THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY (FORTUNATELY)

By Natalie Maynor [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

During World War II, German U-boats roamed the Gulf of Mexico looking for Allied shipping from southern ports. Once in a while, a Nazi sub would intercept a civilian pleasure craft and then let it go after pillaging it for food and water. Ernest Hemingway, who resided in Cuba at the time, convinced the US Navy to loan him a Thompson submachine gun and grenades so that he could go hunting for subs in the Pilar, his 38-foot cabin cruiser/fishing boat (pictured above). Hemingway's plan was to entice a surfaced sub to approach his boat for boarding. He would then kill any of the crew on the deck of the U-boat with his Thompson and then drop grenades and a homemade explosive device down the conning tower to take care of the remaining enemy. 

Hemingway saw only one sub, and that one refused to take the bait and instead sailed off into the sunset. This was very fortunate for Hemingway's two young children, who often accompanied him on these missions. Notwithstanding the element of surprise, it was very naive and unrealistically optimistic of Hemingway to believe that a cabin cruiser, even one with a light machine gun and grenades, would not have been instantly annihilated by a trained German Kriegsmarine crew and the sub's deck gun. 

Some cynics have even suggested that the scheme was primarily a ruse so that Hemingway could endear himself to the Cuban authorities and obtain extra gas rations as well as avoid arrest while driving around drunk in his boat.

THE HIGH-COST ALTERNATIVE TO LASIK

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Dr. Michael Barratt (second from the left in the above photo) is a Mission Specialist astronaut for NASA whose expertise is in space medicine. He was originally nearsighted and needed glasses to see distant objects, while his close-up vision was fine (apparently, you do not have to have 20-20 eyesight to be a Mission Specialist). After several months in space, his vision altered permanently so that he can now see far objects perfectly but needs reading glasses.

This change resulted from a condition called papilledema, which is a swelling of the optic disk in the eye. It affects a large percentage of male astronauts. Essentially, weightlessness alters the shape of the eye. In Barratt's case, his optic nerves became flattened and his retinas developed folds in them. Sometimes the change is temporary; often it is not. Since it can lead to blindness, it is of major concern to NASA, especially if NASA ever gets its funding back to commence long-term 

manned (or womanned) 

space exploration, including missions to other planets.

For some unknown reason, no female in space has ever developed papilledema.

PILGRIM POOCHES

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The records are scarce concerning the importation of dogs to the New World on the Mayflower. However, it is known through a 17th century publication that Pilgrim John Goodman did bring with him a mastiff and an English springer spaniel. He reported that he was glad for the presence of the dogs when he was lost in the woods and heard the cry of lions (probably cougars), and the spaniel in another incident cowered with him and provided limited moral support when he was surrounded by, but not attacked by, wolves. Goodman died within a year of coming to America, but his canines no doubt found employment with someone else thereafter.

There are no records of cats on the Mayflower. Cats were commonly found on ships during that era due to their rodent-killing proclivities and were ubiquitous in English households at that time. It is very likely that several cats traveled to America with the Pilgrims but that no one made a note of it because it would not have been regarded as a remarkable event. Domesticated felines were definitely in New England by 1634, as there is a report indicating that they saved crops from squirrels and chipmunks during that year.

#178--THE INFERNAL COAL TORPEDO

Thomas Courtenay was a St. Louis businessman who developed the "coal torpedo" for use by the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The coal torpedo was a hollow chunk of iron about four inches on each side which was forged to resemble a piece of coal. The torpedo was filled with gunpowder and plugged. It was then coated with beeswax and covered with coal dust so that it looked exactly like a hunk of bituminous. 

Courtenay entered into an agreement with the Confederate government where he was placed on rolls of the Confederate Secret Service and he and his employees threw coal torpedos into refueling bins used by the US Navy or by US freighters.

Eventually, the coal torpedo would make its way onto a US vessel and then into the firebox of the boat, where it would explode from the heat. The explosion by itself would not be able to sink the vessel, but it was enough to rupture the ship's steam boiler. The resulting boiler explosion would cause extensive death, injury, and fire on the vessel and sometimes did result in the ship sinking.

The same concept was adopted in World War II to be used by various resistance groups to sabotage Nazi-controlled steam locomotives, by German saboteurs against American coal-powered plants, and by the British with their dreaded rat bomb.

#177--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 SEARS KENMORE BABY COOKER AND BODY PART ROASTER

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Sears once offered on its website a Kenmore gas grill under "Human Cooking > Grills to Cook Babies and More > Body Part Roaster."  The description ran for a half-day on August 20, 2009, until it was pulled.  Sears claimed, quite convincingly, that it was not responsible for the questionable verbiage.

For further information, as well as a picture of the offending listing, please take a gander at Snopes.

HOW TO BECOME A POD PERSON

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The latest innovation in travel lodging can be found primarily in Japan but has also spread to a few other countries. It is the "capsule hotel," where the weary traveler can rent what is essentially a well-furnished kennel for his (many of these hotels will not rent to females) overnight stay, which includes a TV, wi-fi, heating and cooling, a bed, a desk, and a large red button which can be pressed to provide, at extra cost, porno movies. Each "room" is a plastic pod of about 6.5 feet by 3.3 feet by 4 feet (2 m by 1 m by 1.25 m).

There is a communal bathroom and a locker room for the traveler's suitcase. The hotel provides sleepwear for use in the cubicle.

The cost per night is usually about $20 to $40 US. 

DISSED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Walt Disney's musical about leprechauns, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, received a rave review from The New York Times when the film was released in 1959. Lavish commendations were heaped on most of the cast. One exception, however, was made for the 29-year old actor who played the romantic male lead. He was condemned with the faint praise of being "merely tall, dark, and handsome" with the clear implication that he was eye candy but could not act.

Despite this set-back, the actor, Sean Connery, managed to salvage his career, at least to some extent, when he appeared in several more pictures after he secured the role in 1962 of James Bond in Dr. No.

Darbvy O'Gill and the Little People is in fact worth watching, if for no other reason than to hear James Bond sing.

THE START OF A LAMENTABLE AMERICAN TRADITION

There have been quite a few assassination schemes and attempts against American Presidents--probably a lot more than we realize.

The first known such endeavor occurred on January 30, 1835. Richard Lawrence, a mentally ill housepainter, attempted to shoot 67-year-old Andrew Jackson with a pistol after Jackson left a funeral in the House Chamber of the Capitol. Inexplicably, the gun did not go off. Jackson became peeved and started beating Lawrence with his cane. Lawrence then pulled out another pistol, which also misfired. Lawrence was eventually subdued and disarmed by Davy Crockett and others in Jackson's party.

Lawrence was found by a jury to be not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution and died in 1861.

Jackson was convinced that Lawrence was hired by the Whigs to kill him, but there is no evidence to support this paranoia.

The two pistols were tested extensively by researchers at the Smithsonian Institute about a hundred years later, and they consistently functioned perfectly. Some learned guy calculated that the odds of both of them misfiring were one in 125,000. The day of the attempted assassination was damp and humid, and those conditions may have contributed to the end result.

A BALLSY MANUEVER

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

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

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

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

PROJECT 1794

In 1956, the U.S. Air Force, along with the corporation Avro Canada, embarked on Project 1794, which was the development of a flying saucer which was intended to be used to intercept enemy bombers.  The saucer would be able to take off vertically and turn on a dime.  It would have a top speed of 2,300 to 3,000 miles per hour and would be able to function in altitudes up to 100,000 feet. Later on, the U.S. Army become involved with the expectation that a smaller version of the aircraft could replace the helicopter in transporting troops and equipment.

Avro actually built a functional prototype which looks suspiciously like many flying saucers spotted during the UFO craze.  However, the government abandoned the project in 1961 due to its disappointment in the performance of the aircraft.  Specifically, the government determined that the fact that the prototype became unstable and unflyable in altitudes higher than three feet and could achieve a top speed of only 35 MPH made it unsuitable either to replace helicopters or to shoot down Russian aircraft. 

For further information, please click here.

HOW TO FIND A VAMPIRE

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For centuries, vampire experts had relied on using a naked virgin child and a virgin horse as a means of locating any nosferatu who might be buried in a graveyard. The child was placed on the horse and the horse was led throughout the cemetery. The horse would stop and refuse to go forward should it encounter a plot containing the undead.

Conservative authorities on vampirism insisted that both the child and the horse must be male and that the horse must be pure white. Their more liberal brethen stated that the sex of the participants did not matter and that the horse could be any color, as long as it was solid without any contrasting markings.