A COMMON SENSE APPROACH TO AVOID BEING GUILLOTINED

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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.

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"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.

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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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