THE GLORIOUS FLYING TEAPOT

Twin brothers Francis Stanley and Freelan Stanley started manufacturing steam-driven automobiles in 1897 and formed the Stanley Motor Carriage Company in 1902.  Their vehicles were popularly known as "Stanley Steamers" or "The Flying Teapot." The engine had only 15 moving parts, and the car had no clutch, transmission, or gearshift lever. It was not picky about fuel, and the driver could heat the water into steam using either kerosene or gasoline (and probably many other flammable substances) with equal aplomb. The brakes were not always the greatest, but the operator could also slow down by throwing the car into reverse.

Despite the common perception that a steam car would look like a huge boiler being hauled around at snail-like speeds, the Stanley Steamers resembled other autos of the era, except that there was no exposed radiator.  At a time when many cars could not exceed 40 mph (60 kph), a standard Stanley Steamer could hit 75 mph (121 kph) in both forward or reverse.  The Stanley brothers eagerly participated in racing, and their vehicles racked up spectacular wins, with one of its cars achieving the world land speed record in 1906 of 127.6 mph (205.4 kph). The following year, another Steamer reached an estimated and unofficial 150 mph (240 kph) before it crashed at Daytona.

The Stanley brothers intentionally kept production low, to a peak of about 1,000 units a year.  They personally interviewed potential customers and would not sell a car to anyone they believed was not worthy.  They had an admirable warranty, which simply consisted of fixing anything broken on the car free for the life of the vehicle.

The brothers maintained a policy that they would personally attend the funeral of anyone killed in or by one of their vehicles.  This philosophy lapsed after they sold their company in 1917, but lamentably, they followed it one more time in 1918, in differing roles, at the funeral of Francis Stanley, who died in a Steamer.

The company produced its last car in 1924.  Although its products were superior to gasoline-driven cars in many ways, the high cost of  a Steamer ($3,500 vs. $500 for a Model T Ford), the introduction of electric starters on previously hand-cranked gasoline cars, a loss of performance due to increased body weight with the later models, and the fact that a driver had to warm the Steamer up for 20 minutes before using it all proved to be fatal to sales. Not even the fact that it had a cool steam-powered horn which sounded like a railroad locomotive whistle was able to save it.

The surviving brother went on to establish the Stanley hotel in Colorado, where he remained until his death at the age of 91 in 1940.  A stay at this hotel in 1974 by Stephen King was the inspiration for the haunted Overlook Hotel in his novel The Shining.

If you want the easy-to-use instructions on how to start, drive, and maintain The Flying Teacup, look at the owner's manual here. To see one of several videos of Jay Leno operating one of his Steamers, click here.

By Stephen Foskett (Wikipedia User: sfoskett)
[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html),
CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) ,
 via Wikimedia Commons

HITLER'S MESSERSCHMITT BLUNDER

Public domain USAF Museum Wikimedia Commons

The first practical jet airplane was the German Me-262, which was placed into service in 1944. As a fighter aircraft, it was light years ahead of all of its competitors and was absolutely lethal against heavy bombers, such as B-17s and B-24s, which had virtually no defense against it due to its high speed and powerful 30 mm cannons and/or rockets. In fact, United States Army Air Force General Carl Spaatz in September of 1944 was considering abandoning all bombing raids over Germany due to the threat posed by this new Messerschmitt. Such a decision could have had a profound negative effect on the prosecution of the war.

American fighter pilots, including ace Chuck Yeager, quickly learned that the only chance they had to destroy an Me-262 was to hover near a German airstrip and nail the jets when they were either on the ground or when they were at a reduced speed during takeoffs and landings. 

Unfortunately for the Germans, and fortunately for the rest of the world, Hitler decreed that only one out of every fifty Me-262s could be employed as a fighter. The rest had to be used as bombers, a role for which they were not nearly as well-suited. As a result, only very few of them ever had an opportunity to wreak havoc on Allied aircraft.

My father, who was in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Europe during WWII but almost never discussed his experiences there, did describe one time an incident when a Me-262 strafed his convoy. The pilot was so skilled that he put rounds in each vehicle except for the three ambulances in the middle which had red crosses painted on their tops.

Several years ago, the visionary group Legend Flyers manufactured four or five new Me-262s for enthusiasts (very wealthy enthusiasts, as the price per plane probably exceeded $2 million by a wide margin). These were very close duplicates of the WWII product except for the substitution of more reliable landing gear and General Electric J-85 jet engines in place of those based on the original German design. To see one of these aircraft in flight, click here.

A few of the original 1,400+ Me-262s which were built by the Nazis still survive in museums.

THE DELETERIOUS EFFECTS OF PASSING GAS

One of the major by-products of the internal-combustion engine is water vapor. In the 1930s, German aeronautical engineers devised a scheme to collect, condense, and retain the water from the engine. Further, they strove to have collected at any given moment the exact same weight of water equivalent to the weight of the fuel burned.

Can you figure out why they would want to do this? The answer is below. You just have to scroll through the picture of the cats to get to it.

The answer is, of course, for use in dirigibles. The dirigible was a rigid bag of lighter-than-air gas (the Germans used highly-inflammable hydrogen) holding suspended below it a passenger gondola and an engine (or engines) with propellers to shove the whole thing forward. If the weight of the fuel burned by the engines was not replaced, the whole contraption would eventually get lighter and fly too high. It was much easier, safer, and less expensive to compensate for the lost weight of the fuel with an equivalent amount of water rather than trying the alternative of bleeding off hydrogen--especially since there would often be the risk of sparks from static electricity present.

The below photo of the dirigible Hindenburg illustrates why one would want to avoid as much as possible messing with the hydrogen and static electricity. The Hindenburg, by the way, did not have a water-recovery system and had to rely upon dropping water ballast that had been loaded prior to flight. It also purged 1 million to 1.5 million cubic feet (28 million to 42.5 million liters) of hydrogen gas per each flight across the Atlantic.

If you wished to see how long it takes to disable by fire a dirigible filled with hydrogen, click here. 

THE SWIMMING DEAD

From USFWS

They are in fact in real life animated rotting corpses which engage in homicidal frenzy and are obsessed with only one thing. It is not, however, eating brains--it is sex. 

Salmon from the Pacific migrate from the ocean into the stream in which they were born in order to spawn. The journey is not a pleasant one. The male salmon's jaw grows into a tooth-filled hooked weapon, called a kype, so that he can go medieval on other male salmon. Their color changes from a bright ocean silver to red or random streaks of purple or black. Their flesh and muscles deteriorate and fall off as they encounter rocks and waterfalls. By the time a salmon makes it to its spawning area (if it gets that far), much of its body will be moldy and rotten and the spines will be sticking out of its fins. These gangrenous tattered beings are piscatorial versions of the ghouls so vividly depicted in movies and TV, and their decay rivals the special effects from Hollywood. They usually do not survive past this first spawning.

It is for good reason that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes them in this video as "Zombie Fish--The Swimming Dead."

From USFWS

THE PINKO REDHEAD

In 1953, Lucille Ball's career was skyrocketing. The I Love Lucy TV show featuring her and her husband, Desi Arnaz, was an unqualified hit. On January 19 of that year, she gave birth to her first son, and on that same night CBS ran an episode showing her character also giving birth (well, actually, it revealed her going into the hospital with a large abdomen and ending up with a baby--in 1953, TV did not display the actual birthing process). This was such an newsworthy event that it eclipsed coverage of Eisenhower's inauguration, and the episode retained for five years the record of having the most viewers for a single show.

During the summer, she and her hubbie made the movie The Long, Long, Trailer which achieved great commercial success (and rightfully so, even though my wife doesn't like it for some inexplicable reason).

Then, on September 6, 1953, newspaper and radio gossip columnist Walter Winchell dropped a bombshell. He announced that Lucy was a Commie, as evidenced by the fact that she registered as such in the 1936 election. This revelation occurred during the height of McCarthyism, and the American public breathlessly waited for CBS to give her the axe.

There are some sacred cows that not even the House Un-American Activities Committee dare assault. Lucy calmly explained in a press interview that she declared herself a Communist only to please her grandfather and that she never believed in the Marxist doctrine. Her husband proclaimed that the only thing red about Lucy was her hair, and not even that was real. All was forgiven as a result, and Lucy escaped the trashing of her career that was the fate of many other leftists (either actual or perceived) in the entertainment industry.

And Walter Winchell? What sort of retribution fell on him for hurling dirt at America's most beloved comedienne? Well, after a sagging career, he did achieve renewed fame as the narrator of the extremely popular TV series The Untouchables from its inception in 1959 to its last show in 1963. The Untouchables was the product of Desilu Studios, which was owned and managed by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

THE BLOODY CAREER OF CHARLES R. DREW

Dr. Charles R. Drew was instrumental in perfecting techniques for storing and preserving blood and plasma so that it could be used later for transfusions. In 1939, he established the Blood Transfer Betterment Association, which was a program where plasma could be collected in the USA and shipped to Britain for use by soldiers and civilians. This system eventually was adapted by the American Red Cross when Drew became its director. Drew's techniques saved countless numbers of lives during World War II. These results were in sharp contrast to those obtained in World War I, where millions of men bled to death because transfusing stored blood was not then an option.

Ironically, Drew himself died of exsanguination as a result of a car accident in North Carolina in 1950. According to a common myth, Drew, who was black, was refused a life-saving transfusion in a whites-only hospital. However, all actual witnesses to the event, including Drew's fellow passengers, agree that the medical staff aggressively tried to save Drew's life but could not administer a transfusion because of the nature of his injuries.

For more information about Dr. Drew, please click here.

THE BLACK BOOK

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101III-Alber-178-04A / Alber, Kurt / CC-BY-SA [CC
BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)],
via Wikimedia Commons

"The Black Book" is the informal name of a list of 2820 names of prominent politicians, artists, scientists, writers, and other persons of note living in Great Britain in 1940 and who for some reason or the other were bothersome to the Nazis. It was compiled by Walter Schellenberg (see above photo) of the SS. It was intended to be a reference guide for German troops on whom to arrest immediately once they invaded England. Twenty thousand copies were printed, but only two examples are known to have survived Allied bombings and exist today. One of them is in the Imperial War Museum in London.

One name not on the list is that of the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne in 1936. He was perceived, perhaps correctly, to be sympathetic to the Nazis, and the Germans hoped to recruit him as a puppet ruler during their occupation of the United Kingdom.

The list was not completely infallible and included a few persons who had previously died or emigrated from Great Britain.

Some of the names on the list, according to Wickipedia as well as the memoirs of Schellenberg, are the following:

Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

Sir Norman Angell, Labour MP awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 

Margery Corbett Ashby, feminist

Robert Baden-Powell, founder and leader of Scouting (the Nazis regarded Scouting as a spy organisation) 

Edvard Beneš, President of the Czechoslovakian government in exile 
Vera Brittain, feminist writer and pacifist

Violet Bonham Carter, anti-fascist liberal politician. Cryptically referred to as "an Encirclement lady politician" 

Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister 

Sydney Chapman, economist 

Winston Churchill, Prime minister (well, duh)

Marthe Cnockaert, First World War spy

Claud Cockburn, journalist 

Seymour Cocks, Labour politician (whose name undoubtedly caused him much grief when he was a youth at boarding school)

Chapman Cohen, secularist writer and lecturer

Lionel Leonard Cohen, lawyer

Robert Waley Cohen, industrialist

G. D. H. Cole, academic

Norman Collins, broadcasting executive

Edward Conze, Anglo-German scholar

Duff Cooper, Cabinet Minister of Information 

Noël Coward, actor who opposed appeasement and was an armed forces entertainer, homosexual, and connected with MI5 

Charles de Gaulle, Free French leader 

Sefton Delmer, journalist 

Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War 

Conrad O'Brien, SIS/MI6 Agent ST36, Agent Z3 for Dansey's Z Organization 

E. M. Forster, author 

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis and a Jew (died September 23, 1939) 

Willie Gallacher, trade unionist 

Sir Philip Gibbs, journalist and novelist 

Victor Gollancz, publisher

J. B. S. Haldane, geneticist and evolutionary biologist and Communist 

Ernst Hanfstaengl, German refugee. Once a financial backer of Hitler, he had fallen from favor and had fled Germany in 1937 

Aldous Huxley, author (who had emigrated to the USA in 1936) 

Alexander Korda, Hungarian-born British producer and film director 

Harold Laski, political theorist, economist and author 

Megan Lloyd George, politician

David Low, cartoonist 

F. L. Lucas, literary critic, writer and anti-fascist campaigner 

Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of the Czechoslovakian government in exile 

Jimmy Maxton, pacifist politician 

Naomi Mitchison, novelist 

Gilbert Murray, classical scholar and activist for the League of Nations

Harold Nicolson, diplomat, author and diarist

Vic Oliver, Jewish entertainer, originally from Austria. Married to Winston Churchill's daughter Sarah 

Ignacy Jan Paderewski, pianist, former Prime Minister of Poland 

Nikolaus Pevsner, German-born architectural historian 

J. B. Priestley, anti-Nazi popular broadcasts and fiction 

Hermann Rauschning, German refugee and once personal friend of Hitler who had turned against him 

Paul Robeson, African-American singer/actor with strong Communist affiliations 

Bertrand Russell, philosopher, historian and pacifist 

C. P. Snow, physicist and novelist 

Stephen Spender, poet, novelist and essayist 

Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl 

Lytton Strachey, died 1932, writer and critic 

Sybil Thorndike, actress

Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, politician, former German minister 

Beatrice Webb, socialist and economist 

Chaim Weizmann, Zionist leader 

H. G. Wells, author and socialist 

Rebecca West, English suffragist and writer 

Ted Willis, dramatist

Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

According to Office of Tax and Revenue of the District of Columbia, the assessed value of the White House for 2023 was almost $1.2 billion (or, to be more exact, $1,197,405,320). The structure contains 55,000 square feet including 16 bedrooms, 35 bathrooms, and a finished basement--all on an 18-acre lot in a prime area. It is not for sale, although many persons would dispute that assertion.

Although the Office of Tax and Revenue does assess the value of all real estate within D.C., the White House and all other federal holdings are exempt from taxes.

Embed from Getty Images

THE ANDERSON HOUSE

"Ginger" and delighted guest at the Anderson House

The Anderson House is a fifty-plus room rustic hotel built in 1856 in the sleepy Mississippi River town of Wabasha, Minnesota. Besides being haunted, it was also notorious as a cathouse.

I mean literally a cathouse. One of the most outstanding features of the hotel was its supply of felines. Subject to availability, each guest could request a mellow and affectionate cat for company, and the hotel staff would deliver the animal, along with food, water, toys, and kitty litter, to the customer's room. Due to the popularity of this feature, smart guests reserved a cat in advance. A clowder of the creatures was maintained in a comfortably-furnished glassed-in kitty dormitory, and a guest could view the stock there to select a particular four-pawed companion for his overnight stay. 

Anderson House cat dormitory

Feline-free facilities were also available for ailurophobes or guests who were allergic to cat dander.

The Anderson House provided the inspiration for a 1990 children's book Blumpoe the Grumpoe Meets Arnold the Cat, which features a grumpy old curmudgeon who is befriended by a black-and-white cat at the hotel.

Unfortunately, the economic crisis shut down the Anderson House in 2009, and the resident cats were distributed to new homes. The hotel has since re-opened under different management, but lamentably, felines are no longer provided.

And, to my credit, please note my scrupulous eschewing of atrocious puns in this feature, such as stating something like "it was the purrfect place to spend a night."

Roster for July 8, 2008

THE NOTORIOUS FRANCIS HENNING

One of the most prolific counterfeiters of the 20th Century (not counting the Nazis) was Francis Leroy Henning (1891-1968), who made over a half-million pieces of phony money. Unlike those who favored $20 or $100 bills, Henning forged nickels.

In the 1930's, Henning plied his trade with the more conventional paper currency. He printed fake $5 bills at a time when $5 had the buying power of about $120 today. Unfortunately for Henning, U.S. paper currency is very difficult to counterfeit, and Henning was caught and served three years for this misdeed.

Henning thereafter figured that folks would be far less likely to scrutinize a nickel to see if it was fake--especially when the nickel was in circulated condition complete with the usual scratches and wear associated with use. In the early 1950s, he fabricated obverse and reverse dies from a used nickel and submitted a roll of coins for deposit in a local New Jersey bank. When the teller casually observed that it was unusual to have a roll of circulated coins all of the same date, Henning realized that he would have to expand his forgeries to include a variety of examples for future transactions.

Henning thus created a series of nickels dated 1939, 1944, 1946, 1947, and 1953 as well as one additional date which has yet to be determined. He purchased his metal alloy from the same source as that used by the U.S. mint (at a cost of about 3.5 cents per nickel), and his products were superficially pretty realistic, although they often, but not always, weighed about 5.4 grams compared to the legitimate nickel's weight of about 5.0 grams. Most of his examples also contained minor defects (such as a small hole in the "R" of "PLURIBUS") which would not be spotted by a normal person acquiring a used nickel in commerce.

How did Henning's latest criminal acts get discovered? Well, indirectly, you can credit the Empire of Japan when it dragged the USA into WWII. The conflict consumed prodigious quantities of copper and, in order to free up supplies, the Treasury in 1942 started making nickels containing 35% silver and reduced amounts of copper. In an effort to make the silver nickels easier to sort later on if they were eventually to be pulled from circulation, the government for these coins moved a teeny-tiny mint mark from the side of Monticello and replaced it with a huge one* over the dome of the building. In addition, the softer silver nickels, once in circulation, wore down quickly, developed a characteristic greasy feel to them, and displayed a dark dingy smeary patina which would further distinguish them from their pre- and postwar cupro-nickel brethren.

Henning's 1944 nickels did not sport the huge mint mark and further were obviously not made of silver. The authorities quickly figured out that something was funny after both a coin collector and a bank teller separately reported receiving the suspicious money. Henning got nervous and tossed about 200,000 fake nickels into Copper Creek in New Jersey and another 200,000 in the Schuylkill river in Pennsylvania. The Secret Service and local law enforcement retrieved some of the submerged coins (although probably not most of them) as well as the unused metal from Henning's shop and eventually melted them down for use in minting legitimate nickels. 

For his efforts, Henning received a $5,000 fine and a three-year prison sentence in 1955. He also lost his shirt, as the approximately 100,000 nickels he had placed into circulation were totally inadequate to compensate him for the cost of the alloy he had purchased and the $5,000 fine--let alone the three years of imprisonment. 

Nowadays, the price of the metal in a nickel exceeds five cents, so it is unlikely there ever will be a repeat of Henning's performance.

What about those folks who were defrauded by a Henning nickel? If they had kept the coin, they now have a collectible which is worth far more than five cents and which in fact might sell for $100+. However, the issue of whether or not it is legal to hold, even for non-fraudulent purposes, an example of U.S. counterfeit money is not one which I am prepared or equipped to address.

For further information, please see this article from COINWEEK.

*Parenthetically, this was the first time that a U.S. coin displayed a "P" (for "Philadelphia") mint mark. At the time of this writing, the value of the silver in a single wartime nickel is approaching $2.00, and collectors and speculators have already long ago removed them from circulation.

A TYPICAL GENUINE 1944 SILVER NICKEL

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.

A COMMON SENSE APPROACH TO AVOID BEING GUILLOTINED

View image | gettyimages.com

Because of his popular and famous treatise Common Sense, which castigated the British monarchy, Thomas Paine is often credited with being the father of the American Revolution. When that unpleasant encounter with Great Britain was over, Paine turned his attention to France, and wrote against the French monarchy. He then went to that country, where he stood in high favor with the revolutionaries and was granted honorary French citizenship and even elected to the National Convention, notwithstanding his inability to speak the language.

Unfortunately for Paine, he was not revolting enough to satisfy Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror. Paine, a foe of capital punishment, had suggested that the king and queen of France should be deported instead of executed. Robespierre, upset by Paine's wussy attitude towards decapitation, ordered his arrest in 1793. The American minister to France did not particularly like Paine and made less than lukewarm efforts to free him--even to the point of suggesting that Paine was a subject of France's archenemy, Great Britain, instead of its ally, the United States.

Paine was jailed in a palace which had been converted into a prison. As so often happened to those who irritated Robespierre, our hero was eventually sentenced to death. However, Paine had for several days a severe fever--probably typhus. He convinced his guards to keep his room door open for ventilation, and the guards did so, as there was no realistic chance for his escape. Each night, the guards would place a mark on the doors of prisoners slated for the guillotine the following morning. Because Paine's door was wide open and leaning against the wall of the hallway, they marked the inside face of the door instead of the outside on the night prior to Paine's scheduled execution. Paine simply closed his door after the guards left, thus concealing the mark from the executioner's crew making their rounds the next day. Shortly thereafter, Robespierre fell out of favor and was himself guillotined, which removed a lot of the impetus for killing Paine. 

Later that year, James Monroe, the future President, was appointed as the American ambassador to France. Monroe liked Paine and was able to obtain his release from prison. 

FINALLY REVEALED! THE ORIGINS OF BRUNCH!

"Brunch," the term which ranks right up there with "ball clubs" (as though the New York Yankees or St. Louis Cardinals are social groups who play recreational catch on balmy Sunday afternoons) in being so ultra-cutesy that it makes me want to gag, was coined in 1895 by the English author Guy Beringer. He originally proposed this blending of two meals into a single light one as a solution for hangovers where people recovering from the previous night's alcoholic excesses would not have to leap right into heavy meaty dishes. Originally, it only referred to the meal if it was around the normal breakfast time; otherwise, if it was nearer to the noon repast, it was called "blunch."

I suppose that it is inevitable that someday we will have a mid-afternoon meal called "dunch" or maybe "linner."

For more information on this fascinating topic, please see mental_floss.

WHEN PIGS SWIM

By cdorobek (Flickr: 08.2012 Vorobek Bahamas - swimming pigs)
[CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Big Major Cay a/k/a "Pig Island" is an uninhabited (at least by humans) island in the Bahamas.  It is, however, the home to a colony of swimming pigs.  The porkers enjoy cavorting in the water and will eagerly paddle out to boats for handouts. 

No one is sure how the colony started, but the first hogs there were probably either left on the island by sailors for a future source of food or were the survivors of a shipwreck.

Lamentably, the word has gotten out, and many areas in the Caribbean now feature entrepreneurs who buy some hogs, who throw the pigs into the water during the day to be photographed (for a price) with the tourists, and who then recapture any swine who have not drowned or been eaten by sharks and pen them up at night for use the next day. Further lamentably, pigs defecate even while in the water, and some tourists with skin abrasions or cuts who swam with the porkers have come home and developed very serious life and limb-threatening infections.

THE TIMELESSNESS OF SINO-CINEMA

As of 2011, the government of the People's Republic of China has banned its film and TV industry from producing or showing any movies or shows featuring time travel. Like most totalitarian regimes, it (ahem) apparently does not want to misrepresent history in any way, shape, or form, and it feels that showing alternative time lines which never really happened could lead to that sordid result. 

For more information, please click here.

Embed from Getty Images

"OPERATION NORTHWOODS"

On September 1, 1939, World War II officially started when Nazi troops dressed in Polish uniforms "attacked" a German radio station on the border between Germany and Poland, thus providing Hitler with apparent justification to launch his invasion against the Poles. On March 13, 1962, U.S. Army General Lyman Lemnitzer (pictured above), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted on behalf of the Joint Chiefs an even more outrageous plan, "Operation Northwoods," to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. President Kennedy, upon review of the proposal, was furious, and General Lemnitzer shortly thereafter was denied a reappointment to the Joint Chiefs.

Lemnitzer and the other Joint Chiefs were virulent anti-Communists and were outraged by the humiliation inflicted on the United States by its mishandling of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Their proposed response of "Operation Northwoods" was the stuff that tin foil-hatted conspiracy theorists dream about--except that this time it was all true. "Operation Northwoods" called for the performance of various bad things by the U.S. and then blaming them on Cuba in order to garner public support for military action against that nation. 

The most benign component of this scheme was based on the hope that John Glenn's Mercury capsule would explode in flight. If it did, there would be evidence placed to suggest that Cuba had sabotaged it. Since Glenn selfishly thwarted this aspect of the plan by surviving his space mission, there were backup scenarios, including the bombing of civilian targets in the United States, the faked shooting down of a civilian airplane over the water in or near Cuban airspace, the sinking of refugee boats coming from Cuba, the blowing up of an American warship in Guantanamo Bay, the gunning down of Cuban immigrants in the streets of the United States, the flying of a U-2 spy plane over Cuba at such a low altitude that it would be brought down, and the launching of military sorties against countries near Cuba--again, with all of these actions to be attributed to Castro.  

This plan was submitted at a time when the military leaders were convinced that the Kennedy administration was too soft on Communism and that something had to be done (even including, according to some theorists, Kennedy's assassination). It is perhaps not coincidence that one of the most popular literary works published in 1962 was Seven Days in May, an excellent novel whose premise was based on an attempted military coup against the United States. Kennedy himself affirmatively encouraged the adoption of the story into a movie, which was released in 1964. 

After Kennedy vetoed "Operation Northwoods," Lemnitzer was transferred to Europe to become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He was later appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (also known as the "Rockefeller Commission" to see if the CIA had broken American laws and if government officials had been involved in the Kennedy assassination.

For additional information on "Operation Northwoods," please obtain a copy of James Bamford's book Body of Secrets. 

THE FLOUR OSSIFICATION FACTOR

Remember the story of Jack and the Beanstalk--that happy tale about a wayward juvenile delinquent who commits burglaries involving coins, a harp, and an auric-oocyte-laying goose and then follows it up with a felony murder when the homeowner attempts to regain his stolen property?

If so, then you will recall the catchy phrase bellowed by the giant of:

"Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! 

I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Be he 'live, or be he dead, 

I'll grind his bones to make my bread."

This utterance always seemed a little weird to me. However, that was before I heard that bakers in England in the 1600s were accused of cutting their bread dough by the addition of ashes and bones. In that context, the rhyme makes perfect sense.

Contrary to these rumors, the bakers probably did not actually employ ashes and bones to dilute the flour; however, they did use alum, which can be bad for you if you eat too much of it. Where did they get the alum? From urine.

View image | gettyimages.com

THE MAN WHO DID NOT GET AL CAPONE

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One of the most beloved 20th Century U.S. folk heroes was Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness, who, with his handpicked band of agents called "The Untouchables," spearheaded the prosecution of Al Capone which landed Capone in the federal pen for income tax evasion. Ness has been the subject of various TV shows, movies, and books. In fact, one of the greatest television series of all time was the version of The Untouchables produced by Desilu Studios from 1959 to 1963 and starring Robert Stack, shown above, as the quintessential Eliot Ness.

Ness's personal courage cannot be gainsaid in light of his willingness to take on Al Capone. In reality, however, Eliot Ness was not the fed who was responsible for sending Capone to prison. That distinction belongs to U.S. Attorney E.Q. Johnson and Internal Revenue agents Frank Wilson and  Elmer Irey, who were the backbone of the prosecution team who put together the income tax evasion case against Capone. Ness did greatly vex Capone by seizing a lot of Capone's assets and destroying many of his breweries, but Ness had little to do with the tax case. Nor did he, contrary to what was represented in the 1987 film version of The Untouchables, toss mobster Frank Nitti off of the roof of the U.S. Courthouse in Chicago.

Ness, however, was a great self-promoter with the press and did nothing to discourage the impression that only he and The Untouchables were responsible for the defeat of one of the most malevolent organizations of the era (well, of course, not counting that Nazi group stirring up stuff in Germany).

Ness moved on to become the Safety Director in Cleveland from 1938 to 1942, where he was the head of the police and fire departments. Ironically encumbered by a heavy drinking problem, he drifted into various public and private jobs thereafter. He co-authored a book about The Untouchables with Oscar Fraley, which appeared a month after Ness's death from a massive heart attack at age 54 in 1957. Ness contributed a 21-page manuscript, which was fairly factual, for his share of the book; Fraley fattened up the remainder with a bunch of embellishments.

The real Eliot Ness is pictured below:

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