MALARIA--THE WONDERDRUG

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From 1917 through the mid-1940s, tertiary syphilis was treated by intentionally infecting the patient with malaria. The malaria would provoke a sustained high fever which essentially cooked the syphilis spirochete. The malaria would thereafter be treated with quinine. A 15% mortality rate and the introduction of new antibiotics against syphilis led to the abandonment of this regime.

The author of this procedure, Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 as a result. 

On a side note, Wagner-Jauregg also believed that "excessive masturbation" was a symptom of schizophrenia, and he treated those who were so afflicted by sterilization. 

During WWI, he was angered by German soldiers who claimed to be too mentally upset to return to the battlefield. He treated these individuals with "extreme electric shock therapy," which killed large numbers of them. It took the intervention of Sigmund Freud to convince the post-war German government not to prosecute Wagner-Jauregg criminally.

Notwithstanding the fact that his wife was Jewish, the doctor became a devout Nazi until his death in 1940. Ironically, because his wife was Jewish, his application for membership in the Nazi Party was denied.  

FDR'S MURDER CONFESSION

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Franklin Roosevelt had a theory that people were so much in awe of his position that they never paid attention to what he actually was saying.  He tested his hypothesis numerous times, with great success, at social events where he would tell a guest "I murdered my grandmother this morning."  Almost invariably, the recipient of this information would nod agreeably or remark "that's nice" or something equally innocuous.

THE GREAT AND WONDERFUL OZ COINCIDENCE

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During the 1939 filming of The Wizard of Oz, the wardrobe folks were combing second-hand shops looking for a coat to be worn by the huckster character Professor Marvel. They were seeking "grandeur gone to seed" and found in a used clothing store a Prince Albert style coat which had obviously been very elegant and expensive when new but which had since become ratty with age.

One day during filming, the actor portraying Professor Marvel turned out one of the pockets of the coat and found the name on it of "L. Frank Baum." L. Frank Baum, who died in 1919, had achieved fame and fortune in 1900 when he wrote "The Wizard of Oz." The studio thereafter confirmed with Baum's tailer in Chicago and with Baum's widow that he had owned the actual coat in question.

THE KEY TO DETROIT

Since 1702, a revered tradition in the United States (and earlier in other parts of the world) has been the presentation by the mayor of a municipality or his delegate of "the key to the city" to certain select individuals. Although in modern times the key is usually a large prop which does not unlock anything, it still represents an award to an individual whom the city wishes to honor and revere. The prestige of such a tribute is usually in proportion to the size of the city presenting it.

In 1980, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young arranged for the Detroit Key to the City to be presented to the leader of a foreign country. His name was Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who had recently achieved his exalted position by liquidating 21 government officials, including 5 Ministers of the state.

While did Young do this? Part of the reason may have been that Hussein had been donating money to various Chaldean (a Middle Eastern form of Catholicism) churches around the world and had included a $250,000 gift to the Chaldean church in Detroit. What is more likely the primary reason was that, at the time, the USA was really not getting along very well with Iran and wanted to ingratiate itself with Iran's archenemy, Iraq. It is widely suspected that the U.S. Department of State encouraged the presentation of the key in order to suck up to Hussein.

For further info on the history of "the key to the city" as well as the presentation of it by Detroit to a scum-sucking murderous despot, please click here in the Today I Found Out website.

Shakil Mustafa at the English language Wikipedia

[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

 via Wikimedia Commons

BEATING THE ODDS AT COIN-FLIPPING

 

With most coins, if you flip them, you will have a slightly better chance of getting tails than heads.  This is because coins usually have a bust or portrait on the obverse which makes that side a wee bit heavier than the weight provided by the design on the reverse.  If you were to flip a U.S. penny (the kind with the Lincoln Memorial on the back) 1,000 times, it would probably come up heads about 495 times and tails 505.

THE EXPLOITS OF DR. MEDICINE CROW

To be even eligible to be a War Chief, a Crow Indian warrior had to perform the following four tasks:

1)    Disarm an enemy

2)    Touch an enemy without killing him or being killed

3)    Lead a war party on a successful mission

4)    Steal a horse

As may be expected, the encroachment of European-style civilization severely curtailed opportunities for braves who were born in the 20th Century to achieve War Chief status.

This brings us to Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow High-Bird, who was born in 1913. Dr. Medicine Crow was the proud descendant of the Crow scout who provided intelligence for George Custer at the Little Big Horn (you could conceivably argue that this scout did not do the best job in the world, but that is a topic for another day). Medicine Crow joined the Army in World War II and was a member of the 103rd Infantry Division. Like his ancestor, he acted as a scout behind enemy lines. In tribute to his heritage, he always wore war paint underneath his uniform and carried a sacred yellow-dyed eagle feather inside of his helmet.

At one point, he was ordered to take seven men, scrounge up some explosives, and blow up a section of the Siegfried line. This was the heavily fortified barrier on the German border, and the Germans took strong umbrage at his actions. Despite heavy machine-gun fire, Medicine Crow and his men fulfilled their mission without any casualties and breached the German fortifications. Task No. 3 accomplished.

Later on, Medicine Crow became separated from his lines and collided with a German soldier. Medicine Crow took the German's rifle and nearly choked him to death until the German cried out for his mother.  Medicine Crow released his choke hold and took the German back as a prisoner. Tasks 1 and 2 accomplished.

Finally, Medicine Crow spotted during one of his scouting mission a bevy of German officers holed up on farm with their thoroughbred horses. Medicine Crow sneaked in, mounted one horse, and led another fifty away, singing a Crow war song while the irate Germans ran into the corral in  their underwear and took pot shots at him with their handguns. Task 4 accomplished.

Medicine Crow did a lot of other good stuff during the war. When he returned home, he was awarded the title of War Chief, which he did not realize he had earned until his tribal elders pointed it out to him.  No person has achieved that honor since then.

Dr. Medicine Crow also was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honor, received three honorary PhDs, and authored nearly a dozen books on military history. He had been the official historian for his tribe for over fifty years.

In August of 2009, he traveled to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom--the highest honor awarded to American civilians--for his combined military service and all the work he has done to help improve the lives of the people of the Crow people. He personally led the ceremonial dance after the ceremony.  

This brave warrior and decent human being passed on in 2016 at the age of 102.

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THE AMBIGUOUSLY-WORDED DINNER INVITATION

Issei Sagawa was born in Japan in 1949 of weathy parents. As a youth, he indulged in bestiality with his pet dog. At the age of 23, he broke into the Tokyo residence of a German women with the intent to consume a gobbet of her flesh. She resisted, and Sagawa escaped unsatiated. He was charged with attempted rape when he failed to reveal to the police his true motivation for the attack.

At the age of 28, he emigrated to France to acquire a Ph.D. in literature at the Sorbonne University. While there, he frequently brought home prostitutes with the intent of shooting them, but he could never force himself to pull the trigger.

In 1981, Sagawa invited a classmate home for dinner but failed to advise her in advance that she was going to be the main course. He was apprehended by the French authorities after he threw the unconsumed portions of her body into a lake. 

Sagawa's wealthy father provided him with the best legal assistance available, and the French court determined that he was demented and insane, dropped the criminal charges, and ordered him confined to a mental hospital. After noted author Inuhiko Yomota wrote a book about his exploits, Sagawa achieved celebrity status. The French government, not pleased about the publicity the case was engendering, deported Sagawa to Japan where he was promptly confined to a mental institution.

France sealed its records on the case and refused to provide them to the Japanese authorities. In addition, Sagawa had not been convicted of any crime in connection with the classmate consumption. Consequently, Sagawa's escapades in France could not serve as a basis to deprive him of his liberty. The Japanese psychiatrists all concluded that he was a pervert but that he was not insane and that he knew all along exactly what he was doing. In other words, he was simply evil. However, because Sagawa had not committed a crime in Japan, he was able to check himself out of the hospital in 1986 and remained a free man  until his death from natural causes in 2022.

The reason we know as much as we do about the exploits and intentions of Sagawa arises from the fact that he made a career out of writing about and lecturing about his horrific acts. The closest thing to remorse that he had expressed was his opining that having a reputation as a murderer and cannibal is a terrible punishment. 

As noted in Wikipedia, Sagawa's continued freedom was "widely criticized." Well, duh.

For further information on Sagawa, click here. 

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THREE OUT OF FOUR AIN'T BAD

Photo stolen from Matthew Thompson

The state in the USA which lies furthest to the north is Alaska.

The state in the USA which lies furthest to the west is Alaska.

The state in the USA which lies furthest to the east is Alaska (the part of Alaska which lies west of the 180th meridian is eastier than Asia, Europe, and Maine).

"SHORTIE" LICENSE PLATES

For many years, the length of license plates in Illinois and some other states was based on the number of digits on the plate and, to a limited extent, the width of the first numeral. A plate containing only three digits on it was much shorter than one with seven. A seven-digit plate beginning with "1" was usually slightly shorter than a plate beginning with "2."

In 1956, Illinois, like most other political divisions in the USA, Canada, and Mexico, standardized all its automobile and truck plates at 6 inches by 12 inches.

THE LOUSIEST MOVIE EVER MADE?

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Many movie critics name Edward Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, starring Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson, and Vampira as the worst picture ever made, notwithstanding the fact that I can think of some Jack Nicholson examples which should by all rights be tied for this honor. Plan 9, turned loose on the world in 1959, was the last movie starring Lugosi, even though Wood did not even conceive of the picture until after Lugosi's death in 1956. Wood used some stock footage he had earlier shot of Lugosi in a vampire cape and then employed Wood's wife's chiropractor as a stand-in for Lugosi for the rest of the film. Because the chiropractor bore little resemblance to Lugosi, the chiropractor was filmed in all of his sequences holding his cape in front of his face.

The Lugosi dubbing was only a very small problem with the feature, which was also a quintessential example of poor acting, paper-plate-on-a-string flying saucer special effects, contrived dialogue, rampant continuity errors, illogical plot lines, boom mikes captured in shots, and just plain weird stuff, such as a commercial airliner whose cockpit appears devoid of any instruments.

It clearly is one of those movies worth seeing because it is so bad.

Incidentally, it is quite possible that the 2008 release of The Machine Girl may have been a valiant attempt to seize the worst-picture-ever-made title away from Plan 9. Watch the trailer at your own risk. It is gory. You have been warned. I do have to admit, however, that its "drill bra" concept is rather intriguing.

THE OSTENTATIOUSNESS OF BINION'S

From 1964 to 1999, Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas had 100 $10,000 bills on display in its lobby. The collection was finally broken up in anticipation of the casino's insolvency, and the bills were sold individually to collectors. Some of the bills brought as high as $160,000 apiece, i.e. 16 times their face value, which is not as impressive if you consider that a penny sold in 2015 for $2.585 million, i.e. 258,500,000 times its face value.

A new Binion's casino has risen from the ashes, and it again has $1,000,000 on display--but only with boring, ordinary types of bills no greater than $100.

By National Museum of American History
through Wikimedia Commons

THE BAYONET HOE

 

A well-used 1943 U. Fork & Hoe bayonet cut from sixteen inches down to ten. 

One wonders of the tales it could tell were it able to speak. 

A quintessential example of beating swords into plowshares was promulgated in 1943 by the Union Fork and Hoe Company of Columbus, Ohio. 

From 1905 through 1942, the U.S. War Department required bayonets with a 16-inch blade for its primary battle rifles. However, due to the inconvenience of carrying the longer blades in aircraft and tanks, as well as the fact that  modern warfare no longer required, at least on a major scale, the need to have a bayonet long enough to go through the chest cavity of an enemy horse, the War Department specified a new length of only 10 inches. 

Companies who had been making the 16-inch bayonets, such as U. Fork and Hoe, were commissioned to shorten the blades on their existing stock of 16-inch bayonets, as well as the bayonets already in the government inventory, to 10 inches. In a synergistic flash of inspiration which combined patriotic marketing with recycling, U. Fork and Hoe converted the cut-off bayonet tips into blades for both individual hoes as well as larger farm implements.

For photos of the U. Fork and Hoe bayonet hoe, please click here.

Many collectors of these World War II bayonets have learned to their chagrin that they must be very careful in their enunciation when uttering "U. Fork and Hoe" in the presence of their wives or girlfriends.

HITCHCOCK'S LOST MOVIE RISES FROM THE GRAVE

One of Alfred Hitchcock's early films, The White Shadow (1924), was about twin sisters--one good and one evil.  It is doubtful that is has any connection to the Ken Howard TV show of the same name. The movie bombed in the box office, and eventually all known copies had either disappeared or had simply decomposed, having been recorded on unstable nitrate-based film.

However, in 2011, the first three of the six reels in the movie turned up in New Zealand.  They had been in the storage rooms of the New Zealand Film Archives since 1989.  The Archives had inherited the reels from a local projectionist, Jack Murtagh, who had kept them and hundreds of other early films in his garden shed.

Murtagh was not a movie thief.  Because of the flammability of nitrate film, it was very expensive to transport it.  Since New Zealand was usually the end of the theatrical line, most movie companies simply abandoned the films in New Zealand rather than pay the cost of shipping them back.  Murtagh merely retrieved the discarded reels from the trash bin.

The three surviving reels of The White Shadow are in surprisingly excellent condition.  If the other three reels are ever found, the completed movie would be worth millions of dollars.

To watch the three available reels, click here.

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THE ANGUISH OF LEONARD SHERMAN

NORMAL

INVERT

In 1962, the United States Post Office Department issued a yellow, black, and brown commemorative stamp honoring Dag Hammarskjold, who had been the Secretary-General of the United Nations and who had died in a plane crash in the previous year. New Jersey jeweler Leonard Sherman was extremely jubilant when he obtained a sheet of the stamps from the post office and discovered that the yellow color on his sheet had been printed upside down. Sherman realized that previous examples of this type of inverted printing error in other issues of stamps had made those items worth incredible sums of money.

Unfortunately, Sherman should have kept his mouth shut and let the smoke clear before he announced his discovery. Postmaster J. Edward Day, upon hearing about Sherman's find, remarked snarkily that, "The Post Office Department is not running a jackpot operation." Day promptly ordered the printing of an additional 40 million stamps, all with the yellow color upside down, in order to destroy the rarity of Sherman's stamps and to screw him out of his good fortune.

(STAMP PHOTOS FROM SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM ARAGO WEBSITE, WHICH IS COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT OF AND NOT ASSOCIATED WITH  "HENRY'S DAILY FACTOIDS.")

THE GREATEST AMBASSADOR OF ALL

As anyone who has heard the 1958 novelty song Beep-Beep (recorded by The Playmates) knows, the American Motors Corporation, especially in the 1950s, had a reputation for building solid but boring underpowered small cars suitable primarily for transporting little old ladies to supermarkets and places of worship. However, the 1957 Nash Ambassador belies that stodgy stereotype.

First of all, by 1957 standards, it was big at 209 inches long--six inches longer than a '57 Chevy Bel Air. If you got the configuration with the full-sized bumper and continental kit spare tire, you had 219 inches of vehicle--over a foot longer than a 2019 Ford Flex SUV/station wagon. It was powered by a 327 cubic inch V-8 (the '57 Corvette had only 283 cubic inches in the largest engine option available). Most Ambassadors, unlike many cars of the era, contained an automatic transmission.

It was highly-styled and was the first car equipped with quad headlights.

Both front seats reclined (an unusual feature at that time); an optional rear seat was available which could convert into twin beds, which made the car very popular with androgen-driven teenage boys.

Unfortunately, 1957 was the last year for this glorious vehicle. Mitt's dad, George Romney, as CEO of AMC, killed it. However, you can still buy a used one. The car in the photo, for example, was available from the St. Louis Car Museum and Sales for $39,900, although it has been probably sold by now. However, you can often find others on the market by clicking here.

THE LORD HIGH EXECUTIONER

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Albert Anastasia a/k/a "The Mad Hatter" a/k/a "The Lord High Executioner" (1903-1957) accomplished the very ambitious achievement of becoming the most ruthless hoodlum who ever headed what became known as the Gambino Family crime syndicate in New York. Among his many homicides, he ordered the murder of a young clothing salesman who had spotted bank robber Willie Sutton on the subway and informed the police. Anastasia had nothing to do with the bank robbery or Willie Sutton; he just felt morally obligated on general principles to kill someone whom he thought was a squealer--even if the target was a civilian and not mobbed up.

Being notorious and engendering adverse publicity is not necessarily a good thing for a crime boss, and Anastasia was gunned down in the Park Avenue Hotel barbershop upon the orders of his understudy and successor Carlo Gambino. He tried to fight back, but in the heat of the moment, he attempted to attack his assailants' reflections in the mirror instead of the real thing.

For a more detailed chronicle of the Mad Hatter's illegal activities, including his role in Murder, Inc., please click here.

SERGEANT MAUDE

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Numerous television and movie actors--including but not limited to Peter Falk, Christopher Lee, and Lee Marvin--proudly served in the military in World War II. Actress Bea Arthur (formerly known as "Bernice Frankel"), darling of liberals everywhere and star of Norman Lear's Maude, did her duty in the United States Marine Corps for 2.5 years in World War II as a typist and truck driver and was discharged with the rank of Sergeant.  In her recruitment interview, she expressed a fondness for hunting with a bow and arrows or a .22 rifle.

Sadly, she apparently was later either embarrassed by her service or afraid that revelation of it would have had a negative impact on her Hollywood career. She consistently denied until her death in 2009 that she had ever been in the military.

By United States Marine Corps photographer
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

THE STIGMA OF CABBAGE

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It is against the rules of major league baseball in South Korea for a player to be in the possession of cabbage. This restriction arose in 2005 following a scandal where several pitchers were caught wearing frozen cabbage leaves underneath their caps as a means of keeping cool. It is unclear whether or not other green leafy vegetables are also barred from the playing field.

LOCOMOTIVE PYROMANIA

As any fan of westerns is aware, American steam locomotives in the 19th century frequently sported huge and flamboyant smokestacks. However, their brethren in most parts of Europe more often featured a modest little pipe as the smoke exhaler--a design which was ultimately also employed by later American steam locomotives.

The explanation for the two different styles is simple. Early American locomotives had available large tracts of virgin forests which could easily yield huge quantities of cordwood for fuel. Hence, in young America, it was most economical to employ wood-burning steam engines. One negative feature of this type of locomotive was that it spewed out prodigious quantities of sparks which would ignite vegetation along the roadbed as well as the garments of passengers. The large stack contained one of many variations of a spark arrestor which would lessen, but not totally eliminate, the risk of ember-induced fire.

European countries were more industrialized and had easy access to coal. The coal-powered locomotive was far less promiscuous about ember-belching and did not require, under most circumstances, elaborate spark arrestors. When the United States settled down and became more industrialized, it too used coal or oil as a fuel for its steam locomotives and converted to the dainty little smokestacks.

Ltshears, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Harveyqs at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

INDIANA JONES--WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

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Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was a famed paleontologist, explorer, and naturalist. While in the employ of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he led numerous expeditions in the 1920s to Mongolia and China, where he discovered fossils of several new mammal and dinosaur species (including Protoceratops and Velociraptor) as well as the first known fossilized dinosaur eggs. Andrews eventually became the Director of the museum.

He was proficient with firearms and needed to be, as his expeditions were conducted under hazardous conditions and often featured encounters with hostile Mongolian brigands. His descriptions of his adventures led to the stereotyping use of "Outer Mongolia" in cartoons and other examples of pop culture as a synonym for an extraordinarily remote area of the earth.

Many film experts believe that Andrews was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, although this rumor has never been officially confirmed by George Lucas. Andrews certainly was the prototype for other similar explorers in various adventure movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

He was also a renowned author, and I can still recall the joy I experienced when I was seven years old and discovered his seminal work All About Dinosaurs at the public library in the small town in which I was raised.

DIREWOLVES AS PETS

The extremely (and rightfully so) popular Game of Thrones on HBO featured feuding kingdoms in a dark and bloody medieval fantasy world. The sigil of House Stark (who were the good guys in the series--although there weren't that many of them left by the end) is that of a direwolf. In the show, a direwolf is essentially a gray wolf on steroids and is renowned for its strength, intelligence, and ferocity. Each of the five Stark children was given a direwolf puppy who grew up to protect loyally its respective master and who could be relied upon to rip out the throat of an attacker—a service which had to be rendered more often than you might think.

Early in the series, the direwolf named Lady, who was the pet of Sansa Stark, was put to death. However, the actress portraying Sansa (Sophie Turner) grew so fond of Lady during the brief time that Lady was on set that she adopted Lady in real life.

Lady (whose real name is Zunni) and her associates in the show, at least during the first season when the canine characters were not yet supposed to be fully-grown, were not actual direwolves. They were instead Northern Inuit dogs who look like wolves (although later in the series, gray wolves or wolf-dog hybrids and creative photography were used to illustrate the beasts as huge slavering adults). However, Northern Inuits cannot be relied upon to rip out throats whenever necessary. They are one of the most loveable and gentle breeds around, and it is unlikely that one would ever harm a human. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be incredibly stubborn and try to be the alpha dog over their owners, and they need masters who can devote a lot of time to them along with opportunities for a lot of daily exercise. Ironically, because it is possible that there is some wolf blood in their recent lineage, some local governments have sought to ban ownership of them.

Direwolves are not just fantasy creatures. Real dire wolves (generally spelled as two separate words when not used in a Game of Thrones context) actually existed. Most became extinct about 12,000 years ago, although some paleontologists speculate that a population may have lingered in Arkansas as late as 2000 BC.

Subsequent to preparing but prior to releasing the above factoid, I was gobsmacked to find out, on April 7, 2025, that Time Magazine revealed that a company named Colossal Biosciences had recreated three viable dire wolves which are at an undisclosed 2,000 acre location in the northern United States. Colossal compared the gene sequences from fossilized dire wolf bone fragments (one 13,000 years old, the other 72,000) with those of a modern gray wolf. It then modified the gray wolf sequence in twenty different places to accentuate the dire wolf traits, implanted the resulting eggs in large dogs, and produced one female and two male white wolves with thick fur, large bodies, extremely powerful jaws, and other dire wolf characteristics. As for their suitability as pets--probably not. They are already showing wolf-like tendencies to avoid people rather than dog-like tendencies to run up to a human for a belly-rub. Wolves generally make bad pets; huge wolves in a pack of only three without any parents to teach them how to act like wolves could be highly unpredictable and may not be the best choice to bring you your slippers, rescue Timmy in the well, or abstain from ripping out the throats of your neighbors.

Finally, can these be legitimately called dire wolves, or are they still "only" gray wolves, albeit genetically modified? I don't know. You decide.

Photo by Robert Clark for TIME

THE REBELLIOUS NEPHEW

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Herman Goering’s (pictured above) many duties during World War II included commanding the Luftwaffe and serving as the Deputy Führer under Adolf Hitler. He was no small-time Nazi-come-lately.

Werner Goering achieved notoriety as Herman’s nephew. Werner was raised as a Mormon after his father emigrated to Utah. During World War II, Werner joined the U.S. Army Air Force and become a B-17 pilot.

Civilian and military intelligence officials were very concerned about the above familial connection. They thoroughly investigated Werner and could find nothing to indicate that he was anything other than a loyal American and a very competent pilot. Nonetheless, they were still fearful about putting him in a position where he could, either voluntarily or involuntarily, be captured in Germany. At best, the propaganda potential for the Germans in such an event would be immense; at worse, Werner would intentionally land his bomber in Germany, cooperate with his uncle, and share classified information.

Notwithstanding the above, Werner flew 49 missions over Europe before the war ended. What he did not know was that his co-pilot, Jack Rencher, had been recruited by the FBI. Rencher, an expert pistol shot, was under standing orders to execute Werner if it ever appeared possible that Werner could be captured by the Germans. On one particularly bad mission, Rencher was concerned that the aircraft would not be able to make it back to England and was about to complete his assignment. Fortunately, they were able to reach home safely after all.

Werner and Rencher developed a great deal of respect for each other and remained good friends until Rencher’s death in 2010, notwithstanding the fact that after the war Rencher told Werner about the special assassination assignment.

Ironically, although Werner (and everyone else) believed for most of his life that he was Herman Goering’s nephew, recent investigation reveals that he was not. Apparently, Werner’s father had fostered the rumor that he was Hermann Goering's brother merely to gain respect by association from the Salt Lake City German community at an earlier time when his purported sibling was revered as a decorated World War I ace and had not yet pursued his new career as a despot and war criminal.

For more information about the travails of Werner, please read Stephen Frater's book  Hell Above Earth: The Incredible True Story of an American WWII Bomber Commander and the Copilot Ordered to Kill Him. 

  

THE DISNEYLAND DISQUALIFICATION

The current dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, was not originally slated by his father, Kim Jong-Il, a/k/a "Dear Leader, Who is a Perfect Incarnation of the Appearance That a Leader Should Have" (his actual title) to serve as Kim Jong-Il's successor in that office. That privilege had been reserved for Kim Jong-Un's older half-brother, Kim Jong-Nam (pictured below).

Unfortunately for Kim Jong-Nam, he was caught trying to go to Disneyland Tokyo with a forged passport in 2001. He was exiled to the People's Republic of China and had since traveled to numerous countries in the world. His wanderlust may not have been as much a product of a playboy lifestyle as a desire to avoid assassination attempts--especially since his brother had no problem condemning their uncle to death and executing him--according to some reports, by machine gun fire, according to others, by feeding him to starving dogs. Anything is possible in North Korea.

This just shows that you really have no idea with whom you might be rubbing shoulders at Disneyland.

On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong-Nam was killed by poison in Malaysia. You are not paranoid when someone really is out to get you.

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