"WE HAD TO DESTROY THE ANIMAL IN ORDER TO SAVE IT"

President Theodore Roosevelt enjoyed a reputation as a fervent naturalist and conservationist. As a result, the Smithsonian Institution commissioned Roosevelt and his son Kermit to travel to Eastern Africa in 1909, along with other zoologists, to harvest examples of various exotic wildlife for display and study in the United States.

The expedition brought back over 11,000 specimens, including insects and plants. However, T.R. and his son personally killed 512 vertebrates, including seventeen times as many lions as Dr. Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who recently got in hot water for hunting the big cat in Zimbabwe. A full casualty list of the two Roosevelts is attached below. Some of the animals are still on display at the Smithsonian.

There is no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was a devout conservationist who really enjoyed killing animals. This is not necessarily a contradiction, as evidenced by the fact that deer hunting is an important aspect of keeping herds from becoming so large that they end up dying from lack of food. However, it should be noted that several of the Roosevelt trophies included white rhinos (called "square-mouthed" on Roosevelt's list), which even in 1909 were on the brink of extinction and certainly did not need harvesting in order to prevent mass starvation.

For a brief synopsis of the 1909 expedition, please click here. To read the book written by T.R. on the subject, African Game Trails; an Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist, click here.

THE LAVISH SPUD DEPICTION

In 2015, an anonymous businessman paid photographer Kevin Abosch 1,000,000 euros (more than $1,000,000) for a photograph. It was of a potato, although admittedly a genuine Irish one.

I cannot afford the licensing fees to display this particular potato directly in this Factoid, so you will have to be content with the below picture of a common tater. If you wish nonetheless to see the Abosch photo, click here.

The ultimate fate of the model for the Abosch photo is unknown, although its prognosis was grim.

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REMOVING MOLES

By Didier Descouens (Own work)
 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

Most folks who even think about them regard moles (the animal) as a small, gross, ratty mammals which destroy lawns. What they may not realize is that, for a while, moles were highly prized in the fur trade. 

In the early 1900s, Queen Alexandra, the wife of Britain's King Edward VII, ordered a mole-fur garment and started a vigorous fashion trend which resulted in a thriving industry in Scotland of converting what had been major pests into little patches of fur and sewing them together for coats and other wearing apparel. Because the mole travels backwards into his tunnel almost as often as he goes forward, the fur is very short and dense and has little nap. As such, it is very soft and velvety.

Moles have a strange biochemistry which enables them to breathe in very low oxygen areas, such as their tunnels. They decompose extremely rapidly, which means that they had to be skinned almost immediately after their demise in order to avoid ruining the pelt.

1921 MAGAZINE FUR AD FEATURING
A MOLESKIN COAT

A HEROIC ENDEAVOR

The first known coin-operated vending machine was developed by Hero of Alexander approximately 2,000 years ago. It was used to dispense a set amount of holy water at religious shrines in order to thwart participants who had been taking more water than they had actually purchased. The weight of the coin exerted force on a lever which would lift a plug, allowing a predetermined amount of water to flow out--a system very similar to the flushing mechanism in modern toilets.

The below illustration contains a translation of Hero's description of his invention.

MODERN ALCHEMY--TURNING SILVER INTO URANIUM

During World War II, when copper was being diverted to make munitions, the atomic bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, borrowed 14,700 tons (13,336 metric tons) of pure silver from the U.S. Treasury to be used for the huge amounts of electrical wiring required by the giant calutrons which separated the isotopes of uranium. By 1970, all but .04% of the silver had been replaced by copper and returned to the Treasury vaults. 

There is no evidence supporting the common belief that silver coins were withdrawn from circulation specifically to make the wiring.

The amount of silver in question would form a cube 35 feet on each side. It would be very heavy and worth a lot--over 6.4 billion dollars based on a price for silver of $15 an ounce.

AND YOU THOUGHT CROCS WERE BAD

The second-most dangerous vertebrate to man in Africa is the hippopotamus.  Hippos are very mean, can run at 18 miles an hour (29 kph), and weigh 8,000 pounds (3,600 kg). According to a statistic found on many sites on the internet (but without citing an ultimate source), hippos kill about 2,900 people per year.

Hippos may also be one of the most uncouth vertebrates in Africa. A hippo will  engage in a practice called "dung-showering," where he backs up to a rival or other target and spins his tail like a propeller while violently expelling a mixture of feces and urine through it. For these reasons, many people are loathe to invite hippos to formal gatherings.

The most dangerous vertebrate on that continent is, of course, man himself. Perhaps the deadliest animal of  them all in Africa is the mosquito and the various exotic pathogens it carries.

SEVERAL STARS ARE BORN

In 1944, Congress established the rank of "General of the Army." Five U.S. Army officers achieved this designation--Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Henry Arnold, and Omar Bradley.  As such, the recipients earned the right to wear five stars.

John J. Pershing was appointed "General of the Armies" (which is technically different than "General of the Army") in 1919. The law passed in 1944 establishing the "General of the Army" rank stated that Pershing, who was still alive but retired, would have a higher rank than the mere five-star officers stated above. Pershing was considered to be a "six-star" general, but he died in 1948 prior to a formal adoption of an insignia for that rank.

However, death did not prevent the promotion of another general to the stratosphere. During his lifetime, George Washington achieved the rank of Lieutenant General--three stars. However, in 1976, Congress and President Carter enacted a bill retroactively promoting Washington, effective on July 4, 1776, to the rank of General of the Armies. The bill further provided that Washington had seniority over all other officers in the US armed forces, past and present, thus putting him at a higher rank than even Pershing. Seven stars for Washington, perhaps?

Of course, the highest seniority in the United States military always ultimately rests with the President, as Commander-in-Chief--a fact that is often ignored by voters, with potentially tragic results.

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THE BATRACHIAN SINFONIETTA COADUNATION

For centuries, any European concert violinist who had his act together would keep in his instrument case the violin itself, a bow, a live toad, spare strings, and a lump of rosin-impregnated beeswax. You might think that he would also carry replacement filaments for his bow, but bow repair can get sort of hairy and was generally done by a specialist and not by the musician himself.

The toad? The common toad a/k/a the European toad (Bufo bufo) secretes a toxin in its skin called, appropriately enough, bufotoxin. Savvy violinists would rub the toad with their hands right before playing, and the toxin would inhibit perspiration and prevent slippery fingers--thus allowing the violinist to provide a ribbiting performance.

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THE WYOMANS' PAUCITY OF VERTICAL TRANSLOCATION

There are only two sets of escalators in the entire state of Wyoming. Both are located in bank buildings in Casper.

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TAKING THE LEAD

Many decades ago, a common attraction at a county fair would be a salesman who would drive up in a Model T Ford or Hupmobile or the like which would be running very roughly and knocking. The salesman, once a crowd had gathered, would sprinkle a few drops of a chemical on his necktie and then wave the necktie in front of the carburetor. The car engine would then immediately subside to a gentle but enthusiastic purr once fumes from the necktie were sucked in. The spectators would then shove dollar bills towards the salesman for a bottle of this miracle additive to put into the gas tanks of their own vehicles.

I did not use the term "huckster" or "charlatan" or any other derogatory term for the salesman, as his product actually worked to boost the octane of the gasoline and to improve engine performance. Unfortunately for the salesmen, the miracle ingredient was tetraethyl lead, and many of the salesmen ultimately discovered that wandering around with lead fumes wafting from a garment around one's neck is not healthy. However, even the surviving salesmen soon went out of business once the major oil companies added tetraethyl lead to the gasoline at the refinery so that everyone, in true democratic equality, could be exposed to lead fumes. 

Tetraethyl lead was phased out by law starting in the late 1970s, which proved to be an inconvenience to those owning cars from the 1950s with high-compression engines which needed high-octane gasoline.

THE TIMELESSNESS OF SINO-CINEMA

As of 2011, the government of the People's Republic of China has banned its film and TV industry from producing or showing any movies or shows featuring time travel. Like most totalitarian regimes, it (ahem) apparently does not want to misrepresent history in any way, shape, or form, and it feels that showing alternative time lines which never really happened could lead to that sordid result. 

For more information, please click here.

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THE FIRST GODFATHER MOVIE IS STILL BETTER

When Francis Ford Coppola (pictured below) directed Godfather II, he used studio executives, writers, and associate producers to portray senators in a scene involving Kefauver-type congressional hearings on organized crime. He figured that real senators from that era (the early 1950s) would be somewhat stiff and self-conscious when appearing in front of television cameras, so he wanted his movie senators to be played by intelligent, articulate individuals who nonetheless would not be polished and sophisticated actors. His idea worked splendidly.

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THE BEEFCAKE FELINE COMMONALITY

Millennials and those younger than Millennials probably have no concept whatsoever of the difficulty in researching esoteric topics (and even non-esoteric ones) prior to the age of the internet. If you wanted to do a school term paper in 1970 about, say, Komodo dragons, you could probably find a few brief encyclopedia articles and maybe a couple of paragraphs in a reptile book. For a thorough, in-depth treatment of the topic, or for any information at all on a more exotic item, you were probably screwed, unless you somehow could locate the name of a helpful tome or article (which would be a very tedious and time-consuming task) and hope that your local library could order the reference materials so that they would arrive in time for you to use them for your project--and that the materials would actually be relevant once they showed up. As an example, if you wanted to learn about our infamous decapitated chicken, Headless Mike, in 1970, you might well never dig up anything about him unless you happened to browse through the 1945 print edition (there was, of course, no online edition) of Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and found a citation to the Life magazine article on that topic.

The internet, of course, has changed all of that. There is a glut of info on virtually everything, and it is easily searchable. Case in point: In the old days, if you wanted to assemble a huge collage of photos of studly guys posing with cats, it would have been almost impossible to do so. Today, however, all you have to do is go directly to the site devoted to that topic, and all of your hunks with felines fantasies will be satiated. 

Of course, the downside of the internet is that any idiot can post any drivel he wants, and you have to be discriminating enough to sort the gold from the dross.

One thing you will not find on the internet is how I happened to be looking at photos of sexy guys holding cats. Oh, what the heck, you can find out after all. Quite simply, I stumbled across the site when I was surfing some of the stories featured on the delightful blog "did you know?".

SO YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE CRAMPED ON YOUR LAST FLIGHT

The most number of passengers carried on a single aircraft occurred on May 24, 1991, when an El Al 747 transported 1,087* Jewish refugees away from a politically unstable Ethiopia.  Actually, the number increased to 1,090 before the trip was over, as three babies were literally air-born.

This evacuation was part of Operation Solomon, where the Israeli government transported a total of 14,235 Jews out of Ethiopia in a 36-hour period. 

*This is the official number of passengers registered for the flight, according to El Al on its webpage describing the operation. However, according to many sources, there were numerous unregistered children who were smuggled aboard, and the actual number of passengers on the plane was 1,122 (prior to any births).

By Eduard Marmet [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0),
 CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
 or GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

T.R.--"THIS HOLIDAY SUCKS"

View image | gettyimages.com

When Theodore Roosevelt was twenty-five years old, he pretty much gave up any enthusiasm he ever had for celebrating St. Valentine's Day.  On February 14, 1884, he lost his beloved 46 year-old mother, Martha, from typhoid fever and, a few hours later, he also lost his equally beloved wife, Alice, to Bright's disease (a kidney disorder)--two days after she had given birth to his first child.

As a result, Roosevelt abandoned politics for a few years and fled to the Dakota Badlands to pursue ranching and hunting.

MARKETING IS EVERYTHING

In 1961, artist Piero Manzoni produced 90 tin cans containing his own feces and offered them for sale for an equivalent weight in gold. This was actually quite a bargain, because the Tate Museum in London purchased one can in 2002 for 22,400 pounds, and other cans have sold in 2007 for 124,000 euros and in 2008 for 97,250 pounds.

Manzoni stated that his work was inspired by his father, who purportedly told him that "your art is s---." 

One acquaintance of the artist now claims that the whole project was a fraud and that the cans contain plaster instead of pure excrement. So far, no one has tested this assertion by opening one of the cans and destroying, in the process, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art. Other collectors have indicated that some of their cans have exploded over time and that there is no doubt that they contain the real thing.

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ABE'S CREATURE COMFORTS

Unlike many frontiersmen of his era, Abraham Lincoln did not like hunting, as he was too much of an animal lover. He was especially fond of cats, and he was the first President to have them in the White House. It was typical for a feline to be feasting at the Presidential dinner table. When Mrs. Lincoln suggested that it was inappropriate for Lincoln to be feeding a cat with a gold fork during dinner, Lincoln replied that, "If the gold fork was good enough for former President James Buchanan, I think it is good enough for Tabby." When meeting with General Grant and Admiral Porter in Virginia during the war, Lincoln took off time to arrange for the adoption of three homeless kittens he found in a telegraph shed.

He also had a dog named "Fido," (pictured below) whom he left behind with some Illinois neighbor boys, as Lincoln was afraid that Fido would not do well in Washington. His favorite horse was named "Old Bob." Lincoln was not known for highbrow ostentatious designations for his animals.

Lincoln had to be physically restrained from running into a fire at the White House stables to rescue the horses.

The Lincoln menagerie also included rabbits, goats, and a turkey called "Tom" (yet another example of creative nomenclature). Tom was slated to be the 1863 Thanksgiving dinner but received a pardon at the request of Lincoln's son, Tad.

From the Henry Homer Collection at the Abraham
 Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

ALSO KNOWN AS THE BOTOX SMILE

There is a term in psychology called the "Pan Am" smile, which refers to an individual who is smiling perfunctorily with his or her mouth but without the activation of the facial muscles around the eyes which characterize a genuine smile. It was named after the insincere smiles, provided automatically to all passengers, which were supposedly the trademark of condescending Pan American World Airways stewardesses.

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THE ONION SPIRED CONUNDRUM

Legend states that when the iconic St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow was completed in 1561, Ivan the Terrible ordered its architect, Postnik Yakovlev, blinded so that Yakovlev could never again design anything else as beautiful. Although such a cruel and capricious decision would have been well within Ivan's wheelhouse (after all, there was a reason why he wasn't called "Ivan the Adorable"), some historians gainsay the verisimilitude of this tale due to the fact that Yakovlev apparently did design some other buildings at a later date.

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THE ELLIPSOIDAL TIRE MANIFESTATION

A standard trick for illustrators or cartoonists who want to make a vehicle appear to be going fast is to show the tires as ovals leaning forward. This illusion of speed originated with photos of cars taken with old-fashioned cameras with a "focal plane shutter." In this type of camera, instead of the shutter opening from the middle of the lens, the shutter traveled from one side to the other to let light in to expose the film. Wheels looked like they were leaning forward because the car was moving, and as the left side of the car was done being photographed, the right side was still being exposed as the car was further down the road. 

The one photo which really popularized this imagery was taken by Henri Latique at an auto race in 1912. In this picture, because Latique was panning the camera to try keep the car in the image, the wheels are leaning towards the right and the stationary bystanders are leaning towards the left.

REMEMBER THE MAINE (COON)!

One of the most popular breeds of cats in the United States is the Maine Coon. Its big hair and big body do not fit the standard feline stereotype of a typical domestic shorthair, and one can almost conclude that they look a little weird. However, their playful nature, extreme intelligence, and mellow disposition (where they seek and enjoy the companionship of their owners but without constantly demanding physical attention) more than compensate for their unconventional appearance. In fact, many of them will eagerly learn to do tricks such as fetch (or more accurately, they will teach their owners tricks like how to play fetch).

There are several theories about the origin of the Maine Coon cat. One impossible one, genetically speaking, is that normal house cats mated with wild raccoons (or even tame ones, for that matter). Another one, implausible but not totally impossible, is that Marie Antoinette, after her arrest, arranged for her snobby long-haired Persian kind of cats to be smuggled to the USA, where they bred with conventional style felines. A third theory is that English sea captains, including one named Charles Coon, introduced long-haired cats on trips to America, where they swapped genetic material with the local population. A fourth postulate is that Maine Coons are the result of matings between bobcats and domestic felines. A final possibility is that they are the descendants of Norwegian Forest cats which were introduced by the Vikings in the 11th century when the Norsemen landed in the New England area. This hypothesis may not be totally bogus, as sea captains brought long-haired cats to America all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but only the Maine Coon cats (which in fact originated in Maine) resemble Norwegian Forest cats.

Whatever their origins, they are pretty cool cats. For more information about them, click here.

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WHAT'S IN YOUR WALLET?

The highest denomination bill ever printed in the United States was $100,000.  It was issued only in 1934 and had a buying power equal to about $1,800,000 in today's inflated money. Much to the relief of toll both attendants, it was to be used only in transactions between federal reserve banks and was not released to the general public.

The back of the bill was orange, not green, because it was a gold certificate.  FDR abolished gold certificates later in 1934, so these bills did not have much of a printing run.

National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History
 [Public domain or CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

DUELING PANCHOS

Dueling is still legal in Paraguay.  However, duels can only take place between two people, the duel must be registered with the authorities, there has to be medical staff on hand, and the participants must be registered blood donors.

Or is it? There are numerous sites on the internet confirming that duels are still legal in Paraguay--including that of the Chicago Tribune. The statement contained within the first paragraph of this factoid has been asserted as an axiom on so many occasions in so many places that it is almost universally accepted as totally valid. However, one is hard-pressed to find any authoritative source confirming the legality of duels in Paraguay. In fact, in a mind-boggling expose by the Mississippi Library Commission, it confirmed that the Paraguay Embassy had informed the MLC that dueling is NOT legal in that country.

How did the rumor get started? Well, dueling WAS* legal in Uruguay between 1920 and 1992, and probably, in a sad commentary on education in the USA, some writer got confused about geography and mixed up the two countries in a story while omitting the part that dueling was eventually banned. The misstatement grew legs and scurried around the internet until it evolved into apparent truth.

*Or was it? Wahahahaha...

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"AND ON HIS FARM HE HAD SOME CADAVERS..."

There have been five other body farms created in the United States since the first one was established in Tennessee in 1981. In addition to the one in Tennessee, there are two in Texas and one each in Colorado, North Carolina, and Illinois. In a body farm, donated corpses are left to rot in a variety of controlled conditions, and the rate and circumstances of each decomposing body provides baseline data for homicide investigations. The farms are also used for training homicide investigators and carrion-detecting dogs.

The body farm in Illinois, located near Carbondale and run by Southern Illinois University, uses both pig and human remains in its studies. It has achieved significantly different results from its sister farms, due to the region's lower temperatures. low elevation, highly acidic soil, high average wind speed, and poor soil drainage. This farm is also investigating what effects various postmortem treatment of the corpses (consistent with what a murderer might do) have on the remains.

There are currently 1,300 persons who are on the list to donate their bodies to the Tennessee facility.

The first body farm outside of the USA either has opened or will open in the very near future near Sidney, Australia.

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MARXIST ARACHNIDS

One of the most common (and generally valid) stereotypes of the solitary lone wolf type of predator is a spider. In almost all species, spiders do not associate with each other except when mating, when two of them are on a dinner date (which usually does not end well for one of them), or when the babies hatch and exit the egg sac en masse.

Note I said "almost all species." Out of the 45,000 known spider species, approximately 25 of them involve social spiders.

Social spiders generally build huge, three-dimensional webs--sometimes 25 feet (7.6 m) long and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide--containing as many as 50,000 spiders. An insect or even larger creature blundering into such a web will find itself immediately overrun and covered, horror-movie style, by hordes of these little vampires injecting it with poison and otherwise plying their trade. An arachnophobe would probably find himself or herself highly stressed if tangled in one of these colonies.

Unlike the case with ants, bees, termites, and and other more conventional social insects, there  is nothing to physically distinguish one spider in the web from another, although the percentage of females far exceeds that of the males. Nonetheless, each individual spider tends to specialize in a particular task, such as web repair, subjecting prey, housecleaning, removing parasites, or feeding the young of itself and others by vomiting regurgitated food into their mouths. This specialization occurs notwithstanding the fact that there is massive inbreeding within the colony and the spiders are genetically very similar. Scientists believe that the task assumed by a spider is largely determined by its early childhood experiences and its unique basic personality.

Evolution favors social spiders in areas of the world where there is heavy rainfall which would destroy flimsy individual webs, where potential prey is large and not easily subdued by a single spider, and where the spider species naturally makes a three-dimensional web, which is much easier to join with others in a colony as compared to the standard two-dimensional orb web.

For more information on these amazing arachnid associations, click here.

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PETITE PASTRY PRESTIDIGITATION

Researchers in Japan have developed a computerized camera to be worn as a pair of eyeglasses for dieters. The camera makes a cookie appear to be larger than it really is while not affecting the apparent size of other objects, including the dieter’s hand. The dieter’s brain perceives that he is eating a larger cookie, and, on the average, the dieter will feel satiated eating 10% less cookies that he would without the glasses. The reverse also applies. If the cookies are made to appear smaller, the eater will consume 25% more of them.

The camera, in conjunction with the controlled release of aromas, can also be used to make a tasteless and disgusting, albeit healthy, rice biscuit appear to be an Oreo or other chocolatey delight and thus far more appealing to the dieter.

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THE 299 PURCHASE CIRCUMVENTION

The procedure of following a preflight checklist for aircrews originated in 1935 when the prototype for the B-17 bomber (known as at the time as the Boeing Model 299) crashed after the pilot failed to disengage the "gust lock." The gust lock holds the control surfaces of a plane in a static position so that the plane does not get damaged by wind when the aircraft is parked on the ground. As the accident occurred when Boeing was demonstrating the plane for the Army Air Corps, the Army, following its long-standing policy of not purchasing aircraft which could not take off without crashing, awarded its contract for 200 bombers to a competitor. 

However, some of the brass were still impressed enough by the earlier performance of the prototype that they used a legal loophole to buy 13 examples nonetheless. This purchase led to further acquisitions until over 12,700 B-17s were sold to the Army by the end of World War II, resulting in the devastation of much of Germany and constituting a major factor in the winning of the war.

By U.S. Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

PRINTING PRESS PERFIDIOUSNESS

Paper money issued by the Confederate States of America has a reputation for its primitive and crude workmanship. While this stigma is well-deserved in most cases, the earliest notes issued by the CSA were of high quality, exquisitely detailed, and the aesthetic equal of the bills employed by the North.

The explanation for this phenomenon is simple. The first currency used by the Confederacy were printed early in 1861 by the National Bank Note Company--an outfit in New York City which was renowned for the excellence of its products. The company was so proud of its efforts that it unabashedly placed its name on the front of each bill in the lower right corner. After that ugly Fort Sumpter incident of April 12, 1861, the rebel government, under the correct belief that the US authorities would frown upon a continuing business relationship between the company and an entity at war with the United States, sent an agent to New York to retrieve the printing plates for the money. It was too late--federal agents had already seized them.

No problemo--the National Bank Note Company was not the only fish in the sea, The rebels also employed the services of the American Bank Note Company--also in New York City. However, the American Bank Note Company was a little more circumspect about its treason, and the Confederate currency it produced was labeled "Southern Bank Note Company."

Eventually, the Southerners had to resort to other sources to print their money, yielding the mediocre bills more normally associated with the Confederacy.

And the two opportunistic Yankee bank note companies? They thrived and produced both money and postage stamps for the United States government and other countries, as well as other elaborately engraved documents such as stock certificates, bonds, and traveler's checks. In fact, the American Bank Note Company eventually swallowed up the National Bank Note Company and is still with us today.

National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American
 History [Public domain or CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons