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 GREYHOUND OF THE SEAS

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In 1903, Germany's ships had won the coveted Blue Riband for six years in a row. The Blue Riband was awarded annually to the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing by an ocean liner. The British government, embarrassed by the situation and, similar to the current American government, willing to go through the public money like it was toilet paper, loaned Cunard Lines 2.4 million pounds (equivalent to about 2 billion dollars today) at a low interest rate to construct two fast ocean liners capable of reclaiming the honor. The deal further provided that the British government would also pay Cunard a grant of 75,000 pounds a year as well as awarding Cunard a mail contract for an additional 68,000 pounds annually. There were strings attached—namely, the vessels had to be constructed to battleship standards so that they could be easily converted to warships in the event of a conflict and turned over to the Royal Navy. The specifications included the installation of mounts for a dozen large guns, the ability to achieve a speed of at least 24.5 knots, and the incorporation of longitudinal coal bunkers which ran down each side of the interior of the ship at the waterline. It was believed that these bunkers would provide extra protection to the ship against enemy shells at the waterline. The Admiralty ignored the fact that the protection would be totally ineffective against submarines, as their torpedoes would strike below the waterline.

When World War I broke out, one of the ships, the RMS Mauretania, was in fact turned over to the Navy and retrofitted as an auxiliary cruiser. The other vessel was rejected for service in the Navy because of excessive fuel consumption. With the ability to cross the Atlantic in four days and eleven hours, it proved to be the fastest ocean liner afloat and was nicknamed the “Greyhound of the Seas.” It was officially called the RMS Lusitania.

The Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk on May 7, 1915 by the German sub U-20 in the Irish Sea.

Tragically, it was the insistence of the Royal Navy that longitudinal coal bunkers be installed which insured that the single torpedo was adequate to bring down the ship. Because the Lusitania was near the end of its voyage from New York and had consumed most of the coal in the bunkers, the bunkers were for the most part empty. The forward inertia of the boat very quickly filled the bunkers with water through the hole caused by the explosion. The weight of the water when it filled all of the bunkers on one side toppled the ship towards starboard, causing the open portholes on that side also to swamp the ship with water at the rate of over 260 tons a minute. Had the boat been constructed with normal bunkers, it is quite likely that compartments of the ship where the blast from the torpedo occurred could have been sealed off with the vessel being injured but not sunk.

The Germans had previously advised that any ship flying British colors would be fair game in the waters around the British Isles. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill expressed hope that the sinking of the Lusitania would bring America into the war as a result of the loss of the 128 Americans who were part of the total death toll of 1,198 (and, in fact, some historians claim that the British government affirmatively put the Lusitania at risk so that this would happen). Although the sinking galvanized American resentment against Germany, the United States still resisted entering into the conflict. After all, it was widely suspected that the Lusitania had been carrying munitions (which was true, by the way), the ship was flying a British flag, and it had entered a zone where the Germans warned that it could be sunk. The Germans did not merely provide the warning through diplomatic channels; they had also run notices in fifty American newspapers, including those in New York.

Had the Americans stayed out of the war, the British Admiralty predicted that Great Britain would have to sue for peace by November of 1917 due to the losses of shipping attributable to the German Navy. However, as a classic example of the axiom “when a pig becomes a hog, it gets slaughtered,” the Germans committed two major blunders which precipitated America's entry into the conflict. The first was the Zimmerman telegram, where the Germans suggested to Mexico that it might want to consider becoming an ally of Germany, invading the USA, and reclaiming part of the territory it had lost in the prior century. The second was a policy originated by German Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff in early 1917 establishing that all traffic in the restricted waters around Britain be sunk, regardless of the vessel's flag or nationality. Germany started attacking American ships, and the rest literally is history.

For further detailed information about the Lusitania and its last voyage, I recommend reading Erik Larson's excellent book Dead Wake.

Parenthetically, the torpedoing of the Lusitania inspired artist Fred Spear in 1915 to produce one of the simplest yet most devastatingly effective propaganda posters ever:

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.

THE TRACTOR COMPANY ANOMALY

General George S. Patton wrote that, “In my opinion, the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised."* The "U. S. rifle, caliber .30, M1," also known as the Garand, was the standard infantry weapon of U.S. troops in World War II, and its 8-round semi-automatic configuration gave the American soldier a distinct advantage over those German, Italian, and Japanese counterparts who were equipped with slower and lower-capacity bolt-action service weapons. About 3.5 million Garands were made by the government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts by the end of the war, and these were supplemented by approximately a half-million more made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven, Connecticut.

Once the war ended and most of the troops went home, the Army had a glut of unneeded Garands, and it couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting unused rifles. Then, the Korean War came along. The remaining supply of surplus WWII Garands was not going to be enough for that conflict, and production resumed.

Obviously, the Springfield Armory was called upon to crank out more new rifles. However, Winchester was not. Instead, the nod was given to the International Harvester Company in Evansville, Indiana. IHC did a great job making vehicles and farm equipment, but it had never produced a firearm. Winchester, of course, was one of the country's most renowned arms maker, had a reputation for high quality (including its WWII Garands), and already had all of the tooling to make the weapons. Why did the tractor factory get the contract instead of the gun company?

The answer is simple--geography. Springfield Armory was within sixty miles of the Winchester plant in New Haven. In fact, most of the country's leading arms manufacturers were in New England and relatively close to the Atlantic Seaboard. The government was concerned that the Soviets, who had just obtained the atomic bomb, could launch an air strike from a carrier in the Atlantic and take out all Garand production at once if Winchester was the selected contractor. In this pre-ICBM era, however, it would have been very difficult for the Ruskies to nuke Evansville, Indiana.

IHC eventually made about 338,000 Garands before it ceased production in 1956. There were a lot of manufacturing glitches, and IHC struggled to meet quotas. The rifles IHC did make were of fine quality and met government standards, but it took IHC quite a bit of effort to do so.

Once at least one source of Garand production was established in the Midwest, the government did award one more contract to another New England gun company--Harrington and Richardson Arms Company of Worcester, Massachusetts. This outfit made approximately 429,000 copies until 1956. American** Garand production altogether ceased in 1957.

Today, all Garands, regardless of the manufacturer or country of origin are highly prized by collectors. The IHC "tractor Garands" are especially so. First, not many of them were produced. Second, a large number of them were sent to Iran as surplus arms when the Shah was still in power, and the current regime has shown no real inclination to return them.

If this factoid was not enough to satisfy your insatiable lust for IHC Garand information, check out this article in The American Rifleman.

*Movie buffs realize from watching Jaws that the M1 rifle is also the greatest implement ever devised for punching a hole in an oxygen tank when the tank is in a great white shark's maw. They also realize from viewing Gran Torino that the M1 rifle is likewise the greatest implement ever devised to encourage compliance with the request "Get off of my lawn."

**Some Garands were made in Italy under license by the US government (obviously, after Italy had surrendered in WWII) by Beretta and the Breda Armory for use by Italian armed forces.

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.

A review of the top-grossing movies in 2013 revealed that those which passed the test earned about $4.22 billion while those which failed earned only about  $2.66 billion. Other 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.

THE HANGMAN

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One of the heaviest burdens on any President of the United States (or, at least, it should be one of the heaviest burdens) is the fact that, as Commander-in-Chief, he is called upon on a daily basis to make decisions which are literally life-and-death. Those Presidents with military backgrounds may enter the Oval Office with previous experience with this type of pressure, while a few have even personally taken lives on the battlefield or ordered military executions to take place. Andrew Jackson went one step further by fighting numerous duels prior to achieving the Presidency, including at least one which resulted in the death of his opponent.

There is one President, however, who was an actual executioner. Grover Cleveland, most famous for serving non-consecutive terms as the 22nd and 24th President, was a highly regarded and ambitious lawyer in the early 1870s. He was convinced to run for the Sheriff of Erie County, New York--a job which was a considerable political plum and which would yield over $20,000 (over $350,000 in today's dollars) to the office holder. Cleveland won the post but was not pleased by the fact that the Sheriff's duties included executing the death penalty within the county.

Prior Sheriffs in Erie County had resolved this moral dilemna simply by appointing a Deputy Sheriff to perform the gruesome task. Cleveland believed that the letter of the law as well as his own concept of integrity required that he do the dirty work himself and not pass it on to a subordinate--especially since the Deputy who had previously administered the punishment and his family were being exposed to public mockery. Consequently, Cleveland personally conducted the two hangings* which arose during his term of office, even though the process literally made him sick for several days thereafter.

Cleveland's hanging prowess was raised by his detractors later on in his political career in order to paint him as cold-blooded and heartless; however, the issue actually garnered more votes for him from the law-and-order crowd than any he may have lost from those opposed to the death penalty.

For a 1912 New York Times article on Cleveland the Hangman, click here. Oddly, enough, the article only discusses Cleveland's first execution.

*Some sources indicate that Cleveland actually performed a total of three, not two, hangings.

ARE YOU INTELLIGENT?

IQ is a measure of how fast you can acquire new information, not the amount of information you know. In other words, even if you have a high IQ, if you do not bother to acquire new information, you can simultaneously be ignorant and a genius at the same time.

Even if you do not want to shell out a bunch of bucks for a formal IQ test, psychologist and author Dr. Travis Bradberry assures us that there are a few things which can provide a clue that you have a high IQ, notwithstanding the particular factual information which may or may not reside within your skull.

The first indication is your level of anxiety. Tests have shown that people with high levels of anxieties generally score better on intelligence tests than their more laid-back associates. If being anxious makes one smart, then the current Presidential election is going to drive a lot of Americans into genius status.

The second thing to consider is whether or not you are an early reader. People who read at an early age tend to score higher on IQ tests. Although it might seem obvious that people who are intelligent were able to read at an earlier age, further investigation suggests that the people became smart because they read earlier and that the early reading helped to boost their IQ.

Another relevant item is whether or not you are a comedian. People who are funny and witty score high in verbal intelligence and abstract reasoning. So, why did the calf walk around his mother? To get to the udder side. If you found the preceding to be hysterical, you might be a genius.

Another thing which affects IQ levels for kids is whether or not they took music lessons. Music training sharpens our old friend verbal intelligence as well as the ability to focus and exercise self-control.

A final factor indicative of intelligence, especially with males, is if they are left-handed (or, at least, if the only reason they are right-handed is because they grew up in the 1950s and had a superstitious incompetent first-grade teacher who forced them to switch from the left hand to the right). Left-handed people tend to do well in divergent thinking, which gives them the ability to link unrelated items in a meaningful way.

The next time you see a nervous left-handed male with his face buried in a book and chuckling out loud while clutching a trombone, engage him in conversation and see how smart he is.

For more information on Dr. Bradberry's hypothesis, click here.

"The difference between stupidity and genius

 is that genius has its limits."--Albert Einstein

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HALF-BUCKS GONE? LONG TIME NO PASSING---

A few years ago, I was in a McDonald's restaurant and witnessed a man and woman of about 35 years of age and their daughter ogling a treasure they had received in change. Their excited cries revealed that they were holding a half dollar--an object that none of them had ever previously seen.

The foregoing tableau merely reflected the fact that U.S. half dollars are not normally found in circulation. This was not, however, always the case. Six decades ago, 50-cent pieces were ubiquitous and had their own compartment in every cash register drawer. Seventy-five cents in change would be tendered in the form of a half dollar and a quarter, not three quarters as it is today.

What happened? As the geezers among us will recall, dimes, quarters, and half dollars used to be made out of an alloy containing 90% silver. In the mid-1960s, due to the rising price of silver (or the pressure of inflation--take your pick on the description), many folks hoarded silver coinage. In addition, the government was losing its shirt minting silver money, as the value of the metal in it exceeded the face value of the coins (it is pretty pathetic when you have the power literally to manufacture cash but cannot turn a profit). Consequently, the government in 1965 started producing dimes and quarters out of a silverless cupro-nickel alloy pressed over a copper core (called "clad" coinage).

In order to make the fact that cheap copper slugs were replacing honest silver coins more politically palatable to the public, the government did not remove all silver from the 50-cent piece. In 1965, it instead started making half-dollars consisting of silver on the outside with a copper core on the inside. Unless closely inspected, these coins maintained the illusion of being 90% silver, but in reality, the copper core brought down the total silver content to 40%, which made them still profitable to mint.

Unfortunately, the price of silver continued to climb, and eventually even the 40% half dollars had more than fifty cents worth of silver in them. People, following Gresham's law (which states essentially that money made out of cheap metal will drive out of circulation money made out of valuable metal), hoarded these 40% half dollars, just as they had been already hoarding the 90% silver version as well as the silver dimes and quarters. After a few years, there were very few half dollars in circulation, and Americans were using quarters in their place in all of their daily transactions.

Eventually, in 1971, the mint ceased using any silver in the making of half dollars and switched over to the same composition used in clad quarters and dimes. However, citizens by then had grown accustomed to not using 50-cent pieces at all, and they (the half dollars, not the citizens) languished for the most part in bank vaults, where they can still be found today. Since 2002, the mint has only made a limited quantity of half dollars each year for collectors and is no longer producing large numbers for general circulation. 

If you wish to buy some of those fresh collectible 50-cent coins from the mint, click here.

THE HELL WITH KANSAS

Many travelers speeding through the sleepy unincorporated hamlet of Stull, Kansas--located between Topeka and Lawrence--do not realize that it is more than just a wide spot in the road--it actually is rumored to be one of the seven places on earth which is a direct gateway to Hell.

Stull consists of a United Methodist Church, a bait house, a few homes, a cemetery, and not much else. No longer present is the Evangelical Emmanuel Church which had been constructed in 1867 by the German settlers in the area. That church, located on the north side of the graveyard, was abandoned in 1922 and eventually demolished in 2002 by unknown individuals or forces and without the permission of the landowners. The cemetery (pictured below) during daylight appears non-spooky and exceedingly prosaic.

Depending on the version of the story, a stairway to Hell is underneath a seal next to the site of the former church or under one of the graves in the cemetery. The seal opens only on Halloween and the vernal equinox, and the devil emerges during those times to roam the area. Some believers state that anyone who descends down the stairs never returns; others claim that the journey to the nether regions may take several days but that the person eventually re-emerges--however, without any recollection of where he was or of the passage of time.

The roof of the diabolical church caved in 1996, several years before the demolition of the building, yet rain purportedly would never fall into the structure. Pope John Paul II allegedly ordered his plane to detour around eastern Kansas during a visit to the USA in the 1990s in order to avoid flying over unholy ground. It is said that a witch was burned in Stull and buried in the graveyard (there is a tombstone with the name "Wittich" on it). There is supposed to be the ghost of a child who haunts the area born of the union of the devil and a witch. Rumors hold that a large tree in the cemetery was used to hang witches.

The actual inhabitants of Stull have no trouble believing that visitors to the cemetery may in fact lose their memory of events and the passage of time while they are there; however, the Stull citizens attribute this phenomenon to the fact that many of the interlopers imbibe heavily of alcoholic beverages or pharmaceutical compounds during their visits. The people who live in Stull have grown weary of thrill-seekers, college students, and reporters invading the cemetery in the middle of the night in the hopes of seeking something supernatural and leaving behind used condoms and empty liquor bottles. The cynics among the residents point out that nobody seemed to have known that Stull was possessed or haunted until an article appeared in November of 1974 in the University of Kansas newspaper describing many well-established legends of its long supernatural history--legends which apparently no one had ever heard prior to the publication of the article.

Nonetheless, Stull is not totally without honest notoriety. In the early 1900s, a farmer accidentally killed his son by burning a field without realizing that the boy was in it, and, in a separate incident, a missing man was found hanging from a tree.

In short, Kansas has many interesting attractions for a visitor, but in reality, a direct entrance to Hell is probably not one of them. For that, you have to go to Michigan.

By Ryanmetcalf (Ryanmetcalf)
[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html),
CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

  

MUMMIES DEAREST

In 1833, there was a cholera epidemic which claimed numerous lives in Guanajuato, Mexico. As would be expected, the bodies were interred. However, death did not dissolve the financial obligations of the buried, as both death and taxes are equally certain. Under local law, the deceaseds' relatives were required to continue to pay a burial tax on a periodic basis. For those who did not do so, the bodies of the loved ones were removed from their graves starting in 1865 and put in storage in a municipal building. Eventually, the cemetery workers figured out that they could make a profit by charging relatives and tourists a fee to enter the building, and the El Museo De Las Momias (the Museum of Mummies) was born.

Disinterment of the deadbeats was outlawed in 1958, but the museum containing the corpses of those who left the ground prior to that time still stands and is still open for visitation.

Query: Why did the necrophiliac from Guanajuato skip his prom in 1959?

Answer: Because he couldn't dig up a date.

By Russ Bowling (originally posted to Flickr as Las Momias)
[CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

THE STUMPY PLANE

One of the most bizarre-looking airplanes ever produced (except perhaps for some really, really weird ones churned out by the Third Reich) was the Gee Bee, named after its manufacturer, Granville Brothers Aircraft of Springfield, Massachusetts. The Gee Bee consisted of a huge engine in a cowling with itty-bitty stubby wings and a miniscule rudder and cockpit attached almost like an afterthought.

It was designed strictly for racing. And, except for one peculiarity, it raced exceedingly well. Jimmy Doolittle, who later achieved fame for his daring air attack on Tokyo in 1942, flew a Gee Bee to win the 1932 Thompson Trophy race and then later used one to achieve a speed record for a land-based aircraft of 296 miles per hour (476 kilometers per hour).

The plane was, for its time, very fast and powerful and highly responsive. Its extreme responsiveness was responsible for the peculiarity mentioned in the previous paragraph--i.e. the fact that the aircraft was exceedingly dangerous and would crash without hesitation with the slightest over-control by the pilot. It also had a stall speed of 100 miles per hour (161 kilometers per hour), which was unusually high for a small propeller plane, especially of that vintage. Unlike most aircraft, the Gee Bee usually did not provide advance warning of a stall--it would instead suddenly turn nose down and plummet to the earth. After too many fatal crashes (including one which killed a Granville Brother), the remaining brothers got out of the Gee Bee business altogether.

Pilots who were skilled enough to handle the machine and survive were lavish with praise about it and its speed and maneuverability. They noted that it flew best when upside down (although this configuration was not utilized during landings--at least not intentionally).

One of these pilots is Delmar Benjamin, who built his own Gee Bee more than sixty years after Granville Brothers ceased production. You can watch him fly it here. For those of you with a more morbid turn of mind, a simple Google search will bring you a video from 1931 of a fatal crash of an original example.

By El Grafo (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
 or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

THE BAD LUCK OF THE PORTER

The William D. Porter, an American destroyer commissioned in 1943, had a very ignoble career, starting with its maiden voyage. Pulling out of dock to join a convey escorting the battleship USS Iowa, the Porter collided with and damaged another vessel. Shortly thereafter, one of her crew members was swept overboard by a freak wave and was lost. While maintaining strict silence in U-boat infested waters, the Porter accidentally set off a depth charge. She then blew an engine and endangered the convoy by falling behind.

These incidents by themselves are not all that remarkable considering the number of ships manned by green crews which were churned out in World War II. However, the Porter notched things up a bit by accidentally launching a torpedo which nearly sank the Iowa. While this was considered a bad thing to do on general principles, the gravity of the situation was compounded by the fact that President Roosevelt, the Secretary of State, and numerous high ranking military officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were aboard the Iowa on the way to the Tehran conference. They witnessed the near miss of the torpedo and saw a Secret Service agent trying to defend the President by shooting his pistol at the torpedo. Although the Iowa almost returned fire under the belief that the Porter was under the control of saboteurs, she ultimately refrained from doing so. The Porter was sent back to Bermuda and the entire crew was arrested.  The officers were assigned to obscure shore posts, and the crewman who accidentally launched the torpedo was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor--a sentence which was eventually set aside by Roosevelt.

The Porter thereafter was a source of derision throughout the fleet and was regarded as cursed. She received hundreds of signals during her career along the lines of "Don't shoot--we're Republicans." She was banished to the Aleutians, where her most noteworthy action was the shelling of the base commandant's house by an intoxicated crewman. 

Eventually, the Porter was given a chance to redeem herself in the South Pacific, where she shot down at least three American planes and riddled another American ship with gunfire. On June 10, 1945, a Japanese suicide plane attached a nearby vessel, changed course at the last minute, splashed into the ocean near the Porter, and sank. The Porter crew members congratulated themselves at escaping the close call. Unfortunately, a minute or two later they found out the hard way that the wrecked Japanese aircraft had slid beneath the Porter. The plane exploded, and the Porter sank in 2,400 feet of water. Fortunately, however, the bad luck had finally run out, and not a single crew member was lost during the sinking.

The Navy was very embarrassed about the Porter and the whole Iowa incident and covered up the story until a newsman found out about in during a 1958 reunion of the crew.

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?

One of the hoary chestnuts in movie and TV westerns is the somber occasion where the cowboy's horse stumbles in a prairie dog hole and breaks his leg. Inevitably, the grim-faced rider will approach the equine with solemnity, stroke the animal's forehead, and then fire a bullet between its eyes.

In a time and place where one might be a hundred miles from the nearest vet, such an action does seem to make sense. However, with today's mobility, communications, and medical facilities, is death still the panacea for a broken limb on a horse?

Sadly, for the most part, the answer is "yes." Unlike humans, dogs, and cats, whose legs are supported by relatively thick bones, muscles, and sinew, horses have spindly little leg bones--especially those high-performance horses bred to go fast. The fact that a horse can weigh 1200 pounds (544 kilograms) puts an intense load on those bones even when the horse is stationary. When the horse's leg bone breaks, it usually shatters into dozens of pieces, and there is nothing left to knit together in a cast.

Complicating this task is the fact that horses evolved as prey animals, not predators, and their one method of defense is to run away fast. They remain standing almost all of the time in order to make a quick getaway and can even sleep on their feet. It is unrealistic to expect that a horse will calmly take to bed rest for months on end while its leg heals.

Consequently, although vets today can sometimes treat greenstick fractures on horses (where the bone is cracked but not broken), the acceptable remedy today for most horse leg fractures still is euthanasia. Those who have tried to buck this trend, such as the owner of Barbora, who won the Kentucky Derby in 2006 and then broke his rear leg, have usually regretted the decision and, as in the case of Barbora, eventually followed through with putting the animal out of its misery.

For the inspiration for this factoid as well as a more thorough treatment of this topic, check out Roger Schlueter's column in the Belleville News-Democrat.

Embed from Getty Images

ROOSEVELT'S FILTHY LUCRE

President Theodore Roosevelt was a man of many interests, and he micromanaged much of the federal government from picking out bayonets for the Army to critiquing coin design. Two of the gold* pieces--the eagle ($10) and double eagle ($20)--produced during his Presidency were designed by noted sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the double eagle especially is generally recognized as probably the most beautiful coin ever made in the United States. However, Roosevelt also authorized, against the wishes of the mint officials, a new design for the $2.50 and $5.00 gold coins.

One of Roosevelt's close buds, William Sturgis Bigelow, was intrigued by the incuse relief works of art of ancient Egypt and suggested that the new coins be also incuse--i.e., the lettering and design be lower than the surface of the coin instead of raised, as is the normal practice. Bigelow recommended that his highly-regarded sculptor friend, Bela Lyon Pratt, be awarded the commission. Pratt, using for the first time in coinage history a genuine native American as a model (the native American on the earlier-designed Indian head penny was actually a young white girl wearing a headdress), came up with a design for both the $2.50 and $5.00 pieces featuring an Indian chief on the obverse and a walking American eagle on the reverse--all done in incuse. 

Not everyone was happy about the results. A noted Philadelphia numismatist wrote to Roosevelt and complained that the Indian was emaciated, that the incuse coins did not stack properly, that the eagle was "European," that the coins could be easily counterfeited, and most serious of all, that the incuse design would collect bacteria and promote disease. Notwithstanding these objections, the coins remained in production (although not for every year) from 1908 through 1929.

And Bigelow, the man who advocated the purportedly filthy, germy design? He was a prominent physician.

For more information about the Pratt-Bigelow gold coins, click here.

*Many decades ago, American money was actually made of precious metals and had value above and beyond the feeble hope that the fiscal policies of the United States were sound.

By US Mint (coin), National Numismatic Collection
 (photograph by Jaclyn Nash) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

TUDOR CTE

King Henry VIII of England is best known for the synergistic combination of being excessive in corpulence, down on Catholicism, hard on wives, capricious in temperament, and foolhardy in his decisions. It is perhaps surprising to learn that in his younger years, he was apparently quite buff and physically fit with an easy-going disposition and a high intellect.

Researchers at Yale University now believe that Henry's change in behavior and physical condition was due to receiving several traumatic brain injuries, including from two serious jousting accidents (well, you can decide for yourself if "accidents" is the correct term for incidents where one intentionally exposes oneself to being knocked off a horse by a lance) and an unfortunate episode where he attempted to vault over a creek and landed on his head.

Who knows how history might have been changed if Hank had worn a better helmet.

For further information on the Yale study, check out this link.

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THE GELATIN-PINEAPPLE INCOMPATIBILITY

As any gourmet gelatin chef knows, you cannot make Jell-O (or any other brand of gelatin) with pineapple. Well, technically, you cannot make it with fresh pineapple. Canned pineapple works fine, With fresh pineapple, however, the product simply will remain a liquid and will not gel.

Why not?  Well, gelatin is actually a protein made from boiling animal bones, connective tissue, and skin (yummy). Fresh pineapple contains sulfhydryl protease enzymes, which essentially break down the gelatin proteins into amino acids and prevents them from forming the molecular building blocks which give gelatin its form. Cooking the pineapple (which is part of the canning process) destroys the protease enzymes and renders the pineapple gelatin-friendly.

Actually, pineapple is not the only enemy of Jell-O. Other substances which contain proteases include broccoli, mushrooms, spinach, wheat, soy beans, papaya, mango, guava, pawpaw, kiwi, figs, meat tenderizer, and ginger root. This may well explain why your last mushroom and fig gelatin creation was a flop.

For even more intimate details about the great pineapple/Jello-O dilemma, check out the Today I Found Out website.

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THE CAMP SALINA MASSACRE

GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR EXERCISING
ABOARD SHIP ON THEIR WAY TO THE USA

During World War II, approximately 425,000 captured German and Italian military personnel were incarcerated in 500 POW camps located within 44 different states in the USA. 

Now, one may wonder why the Allies would go to the trouble of shipping POWs all the way from Europe to America when the prisoners could have been housed in the United Kingdom. Actually, many of them were in fact lodged in Britain. However, the Brits were hard-pressed to keep their own people fed, and the close proximity of the British-held captives to the European continent provided a constant temptation for them to escape. On the other hand, the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and the subsequent long train ride for the prisoners from the eastern seaboard to camps in places like Kansas or Minnesota were usually enough to overwhelm the captives with a sense of futility with respect to attempting to overcome the huge distances which would be involved in executing an effective departure. In addition, there were plenty of Liberty ships returning empty from Europe back to America anyway, and it thus made sense to use the available space for some POWs.

The majority of the prisoners adjusted very well to camp life in the United States, and most of them were happy to be loaned out to work in American farms, mills, and other industries. It was certainly a more comfortable gig than their compatriots had fighting on the Russian front. Many of the captives became friends with their American employers ("employers" is a correct term, as the prisoners were paid wages), and quite a few returned to the USA after repatriation to become American citizens.

Die-hard Nazis who thought that it was treason to cooperate with their American captors in any fashion (and who would administer harsh sanctions against fellow POWs who did so) were transferred to special camps.

Most of the time, the Americans abided by the 1929 Geneva Convention and treated their charges humanely. However, on July 8, 1945, at the POW camp in Salina, Utah, nine sleeping German prisoners were murdered by 23-year-old Pvt. Clarence V. Bertucci of the US Army and another 19 were wounded. One captive was almost cut in half when Bertucci raked the tents of the prisoners with a M1917 .30 caliber machine gun, firing almost 250 rounds within 15 seconds. Bertucci then screamed for more ammunition, but his request was denied. The survivors of the shooting were taken to the Salina hospital, and witnesses indicate that blood was flowing outside from beneath the hospital door.

Bertucci had had some prior disciplinary problems but had displayed no signs that he was going to go on a murderous rampage. Afterwards, he was unrepentant, expressed disappointment that he had not been in combat, and declared that he did not like Germans. He was pronounced insane by a military panel and was transferred to a New York mental hospital. How long he remained there has been lost in the vagaries of history. He died in 1969. Cynics maintain that Bertucci was not actually medically or legally bonkers but that the Army, obviously embarrassed by the massacre (especially one occurring two months after Germany had surrendered), needed to "justify" how it happened.

The slain Germans were buried with full military honors in American uniforms at the Fort Douglas Cemetery in Salt Lake City. However, contrary to tradition, their coffins were not draped with their country's flag, as the US Army refused to use the Nazi ensign and no other flag had yet been adopted for post-war Germany. The survivors were sent back to Germany after their recovery.

WHIPPING BOYS

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A "whipping boy" is not merely an expression but actually refers to a position held by, appropriately enough, a boy who was whipped. 

The position of "whipping boy" arose around the 15th century in the monarchy in England. Because of the divine nature of royalty, the only person who could physically punish a misbehaving prince during that era was the boy's father. However, kings were often out doing stuff like beheading wives or fighting the French and were thus frequently not available to handle the discipline of their children. 

The whipping boy was a child of the same age as the prince who would be whipped in place of the prince by a palace employee. The prince, in theory, would feel guilt and remorse and would not repeat the offense which led to the punishment.

While being a whipping boy for a sociopath prince who did not feel guilt or remorse could be a real buzzkill, most whipping boys actually had it pretty good. They were often the only companion of a similar age a prince had and would be BFF with the prince. In most cases, a prince would in fact feel great remorse over getting his only true friend in trouble. 

In short, whipping boys usually had all of the luxury of growing up living like a prince, would often be rewarded with great wealth and estates by the prince when the prince and he achieved adulthood, and would always have the ear of the king once the prince inherited the throne. It generally was worth a few lashes, especially since all boys at that time (except princes) were routinely beaten anyway, regardless of their stations in life.

PRINCE JOFFREY--YOU WOULD NOT WANT
TO BE THE WHIPPING BOY FOR THIS GUY
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