that any 1964 silver dollar which ever sees the light of day would suffer the same fate.

If a genuine 1964 silver dollar did emerge, and if it could be legally sold, it would command millions of dollars. In fact, David Hall, president of Collectors Universe and co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service, will pay $10,000 to any person holding one just for the privilege of examining it.  If it were lawful to own one, a genuine 1964 cartwheel might be the most valuable coin in existence (except maybe for this one).

By Wehwalt (Own work) [Public domain, CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
 or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)],
via Wikimedia Commons

HIRSUTE PORCINE DENTAL APPARATUS HYGIENE RAMIFICATIONS

Until the late 1930s, toothbrush bristles were made out hog hair, not nylon or some other form of plastic.  As a result, the use of the toothbrush actually promoted decay, as the hollow hair shafts tended to retain bacteria and encourage their growth.

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EATING ON THE FLY

The European Union in 2014 adopted agricultural regulations which permit, on a trial basis, the addition of maggots as a source of protein to cattle and other livestock feed. In Scotland, the maggots are raised on fermented grain used in whiskey manufacturing; in some other countries, they are part of the cycle of life by feeding on the excrement of the animals who will eventually eat them.

They might serve well as a source of protein if consumed directly by humans and thus eliminating the livestock middleman, but some folks do not find them all that appetizing.

For a video on how to raise maggots at home, click here.

By Paul venter (Own work)
[CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

GETTING A HEAD IN TELEVISION

HBO's highly popular (and deservedly so) series Game of Thrones is a drama about political machinations set in a fantasy medieval type of world. On rare occasions, the writers use isolated acts of violence associated with this type of society in order to move the plot along.

One such example of violence is portrayed in the last episode of the first season, where an evil youthful king displays to his reluctant fiance the heads of his enemies (including that of his fiance's father) mounted on pikes. One of the severed heads is that of George W. Bush with long hair.

The producers of the show, Dave Benioff and D. B. Weiss, freely acknowledged that it is in fact Bush's head (or more accurately, I hope, a wax replica of it). They stated in 2012 that, "The last head on the left is George Bush. George Bush's head appears in a couple of beheading scenes.  It's not a choice, it's not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had lying around."

One might believe that HBO, in light of the hundreds of millions of dollars it has dropped in making a very lavish production filmed in various exotic spots of the world, could have afforded to prepare an fake head of a generic person rather then using "whatever head [they] had lying around." One could legitimately be curious about why there would be a head of Bush lying around in the first place.  Could it be that this is rather (gasp) a sight gag in arguably poor taste promulgated by a couple of Hollywood liberals for the amusement of all of their fellow Hollywood liberals?

I myself am not offended, as I am a crass connoisseur of poor taste.  I in fact found these antics amusing. However, I do suspect that if a Hollywood conservative producer (presuming that such an animal would ever exist) featured a severed head of President Obama in similar circumstances, the sanctimonious screams of horror from the media would be enough to make the welkin ring.

HBO has altered the image in all future releases of this episode to represent a generic non-specific medieval decapatee.

The head appears briefly at the 0:37 time stamp on this video link. 

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WHAT THE H-

Heroin in the USA was not always sold surreptitiously in darkened alleys. It used to be available, without prescription, on the shelf of the local drug store.

Friedr. Bayer & Co., a German chemical company, introduced Heroin (with a capital "H") in 1895 as the brand name of its new cough suppressant which it believed (quite incorrectly) to be non-addictive. The drug was also sold by Bayer as a cure for morphine addiction until Bayer realized, with a great deal of embarrassment, that it metabolized into morphine in the body and was actually more addictive. Until 1914, it could be legally sold over the counter in the United States.

The name was based on the German word "heroisch" which means "heroic" or "strong."

The Versailles Treaty in 1919 stripped Bayer of some of its trademark rights to Heroin, which is why "heroin" is now a generic term for the drug and not capitalized.

THE FRUIT MACHINE

In the 1960s, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police organized a special department known as Section A-3. Section A-3's sole responsibility was to root out every homosexual in the Canadian government. All such individuals, once exposed, either immediately resigned or were fired.

Section A-3 initially tried to follow everyone around and see what sort of clubs or other social gatherings they attended, but this proved to be an extremely costly and inefficient procedure. What the Mounties needed was a surefire form of gaydar which could be systematically used to test each and every government employee. They found it (or at least believed they did) with a device informally known as "The Fruit Machine." 

The Fruit Machine used a pupil responsive test and also measured perspiration and pulse rate. The subject (who was told that he or she was taking a "stress test") would be shown various pictures of mundane objects along with photos of naked men and women. If the subject's pupils dilated upon viewing a photo of an unclad person of the same sex, the subject would be presumed to be gay. The Fruit Machine examinations were also supplemented with other tests to determine the subject's reaction to trigger words such as "queer," "gay," "drag," and "bar."

It soon became apparent that The Fruit Machine was extremely unreliable. In addition, it developed various mechanical problems. Furthermore, employees figured out the true intent of the test and refused to take it. The RCMP, as a result, forsook using its beloved device. Instead, they brought out a plethysmograph (a/k/a "The Peter Meter") designed to measure blood flow to the genitals to detect any sexual arousal when the subject viewed the photos. Presumably, at this point, the Mounties eschewed any attempts to continue to pretend that they were administering "stress tests." 

At least 400 employees were canned as a result of the RCMP anti-gay crusade.

The plethysmograph, although flawed, still lives on, however. Law enforcement officials in both the USA and Canada use it when investigating suspected pedophiles or ephebophiles. 

A TREDECTET OF LOAVES

In the 1260s, British bakers were notorious for gypping their customers by selling extra-light products. As a result, King Henry III directed that Draconian penalties* be imposed against any bread maker caught skimping on the goods. In order to make sure that they didn't accidentally sell a wussy load to a customer, the bakers over-compensated by adding an extra roll to every 12, thus establishing that thirteen items equals a "baker's dozen."

*In the 1260s, you really, truly, did not want to have Draconian penalties inflicted upon you.

SURELY YOU ARE NOT SURPRISED

According to a 2013 poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, Americans rank each of the following more favorably than they do the U.S. Congress:

Lice

Brussel sprouts

NFL replacement refs

Colonoscopies

Root canals

Used car salesmen

Traffic jams

France

Carnies

Nickelback (which apparently is some music group I had never heard of)

Genghis Khan

DC political pundits

Donald Trump

Cockroaches

However, Congress does rank above the following (by a narrow margin):

Lindsey Lohan

Playground bullies

Telemarketers

Kardashians

John Edwards

Gonorrhea

Fidel Castro

Ebola

North Korea

Meth labs

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THE BUMPY RAILROAD CROSSING AVOIDANCE MOTIVATOR

For its 1956 through 1958 product line, Chrysler Corporation offered as an option an under-dash record player.  It handled special 7" records which would play up to one hour per side (which was fairly impressive in an era where 7" 45 RPM records usually had only about three minutes per side).  The only company which made records which fit the player was Columbia.  For 1960 and 1961 Plymouths and De Sotos only, Chrysler tried again with an optional record player which would play a stack of up to fourteen standard 45 RPMs. Photo of 1960 De Soto Adventurer courtesy of Alf van Deem via Wikimedia

URSINE STEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Ahhhh...

The "polar bear plunge" where either very dedicated or very masochistic human participants swim in ice cold water to raise money for charity is aptly named. Polar bears with their black skin, thick blubber, and hollow hairs are extremely adept at trapping their body heat and handle their frigid environment with equanimity. In fact, their insulation is so highly-perfected that they are usually invisible under all but the most sophisticated infrared detectors.

These physical attributes explain why polar bears don't mind swimming in icy water. However, I am still baffled by the behavior of our family's English setter when I was growing up. Even without a polar bear physique, one of his greatest joys in mid-winter was to find a pond with a thin layer of ice on it so that he could go crashing through and have a nice invigorating dip.

POSTAL SCATOLOGICAL DISSEMINATION

Although perhaps not on the same order of magnitude as some other environmental hazards, the improperly placed pooch poop problem crosses all borders. The Spanish town of Brunete aggressively investigates instances where owners do not pick up the excrement from their dogs. When the owner has been identified (which is more often than you might think), the town will mail the offending feces back to him/her in a box marked (in Spanish, of course) "lost property." The rate of illegal canine crapping has gone down 70% since the policy was implemented.

THE NAUTICAL WARRIOR INEQUITY

No one should gainsay the sacrifices and contributions made by those who served in the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard during WWII. The monuments to them and the benefits available to them for education, health care, and subsidized home loans are far less than deserved and constitute grossly inadequate compensation for what most of them endured during that conflict.

What about the Merchant Marine? Sailors who manned Liberty ships and other vessels carrying troops and materials in the war effort bled, burned, and drowned just as easily as Navy personnel when their ships were torpedoed. However, until the issue was litigated in 1988, mariners were not entitled to any of the basic veterans' benefits.

This attitude was summarized recently by Terry Vance, state adjutant and quartermaster for the Illinois VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars), who explained to the Belleville News-Democrat why the Merchant Marine is not considered by the VFW to be a branch of the armed services, why mariners cannot join the VFW, and why mariners are not included in military monuments sponsored by the VFW: "Memorials are built for the warriors. So people need to understand that it's warriors we're remembering, not necessarily the wars."

Does putting yourself in harm's way to support your country's military objectives make you a warrior? If so, then the mariners on the more than 400 cargo ships sunk by German subs in just the first three months of 1942 should be considered warriors--even if knowledge of their losses was kept secret from the American public by President Roosevelt in order to avoid injuring national morale.

About 243,000 men served in the Merchant Marine during the conflict and 9,497 died as a result, for a mortality rate of 3.90%. The death rates for the official American armed forces were "only" 2.94% for the Marine Corps, 2.08% for the Army, 0.88% for the Navy, and 0.24% for the Coast Guard.

"Non-warriors" my butt.

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THE SELF-RELIANT DR. KANE

Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane (1861-1932) was a leading practitioner in the field of railroad surgery, which, a hundred years ago or so, was its own separate medical specialty. As the name suggests, a railroad surgeon would be utilized to treat injuries suffered by railroad workers. Even more so than today, railroad work was very hazardous, and a railroad surgeon often had to operate under very primitive and dirty conditions far away from any decent medical facility.

Kane, who was on the payroll of five different railroads, saw the need to be able to improvise with materials at hand when real medical supplies were not available. He developed the use of woven asbestos, a material which was ubiquitous at the time and available at any hardware store, to make bandages which could be sterilized by flame immediately before they were utilized. He advocated the deployment of sheets of mica, a transparent mineral, to protect head wounds which exposed the brain. The mica, which could also be sterilized by flame, would be obtained on site from any stove which had a mica window. He used an acetylene lamp on his head, coal-miner style, to illuminate the abdominal cavity to make surgical repairs.

Dr. Kane was also innovative in the traditional operating theater he had in a hospital he owned. He was probably the first surgeon to play music in the surgical parlor. Starting in 1914, he would crank up a phonograph in order to calm the patient prior to administering anesthesia.

He implemented a policy of placing a discrete tattoo on each mother during childhood as well as a matching identical one on her infant to insure that no babies were accidentally switched. In his later years, he pushed the tattoo window perhaps a little too far when he would sign all of his work by inking "-.-" on his surgical patients--the Morse code symbol for the letter "K."

What Dr. Kane is perhaps most noted for was his practice of self-surgery. He cut off his own finger after it got infected. In 1921, at the age of 60, he removed his own appendix using local anesthesia--in part, because he wanted to see how effective local anesthesia could be for use on his other patients. At the age of 70, he performed another operation on himself, attended by the press and a photographer, when he repaired his own inguinal hernia, a more hazardous procedure because of the risk of severing the femoral artery. Thirty-six hours later, he was back at work performing surgery on others.

THIS TOOK A LOT OF BALLS

A freighter full of 5,000 sheep capsized and sank off of the coast of Kuwait in 1964. The sheep died and started decomposing. This was unacceptable, as the scene of their putrefaction was next to the source of Kuwait's drinking water and no one wanted to drink rotten sheep.

Danish inventor Karl Kroyer solved the problem by devising a way to run a hose to the sunken vessel and to pump into it 27 million small buoyant balls, which caused the sheep ship to become shipshape and rise to the surface.

Kroyer then attempted to patent his invention in Holland, but it was rejected by the Dutch patent officers because they claimed that the idea was not original. Although Kroyer did not intentionally poach another person's work, it turns out that the patent office was correct. Specifically, the May 1949 issue of Walt Disney Comics featured the story The Sunken Yacht where Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie had used the exact same technique to fill Uncle Scrooge's sunken yacht (hence the name of the episode) with ping pong balls to raise it from the depths of the sea. 

It is still unclear why the Dutch authorities were using Donald Duck comic books to conduct a patent search, but hey, they obviously knew what they were doing. Some folks have asserted that the Dutch patent office did not have the comic book in mind when it denied the patent, but the patent office itself actually gainsays these skeptics.

For further information, click here.

Copyright 1949 "The Sunken Yacht"
by Walt Disney Corporation

THE DEXTROROTATORY STAIRWAY ELUCIDATION

Spiral staircases in medieval castles usually ran clockwise from the vantage point of a person ascending. This configuration put the wall next to the right side of an invading knight climbing the stairs and, if he was right-handed, inhibited his sword hand. Left-handed knights were not a problem, as they did not exist. Southpaws were considered the spawn of evil and could not become knights.

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INFANT SARTORIAL CHROMATIC TRUISMS

Many years in the past, male babies were not assigned the color blue and female babies the color pink. Their parents were instead more concerned about other issues such as starvation, cholera, war, and roving packs of timber wolves. However, about a century ago, department stores and other purveyors of baby clothes promulgated the notion that male babies should wear pink (a diluted form of red, which is of course associated with manly activities involving blood such as hunting animals and armed conflict) and that girls should wear blue. However, the tide gradually turned, and in 1927, Time magazine published a chart showing which major clothing vendors favored which color for each sex. It was not until about 1940 that the current pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys policy emerged as the clear winner.

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