NOBODY KNOWS THE TRUFFLES I'VE SEEN

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

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

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

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

ASSESSING PRIORITIES

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

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

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

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#421--THE BLEW WHALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE ENIGMA OF THE CHESHIRE CAT

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

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

EATING ON THE FLY

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE H-

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

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

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

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

THE SELF-RELIANT DR. KANE

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

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

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

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

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

INFANT SARTORIAL CHROMATIC TRUISMS

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

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PRESERVING THE NUCLEAR FAMILY

In 1951, two years after the Soviets obtained the atomic bomb, and for decades thereafter, virtually every U.S. schoolchild was exposed to the public service film Duck and Cover, featuring Bert the Turtle. In the opening of the movie (which you can view in its entirety here), the chelonian is sauntering down the road, jauntily wearing a hard hat, when he realizes that behind him a monkey on a branch of a tree is setting off  a stick of dynamite suspended on a string. Bert "ducks for cover" by retreating into his shell, and the evil simian (who is obviously a commie pinko Ruskie) disappears in the blast and is presumably and appropriately atomized. The film then explains that should a child encounter an unanticipated atomic explosion, he should immediately duck underneath his desk or any other available shielding and cover his exposed skin and eyes.

For decades thereafter, smug youth who had grown up in the atomic age ridiculed with copious quantities of condescension the naivete of those who proposed that crawling underneath a desk could provide any sort of protection in the event of a nuclear explosion. 

Admittedly, Bert was dealing with smaller one-stage fission explosions, not the later-developed far more massive two-stage multi-megaton hydrogen bombs. However, for the most part, Bert's advice was sage and still is so. Of course, anyone relatively close to an atomic blast is likely to be vaporized instantaneously, while victims a little further away will have a couple of seconds to succumb to a horrible fiery death. However, for those persons a greater distance from the detonation, ducking and covering would in numerous (but, of course, not all) cases increase the chances of survival. 

In the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, many persons were far enough from the detonation that they would have lived but for the fact that they got up and looked out the window to see what the source of bright light was--only to be shredded by shards of glass when the blast wave hit the window several seconds later. A similar phenomenon occurred during the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion, where a school teacher told her 44 children to duck and cover while she remained standing. The kids ended up fine, while the teacher suffered serious and paneful lacerations from the flying glass.

Also, in the Japanese bombings, some victims received substantial protection, even with just a thin layer of covering, from the thermal effects of the blast--with some showing third-degree burns on exposed skin with no injury on the parts of the body covered with clothing. In another example, a telephone pole located behind a bush showed no charring on its parts which were shadowed by leaves from the bush, but it was burned black on the portions not so protected.

"Duck and cover" states that whenever possible, the person hide behind a substantial barrier between him and the explosion, even if it just means falling face down in the street next to a curb. The barrier will impede, at least in part, the total amount of gamma radiation (which is emitted in straight lines from the blast) absorbed by the victim.

Naysayers also argue that being caught in a building in a nuclear zone simply means that you will suffer certain death by being buried and crushed in the rubble. Studies of other tragedies involving collapsing buildings show that stout objects like desks create cavities which can protect persons underneath--at least creating better odds than merely standing up in a room waiting for the roof to come down. 

A few persons in reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima as close as 170 meters and 300 meters to ground zero (well within the open-air lethal zone for exposure to the radiation, blast, and thermal effects) survived with only minor injuries.

Would following "duck and cover" procedures make nuclear war anything but a horrific experience? Of course not. Is it not quite possible that a child initially surviving such a conflict would ultimately die from fallout, disease, exposure, C.H.U.D.s, or many other things? Absolutely. However, the standard alternative advice by the nattering nabobs of negativism of "Stick your head between your legs and kiss your a-- goodbye" does seem a tad defeatist.

Duck and Cover was not the only atomic warfare education provided. In 1967, gym classes for the boys in my high school were preempted for a couple of months in order to teach a variety of potentially relevant skills such as using a dosimeter, reading a Geiger counter, assembling survival supplies, and building a fallout shelter. It apparently was presumed that either the girls could not master this information or that they simply did not need to do so. After all, the males now knew what to do and would presumably protect the weaker sex.

And no, the Duck and Cover film did not even mention either the thumb test or riding the blast out in a refrigerator.

And, if you wish to see further how Hollywood envisions nuclear Armageddon, there are many examples from which to choose.