SAPEURS

Sapeurs are gentlemen (and occasionally ladies) from Brazzaville (the capital of the Republic of Congo) who have made an art form out of dressing in very colorful yet very elegant French fashion kinds of clothes. They are not rich (the average income is less than $400 per month), but they save their money for designer suits and accessories. There are very strict and well-established rules (such as that a perfect ensemble may not have more than three colors) which distinguish a Sapeur from someone who merely dresses garishly.

They generally act as ambassadors for good moral conduct, proper etiquette, and peace in a country which had a bloody civil war in the late 1990s and which is still recovering from terrible poverty. They have normal day jobs but sometimes get hired out to appear at weddings or funerals. They are well revered in the community and provide onlookers with a momentary respite from the destitution around them. They welcome newcomers to their ranks.

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THE HITLER-SANDERS CHIMERA

Just when I think that Führerphilia has finally reached the pinnacle of the bizarre (see, for example, Nazi Oenophilia), I find that I am wrong. Case in point--a chicken fast-food restaurant in Thailand called "Hitler" featuring as its trademark the head of the dictator on the shoulders of what appears to be Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. 

In response to international criticism (and more likely, a nasty letter from the KFC legal department), the owners of the restaurant have changed its name to "H-ler." Really subtle, guys.

You can access the H-ler Facebook page here.

THE INFERNAL COAL TORPEDO

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

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

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

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

THE DREADFUL PENNY DREADFUL

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"Penny dreadfuls" were cheap pamphlets published for about eighty years in England after they were introduced around 1830. They were serialized adventure stories, often very sensational or lurid in nature, which were designed originally to appeal to adults who could not afford to buy real books. However, eventually the audience was primarily composed of teenagers. These publications filled the niche occupied by comic books today and were condemned by the same types of do-gooders who vilified the horror-type comic books of the 1950s.

Due to their cheap price, low quality of paper, perceived lack of worth, and paper drives in two World Wars, few examples of the earlier editions survive today.

For more information about penny dreadfuls as well as the TV series named after them, please see this article in The Guardian.

BOVINE COMPASSES

 

Scientists studying satellite images from all over the world were gobsmacked to note that, in the vast majority of instances, grazing or resting cattle line up their bodies so that they are facing either magnetic north or south. The exception to this rule occurs on pastures beneath or near high-voltage power lines which disrupt the normal electromagnetic fields of the earth.

Click here for an abstract of the study as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which also contains a PDF of the full report).

THE WICKED BIBLE

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In 1631, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, produced a version of the King James Bible which erroneously contained the commandment, "Thou shalt commit adultery." The King ordered all of the books called back and destroyed, and the printers were fined 300 pounds (about 34,000 pounds in today's money). The few surviving copies of what became known as "The Wicked Bible" that still exist are quite valuable today.

THE LAST TIME US SAILORS HEARD "AWAY ALL BOARDERS!"

On June 4, 1944, sailors under U.S. Navy Captain David V. Gallery, Commander of Task Force No. 22.3, boarded and captured the German submarine U-505 off of the coast of West Africa. A seaman from the sub was the only casualty on either side. 

Captain Gallery was very pleased because he had worked very hard to devise a feasible plan where a Nazi submarine could be obtained intact with all of its code books. It was a far more difficult and risky procedure to orchestrate the capture of a sub than to simply sink it with dozens of depth charges. The Americans had to damage the U-boat only to the extent that its crew would abandon it after setting scuttling charges with the Americans then swarming onto the vessel and hopefully removing the charges before it blew up. As events transpired, the American boarding crew discovered that the Germans fortunately had neglected to set scuttling charges and merely had opened valves instead to flood the boat--valves which the Americans simply closed.

Unfortunately, no one had told Captain Gallery that the allies had already broken the Kriegsmarine codes. As a result, his capture of the vessel needlessly increased the risk that the Germans would completely redo their code books from scratch and set the Allied cryptoanalysts back five years. 

Fortunately, however, this did not happen, and probably the only reason that Captain Gallery received just a blistering dressing-down instead of a full court-martial from Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King was the need to maintain secrecy.

The German crew members were interred  at Camp Ruston in Louisiana with the same concerns about secrecy and without access to the Red Cross, contrary to the Geneva Convention of 1929. Their relatives and the German government thought that they were all dead until 1947, when they were repatriated. During their internment, the prisoners launched hydrogen-filled balloons marked with "U-505 lives!" in a futile attempt to reveal their plight.

Nothing succeeds like success. After the war, when it was clear that the Germans had not suspected a thing and the capture of the sub was not a fiasco after all, Task Force No. 22.3 received a Presidential Unit Citation, and Gallery was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Lieutenant Albert David received the Medal of Honor as the leader of the boarding party of the U-boat, which, during its seizure, was foundering and which the Americans thought at the time was about to blow up from scuttling charges. The decorations were partial compensation to the American sailors who were chagrined when, in the interest of security,  they were ordered to turn in all of the Lugers, binoculars, and other souvenirs they managed to snag while securing the boat.

Being taken by the enemy had not been the first misfortune to befall U-505. During a prior voyage of the sub, on October 24, 1943, its previous Captain blew his brains out in the middle of a depth charge attack while standing in front of the periscope. This act demoralized the crew. Nonetheless, the surviving crewmen did manage to get the U-boat back home.

The U.S. Navy donated U-505 to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 1954. At the time, the interior of the sub had been thoroughly gutted of all parts and machinery. The Museum sent requests to all of the German manufacturers who had made the components originally in World War II, and they all graciously, at no cost, provided replacements. 

Go to Chicago and you can tour the sub yourself.

U-505 SHORTLY AFTER CAPTURE

AIR FORCE BEARS DO NOT GET TO DO ANYTHING IN THE WOODS

During the 1950s, the fastest bomber around was the B-58 Hustler, which could travel twice the speed of sound. Pilots at that velocity could not survive an ordinary bailout, so the U.S. Air Force developed a special ejection capsule (pictured below) for supersonic use. In the early 1960s, it tested the capsule by using Himalayan and black bears. The capsules, each containing a bear, were blown out of the aircraft while they were going 1,100 miles per hour and parachuted to the ground.  

The bears all survived the bailouts with only minor physical injuries but with some psychological stress. The Air Force expressed its gratitude towards the ursines by killing them after their flights in order to perform necropsies.

J Clear at en.wikipedia
[CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
 or Public domain],  via Wikimedia Commons

FIELD OF SCREAMS

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In medieval England, prior to the existence of formal legal descriptions and written deeds, land was conveyed from one person to another through an elaborate ceremony. A very important part of the ritual was when the buyer and seller would each provide at least one young boy who would be marched around the perimeter of the parcel while being flogged. The theory was that the lads would be so traumatized by the event that they would remember every detail of the transaction and the boundaries of the tract for the rest of their lives. They could thus testify as competent witnesses to the conveyance should any dispute arise years or even decades later.

THE FELINE FOOD AQUATIC INCOMPATIBILITY

MURRAY

Many, if not most, domestic cats will not drink water from a bowl next to their food dish. Purportedly, this is instinctual behavior inherited from their ancestors in the wild who learned not to partake of water which could have been tainted by a nearby rotting dead animal upon which the cat had earlier fed. Consequently, if you have one of those combo cat dishes which has the food right next to the water, your feline companion may not be getting as much liquid as he should.

I had been unaware of this fact for most of my life, but it was consistent with the behavior of our orange cat, Murray. For the first eighteen years of his existence, he had a water bowl right by his food dish downstairs where he spent the night and as well as a separate water bowl upstairs. He almost never used the downstairs bowl, and he would scurry upstairs each morning to take a long drink before starting his day. I had just thought that he was weird, but when I learned of the food connection, I moved his downstairs water bowl ten feet away from his victuals. He thereafter guzzled from it enthusiastically.

After a very long and contented life, Murray eventually passed on. We miss him.

THE CASE OF THE NON-SUICIDAL LEMMINGS

 

Argus fin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide by stampeding over a cliff into the sea. This legend acquired legs in 1958, when Disney released a film called White Wilderness. The director imported some lemmings which had been captured by Inuit children, drove them off of a cliff (the lemmings, that is), and used trick photography to vastly increase their numbers in the movie. According to the film, the lemmings were not intentionally committing suicide, but merely died from exhaustion and drowning in a futile attempt to swim to the opposite shore of the ocean.

However, as revealed by Snopes, these much-maligned mammals do not hurl themselves by droves into the water for any reason, although a few may fall in accidentally.

Lemmings do have large fluctuations in numbers, but so do many wild animals. Lemmings handle the problem of overpopulation through the more traditional means of starvation, epidemics, being eaten by predators (including other lemmings), and migration. 

STAUFFENBERG'S NOBLE FOLLY

There are more streets in Germany named after Col. Claus von Stauffenberg than any other person. Beethoven comes in second. Stauffenberg was, of course, the Army officer who unsuccessfully tried to kill Adolf Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944 and who was shot for his efforts on July 21, 1944.

Approximately 5,000 individuals were executed in an orgy of retaliation and witch-hunting by the Nazis in response to the plot. One of these victims was revered Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was permitted to commit suicide as an alternative to his family being killed. It also avoided a trial for him in "hanging-judge" Roland Freisler's kangaroo court followed by strangulation with piano wire--a fate suffered by many of the other conspirators. Surprisingly enough, although Staffenberg's widow was sent to a concentration camp, she and her children survived the war, and she died in 2006.

The 2008 film, Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg, does a decent job portraying the assassination plot and its unfortunate resolution. It is worth watching.

For further information about Col. Stauffenberg, click here. 

THE COFFIN TORPEDO

For about 20 years after the American Civil War, body-snatching from graves was common in the USA, as medical schools had no legal source of cadavers under the laws at that time. To help discourage the practice, Philip K. Clover of Ohio invented in 1878 a "coffin torpedo," which essentially was a small cannon buried over or inside the casket which would fire several lead balls straight up into anyone attempting to remove the coffin or its contents.  Probate Judge Thomas N. Howell, also of the Buckeye State, invented a device in 1881 which performed the same task of killing or maiming the grave robber, except through the use of high explosive. 

Legitimate cemetery workers were not enthusiastic about these booby traps, as they sometimes went off when a gravedigger was working on an adjoining plot.

Sales of the coffin torpedoes were initially good, but they fell precipitously after a few years as new laws were enacted which gave medical schools legal access to cadavers and destroyed the incentive for corpse stealing.

THE PARCEL POST BANK

The Bank of Vernal in Vernal, Utah was built in 1916 and is the only known building constructed out of bricks sent through the U.S. Post Office.  It was cheaper to have the brickyard mail thousands of packages (each containing seven bricks) than to have the approximately 75,000 bricks sent down by commercial carrier from Salt Lake City. Due to the extremely rugged terrain between Vernal and the rest of civilization, the Post Office lost huge amounts of money delivering this mail. In response, it finally imposed a requirement which, for all practical purposes, limited a customer to receiving only 200 pounds of mail a day without special dispensation.

The building is still in use as a branch of Zions Bank.

For more information on the "parcel post bank," click here.

THE INFAMOUS KANSAS/NEBRASKA OVERPRINTS

STAMP PHOTO FROM SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL
POSTAL MUSEUM ARAGO WEBSITE

The rising criminality of the Roaring Twenties was not expressed only by an increase in bank robberies; post offices were also a prime target, especially in the Midwest. In 1928, thieves stole and fenced U.S. postage stamps worth over $200,000 from post offices. In an effort to make it easier to trace such thefts, the Post Office Department embarked on a scheme where it intended to print all postage stamps, except for those for use in major cities, with the name of the state where they were legally issued. The theory was that anyone possessing or selling large quantities of stamps marked with the name of one state in a different state would have a heap of 'splaining to do. In 1929, the postal authorities issued a trial run of stamps in eleven different denominations for sale in Kansas and Nebraska and labeled them either "Kans." or "Nebr." 

The experiment was a flop. Even though a stamp marked with the name of a particular state could be legally used anywhere in the country, numerous folks thought that the postage was valid only for mail sent within Kansas or Nebraska. Many postal workers in Kansas and Nebraska did not know about the overprints and refused to accept them at all. The overprints did not appreciably assist in the investigation of post office thefts. The Post Office Department therefore quietly abandoned its plans to expand the project to the remaining 46 states. 

As would be expected, due to their limited issue and unusual origin, these stamps are now prized by collectors. 

DEATH DEALS THE CARDS

In 1930, William Kogut committed suicide while on death row at San Quentin. He did so by cutting out the red hearts and diamonds symbols from several decks of playing cards, soaking them in water, sealing the mixture in one of the metal legs of his bunk, and placing the leg next to the radiator in his cell. The watery paste composed of the red dye and the paper from the pieces of the card contained our old friend, nitrocellulose. The nitrocellulose, while relatively intact while wet, became highly unstable when it dried out, and it exploded.

Modern playing cards are usually coated with plastic and contain far more benign dyes, which makes this trick much harder to perform today.

For more information about Mr. Kogut's spectacular demise, click here.

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THE BAEDEKER BOMBINGS

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Baedeker was a German publishing company renowned for producing for many decades highly informative travel guides, primarily for European destinations. Places of interest were rated from one to three stars, with three stars being the most desirable.

In 1942, Hitler launched a series of bombing raids against several picturesque towns in England with little military importance, but with high cultural significance, such as Exeter, York, and Bath, based solely on the fact that they had received a Baedeker three-star rating. These bombings were known, appropriately enough, as "The Baedeker Raids."

This was not the first contribution of the Baedeker Company to the Third Reich. In 1938, German troops used commercial Baedeker guide books to assist them in the invasion of Austria, as they did not have suitable official maps for that purpose.

Due to peculiarities in the manufacturing process, most Baedeker guides decomposed prematurely with the passage of time. Copies in good condition are highly prized by book collectors.

THE UNSAVORY ORIGIN OF EELSKIN

Eelskin leather is eschewed by many persons for purses or wallets under the belief that the skin from an electric eel will produce residual amounts of electricity which will demagnetize credit cards. This fear is without rational basis.  

First of all, it takes about 1,000 gauss of magnetism to effect a credit card (the earth's magnetic field, which is strong enough to effect compass needles, is about one gauss in comparison). 

Second, eelskin leather is not produced from electric eels, or even ordinary eels. It comes instead from a hagfish, which is a repulsive worm-shaped fish which zoologists suspect, but are not sure, is related to a lamprey. 

Hagfish are known for being the only chordates which routinely tie themselves up in knots (the rat kings described in an earlier Factoid are not routine). This ability probably arises from the fact that they really do not have a bony spinal column. They are also renowned for producing enormous quantities of disgusting slime, which is perhaps why their leather is so soft and supple. 

 pbsouthwood at https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/15727711

THE STRAIGHT POOP ABOUT THE PENTAGON

The Pentagon has an inordinately large number of toilet facilities on its premises--about twice that needed for an office facility of its size. And, despite the assertions of various anti-government or anti-military groups, it is not because the occupants of the building are so full of you-know-what. The real reason is far more prosaic.

The construction of the gargantuan complex started on September 11, 1941,* and it was amazingly finished and dedicated by January 15, 1943. It was (and is) located in Virginia. In the early 1940s, Virginia segregation law required that there be provided separate restrooms for "colored" and "white." Whether or not this statute applied to the Pentagon is debatable, in light of the fact that the governor of Virginia had given the War Department exclusive jurisdiction over the property and the additional fact that President Roosevelt had signed an executive order banning discrimination against federal employees on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin.**

There was no actual debate on the matter, however, as Col. Leslie Groves,*** chief of operations of the construction project, ordered that a s---load of bathrooms be provided in accordance with Virginia segregation policy.

In order to comply both with the dictates of the Colonel and the executive order of the Commander-in-Chief, the final construction of the project included the full panoply of potties; however, the doors of the restrooms were not painted to designate their use by any particular race--although one employee did chalk "colored" and "white" notations on them for a brief period until strongly encouraged to discontinue the practice.

For a more detailed analysis of Pentagon bathroom habits, check out the article in Snopes.

*I do not know whether or not it was coincidence that terrorists tried to destroy the facility exactly sixty years later.

**Actual desegregation of the Armed Forces would have to wait for Harry Truman in 1948.

***In his spare time, Groves was in charge of the Manhattan Project and building the atomic bomb.

By David B. Gleason from Chicago, IL (The Pentagon)
 [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

THE ECSTASY OF BEE VOMIT

When you go into grocery store and see row upon row of golden jars of honey (be they conventional jars or cutesy ones shaped like bears), you possibly may not appreciate the amount of effort required to make this popular sweetener. It requires visits by our friends the bees to two million flowers in order to produce a pound of the stuff. A single bee would have to fly 90,000 miles in order to achieve that same amount (she would also personally consume an ounce of the precious food to fuel such a prodigious undertaking).

Historically, honey has been used for a variety of medicinal purposes, such as treating wounds, burns, and hay fever; on those occasions where the patient dies anyway, it can then be used to embalm the corpse. Being composed primarily of simple sugars, it is an excellent source of instant energy but should be approached with caution by diabetics and avoided altogether by infants under one year of age or by soldiers fighting against Mithridates. Romans used it to pay their taxes. John the Baptist utilized it as his major source of carbohydrates, and Cleopatra employed it as part of her beauty regimen.

No one knows for sure the shelf life of honey, as it has been uncovered in 2,000 year old tombs and found to be perfectly fresh.

Also, it tastes really good. 

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