THE AGRICULTURALLY-INSPIRED COMPONENT OF MOTOR VEHICLE REGISTRATION

During World War II, a massive campaign was initiated within the United States to divert iron and steel from civilian use into the manufacture of munitions. In Illinois, one of the first casualties of this process was the use of metal in license plates. From 1942 through 1948, Illinois license plates were literally homegrown, where good and noble Illinois soybeans were used as the base material for their manufacture. These soybean fiber plates, although more susceptible to water damage and mold than their steel predecessors, nonetheless usually survived their one-year deployment until the next set of annual plates was released.

Usually--not always. One major problem a farmer and or other handler of livestock often encountered was to return to his vehicle only to find that his animal charges (especially goats) had eaten a license plate.

Georgia and Virginia also experimented with soybean plates during the war, although not as long as Illinois did. Illinois made a few soybean plates for use by Alaska. Montana bought expired Illinois soybean plates, flipped them over, and printed new Montana plates on the other side.

HOW TO RAED

A sramt guy in Eglnand woshe nmae I do not rmbeemer dcisroveed a wilhe ago taht msot preosns raed by lkoonig at the frist and lsat letters of ecah wrod. In oehtr wdors, if you wree to see a snetncee wrehe all of the wdros bigen and end wtih the rhigt leretts but all of the iennr lreetts were jmubeld, you wulod slitl be albe to raed the msagese whitout too mcuh tuorlbe.

"NAKED CAME THE STRANGER"

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One very successful bestseller in the late 1960s was the salacious work of Long Island housewife Penelope Ashe, who penned Naked Came the Stranger. The book is centered around the adulterous adventures of heroine Gillian Blake and featured, among her many other sexual encounters, a tryst with a Shetland pony. Ashe was the guest at numerous bookstore signings and talk shows.

Towards the end of 1969, nineteen males appeared on the David Frost Show as "Penelope Ashe" and revealed that they, along with five female colleagues, had actually written the book and that there was no real Penelope Ashe.

The scheme had been concocted by Michael McGrady, a columnist for Newsday. McGrady had developed the hypothesis, based upon other literary triumphs of the time, that all any author needed for a modern bestseller was to put as much prurient garbage in his work as possible. To test this theory, he enlisted the above-described 24 individuals from the Newsday staff and instructed each one to write a chapter in the book. He emphasized that there could be no redeeming social value or literary merit in their efforts and warned them that any true excellence in writing would quickly be blue-penciled into oblivion. In order to avoid any real plot or continuity within the novel which could be associated with decent literature, each author was to follow his or her own path--although there was one meeting in advance to determine a bare (so to speak) amount of consistencies, such as whether Gillian's skin was milky or tawny and whether her breasts were pert and patridgey or bodacious and melony*. The paramount requirement that McGrady imposed was that there had to be "an unremitting emphasis on sex." When the chapters were done, McGrady painstakingly edited the prose to make it worse.

McGrady then enlisted his sister-in-law to portray Penelope Ashe, and the book was immediately picked up by a major publisher and started selling like hot cakes. The revelation of the scheme later on sent sales even higher. It is available on  Kindle even today.

*The final decision was that her breasts would be "pendulums of passion swinging in the winds of lust."

BRIDES IN THE BATH

George Joseph Smith was an English bigamist (technically, a septgamist, since he had seven wives at once) who plied his craft about 100 years ago. He was also a serial killer famous for his participation in the "Brides in the Bath" murders, where he killed three of his wives by drowning them in bathtubs and making the deaths look like they were from natural causes--i.e. that each victim drowned in the tub while in the throes of an epileptic fit.

Smith's undoing is a prime example of the axiom that "when a pig becomes a hog, it gets slaughtered." Individually, none of the deaths caught the attention of the authorities, and none of them were initially suspected as homicides. It was only when the police discovered that the same man was married to three different women who all died in the tub that they became really suspicious.

However, the Home Office Pathologist Bernard Spilsbury could not find any appreciable markings on the bodies consistent with the struggle which would have resulted from an unwilling drowning victim, nor could he locate any evidence that the victims were drugged prior to their immersion. He did drowning experiments using volunteer female divers but could not immerse the heads of any of them under water without violent resistance which would have left tell-tale bruising. Finally, he suddenly pulled on the ankles of one of the divers, forcing her head underwater. She instantly fell into shock and lost consciousness, and Spilsbury had an apprehensive half-hour trying to resuscitate her before he succeeded.

As a result of Spilsbury's experiments and the testimony of the female diver (who apparently was a good sport about the whole incident), Smith was convicted of the three murders and executed in 1915.

Photo by Yannick Trottier through Wickimedia Commons

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC SOUTH ARKANSAS VINE RIPE PINK TOMATO

The official state fruit of Arkansas is the South Arkansas vine ripe pink tomato.

The official state vegetable of Arkansas is the South Arkansas vine ripe pink tomato.

Well, which is it? The South Arkansas vine ripe pink tomato cannot be both a fruit and vegetable, can it?

Yes it can. Botanically, a tomato is a fruit, as it is the fleshy thingie on the tomato plant which holds the seeds. However, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, a tomato is a vegetable. In one of its many decisions where the Court chose to ignore reality in order to achieve a desired result, it determined in 1893 that a tomato was usually not served as a dessert like many fruits were. Therefore, according to the Court, notwithstanding the scientific evidence to the contrary, the tomato was thus a vegetable and subject to a ten percent tariff on vegetable imports.

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THE DIABOLICAL EXOTHERMIC STRATEGY OF THE JAPANESE HONEYBEE

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The giant Asian hornet (pictured above) is not a friend of the honeybee, and its appearance at a beehive is not greeted by the hive's occupants with approbation, especially in light of the fact that a few hornets can eliminate an entire colony of 10,000 bees in a matter of hours while seizing the bee larvae as food for the hornet children. The gargantuan size of the hornet and the thickness of its exoskeleton protect the hornet from the stings of the bees, and each hornet can sting repeatedly while a bee can only sting once before it dies. The resulting slaughter from a giant Asian hornet invasion dwarfs even the acrimonious interaction between the competing houses in Game of Thrones.

However, not all bees meekly go to their demise in the presence of these monsters. Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica) eschew futile stinging and lay a trap instead. They gather around the entrance of the hive and allow a hornet to enter. They then block the entrance, cluster together, and form a ball of bees with the hornet at its center. The bees thereafter exercise briskly by buzzing their wings for twenty minutes. The resulting body heat from the bees cooks the hornet to death.

Although giant Asian hornets feed on insects, they certainly will attack humans. Their venom is powerful and can result in death, especially in the case of multiple stings, even if the victim is not allergic to the toxin.

HOW TO PAINT WITHOUT HOG BLADDERS

Artists' paint used to be stored in fragile pig bladders (literally, a bladder from a pig) tied up with string. To get at the pigment, the artist would prick the bladder with a pin and use the paint as it bled out. Unfortunately, this would ruin any remaining paint in the bladder, and the whole package would have to be discarded after perforation no matter how little of the paint was actually used. Another problem was transport. Most artists confined their work to their studio, as their bladders (more specifically, their pig bladders) would frequently burst if they tried to move their painting supplies to a remote location. Further, because the paint still quickly dried out even when in the pig pigment pouch, the artist would have to mix up a fresh batch of each color every time he stood in front of the easel. 

In 1841, South Carolina artist John G. Rand, while living in London, got tired of wallowing in porcine excretory systems and developed the tin paint tube with cap. This invention allowed the paint to be stored for long periods of time, even after the tube had been opened. The tubes could easily be transported. And, the artist could have available at any time a wide range of colors.

French artists initially derided Rand's new-fangled invention, but they quickly and hypocritically got on the bandwagon when they found that they could head out into the countryside and render vivid portraits of water lilies, haystacks, and Polynesian women. In fact, Rand is arguably the true father of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as probably very few examples of them would have occurred without his nifty metal tubes.

NOTHING LUCKY ABOUT "I LOVE LUCY"

In the 1950s, newspapers often featured a game called "Lucky Bucks" where readers could win prizes by matching serial numbers on dollar bills. This game was a plot element in a 1954 episode of I Love Lucy, but the show's sponsor, Phillip Morris Tobacco, insisted that the name of the game on the show be changed to "Bonus Bucks." Phillip Morris required that the writers of I Love Lucy eschew use of the term "lucky" whenever possible, as it did not want to remind the viewers of its competitor's product Lucky Strike cigarettes.

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THE BECHDEL MOVIE SEXISM TEST

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The Bechdel test, named after Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist who developed it in 1985, is a way of determining whether or not a movie is hopelessly gender-biased. Specifically, to pass the test of NOT being a film treating women like second-class citizens, the movie must contain at least one scene where 1) there are two or more women 2) who have a conversation with or among each other 3) which includes, even briefly, a topic other than just a man.

Surprisingly, over 50% of all movies fail these criteria, usually either because there are so few female characters that they never have an opportunity talk to another one in the film or because the female characters that are present have vacuous chick-flic feeling-sharing discussions among themselves about the leading male character to the exclusion of everything else.

Some Bechdel examiners have imposed one additional requirement--namely, that the two female characters have to have a large enough role in the film that they are at least each named. This additional imposition prevents a movie from claiming that it passed the test merely because, say, one extra portraying an anonymous female passenger on an airliner exclaims out loud in the presence of another something like "Eek, there are snakes on this plane!"*

Often, movies which pass the test are lower-budget than the ones that fail. Some of the failures include, The Social Network, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Avatar, Casablanca, the Star Wars Trilogy, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Anchorman 2, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Monsters University, and Star Trek Into Darkness. Gravity and The Name of the Rose also failed, but we can forgive those, as in Gravity there are not that many women 200 miles above the earth and The Name of the Rose took place entirely in a cloistered medieval monastery.

In 2013, out of the top-grossing movies, those which passed the test earned about $4.22 billion while those which failed earned only about  $2.66 billion. Prior years show the same type of disparity. Maybe Hollywood should realize that well-written scripts which portray non-shallow female actors are more successful than those where the only women shown are obsessed about nothing except men.

The modified Bechdel test (i.e. the one where the female characters have to have names in order to count) is now being applied in Sweden as part of the official rating system of the movies.

*The movie Snakes on a Plane actually passes the test, as it features female flight attendants who discuss topics among themselves other than bedding the captain.

CENSORING MR. SKINNY LEGS

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For those of you who do not have access to a TV-watching toddler, you may not be aware of the British-made animated show Peppa Pig. Peppa is an innocent young shoat who lives in an idlyllic and bucolic universe with her family consisting of Mommy Pig, Daddy Pig, and her younger brother George. Many other anthropomorphic mammals make up her gentle world, and probably the most serious crisis she ever encounters is trying to find a friend for her pet goldfish (don't worry; she succeeds). In short, it is a very pleasant and suitable television program for youngsters who are not yet ready to realize how screwed up real life can be.

Nonetheless, one episode of Peppa Pig was banned in 2012 by the Australian Broadcasting System, and the same episode was later pulled in 2017 in Australia by the Nick Jr. network as "inappropriate for children."

What was the offensive content? Did it show Mommy Pig and Daddy Pig sharing the same bed? Did Mr. Wolf eat George? Was it that the shape of Peppa's head is too phallic?

Nope, none of these. The episode in question involved "Mr. Skinny Legs," a friendly spider. Peppa is initially alarmed when she finds Mr. Skinny Legs in her dollhouse. However, once she is informed by Daddy Pig that spiders "can't hurt you," she happily plays with Mr. Skinny Legs and hosts a dollhouse tea party in his honor. 

British spiders are, on the whole, pretty woosie, and you could  get away with cavorting with them without inscribing Thanatos on your dance card. Not so in Australia, where there are deadly arachnid species like redbacks and funnel-webs which can go medieval on you with a blowtorch and pliers. The Australian broadcasters simply did not want to encourage younglings to handle creatures which could turn out to be lethal--although Nick Jr. did initially resist pulling the show on the basis that Mr. Skinny Legs did not look "real."

Peppa and her friends can easily be found on YouTube. To view the controversal Skinny Legs episode, please click here.

THE STRANGE D-DAY SAGA OF YANG KYOUNGJONG

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It appears likely that the first enemy combatants captured by the Allied forces during the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, were not Germans. They were Koreans.

Yang Kyoungjong, one of the Koreans, joined the Japanese Army in 1938 after it had conquered Korea (it is not clear if he did so voluntarily or involuntarily). He was used as cannon fodder by the Japanese in their undeclared border war with the USSR and Mongolia. The Russians captured him and then used him as cannon fodder against the Germans. The Germans captured him and intended to use him as cannon fodder against the Allies. He was then apprehended by the Allies early on in the Normandy invasion. His three Korean companions who were rounded up with him had similar military experiences. 

It would have completed the cycle had the Americans then impressed Kyoungjong for use against the Japanese, but his captors thought at first that he was Japanese himself and instead kept him penned up as a prisoner of war in a camp in England (after all, he had been caught in a German uniform). 

After the war, he moved to Evanston, Illinois and lived there until he died in 1992. His children had no knowledge of his exploits until after his death.