Stravinsky and Nijinsky

The most infamous riot in the history of the performing arts began with the violins in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” But more remarkable than the fistfight was the way the piece revolutionized classical music and ballet.

On the night of May 29, 1913, an elegant Parisian crowd assembled for the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s eagerly anticipated new ballet, “The Rite of Spring.” The opening seemed promising, but then the violins kicked in with a pulsing chord so dissonant that it made spectators wince. As the orchestra continued, the audience hissed and booed. They rose to their feet and shouted—some defending the music, but most denouncing it. People began whacking each other with canes, umbrellas, and, before long, bare fists. Stravinsky’s musical revolution had arrived.

Prelude to “The Rite”

By one account, the idea for “The Rite of Spring” came to Stravinsky in a dream. He envisioned a pagan rebirth ritual, with people throwing themselves before vengeful gods. Rather than a cheerful celebration of springtime, it was a dark and superstitious rite. To compose music appropriate for such a vision, Stravinsky tossed aside convention and broke new ground in rhythm and harmony. He constructed atonal chords never heard before and developed a meter so complex that he struggled to accurately record it on paper. At times in the piece, parts of the orchestra actually seem to be playing against each other.

Stravinsky first performed “The Rite of Spring” for ballet director Sergei Diaghilev and orchestra conductor Pierre Monteux. Both men were shocked and overwhelmed. Later, Monteux wrote that he didn’t understand one note of it and wanted to flee the room. Nevertheless, plans for the ballet got under way. Diaghilev entrusted the choreography to dance phenom Vaslav Nijinsky, whose steps proved just as inspired as the music.

Concept, costumes, and set designs by Nicholas Roerich.

The first signs of trouble came during rehearsals. The ballerinas complained that Nijinsky’s flat-footed, straight-knee jumps jarred them to their bones, and the musicians struggled to keep up with Stravinsky’s galloping pace. At one point, after practicing a particularly dissonant section, the orchestra couldn’t help but burst into nervous laughter.

The Least Quiet of Riots

On opening night, the scene was chaotic. Only minutes into the performance, the audience’s reaction was so loud that the ballerinas couldn’t hear the music. Horrified, Stravinsky fled backstage to find Nijinsky standing on a chair desperately calling out the time for the dancers. Meanwhile, Diaghilev was frantically turning on and off the house lights in an attempt to pacify the crowd. By intermission, the police had arrived, and the theater manager took to the stage, begging the audience to calm down.

The Ballet Russes 1913

The truth is that the spectators were reacting as much to the dancing as to the music. “The Rite of Spring” contained no elegant arabesques or ballerinas in tutus. Instead, the dancers moved more with their hips than their feet, evoking something raw and primitive. What’s more, they dressed as pagan tribesmen, wearing rough tunics and stylized masks on their faces. It was the antithesis of classical ballet. In one scene, the dancers encircle a girl who stands transfixed with fear. Tribal elders swarm around this “chosen one” until she begins to leap frantically into the air. Her dance becomes more and more frenzied until she finally collapses dead—a ritual sacrifice to spring.

After the Revolution

Vaslav Nijinsky and an unnamed ballerina.

For several more nights, Diaghilev and Nijinsky performed “The Rite” to outraged Parisians. Stravinsky, however, grew too sick to attend. Five days after the ballet’s premiere, he fell dangerously ill with typhoid fever. But the following March, the piece was played again in Paris as an orchestral work (without the ballet). This time, instead of rioting, the audience cheered and then carried the composer aloft on their shoulders.

These days, “The Rite of Spring” is more likely to elicit polite applause. The innovations that made it revolutionary nearly a century ago are staples of dance and music today. In the world of ballet, “The Rite” introduced the idea that dance didn’t have to be refined to be significant, and Nijinsky’s choreography deeply influenced modern dance pioneers, such as Martha Graham. In the realm of music, the impact was just as profound, advancing the notion that abrasive music could also be beautiful. The genius of the piece is that it contains all the basic principles of a successful composition—compelling melodies, dynamic rhythms, contrast, repetition—while also pushing them to extremes. After the scandalous riot, it only took a few short years for “The Rite of Spring” to be widely embraced. By the 1920s, it was being performed in the United States, and by the 1940s, it had become background music in a Disney movie. By expanding the boundaries of acceptability, Stravinsky made room for all the dissonant music of the 20th century, from Arnold Schoenberg to Sonic Youth, and changed the definition of music forever.

The Mouse & The Musician

In 1940, “The Rite of Spring” took a big leap from avant-garde to mainstream when Stravinsky let Walt Disney use the piece for an animated movie. In the score of Fantasia, a truncated version of “The Rite” plays during the scenes depicting the beginning of life on Earth, from the primordial ooze to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Years later, Stravinsky wrote critically about Disney, claiming the film company had pressured him into licensing the rights to the music. He went on to describe the performance as “a dangerous misunderstanding” of his composition. Disney representatives were baffled and offended. In response, they released photos of Stravinsky in the studio holding up animation mockups and smiling.

The Kirov Ballet

(YouTube link)

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The above article by Elizabeth Lunday is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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KILL OFF YOUR RIVALS | Benjamin Franklin

During colonial times, the almanac business was cutthroat. The books were the bestsellers of their day -fun compendiums full of facts and witticisms. So, in 1732, Benjamin Franklin decided to enter the game with Poor Richard’s Almanack. In an early edition, Franklin jokingly predicted that rival almanac writer Titan Leeds would die on October 17, 1733 at 3:29 PM, the very instance of a conjunction of the Sun and Mercury.

Humorless, Leeds took the bait and ridiculed Franklin publicly. The response only generated more press for Poor Richard’s Almanack, turning it into a best seller. After October 17 came and went, and Leeds was still breathing, Franklin kept up the gag, claiming Leeds was dead and pretenders were writing under his name. Five years later, when Leeds finally passed away for real, Franklin thanked the imposters for stopping their ruse. By then, Poor Richard’s Almanack had made Franklin a rich man many times over.

STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANT … TURTLES | Salvador and Gala Dali

(YouTube link)

Though notorious in Europe, Salvador Dali and his savvy wife, Gala, weren’t famous in the United States until 1941, when they took the nation by metaphysical storm. To introduce themselves to Americans, the Dalis threw an unforgettably weird party in Pebble Beach, California, called “Night in a Surrealist Forest.” Dali decked the room with 12,000 shoes, 2,000 pine trees, 24 animal heads, 24 mannequins, and a wrecked car. His guest list ranged from A-list stars, such as Clark Gable, to wild animals, including a baby tiger. At one point in the evening, Bob Hope screamed when, after removing the dome from a plate, a toad leapt out at him. After the bizarre bash, Dali conducted an interview for American Weekly from a tall chair -its legs resting on the backs of four giant turtles. Gala claimed the chair “stimulates the artist’s creative powers.”

THROW A PARADE | Edward Bernays

In 1928, smoking was still considered a taboo for women, so the American Tobacco Company hired a rising adman named Edward Bernays -Sigmund Freud’s nephew- to stamp out the stigma. To make cigarettes seem more feminine, Bernays invited 30 debutantes to light a “Torch of Freedom” on Easter Sunday in New York City. Reporters devoured the photo op of stylish women in hats and fur-trimmed coats smoking on Fifth Avenue and making lofty declarations about smashing stereotypes. The next day’s headline in The New York Times read “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.” And ladies have been lighting up openly ever since.

LIVE BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS | Richard Branson

Billionaire Richard Branson is like a modern P.T. Barnum. Ever since he launched his Virgin brand empire in 1972, he’s executed so many outlandish publicity stunts it’s tough to imagine he’s had time to do much else -let alone run an airline, an animation studio, and dozens of other ventures. To celebrate the opening of Virgin Brides, his bridal business, Branson got gussied up in blue eye shadow, red lipstick, pearl earrings, and a $10,000 wedding dress. For Virgin’s first flights to South Africa, he dressed as a Zulu warrior. When Virgin added flights from San Francisco to Las Vegas, the then-56-year-old CEO bungee-jumped 407 feet off the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, smashing into the building, and ripped his pants open.

GO TOPLESS | Marilyn Monroe

Before Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson, there was Marilyn Monroe, the woman who taught those ladies everything they need to know about getting famous. By 1952, Monroe had been credited in 15 films, but most Americans didn’t know her name. She needed some publicity, fast. Around that time, wire service reporter Aline Mosby discovered nude calendar photos that looked suspiciously like Monroe. When the rumor mill started churning, 20th Century Fox warned the actress to stay quiet.

But Monroe had other plans in mind. In March 1952, she gave an interview, admitting the photos were of her and claiming she’d only done them to pay the rent. The outpouring of sympathy made Monroe the most talked about woman Hollywood. One month later she was on the cover of Life magazine, and her next movie, Clash by Night, was a smash hit. Biographers now think that the person who originally leaked the photographs was either Jerry Wald, an executive producer of Clash by Night, or Monroe herself. And that’s how a star is born.

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The article above, written by Mike Albo, is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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1. Regular Exorcise!

Baudelaire once said that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” But in modern-day Vatican City, the devil is considered alive and well. The former Pope John Paul II personally performed three exorcisms during his reign, and the current Pope Benedict XVI is expanding the ranks of Catholic-sponsored exorcists throughout the world. In fact, Father Gabriele Amorth, the Church’s chief exorcist, claims to expel more than 300 demons a year from the confines of his Vatican office, and there are more than 350 exorcists operating on behalf of the Catholic Church in Italy alone. Amorth also teaches bishops how to tell the difference between satanic possession and psychiatric illness, noting that those who suffer from the former seem to be particularly repulsed by the sight of holy water and the cross.

2. Where Thieves Go to Prey

With 1.5 crimes per citizen, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world. It’s not that the cardinals are donning masks and repeatedly robbing the bank, it’s just that the massive crowds of tourists make Vatican City a pickpocket’s paradise. The situation is complicated by the fact that the Vatican has no working prison and only one judge. So most criminals are simply marched across the border into Italy, as part of a pact between the two countries. (The Vatican’s legal code is based on Italy’s, with some modifications regarding abortion and divorce.) Crimes that the Vatican sees fit to try itself—mainly shoplifting in its duty-free stores—are usually punished by temporarily revoking the troublemaker’s access to those areas. But not every crime involves theft. In 2007, the Vatican issued its first drug conviction after an employee was found with a few ounces of cocaine in his desk.

3. The Worst Confessions

Some sins are simply too much for a local bishop to forgive. While priests can absolve a sin as serious as murder (according to the Church), there are five specific sins that require absolution from the Apostolic Penitentiary. This secretive tribunal has met off and on for the past 830 years, but in January of 2009, for the first time ever, its members held a press conference to discuss their work.

Three of the five sins they contemplate can only be committed by the clergy. If you’re a priest who breaks the seal of confession, a priest who offers confession to his own sexual partners, or a man who has directly participated in an abortion and wants to become a priest, then your case must go before the tribunal to receive absolution. The other two sins can be committed by anyone. The first, desecrating the Eucharist, is particularly bad because Catholics believe that the bread and wine transubstantiate into the body and blood of Christ. Messing with them is like messing with Jesus. And then, there’s the sin of attempting to assassinate the Pope. That one’s pretty self-explanatory.

The meetings of the Apostolic Penitentiary are kept confidential because they’re a different form of confession. The sinner is referred to by a pseudonym, and only the Major Penitentiary, Cardinal James Francis Stafford, decides how the sin shall be dealt with. Presumably, a bunch of Hail Marys doesn’t cut it.

4. Read the Pope’s Mail

The Vatican Library. (Image credit: Flickr user Francesco Costa)

The Vatican’s secret archives haven’t been truly secret since Pope Leo XIII first allowed scholars to visit in 1881. Today, it’s even more accessible. Outsiders are free to examine the correspondences of every pope for the past 1,000 years, although there is one catch: Guests have to know exactly what they’re looking for. With 52 miles of shelves in the archives, the librarians prohibit browsing.

The most famous letter there is probably Henry VIII’s request that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon be annulled, which Pope Clement VII denied. Henry divorced Catherine anyway and married Anne Boleyn (and four other women), leading to Rome’s break with the Church of England. The archives also contain an abundance of red ribbons, which were used to bind 85 petitions from English clergyman and aristocrats.

5. The Pope Likes to Text Message

Pope Benedict XVI routinely sends text messages of his homilies to mobile subscribers around the world, and in 2009, the Vatican opened up an official YouTube channel to show various Papal addresses and ceremonies. The Vatican even released an iPhone application that contains multilingual versions of the Breviary prayer book and the prayers of daily mass. But the Pope’s enthusiasm for technology isn’t limited to cell phones and the Internet. The Vatican has also added solar panels to the roof of the Pope Paul VI auditorium as part of its commitment to fight climate change.

6. They Have the Finest Swiss Bodyguards

(Image credit: Flickr user Robert Young)

Nowadays, the Swiss have a reputation for pacifism, but back in the 1500s, they were considered an unstoppable military force. Swiss armies were renowned for the their mastery of a weapon called the halberd, a deadly combination of a spear and an axe, and their ground troops were famous for routinely demolishing legions of enemies on horseback. After Pope Julius II witnessed their ferocity in battle 500 years ago, he recruited a few soldiers to become his personal bodyguards. Ever since, Swiss Guards have pledged fidelity to the Pope, sometimes dying for the cause. During the sacking of Rome in 1527, for instance, three quarters of them were killed while providing cover for Pope Clement VII to escape.

Today, the hundred or so members of the Swiss Guard spend most of their time bedecked in Renaissance garb, twirling their halberds in ceremonies or manning checkpoints around the Vatican. When the Guards are actually protecting the Pope, they wear plain clothes and carry distinctly modern weapons.

7. The Mafia Dipped into the Collection Plate

In The Godfather: Part III, a shady deal between the mafia and the Vatican leads to the murder of the Pope. Was this based on a true story? Possibly. On the morning of September 29, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead, sitting up in his bed, after only 33 days in office. Although Vatican officials claimed the 65-year-old pope died of a heart attack, there was never an autopsy, and at the time, the Vatican definitely had ties to organized crime. Sure enough, in 1982, Vatican Bank president Father Paul Marcinkus resigned from his post after a series of scandals exposed the bank’s ties to the mafia. Eventually, the bank had to repay more than $200 million to its creditors. But Marcinkus was never indicted of a crime. And though he was suspected of being involved in several mysterious deaths, including Pope John Paul I’s, Marcinkus successfully claimed diplomatic immunity in the United States and retired to Arizona in 1990.

8. There’s No Vice-Pope

Once a cardinal becomes the Pope, he’s the designated leader of the Catholic Church and God’s representative on Earth for the rest of his life. As with Supreme Court justices, he can resign before his death, but that’s unlikely. (It’s been more than 500 years since the last papal resignation.) Further, as modern medicine improves, even seriously ill people tend to stick around longer, meaning that a Pope could be alive but unable to perform his duties for years, as was the case with John Paul II. What happens then? Well, no one is really sure. A cardinal can take over the Pope’s responsibilities as the Vatican’s head of state, but no one else is allowed to carry out his ceremonial duties. In the end, many masses and benedictions simply go unperformed until the Pope either passes away or recovers.

9. Faith-Based Economics

The Vatican needs several hundred million dollars per year to operate. Its many financial responsibilities include running international embassies, paying for the Pope’s travels around the world, maintaining ancient cathedrals, and donating considerable resources to schools, churches, and health care centers. So where does that money come from? Catholics pay tithes to their local parishes and donate about $100 million every year to the Vatican itself. But collection plates aren’t the Vatican’s only source of money. The city-state also gets cash from books, museums, stamps, and souvenir shops. (Get your limited-edition Vatican euros here!)

But that’s not always enough. By the end of 2007, the city-state was $13.5 million in the hole. Part of the problem was the weakened American dollar, which translated into less purchasing power. Another contributing factor was the lackluster performance of the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. To boost subscriptions, the Pope has asked the editor to spice up the layout with more photos and allowed him to cover world news stories in addition to the traditional religious fare.

10. Even the ATMs Are in Latin

(Image credit: Flickr user Seth Schoen)

The Vatican Bank is the only bank in the world that allows ATM users to select Latin to perform transactions. That’s just one symbol of the Holy See’s continued devotion to the language. Pope Benedict XVI has been particularly passionate about reviving the language and purportedly holds many informal conversations in Latin. (Pope John Paul II generally spoke Polish.)

The Vatican’s Latin Foundation tries to keep the language relevant by translating modern phrases into the ancient tongue. In 2003, they released an updated dictionary that included the terms “rush hour” (tempus maximae frequentiae) and “dishwasher” (escariorum lavatory). Interestingly, the translations can have serious consequences. A recent U.S. lawsuit was brought against the Vatican for conspiring to protect a child-molesting priest, and it was held up for months as the Church’s experts rejected the prosecuting team’s Latin translations of terms such as “conspiracy to commit fraud.”

(Title image credit: Flickr user David Paul Ohmer)

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The above article was written by David Goldenberg. It is reprinted with permission from the May/June 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the first gunshots of the Civil War -and the first gunshot wounds. As it turns out, the bloodiest war in American history was also one of the most influential in battlefield medicine. Civil War surgeons learned fast, and many of their MacGyver-like solutions have had lasting impact. Here are some of the advances and the people behind them.

Life Saving Amputation: The General who Visited his Leg

The old battlefield technique of trying to save limbs with doses of TLC (aided by wound-cleaning rats and maggots) quickly fell out of favor During the Civil War, even for top officers. The sheer number of injured was too high, and war surgeons quickly discovered the best way to stave deadly infections was to simply lop off the area -quickly.

Among those saved by the saw was Daniel E. Sickles, the eccentric commander of the 3rd Army Corps. In 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, the major general’s right leg was shattered by a Confederate shell. Within the hour, the leg was amputated just above the knee. His procedure, publicized in the military press, paved the way for many more. Since the new Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. had requested battlefield donations, Sickles sent the limb to them in a box labeled “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.” Sickles visited his leg yearly on the anniversary of its emancipation.

Daniel Sickles' leg on display at the the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Nis Hoff)

Amputation saved more lives than any other wartime medical procedure by instantly turning complex injuries into simple ones. Battlefield surgeons eventually took no longer than six minutes to get each moaning man on the table, apply a handkerchief soaked in chloroform or ether, and make the deep cut. Union surgeons became the most skilled limb hackers in history. Even in deplorable conditions, they lost only about 25 percent of their patients -compared to a 75 percent mortality rate among similarly injured civilians at the time. The techniques invented by wartime surgeons -including cutting as far from the heart as possible and never slicing through joints- became the standard.

As for the nutty-sounding behavior of the leg-visiting commander, Sickles can be justifiably accused. In 1859, while serving in Congress, he shot and killed U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key for sleeping with Sickles’ wife. Charged with murder, Sickles became the first person in the United States to be found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

The Anesthesia Inhaler: A Knockout Breakthrough

In 1863, Stonewall Jackson’s surgeon recommended the removal of his left arm, which had been badly damaged by friendly fire. When a chloroform-soaked cloth was placed over his nose, the Confederate general, in great pain, muttered, “What an infinite blessing,” before going limp.

But such blessings were in short supply. The Confederate Army had a tough time securing enough anesthesia because of the Northern blockade. The standard method of soaking a handkerchief with chloroform wasted the liquid as it evaporated. Dr. Julian John Chisholm solved the dilemma by inventing a 2.5 inch inhaler, the first of its type. Chloroform was dripped through a perforated circle on the side onto a sponge in the interior; as the patient inhaled through tubes, the vapors mixed with air. This new method required only one-eighth of an ounce of chloroform, compared to the old two-ounce dose. So while Union surgeons knocked out their patients 80,000 times during the war, rebels treated nearly as many with a fraction of the supplies.

Closing Chest Wounds: The Cub Doctor who Kept Lungs from Collapsing

In the early part of the war, Benjamin Howard, a lowly young assistant surgeon, was shuttled to the sidelines with medical grunt work: changing bandages, suturing wounds, and grabbing grub for the docs. But when other surgeons decided there was no point in treating chest wounds, Howard experimented with a new life-saving procedure.

At the onset of the war, a sucking chest wound was almost certainly a death sentence. Among French soldiers shot in the chest during the Crimean War (1853-1856), only eight percent survived. The problem, as Howard came to realize, wasn’t the wound itself, but the sucking. The negative pressure in the thorax was created by the opening in the chest cavity. The effect often caused the lungs to collapse, leading to suffocation.

The sub doctor found out that if he closed the wound with metal sutures, followed by alternating layers of lint or linen bandages and a few drops of collodion (a syrupy solution that forms an adhesive film when it dries), he could create an airtight seal. Survival rates quadrupled, and Howard’s innovation soon became standard treatment.

Facial Reconstruction: The Plastic Surgery Revolution

Carleton Burgan of Maryland was in terrible shape. The 20-year-old private had survived pneumonia, but the mercury pills he took as treatment led to gangrene, which quickly spread from his mouth to his eye and led to the removal of his right cheekbone. He was willing to try anything. In a pioneering series of operations in 1862, a surgeon from City Hospital in New York used dental and facial fixtures to fill in the missing bone until Burgan’s face regained its shape.

The doctor was Gurdon Buck, now considered the father of modern plastic surgery. During the war, he and other Union surgeons complete 23 revolutionary “plastic operations” on disfigured soldiers. Buck was the first to photograph the progress of his repairs and the first to make gradual changes over several operations. He also pioneered the use of tiny sutures to minimize scarring.

To some, it seemed pretty wacky, like sci-fi for the 19th century. An Illinois newspaper enthusiastically and erroneously described the new treatments: “Such is the progress of the medical department in these parts that half a man’s face demolished by a ball or piece of shell is replaced by a cork face!”

The Ambulance-to-ER System: The End of Drunks and Cowards

The Union went into the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, expecting a mere skirmish. The rebels brought a war. Although 1,011 Union soldiers were wounded, empty ambulances led the retreat to Washington, D.C. Most of the civilian drivers at the time were untrained and “of the lowest character,” according to Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, and activist whose son died after lying for hours following a charge. Many were cowards or drunkards, he added.

It took Jonathon Letterman, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, just six weeks to implement a brilliant system to evacuate and care for the wounded, becoming the model for ambulance-to-ER system we know today. On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam left 2,108 Union soldiers dead and nearly 10,000 wounded. Letterman established caravans of 50 ambulances, each with a driver and two stretcher bearers, to ferry the injured to field hospitals. He hired private wagons to carry medical supplies to circumvent enemy damage to railroad lines. He even introduced spring suspensions to ambulances and added a lock box under the driver’s seat to make it harder for soldiers to steal protein, bedsacks, and morphine reserved for the wounded. The rest is history.

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The article above, written by Chip Rowe, is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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1. The Stupidest Coin the Government Ever Made: The Racketeer Nickel

(Image credit: Hephaestos at the English language Wikipedia)

In 1883, the United States issued a newly designed five-cent piece called the “V nickel.” The coin got its name because the value was indicated on the back simply with the Roman numeral ‘V,’ sans the word “cents.” After all, it was obvious it was a nickel, right? Apparently not. Turns out, the V nickel was the same size as a U.S. $5 gold piece, and both coins featured a bust of Lady Liberty on the front.

It wasn’t long before light bulbs started going off over the heads of con men all across America. Within weeks of the V’s debut, crooks were gold-plating the nickels and palming them off as $5 gold pieces. Meanwhile, government officials scoffed at the notion that anyone would fall for such an obvious hoax. Unfortunately, they were wrong again. Despite the gold-plated nickels not looking like $5 coins and not being nearly as heavy, most people didn’t notice, because the gold coins were rarely used in everyday purchases.

By April 1883, “gilded nickels” were both a national joke and a growing concern for commerce and law enforcement. The U.S. Secret Service made arrests in 10 states related to the scam. In one raid, they seized a “half bushel” of coins waiting to be plated. But all good things come to an end, and con artists had a hard time getting enough new nickels to keep the racket going. Finally, embarrassed officials put an end to the scam by halting production of the nickels until new dies were prepared. This time, the redesigned backs read “V cents.” Today, the V nickel remains a favorite among coin collectors.

2. The Coin You Carry in Bundles: The Kissi Penny

Money hasn’t always been strictly confined to coins and bills. In Biblical times, for example, people used sheep and cattle as currency. Of course, because deceased livestock don’t paste that well into scrapbooks, numismatists have to draw the line somewhere. And that’s where the phrase “odd and curious money” comes in. It’s a numismatist category used to classify various pre-cash societies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

One widely collected type of odd and curious money is an iron currency from West Africa known as the Kissi penny or Kilindi. Named for the Kissi people living in and around Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, the pennies are actually rods of twisted iron roughly 1 foot long. Each has a double-pointed tip at one end and a leaf-like piece at the other—distinctive marks that kept “clippers” from being able to whittle away the metal and pawn off the cut coin as whole. The exact value of the Kissi penny is not known, but it wasn’t much. Large purchases were made by binding Kissi pennies into bundles of 20 to 100. Historians do know, however, that Kissi pennies weren’t taken lightly. They were said to possess a soul, and if one was broken, it was repaired by a blacksmith under the guidance of a local priest.

3. The Coin Your Mom Doesn’t Want You to Pick Up: Leper Colony Coins

(Image credit:Flickr user Jerry “Woody”)

Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, was once among the most feared diseases in the world.  Mistakenly believed to be highly contagious, it was a disfiguring and paralyzing condition that, until the 1900s, had no known cure. Sufferers were forced from their homes and exiled into colonies, where they wouldn’t be able to spread the disease to the larger population.

Among attempts to quarantine lepers? Giving them their own currency. Many people feared leprosy could be transmitted by handling money, so special coins were minted (and, in some cases, paper bills printed) for leper colonies in areas including Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Philippines. Some city officials found another convenient use for leper money—paying inmates for their work and allowing them to buy personal items with it. This, so the logic went, prevented prisoners from ever being able to save up “real” money to aid in an escape.

4. The Coin from 1780 That’s Definitely Not from 1780: The Maria Theresa Thaler

The English word “dollar” comes from “thaler,” any of several large silver coins issued in the German-speaking countries of central Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries. But by far the most famous is the Maria Theresa thaler, which features a portrait of Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria (1717–1780) on the front. And though the archduchess’ thalers were Austrian coins, they wound up being circulated across North Africa and the Middle East for almost two centuries. Because Austrian traders used them to buy coffee in the Middle East, thalers quickly became popular among Eastern merchants, who came to trust the weight and purity of the coins’ silver content.

The catch? Merchants put their trust solely in the 1780 Maria Theresa thaler. When presented with newer (and perfectly legitimate) thalers imprinted with more current dates or featuring different monarchs, Eastern traders assumed the coins were counterfeits. Eventually, it became such a problem that the Austrian government agreed to mint new Maria Theresa thalers, dated 1780, for foreign trade. In fact, for decades after that prized date, demand for the coins was so strong that mints in Italy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands churned out their own versions of the 1780 Maria Theresa thaler.

Reportedly, the 1780 thalers were still circulating in parts of Yemen, Muscat, and Oman until the early 1980s. And today, Austria still mints Maria Theresa thalers, though they’re commemorative coins not used for regular trade. Estimates vary, but it’s believed between 400 million and 800 million of them may have been minted during the last 225 years.

5. The Coin You Can Never Take on an Airplane: Spanish Pieces of Eight

In the New World, colonists had to get creative when it came to currency. Because the British were too cheap to mint coins for their American settlements, colonists had to make do with barter, paper money, or whatever foreign coins they could scrape up through trade. Fortunately, Spain’s New World colonies were rich in silver mines, and the Spanish had plenty of coins to toss around.

At the time, Spain minted coins about the same size as the Germanic silver thaler coins of Europe, and Americans took to calling them “Spanish dollars.” But officially, Spanish dollars were valued at eight reals (real being Spanish for “royal”). So how do you make change for a Spanish dollar? For our colonial forefathers, it was easy. Knowing that silver is a fairly soft metal, they’d just take a mallet and a chisel, or even an axe, and slice up the coin like a pizza. The cut slices were called “bits,” or pieces of eight. A 2-real piece was worth about 25 U.S. cents, which is why a quarter is sometimes referred to as “two bits.” Another term for cut coin slices was “sharp silver,” because the points were indeed sharp enough to cut cloth or even skin.

The circulation of pieces of eight and Spanish dollars in America began to decline after the first U.S. Mint opened in Philadelphia in 1792. However, it took a long time for the establishment to catch up with America’s demand for coins, and foreign currency was legal tender in the United States until 1857.

6. The Dreamiest Coin of All Time: The King Edward Coin

When Britain’s King Edward VIII gave up his crown, he also gave up the glory of seeing his face on English currency. Edward succeeded his father, King George V, in 1936, but problems quickly arose after he announced his intentions to wed a twice-divorced American named Wallis Simpson. Rather than dump his scandalous fiancé, Edward played to the fairy-tale dreams of every girl in the world and gave up the crown instead.

Edward VIII’s reign lasted less than one year, which wasn’t long enough for Britain to switch to new coins, so all the British coins minted during his reign still bore the profile of his late father. Certain colonial coins, such as this 1936 10-cent piece from British East Africa, carried King Edward’s name, but not his image. Rare relics of Edward’s short (and romantic) reign, these coins are a numismatist favorite.

As for the hole in the middle, that’s a fairly common design trait of yore. One explanation is that it allowed people to carry their coins on a string or wear them on a necklace, so they’d be easier to keep track of.

7. The Not-Quite Counterfeit Coin: The 1804 Silver Dollar

America’s most famous rare coin is the 1804 silver dollar. Why so special? Because it was actually made by mistake. Due to governmental budget constraints, the production of silver dollars was halted in the early 19th century. And while a few thousand $1 coins were minted in 1804, they were produced frugally, using the previous year’s dies. Ironically, the first $1 coins dated 1804 weren’t made until 1834, when the United States decided to present the King of Siam and the Sultan of Muscat with a diplomatic gift: complete sets of American coins. Records at the U.S. Mint correctly listed 1804 as the last year silver dollars were made, but didn’t specify that the last ones were dated 1803. Consequently, American officials decided to strike a few new dollars with the date 1804, and ended up creating a coin that had never before existed.

Today, there are only 15 of these 1804 silver dollars left. Eight of them were from the batch minted as diplomatic gifts. The other seven were produced between 1858 and 1860, when an employee of the Philadelphia Mint decided to get rich quick on the coin collector’s market. Using the mint’s silver and equipment, he struck a number of new 1804 silver dollars to sell to collectors. The phony coins (although illegally produced, they’re technically not counterfeits because they were made at a U.S. Mint) were eventually found and melted down—all but seven of them, that is. One of these re-strikes was auctioned in 2003 for $1.21 million, but that’s chump change compared to the $4.14 million paid for one of the original coins back in 1999.

8. The “Choose Your Own Coin” Coin: Blank Coins

The quality-control regulators at our mints do a great job of catching mistakes, but luckily for collectors, some botched coins do make their way into circulation. Among the more common errors are blank coins, such as this one-cent piece. Coins are made by pressing a die onto a planchet, or coin blank, that’s been punched out of a piece of sheet metal. Sometimes, a planchet slips through the process without being struck, and a blank coin, such as the one above, ends up in an otherwise ordinary roll of pennies. Other common errors include coins struck off-center, coins struck on the wrong planchet (i.e., the image of a quarter stamped onto a penny), and double-struck coins.

9. The Coin You Could Stub a Toe On: England’s Giant Pennies

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Wehwalt)

The original English penny was a silver piece descended from a dime-size Roman silver coin, but that sleek and elegant design began to change in the late 1700s. During that century, Britain struggled with the cost of minting coins and often didn’t bother to mint them in small denominations. Labor costs were high, and those who had money dealt in larger denominations, anyway. Then, in the late 18th century, inventors Matthew Boulton and James Watt (who are often credited with creating the first practical steam engine) invented coin-making machinery that greatly cut production costs.

During the Middle Ages, English monarchs, always in need of money, realized they could make a profit by cranking out pennies with less than a penny’s worth of silver. More and more copper was added to the mix, and by the turn of the 19th century, pennies were entirely copper (or bronze). Of course, because these metals were cheaper, the coins got bigger—much bigger.

For the next century and a half, English pennies stayed big—about the size of a modern U.S. half dollar. They also stayed heavy. In fact, demonstrators in the 1960s sometimes used British pennies to throw at police officers. And in 1966, a woman was arrested in Nevada for plunking British pennies into slot machines meant to take U.S. half-dollar coins.

Inflation eventually drove the price of copper so high that making coins out of the metal no longer made sense. By 1969, a ton of English pennies, worth about $1,080 U.S., could be melted down and sold for more than $1,600 worth of scrap copper. The official end to the giant penny craze came in 1971, when Great Britain decided to decimalize its currency.

Incidentally, the United States once followed in the mother country’s footsteps by minting huge pennies. From 1793 to 1857, America made one-cent pieces that were almost the size of today’s half dollars.

10. The Coin That Taught the Government to Recycle: Steel Pennies

While meat, sugar, and gasoline were in short supply during World War II, Uncle Sam was also having trouble getting his hands on enough copper. Turns out, the country’s entire supply was being used to mint coins. In fact, it’s estimated some 4,600 tons of copper went toward making pennies in 1942—enough to make 120 field cannons or 1.25 million artillery shells. So, in 1943, copper pennies were replaced with pennies made of zinc-coated steel.

Steel pennies were unpopular from the start. Vending machines read them as fakes; streetcar conductors mistook them for dimes; and, after the coins had circulated for a short time, the zinc began to wear off and the steel core began to rust.

By the end of 1943, steel pennies were on their way out. But, how would the government scrounge up enough copper for decent self-respecting pennies? Recycling, of course. Army and Navy personnel were ordered to pick up rifle and artillery-shell casings from firing ranges and even battlefields. The empty brass shells were then sent to the Mint, where they were melted down, mixed with a little more copper, and made into pennies.

The campaign worked. All U.S. pennies minted in 1944 and 1945 were made from World War II shell casings. Yet, the new coins presented their own problems. Sometimes, the brass shell cases and fresh copper weren’t mixed completely, giving some of the coins noticeable brass streaks. Also, the explosive residue in the shell casings often stained or discolored the pennies.

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The article above, written by David A. Norris, is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2006 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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"Black Bart" Boles

Guns? Check. Masks? Check. Poetry book? If you’re going to rob a stagecoach, here’s how to do it with flair.

If You’re A Poet, Show It

Even if you’re a no-good, law-flouting bandit, it pays to mind your manners -and your meter. In California, between 1875 and 1883, Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles held up more than two dozen Wells Fargo stagecoaches. Even though he seemed to have an intense private grudge against the bank, he was always polite to its employees, asking stage drivers to “please” throw down the money. Stranger still, Boles often left poetry at his crime scenes. This poem was his most well-known:

I’ve labored long
and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches,
But on my corns
too long you’ve tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

In 1883, Boles was wounded during a holdup and accidentally left a handkerchief at the crime scene. When Wells Fargo detectives traced it back to him, he was arrested and imprisoned, and although Boles’ career as a robber was over, his literary influence was just beginning. During his imprisonment, several copycat stagecoach robbers left truly dreadful bits of poetry at the scenes of their crimes.

Spin the Media

Jesse James and his One-armed Mother

Jesse James spent as much time honing his public image as he did robbing people. In fact, James frequently wrote letters to newspapers, stressing that his gang never attacked innocent farmers, only corrupt banks and railroad companies. He also claimed lawmen hounded James and his brothers because they had been Confederate soldiers, which won the gang sympathy in the South. His letters were widely reprinted, even in The New York Times, helping turn the Missouri bandits into national legends.

One night in 1875, Pinkerton detectives threw a flare into the James family home. The agents were trying to light up the dark house so they could shoot at the outlaws, but the flare exploded in the fireplace, killing Jesse’s young half-brother and maiming his mother, who lost her right forearm. James made the incident seem even worse than it was in his letters to the press, falsely claiming the detectives had tossed a 32-pound military shell into his mother’s home. The public was horrified, and after the explosion, Pinkerton agents received little help from Jesse’s neighbors, who were often happy to provide the James gang with food, information, and hiding places.

Rob Smarter, Not Harder

A stagecoach at Yellowstone National Park

In the early 1900s, automobiles were starting to replace stagecoaches, which meant that stagecoach robbers were a dying breed. One of the last havens for the bandits was Yellowstone National Park, because the park didn’t allow motor vehicles. On the lonely, isolated trails, robbers could loot stagecoaches with remarkable efficiency.  On July 29, 1914, an ex-con named Ed Trafton chose a spot about eight miles from Old Faithful geyser, where there was only one route for stagecoaches. With the aid of an armed accomplice who kept his victims from turning around to get help, Trafton held up 15 coaches, one by one, as though he were operating a drive-through bank.

Get in Touch with Your Feminine Side

During the 17th century, English highwayman Tom Rowland menaced coach travelers with a string of holdups that lasted for 18 years, and the entire time, he was dressed like a lady. Did he put on women’s clothing as a disguise, or was it a fetish? Difficult to be sure, but Rowland worked hard to keep up the charade, even riding sidesaddle when getting away from crime scenes. Caught and convicted in 1699, Rowland was hanged at Tyburn Hill, the historic place of execution for London-area criminals. The law was strict, but jail regulations were not; Rowland spent his final morning dallying with a London prostitute, purportedly dressed as a man.

The body of Bill Brazelton, still wearing his mask.

Wait for the Other Shoe to Drop

Arizona stagecoach robber Bill Brazelton threw lawmen off his trail with a cunning horseshoe trick. Before committing a crime, he would place shoes on his horse normally, then once he’d stolen the goods, he’d quickly turn the shoes around. After he rode off, it would look as though there were two sets of tracks leading to the crime scene, but no tracks leading away.

Brazelton’s scheme worked until one day in 1878, when one horseshoe fell off his steed after a robbery. The horse left behind a bizarre set of tracks, with three shod hooves running in one direction, and one bare hoof running in the other. A suspicious tracker traced the odd hoofprints to a corral near Tucson, where a posse laid an ambush for Brazelton, and he was killed in the attack. That thing about the horseshoe being lucky? Not so much.

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The article above, written by David Norris, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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The hottest thing about chili peppers isn’t the way they taste; it’s everything else they can do for you.

1. THEY STRANGLE CANCER

Human cells aren’t the happy-go-lucky characters we’d like to imagine. In fact, our cells commit suicide on a regular basis, via a process called apoptosis. Unlike the messy deaths that happen when a cell is injured or diseased, apoptosis is a peaceful passing, wherein an otherwise healthy cell reaches the end of its life span, then shuts down, shrinks, and is absorbed by its neighbors. But with certain types of cancer, the natural process of apoptosis doesn’t occur. Unwilling to go quietly into the great night, cancer cells rage on, refusing to die, continuing to multiply,  and eventually forming tumors.

That’s where chili peppers come in. New studies have shown that capsaicin -the chemical compound that gives chili peppers their kick- may be the key to controlling cancer cells. During the past few years, research has indicated that capsaicin can induce apoptosis in cancer of the lungs, pancreas, and prostate. In the case of prostate cancer, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that capsaicin also slows the cancer’s ability to grow. This means chili pepper treatments could be lifesavers for men who’ve survived one bout of cancer but are at risk of another.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that people should feast on pepper-only diets just yet. Right now, there’s little evidence that gorging on chiles will prevent healthy males from getting the disease. In fact, thus far, all research tests on capsaicin have been limited to Petri dishes and some very unlucky mice. That said, scientists remain optimistic about the pepper’s potential to help control the disease.

2. THEY PROTECT MEN AT SEA

Any good sailor knows that barnacles are bad news. If enough of these water-dwelling pests clamp onto a boat’s hull, it becomes less hydrodynamic. In fact, barnacle build-ups can force ships to use as much as 30 percent more fuel. That’s why many seafarers choose to safeguard their vessels by coating them with anti-barnacle paint. The only problem is that these paints are generally filled with toxic chemicals and metals.

Fortunately, in the early 1990s, an American sailor named Ken Fischer came up with a better idea. While chowing down on a Tabasco-laced sandwich, Fischer realized that barnacles might not share his love of spicy food. His hunch was right. Before long, Fischer was making millions off his pepper-based repellant, Barnacle Ban.

Surprisingly, barnacles might not be the only sea creatures averse to chili peppers. The Kuna tribe of Panama reportedly still sails with strings of chilies tied to their boats. The peppers supposedly make the ships (and the Kuna themselves) less appetizing to sharks.

3. THEY NUMB THE PAIN

In addition to killing cancer and fending off barnacles, capsaicin has the ability to dull pain. When it hits the tongue, the spice activates pain receptors that fire up the burning sensation. But after a while, the same process depletes the body of Substance P, a chemical involved in the perception of pain. The message “ouch” stops getting through to your brain, and your discomfort fades.

Medical science has already turned this trick into an over-the-counter cream for arthritis, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Have you noticed that after a trip to the dentist, you talk funny and can’t move parts of your face? That’s because traditional anesthesia temporarily deadens your senses to the extent that you lose control over those body parts. In October 2007, however, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced that they’d used capsaicin to numb rats without rendering them immobile. The researchers first injected rats with capsaicin and then with a local anesthetic. As the capsaicin flowed through the pain receptor pathways, the anesthetic followed in its footsteps, deadening any discomfort while leaving the rats free to scurry about their cages.

In the future, this could mean better painkillers -ones that could make it possible for women in labor to be mobile after an epidural or allow dental patients to move their faces normally after getting a filling.

4. THEY MAKE YOU FORGET HOW BAD THEY TASTE

Although pepper fanatics are always itching for new ways to assault their taste buds, chilies aren’t actually addictive. Numerous scientific studies have shown that chili peppers don’t induce physical cravings, withdrawal, or loss of control -the classic signs of addiction. Yet, there is something about peppers that keeps people coming back for more.

(Image credit: Flickr user Esteban Cavrico)

Scientists think that when pain receptors come into contact with capsaicin, it triggers the body to release endorphins -chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as opiates such as heroin and morphine. And while endorphin highs from peppers aren’t like the ones in Trainspotting, they can provide enough of a euphoric kick to keep people engaged in the actions that release them, such as jogging or bungee jumping. This observation may go a long way toward explaining why humans are the only mammals that keep eating chili peppers, even though the sensation burns. Scientists believe that the little high we get from the spice has helped us convince ourselves that we like the taste. The truth is that we do the same thing -for the same sort of pleasurable payout- with other bitter flavors such as coffee, tobacco, and beer.

(Title image credit: Flickr user cMeFiSh (What’s Next)

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The above article by Maggie Koerth-Baker is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Apollo 8 wasn’t just a NASA mission; it was the biggest, coolest, most mind-blowing Christmas special of all time.

The men of Apollo 8 -Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders- had their work cut out for them. They were slated to become the first humans ever to leave the Earth’s orbit, enter lunar orbit, and see the far side of the Moon. But as their launch date approached in December 1968, NASA added an even more terrifying task to the crew’s to-do list: public speaking. The agency wanted the astronauts to host a live broadcast from the spacecraft on Christmas Eve. Worse still, the men were given only one cryptic instruction: “Say something appropriate.”

The astronauts were in a tough spot. When millions of people of different faiths and backgrounds are listening, what exactly constitutes appropriate? To make matters trickier, 1968 had been a grim year for Americans -the Vietnam War was raging, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated. How could the astronauts simultaneously orbit the Moon, introduce millions to outer space on TV, and buoy the American spirit?

The men were stumped. They began enlisting the help of media experts, who were mostly just as clueless as they were. The answer finally came from the wife of Joe Laitin, a former reporter who’d worked as a public affairs officer under five presidents. She made an elegant, simple suggestion: Why not just read from the book of Genesis?

The astronauts jumped at the idea. They reasoned that genesis had a broad enough appeal across religions to add a hint of spirituality without ostracizing non-Christians. Borman, the mission’s commander, had the first ten verses typed onto fireproof paper and tucked the sheet into his flight plan. The astronauts had their script.

The broadcast began with the crew showing some of the first images of Earth ever seen from space. Lovell remarked, “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there in Earth.”

Viewers were captivated. But as airtime dwindled, Anders revealed that the crew had a special message for all the people of the planet. He started with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth…”

He read the first four verses; Lovell read four more. Borman recited the last two and ended the show, saying, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with a good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -all of you on the good Earth.”

In the end, the crew’s effort paid off. Half a billion people tuned in, making it the largest TV event in history at the time, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive; even Walter Cronkite admitted that he had tears in his eyes. Of course, not everyone on Earth was thrilled; one atheist activist sued NASA for interjecting religion into a government project, but the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. Enough nitpicking! The Christmas Eve special won an Emmy, and Time made the crew the magazine’s “Men of the Year” for 1968. The broadcast was truly out of this world.

(YouTube link)

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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Some advertisers have relied on product placement (think James Bond stopping mid-gunfight for a refreshing sip of Heineken). Others have attempted to make their ads so entertaining that people will watch them in spite of the sales pitch. And then there’s the more mischievous route — the grassroots, take-it-to-the-streets method — and that’s where guerrilla marketing comes in.

Dirt-cheap and chock full of trickery, guerrilla marketing is advertising with a wink. The successful campaigns usually corral attention through subversive means before revealing their true purpose, and they distinguish themselves by being so clever that even once the bait and switch is revealed, there’s no negative outcry.

In other words, even though consumers know they’ve been duped, the reaction amounts to nothing more than a bashful, “Oh Pepsi! We can’t stay mad at you!”

And it’s with that good-humored and awe-inspired mindset that we pay homage to the best “gotcha” moments in advertising.

1. The Blair Witch Project

Arguably the most important aspect of a successful guerrilla campaign is staying one step ahead of the public. As consumers become more attuned to ad agency efforts, marketers have to figure out how to attack the mob from unexpected angles. The brand standard for catching the public off guard? 1999′s The Blair Witch Project. With no stars, no script, and a budget of around $50,000, University of Central Florida Film School pals Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez successfully scrubbed out the line between reality and fiction.

The film’s tagline set the stage: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.” Audiences were expected to believe what they were watching — shaky, low-quality videotape of three runny-nosed kids weeping in the woods — was an edited-down version of real recovered footage. And while it was certainly an inventive way to challenge the boundaries of cinematic storytelling (not to mention justifying the low-budget look of the film), Blair Witch didn’t exactly seem poised to rival Titanic. That is, until an inventive guerrilla marketing scheme was devised.

To ease the suspension of disbelief and stir up some buzz, Sánchez created a Web site devoted to the Blair Witch — a fictitious, woods-based specter who’d been snapping up Maryland kids for the last century. Although the legend was created out of whole cloth, it was soon snapped up by gullible Interneters everywhere, and a first-ballot hall of fame urban legend was born. Pretty soon, thousands of people were terrified of the Blair Witch. Even when the actors who played the “film students” started showing up (alive) doing interviews about the movie, many across the country refused to believe the Blair Witch wasn’t real.

From that point, the “I’ve got to see for myself” effect took over, and Blair Witch dominated at the box office. Considered the most effective horror hoax since Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds broadcast, the film grossed $250 million worldwide. Not a bad return for Artisan Entertainment, which paid only $1 million for the flick after its Sundance screening.

2. Acclaim Entertainment

Nowhere are the semi-criminal aspects of guerrilla marketing more important than in pitching to video gamers. Regular folks might occasionally enjoy being duped by an unusually clever campaign, but gamers seem to suck down daring and deception like a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. The more the stunts flaunt the law, the more the gaming demographic seems to like them.

The undisputed high-score holder in this renegade arena is Acclaim Entertainment, a plucky little company that began as a one-room outfit in Oyster Bay, New York, and bloomed into a multinational juggernaut. Eschewing artistry in favor of an “all publicity is good publicity” philosophy, Acclaim stirs up the stuffy types — and then laughs all the way to the bank. One of its bedrock tactics is to offer people money for performing some insane stunt on behalf of its upcoming game. Prior to the release of “Turok: Evolution,” for instance, the company offered £500 to the first five U.K. citizens who’d legally change their names to Turok. (Almost 3,000 people tried to claim the prize.) Later, promoting the release of “Shadow Man 2,” Acclaim announced it would pay the relatives of the recently deceased to place promotional ads on the headstones of their dearly departed. The company said the promotional fee might “particularly interest poorer families.”

The latter campaign was, of course, shouted down. But Acclaim blew it off and said the whole thing was a joke — right after its name had been conveniently plastered all over the headlines. In fact, many of the company’s schemes are designed to die on the vine that way. Acclaim actually counts on law enforcement and city officials to shut down their antics — preferably as publicly as possible. In 2002, the company announced its plans to promote “Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance” using something called “bloodvertising.” Touting it as the bloodiest game of all time, Acclaim said it was developing bus shelter ads that would seep a red, blood-like substance onto city sidewalks throughout the course of seven days. Officials thought that might not be in the best taste, so the campaign was aborted, as the world looked on. Also in 2002, Acclaim offered to pay all speeding tickets incurred in the U.K. on the day its racing game “Burnout 2″ was released. Naturally, the bobbies balked, feeling that removing the consequences for speeding might encourage people to speed. Acclaim judiciously rescinded the offer, but, yet again, not before the name “Burnout 2″ was burned into the public consciousness.

3. Half.com

The thing about Internet domain names is that they’re frequently difficult to remember. They have “krayzee” spellings, or “numb3rs” in them, or they’re only tangentially related to the products they offer. (What does “fogdog” have to do with sports equipment, anyway?) And in 1999, name recognition was one of the main problems facing half.com, an eBay-esque online marketplace that allows people to sell used items for fixed prices without the hassle of an auction. “There is such a dot-com clutter out there,” half.com CEO Joshua Kopelman said at the time. “We wanted to do something innovative to get some visibility in the crowd.”

That something turned out to be giving the 360-person town of Halfway, Oregon, $100,000 and a new computer lab to rename itself half.com for one year. When media outlets picked up the story, half.com (both town and Web site) got some much-needed publicity. Within weeks of its launch, the site was covered by the Today show, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Time magazine even called the renaming arrangement “one of the greatest publicity coups in history.”

The man who literally put half.com on the map was the site’s then VP of marketing, Mark Hughes. Hughes, who is now proprietor of buzzmarketing.com, managed to generate so much publicity for half.com that only three weeks after the renaming was announced, eBay snapped it up for a cool $313 million. And while half.com is probably the most successful town/product renaming event in history, it’s not the only one. In 1950, Hot Springs, New Mexico, rechristened itself Truth or Consequences after a popular game show, and in 2005, Clark, Texas, decided to go by DISH, Texas, in exchange for a decade of free satellite TV.

4. Booty Call

It’s not easy to draw attention to yourself on the streets of New York, but Manhattan commuters took notice in 2004 when a group of scantily-clad (and extremely fit) boys and girls dashed around Grand Central Station flashing underwear with “Booty Call” printed across their shapely backsides. Drivers and passersby whipped out camera phones and digicams, and soon, pictures of the “Booty Call” flasher brigade were zooming around the internet.

The unprecedented display of indecent exposure turned out to be a publicity stunt executed by a company called (forgive us) ass-vertise.com. Booty Call was a new butt-building fitness class being hosted at the New York Health & Racquet Club. “It was fantastic,” said Jay Travis, brand manager for the club. “It would have cost us half  million dollars to get that kind of publicity.” What kind of publicity did he get? In addition to the live eyes that saw the booties in question, some 800,000 interested parties followed the Booty Call trail to a website explaining the promotion.

5. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

For every guerrilla marketing campaign, there is a guerrilla marketing cautionary tale that illustrates just how thin the line between creativity and criminality can be. And no better example exists than the 2007 effort to promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters -a movie about an anthropomorphic crime-fighting happy meal that never actually fights any crime.

Basically, the whole hullabaloo began when a couple of Beantowners got freaked out by the sight of a Lite-Brite attached to an underpass. The board depicted a Moonite -an alien character from the Cartoon Network’s popular animated program Aqua Teen Hunger Force- “flipping the bird” at oncoming traffic. Although instantly recognizable to anyone who’d seen the show, the presence of a battery-powered circuit board carefully rigged to the support system of a bridge struck some Bostonians as menacing, and the police were summoned.

Fearing a terrorist attack, Boston authorities shut down major road and waterways to investigate the installations and even summoned bomb squads to destroy at least one of the devices. Early in the fiasco, stunned Gen-Xers began trying to explain what the LED boards represented, but the company who created and distributed the devices, Interence, Inc., made the mistake of not immediately speaking up. The hesitation later resulted in two freelance video artists, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, being arrested for placing “hoax devices.” Eventually, Turner Broadcasting -which operated Cartoon network- ‘fessed up, admitting they’d placed the devices in 10 cities as part of a guerrilla campaign. Turner paid $1 million to federal, state, and local agencies in Massachusetts to cover the investigation costs and a second $1 million in goodwill funding. And while the charges against the two artists were dropped, the general manager of the Cartoon Network stepped down in the wake of the incident.

While the TV show on which the film is based got an immediate 20-percent ratings boost, it’s still unknown what effect, if any, the incident had on ATHFCMFFT‘s box office sales. But one thing is clear: If you’re going to buy the municipality of Boston a present, don’t get it a Lite-Brite.

6. Obey: Andre The Giant Has A Posse

Most marketing ploys are created to promote a product, but the global rash of stickers, posters, and stencils reading “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” exist only to urge people to question their surroundings. In essence, it’s an ad campaign against advertising.

As subversive as it is pervasive, what became known as the “Obey Giant” campaign began when Rhode Island School of Design art student Shepard Fairey made a bunch of stickers and started putting them up around Providence. Mimicking Soviet-style propaganda posters, the stickers featured the unlikely visage of late professional wrestler Andre “The Giant” Roussimoff accompanied by messages like “Obey” and “Andre the Giant Has A Posse.” The stickers’ message was unclear — yet clearly counterculture. It resonated with local skateboarders, rockers, and other underground types, and soon, many were asking to join in the fun. The stickers spread underground to New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, and within a few years, they were all over the world.

The Obey Giant campaign is the kind of thing that, once you see it for the first time, you start to see it everywhere. The stickers are hip and cryptic, and they capitalize on the fact that most people think it’s cool to be part of something not everyone understands. Beyond that, the campaign does have a high-minded mission — to create a kind of emptiness in the observer. The propaganda orders a person to do something (“obey”), but the viewer doesn’t know what to do or how to obey. Fairey hopes this confusion will make people question other directives they receive visually — namely, in ads.

These days, Fairey heads up a design and marketing company that reps youth-targeted brands, such as Pepsi and Universal Pictures. An anti-advertising ad campaign staged by a big-shot advertiser? It doesn’t get much more guerrilla than that.

7. Court TV

“Hi Steven,” started the billboard that suddenly appeared near Times Square in 2006. “Do I have your attention now? I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful, poorly-endowed slimeball. Everything’s caught on tape. Your (soon-to-be-ex) wife, Emily.”

As you might imagine, this little love note caught the attention of a lot of people, and more than a few of them raced to the Internet to find out who Emily was and what she had planned. Turns out, Emily was keeping a blog (thatgirlemily.blogspot.com) of her vengeful activities, which included giving away bottles from Steven’s prize wine collection and listing his work number as the contact for a “fabulous 750 square foot studio in Soho for a steal -$300/month.” Oh, and she also posted video clips of his adulterous shenanigans on YouTube.

The website quickly registered more than 1 million hits, and the billboard zipped across blogs and news sites around the world. As word spread, however, it came out that identical billboards were currently decrying Steven not only elsewhere in New York, but also in Los Angeles and Chicago. Was Steven simply a well-traveled adulterer, or was something fishy going on?

E-detectives everywhere picked up the scent, and within days, Emily and her familial woes were exposed as a guerrilla campaign promoting the second season of Court TV’s Parco P.I. -a docudrama series revealing the exploits of a private investigator. the network’s in-house marketing department had devised the campaign in an effort to create a believable female character who might hire a private investigator like the one on the show. They wanted the “Scorned Woman” campaign to raise awareness about the program and hoped it would give the public a chance to play detective themselves.

With millions of hits registered and millions of “fwd: Check out this site!” emails speeding across the globe, the ads were an unmitigated success. As with all great guerrilla campaigns, the ruse was so clever that, rather than sulking about being duped, people reacted with a collective, “Nice one. You got us.” They continued to forward the site to their friends, and the show continued enjoying increased exposure.

8. Médecins du Monde

Not all guerrilla campaigns are about the money. In fact, one of the cleverest and most altruistic grassroots marketing efforts was pulled off by a group called Médecins du Monde — an international humanitarian organization devoted to providing care for vulnerable populations around the world.

In late 2005, the French branch of the organization staged an extremely effective campaign to draw attention to the plight of the homeless in Paris. Christened the “tent city” initiative, the group distributed some 300 “two-second tents” to destitute Parisians sleeping outdoors. Equipped with the rapid-deploying tents (which didn’t require poles or pins), the homeless gathered in small groups of eight to 10 along the Quai d’Austerlitz and the Canal Saint-Martin. The prefab shelter, which bore the Médecins du Monde logo, drew immediate attention to the number of homeless people in the area and provoked such incredible public outrage that the city was forced to act. A rare off-season government session was convened, and officials admitted that Paris’ homeless shelters were vastly overcrowded. They immediately announced the allocation of nearly $10 million for emergency housing.

9. Vodafone

While some guerrilla campaigns border on art — baffling consumers with their cocky blend of ingenuity and imagination — others take a more boorish approach. During the 2002 Bledisloe Cup rugby match, for example, two young men suddenly burst onto the field at a crucial moment and ran across the pitch wearing nothing but the Vodafone logo painted on their backs.

Admittedly, streaking at a rugby match isn’t exactly uncommon, but sponsored streaking very much is. Adding to the drama? The fact that the match was held in Telstra Stadium — Telstra being Vodafone’s competitor.

In the end, one of the streakers was fined $3,500 (AUS), and a maelstrom of criticism was directed at Vodafone. However, millions of TV viewers witnessed the event live, and it was covered everywhere from CNN to the front page of the The Times in London. For a company seeking to sell itself as young and brash, such backlash was a ringing endorsement.

10. Batman

(YouTube link)

These day, the movie-going public is almost habitually beguiled by blockbuster summer films. Zillions of people dutifully line up to see X-Men, or Spider-Man, or Superman, or whatever the opening weekend record-demolisher will be. But this wasn’t always the case. The summer “event film” phenomenon wes a lot to a little Tim Burton flick called Batman.

months before Burton’s Batman was ever released, it was already the biggest movie of 1989. Hats, shirts, posters, sunglasses, medallions, key chains -it was virtually impossible to purchase anything that didn’t have a yellow-and-black batwing insignia emblazoned on it. And all this for a film no one had even seen! Never before had a movie reaped such rewards from word-of-mouth buzz. In fact, the marketing of Batman established a bedrock principle of guerrilla marketing -that word on the street will put more butts in the seats than any slogan or jingle. But how did Batman‘s production team succeed in getting average Joes the world over to hype their film? It all began with an attempt to assuage a couple of comic book geeks.

When word leaked out that a Burton-directed Batman film was underway, many comic book traditionalists panicked. Michael Keaton, then known mostly as a comedic presence, was slated the play the Dark Knight, which caused Batman fans to fret that the film would be nothing more than a gussied-up redux of the campy, almost farcical Batman TV series. To quell fears, the heavyweight production tandem of Peter Guber and Jon peters (Flashdance, The Color Purple, Rain Man) quickly cobbled together a teaser trailer to demonstrate the new film’s dedication to a dark, comic book style Batman. It went out to theaters nationwide and, before long, bedazzled fans everywhere were buying tickets to other movies, where they’d watch the Batman trailer and then head for the bat-exits. McDonald’s got on board offering bat-themed kid’s meals; Coke put out special cans; and there was even a tie-in novel in the works.

When the actual movie finally arrived, it premiered on more than 2,000 screens nationwide and laid waste to all existing opening weekend records. Although it has since been displaced by its descendants, Batman made more than $40 million in its first weekend (a record at that time), more than $100 million in its first ten days, and more than $410 million worldwide by the end of its theatrical run. It was the biggest earner of the year and remains one of the top-50 highest-grossing movies in American history. Yet all of that still pales in comparison to the merchandising, which made an additional $750 million.

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The article above, written by Chris Connolly, is from the July-August 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

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Once upon a time, fairy tales were dark fables designed to scare children into good behavior. This is the story of one American author who thought kids deserved better.

In December 1900, L. Frank Baum was a struggling, 44-year-old writer living in Chicago with his wife and four children. Christmas was only days away, and Baum was desperately searching for a way to buy presents for his family.

On a whim, Baum went downtown to ask his publisher for a royalties’ advance for the five books he’d written that year. He walked out with a check for one of the books, and promptly stuck it in his pocket. He didn’t bother to take a look at it.

When Baum arrived home, his wife, Maud, was ironing a shirt. He reluctantly handed her the check, and at the same moment, they both discovered that it was for $1,423.98—roughly $40,000 today. Paralyzed with disbelief, Maud burned a hole through the shirt.

That book, of course, was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Lyman Frank Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, New York. As a child, his weak heart limited his capacity for rough-and-tumble play. So, despite being the seventh of nine kids, he spent most of his childhood alone, indoors, and dreaming.

As a young man, Baum leapt like a flea from career to career. By his early 30s, he’d been a journalist, a printer, a postage-stamp dealer, and a champion poultry breeder, which led him into publishing, with his trade journal The Poultry Record. He also ran his own theater company, where he wrote, directed, and acted in his own plays.

Then, in 1881, Baum met his leading lady—Maud Gage, a sophomore at Cornell. But Maud’s mother, Matilda, disapproved of the union. Matilda Gage was a feminist who marched alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the women’s suffrage movement. She saw Baum as a flake who’d never amount to anything, and she told her daughter she’d be a “darned fool” to marry the itinerant actor. Yet, Baum’s charm, sincerity, and uncanny ability to tell fantastic stories were no match for Matilda, and he soon won her over. He also became a feminist.

Frank married Maud in 1882, but troubles were around the corner. Baum’s theater company went belly-up, and without local prospects, he looked west for opportunity. In 1888, he moved his family to the Dakota Territory, where he opened a store in the town of Aberdeen. (Years later, when Baum wrote descriptions of the Kansas prairie in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he was actually describing South Dakota.) His shop, Baum’s Bazaar, sold Chinese paper lanterns, Bohemian glass, gourmet chocolates, and other exotic items. But Baum overestimated the frontier’s demands for novelty shopping. In a few short years, he’d gone bust yet again.

At this point, L. Frank Baum was 35 with no career. He headed east for Chicago, where he received guidance from an unexpected source: his mother-in-law. Matilda Gage convinced Baum to pursue his one true talent, telling stories. In Aberdeen, children had stalked Baum, demanding story hour from the raconteur. Kids loved his tales because they weren’t thinly disguised morality lessons. Instead, Baum’s stories were fantasies filled with candy, toys, magic, and adventure. Heeding Matilda’s advice, Baum decided to give writing a try.

FOLLOWING THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

In 1899, Baum teamed up with illustrator W.W. Denslow and published Father Goose, His Book, a collection of pictures and verse. The collaboration worked so well that it inspired Baum and Denslow to try their hands at a full-length novel.

As a child, Baum had loved the European fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, but he loathed the dark, grisly endings. He envisioned a new American fairy tale in which ingenuity and spunk paid off. In Baum’s words, he wanted to create a world where “wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartache and nightmares left out.”

It was a great idea, but what would he call this utopia? Family legend holds that Baum scanned his office for ideas. While staring at his filing cabinet, he drew inspiration from a label on the bottom drawer marked “O-Z.”

Baum’s book was turned down by every major publishing house. Finally, a distribution company agreed to take on the novel about Oz, but only if Baum and Denslow agreed to shoulder the printing expenses. The bet paid off. Today, the masterful integration of color illustrations and text is heralded as a pioneering achievement in literature, a precursor to the graphic novel. Denslow’s drawings were unique in that they not only reflected the plot, but also furthered it. His vibrant pictures spilled over from one page to the next.

More importantly, children loved Baum’s story. By the end of 1900, Maude had burned a hole through her husband’s shirt, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the best-selling book in America.

OZ FEST

Over the next 20 years, Baum would pen more than 70 books under several pseudonyms. Unfettered by gender restrictions, he often wrote under female names, including Suzanne Metcalf, Laura Bancroft, and Edith Van Dyne. Baum also tried his hand at science-fiction, demonstrating a knack for predicting the future on par with H.G. Wells. A running theme in Baum’s work was the triumph of technology over distance and time, and many of his fictional inventions—televisions, satellites, cell phones, laptops—eventually became realities of everyday life.

In 1902, Oz was transformed into a Broadway musical, shortened simply to The Wizard of Oz.
At first, Baum was taken aback by some of the changes. For instance, Dorothy’s faithful companion on the stage wasn’t Toto, but a cow named Imogene.

But when the play became a Broadway hit, Baum softened. He tried to return to the theater to produce his own plays, but all his efforts, including The Whatnexters and The King of Gee Whiz, were flops. He also tried his hand at a vaudeville show, “Fairylogues and Radio Plays,” but that foundered, too.

The truth was that Baum wanted to stop writing about Dorothy and do something new. He intended for the sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz, to be the last in the series. In the story, Baum seals off his fairyland, proclaiming it unreachable from the outside world. But when a film project he was pursuing collapsed, Baum quickly found himself strapped for funds again. He wrote another Oz book, and from then on, Dorothy and the gang kept resurfacing every time Baum needed to pad his wallet.

IT’S A TWISTER

In 1919, Baum died of the same heart condition that had kept him indoors as a child. But even death couldn’t stop the Oz stories from flowing. Baum wrote the 14th book in the series, Glinda of Oz, on his deathbed, and it was published posthumously. After that, various authors churned out 26 official sequels, which have been translated into 22 languages, from Tamil to Serbo-Croatian.

In 1939, the Oz legacy hit a turning point when MGM released The Wizard of Oz movie. Based on Baum’s original storyline, the plot and characters remained relatively faithful to the book, although there were plenty of changes, too. Most of the quotables (“And your little dog, too!”) were Hollywood additions, as were the musical numbers and dancing little people. There were some changes to the story, as well. Dorothy’s slippers, which were silver in the book, were changed to ruby in the movie to show off the new technology of color film.

The key difference between the two versions is that in the movie, Dorothy’s adventure was “all a dream,” while in Baum’s book, Oz was very much real. In fact, later in the book series, Uncle Henry and Auntie Em move to the Emerald City to dine off jeweled plates and converse with talking animals. As it turned out, nobody really wanted to go home to Kansas.

(Image from the NeatoShop)

The movie established Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion as cultural icons. Flying monkeys and yellow brick roads became part of the national psyche, and today, Oz’s popularity shows no sign of waning. The movies, the spin-offs, the Broadway musicals, the plays, and—more recently—the pop-up book just keep cropping up. Much like Dorothy and the gang, Baum took the long way to finding his true calling, but there’s no denying that he left behind an enduring legacy. By writing the quintessential American fairy tale, Baum proved that even late bloomers living in their own fantasy world are entitled to happy endings.

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The article by Kelly K. Ferguson is reprinted from the May- June 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Art Conservator Gwynne Ryan

Dead sharks? Edible statues? Contemporary artists rely on exotic materials to push the boundaries of art. And they’re using a new breed of conservators to fix things when they go bad.

Forget the white coats, Forget the magnifying glasses and tiny brushes. Sure, classical art conservators still spend their days and nights obsessing over ways to remove centuries of grime from Renaissance frescoes, but contemporary art preservation is an entirely different picture.  After all, how do you save a putrefying shark? How do you deal with an avant-garde video installation that’s blinking out? And what do you do when the industrial-grade fireworks stuffed in the headless cow carcass stubbornly refuse to light? Modern art represents the Wild West of art preservation -a world in which artists push the envelope with outrageous ideas and materials, and conservators use any means necessary to keep those works in one piece and on display.

We asked top pros to share the inside stories behind some of the most outlandish and challenging conservation projects. Norman Rockwell paintings these ain’t.

(Image credit: Fickr user Rupert Ganzer)

“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by Damien Hirst
The shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst’s 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London’s Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster.  None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever.

An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D.

So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. “That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it’s so iconic,” says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. “Will we look back on all these changes and say: ‘God, what a ridiculous thing to do?’ It’s kind of hard to know.”

As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ian T Edwards)

“Video Flag” by Nam June Paik
Even back when cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions were the norm, repairing one was a headache. It meant hauling the heavy box to a cluttered shop, where a guy named Murray in a stained shirt would place it on a shelf, and then call you two weeks later with a Kansas-sized bill. Now imagine having to fix 70 of them, with the added problem that CRTs are obsolete and Murray is retired or dead.

That’s what Jeff Martin, another Hirshhorn conservator, is facing with Nam June Paik’s “Video Flag,” a kaleidoscopic wall of 13-inch Sanyo CRTs that evoke the United States and its flag. So far, Paik’s 1986 masterpiece has held up well, but some of the monitors, just like your grandma’s old set, are well past their warranties. “They’re electronics, and they wear out,” says Martin. “What happens when they all need to be replaced?”

Since CRT monitors are no longer being made, buying new ones from Best Buy isn’t an option. Nor is substituting modern TVs; that fuzzy scan-lined picture that made you dump your old CRT for for a plasma or LCD screen is inseparable from the piece’s conception. Worse still, putting the exhibit in protective storage and hauling it out every ten years or so isn’t an option: The TVs need to be powered up periodically or the diodes break down chemically.

So what are the folks at Hirshhorn doing? They’re stockpiling old CRTs like mad for use as spares. But as Ryan points out, “There are only so many CRT monitors in the world. Our conservators are going on eBay like crazy people to buy them up. And they’re already running out.”

“Building Steam 190″ by Donald Lipski
An industrial rubber glove filled with rice, then capped off with a porthole for people to peer inside… sounds like a disturbing artifact you might find in a German tourist shop. For the private collector who bought this work by enigmatic modernist sculptor Donald Lipski, however, it was disturbing on a whole other level.

The first problem: After only a few years, the glove ripped. Even worse, the rice became infested with the larvae of tiny cigarette beetles. It was up to Glenn Wharton, a conservator now with the Museum of Modern Art, to tell the collector the bad news: Two-thirds of the artwork -the glove and the rice- would have to be replaced.

Restoration went well at first. Lipski told Wharton where to find an exact duplicate of the glove and even sent him imported specialty rice (apparently Uncle Ben’s wouldn’t cut it). Wharton then subjected the grains to a freeze-thaw-freeze cycle to kill any latent infestations. Victory! The piece went back on display. But, two years later, Wharton got another call: The rice was infested again, this time with a far-gnarlier breed of lice. At this point, Lipski suggested replacing the rice with ricelike plastic “sprinkles” that he had considered using originally.

“I had a hard time with this,” Says Wharton. “Here’s an artist coming many years later saying, ‘Let’s just change the material aspect of the work.’” After much discussion with Lipski and the owner, the necessary changed were made, but Wharton and his associated suggested that the date of the work be amended to reflect the modifications. Case closed, but due diligence still doesn’t tell us what we really want to know about “Building Steam.” Why?

(Image credit: Flickr user Roberto C. Madruga)

“Palimpsest” by Anne Hamilton
Great art may be timeless, but when the theme of the work is how memory fades over time, conservators know they’re in for some kind of special meta-Hell. “Palimpsest” is a room wallpapered from ceiling to floor with thousands of tiny faded notes written by the artist’s friend, some buried in beeswax. To complete the uplifting message that we’re all headed for senility, there’s also a tank of snails chomping contendedly on two heads of cabbage.

“It requires a whole village to put this thing together,” says Ryan, who is overseeing the work’s installation at the Hirshhorn, the third time it’s been recreated. And while the piece is a bear to assemble, the biggest hurdle is, believe it or not, legislative. Since the work’s initial showing in 1989, snails have been classified as pests by the government. “You have to get special permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Ryan explains. “And then you have to prove you’re not just going to unleash them into the wild afterwards.”

The last time the work was on display in 2005, getting the clearance took longer than expected, and the exhibit opened with replacement mollusks: a selection of garden-variety slugs dug up from the lawns around the museum. When the snails finally did arrive, their treatment was appropriately high-concept. The staff gorged them on fresh veggies, then rotated them in and out of the exhibit on a precise schedule. The snails had it pretty good, in fact, until the end of the exhibit’s run, when, in accordance with the law, they were executed by autoclave. So much for preservation.

(Image credit: Janine Antoni/Luhring Augustine)

“Lick and Lather” by Janine Antoni
The strange thing isn’t that Antoni made a hyperrealistic impression of her upper body using dental molding materials. Or that she cast a series of busts, 14 in chocolate and 14 in soap. Or even that, to mimic the effects of aging, she licked the chocolate and bathed with the soap. What’s strange is that at no fewer than three galleries (in Venice, Dublin, and Philadelphia), visitors have bitten the noses off the chocolate sculptures. Afterward, there was real discussion about leaving them that way. “Do you repair it?” asks Ryan. “Or does that make this one unique?”

The decision was made not to repair the noses (or prosecute the offenders). But as the components age -handmade soap has a shelf life of only three years and chocolate not much longer- “Lick and Lather” continues to pose prickly conceptual questions. “What happens if the artist is no longer around?” wonders Ryan. “The busts can be recast. But who bathes with it?”

Maybe one of those nose biters can volunteer?

(YouTube link)

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The article above, written by Allen St. John, is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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In 2002, a reclusive Russian genius named Grigori Perelman put an end to more than 100 years of suffering in the mathematical community. He solved the most difficult math problem of the 20th century -the Poincaré Conjecture. Its siren call had lured generations of mathematicians to intellectual graves. It first, its simplicity would seduce them, and they’d become convinced the answer was near. But as years passed, they’d be left with nothing to show for their lives’ toil but dead ends. By the time Grigori Perelman proved the Conjecture, the solution was worth $1 million.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MADNESS

Henri Poincaré

In 1885, all of Europe was talking about Henri Poincaré, a 30-year-old genius who’d mathematically proven why the solar system holds together. When a hole appeared in his calculations, he plugged it up by essentially inventing chaos theory: Kings were tripping over themselves to make him a knight· and Sweden gave him a small fortune in prize money. To this day; Poincare holds the record for the most physics Nobel Prize nominations, though he never actually won one.

But his most legendary achievement was something no one noticed until much, much later. At the turn of the century: Poincaré invented an entirely new field called algebraic topology; and today, it’s one of the most complicated and vibrant branches of mathematics. Think of it as a twisted version of geometry, in which shapes stretch, bend, and fold inside out. Poincaré’s goal was to classify objects by identifying their basic form, much the same way botanists classify new species of plants. In the process of creating topology, Poincaré tossed out a conjecture that seemed to be true. It was a side note to a larger problem, and he figured he’d work out the details later. Little did he know; his side note would become one of the greatest challenges in the mathematical world.

THE VICTIMS

Poincaré’s conjecture seemed simple enough. It claimed that any object without a loop is essentially a sphere. Think of a knife made out of Play-Doh. Without punching a hole in it or closing a loop, can you squish it into a ball? Yes, of course. Now picture a pair of Play-Doh scissors. No matter how hard you try, you can’t crush it into a ball without closing up the finger holes. It’s impossible. Poincare believed that objects like the knife were related to spheres, while objects with holes and loops in them were not.

Poincaré thought the conjecture would be easy to prove, and he even published a solution. But then, he saw a flaw in his work and retracted it. After his death in 1912, the question lay dormant for decades, until an Oxford professor named J.H.C. Whitehead rediscovered it in the late 1930s. J,H.C. (known to his students as “Jesus, he’s confusing”) also published a solution. But he, too, found a mistake and retracted it. However, his work sparked interest in the problem. By the 1950s, the Poincaré Conjecture was one of the best-known challenges in the math community:

Christos Papakyriakopoulos

That’s when two Princeton students, Edwin Moise and Christos Papakyriakopoulos (commonly known as Papa), decided to try their hands at it. Moise in particular looked like the guy to do it. Young and brash, he liked to announce his next big problem like a batter calling his shot. Twice that included one of the toughest problems in topology; and twice he returned with the solution. Then, he set his sights on Poincaré.

Papa was vastly different. A self-taught political refugee from Greece, he was famous for his odd, obsessive nature. Legend has it that when he came to Princeton, he checked into a motel and never checked out. He never even unpacked his bags. He simply fell into a routine that he followed every day; down to the minute, which always included a midday nap on top of his desk.

Throughout the 1950s, the two geniuses dueled with each other over Poincaré. Papa would announce a proof, and Moise would shoot it down. Then Moise would announce a proof, and Papa would shoot it down. This went on for years, while neither man worked on almost anything else.

Eventually, Moise cracked. One day he simply turned away from math altogether. Michael Freedman, a topologist who works for Microsoft, describes this phenomenon as getting “wrecked” by a problem. He says many mathematicians thrive on the knowledge that they are smart enough to solve almost anything, given enough time. When Moise realized his best efforts were never going to solve Poincaré, his spirit broke. He never did serious math research again and spent his last few years critiquing poetry. Papa kept working on the problem for 25 years, swearing he wouldn’t marry until he’d solved the Conjecture. In 1976, he died of stomach cancer, still a bachelor.

HOPE IN A HIGHER DIMENSION

Steven Smale

After dozens of mathematicians had devoted their careers to the Poincaré Conjecture, a breakthrough came in 1960, when a young hotshot named Steven Smale made the first tangible headway into the problem. Smale decided not to worry about objects in the three-dimensional or even the four-dimensional universe. Instead, he proved that the Conjecture was true in the fifth dimension and higher. Until then, it had always been assumed that problems were easier to solve in dimensions that we can visualize. Smale broke new ground by solving a problem in higher dimensions before the lower ones, and today; it’s common practice. Mathematicians say the extra dimensions give them room to manipulate imaginary objects.

Smale’s discovery inspired the math world, and a new generation of Don Quixotes started sharpening their lances. Another ray of hope came in 1982, when mathematician Michael Freedman managed to scoop up Poincaré in the fourth dimension. Both he and Smale received the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize, just for their partial proofs. And yet, the question of the third dimension-the only one that had actually interested Henri Poincaré-still remained. Technically speaking, without the third dimension, mathematicians were no closer to the answer than they’d been in 1904.

TO THE VICTOR GO NONE OF THE SPOILS

Through all of this, some mathematicians devoted themselves to disproving Poincaré. In fact, during the 1950s, a man named R.H. Bing would spend two weeks trying to prove the Conjecture was true and then two weeks trying to prove it was false. Neither effort panned out. Regardless, most mathematicians believed the solution to Poincare was out there-somewhere.

Grigori Perelman

Finally, in 2002, Grigori Perelman, a recluse living with his mother in St. Petersburg, posted a short paper on a math web site. The reticent Perelman never once mentioned Poincaré in his essay; but the few people who read it understood its implications. The paper addressed one of the biggest obstacles that had blocked mathematicians from proving the Conjecture. Whenever they’d tried reducing certain shapes to their most basic forms, little irregularities kept popping up like painful burrs. To smooth out the rough spots, Perelman applied a type of mathematical sandpaper called a Ricci flow. The math community started to buzz that he’d resolved the underlying issues of the problem. Eventually; one mathematician asked Perelman directly if his paper answered the Poincaré Conjecture. Never one to be long-winded, Perelman wrote back, “That is correct.”

Because Perelman hadn’t taken the normal steps of running his ideas past colleagues and publishing in a referenced journal, it took some time to verify this claim. It didn’t help that his paper only included the barest essentials to prove the Conjecture. It took six experts two years to fill in the gaps that Perelman had seen as self-evident.

By 2006, his proof had held up to every attack, and Perelman was offered a Fields Medal. But by that time, Perelman was so disillusioned with the field of mathematics that without a flourish, he turned it down, becoming the first person in history to refuse the award. Also without explanation, Perelman never claimed the $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Today, Poincaré’s side note may only be applicable to the most obscure physics problems. But mathematicians expect that, like most theoretical breakthroughs, the effects will eventually diffuse to the rest of science. After all, when Newton first unveiled calculus, experts said only a few people on Earth could possibly understand it. Now it’s taught to teenagers and used in everything from engineering to statistics. Whether Grigori Perelman likes it or not, someday he may find himself honored in high school textbooks, and the Poincaré Conjecture may become as easy to understand as gravity.

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The above article by Erik Vance is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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1. Take Orders from a Dog

Sometimes the only thing standing between an artist and true greatness is the lack of a good pet. German composer Richard Wagner relied on his spaniel, Peps, to guide him through the creation of Tannhäuser, an epic opera about the struggle between sacred and profane love. Peps had his own stool next to Wagner’s piano, and whenever Wagner was having difficulty with a passage, he’d take direction from his pooch. In the process, Peps would go berserk when something didn’t agree with his ear, and Wagner would tweak the opera to please him.

2. Turn Hatred into Motivation

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen despised Swedish playwright August Strindberg, but he couldn’t have written some of the greatest works of modern drama without him. The two traded jabs for well over a decade at the turn of the 20th century: Strindberg accuse Ibsen of copying his work, claiming that Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler ripped off his Miss Julie; Ibsen countered that Strindberg was psychotic. And Ibsen may have had a point -Strindberg was given to catatonic spells and often lashed out with a knife at invisible enemies behind his back. Ibsen loathed Strindberg so fiercely that he hung a portrait of his nemesis over his desk, which he used as a particularly masochistic form of inspiration. Ibsen would tell visitors, “I cannot write a line without that madman standing and staring down at me with those crazy eyes.”

3. Smell the Success

German writer Friedrich von Schiller composed the 1785 poem “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven later set to music in his Ninth Symphony. What inspired Schiller’s passion for happiness? Rotten apples. The poet insisted that he needed the smell of putrefying fruit in the air to write, so he kept his desk drawer well stocked.  But here’s the weird part: Schiller may not have been (completely) crazy. In 1985, researchers at Yale University found that the scent of spiced apples can lift a person’s mood significantly and stave off panic attacks.

4. Play Dead

When poet Dame Edith Sitwell was a little girl growing up in Victorian England, her parents would lock her into an iron frame to straighten out her spine. Sitwell hated them for it, and she rarely spoke to her parents later in life, even as she became increasingly famous for her poems about the London Blitz during World War II. The countless hours that Sitwell spent locked inside of that iron frame may have had a peculiar effect on her mind. As an adult, to cultivate a state of tranquility, Sitwell would wake up every morning and lie down in a coffin. After a few hours, she’d feel calm enough to write.

5. Get a New Hairdo

Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes found early in his career that he had trouble staying on task while studying or writing -it was just too tempting to throw on some sandals and go to town! But Demothenes found a clever way to make himself work: When he felt wanderlust, he’d shave off half of his hair. Knowing that he looked far too ridiculous to leave the house Demosthenes would be able to concentrate on his writing for a couple months at a time -or at least until his hair grew back.

6. Lay Everything Bare

Clothes can be such a distraction. Victor Hugo, the celebrated French author of realist novels that would become sentimental musicals (Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), conquered writer’s block by shutting himself in a room, completely naked, with just a desk, a pen, and paper. He ordered servants not to give him clothing until he’d finished working.

To write his final novel, Ninety-Three, Hugo took his nudity outdoors. Every morning, he’d stand in the buff on his roof and pour a bucket of water over his head. Fully refreshed, he’d then go into a glass cage, which he called his “look out” and write standing at a podium, naked.

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The article above, written by Ethan Trex and Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Megalonyx jeffersonii

Fossils rarely do scientists the courtesy of showing up intact, so putting them together is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. A tough one. Without a picture on the box to go by. It’s no wonder a few old bones have made some of the world’s smartest scientists look so stupid.

1. All the President’s Sloths

In decades past, American presidents apparently had hobbies other than playing golf and eating at McDonald’s. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was an avid paleontologist. As early as the 1790s (before it was cool), he kept an impressive fossil collection at his home in Monticello. So when a group of confused miners came upon some unidentifiable bones in a West Virginia cave, they sent them to Jefferson. Judging from the long limbs and large claws, the president suspected they belonged to a giant cat “as preeminent over the lion in size as the mammoth is over the elephant” and that the animal might still exist somewhere in the unexplored West.

Jefferson got the size right. The description? Not so much. The animal he named Megalonyx (giant claw) was actually one of the giant ground sloths that very slowly roamed America during the last ice age. And while Jefferson later agreed with this alternative diagnosis, his error wasn’t a complete waste. The Megalonyx marked one of the first important fossil finds in the United States, and it prompted the first and second scientific papers on fossils published in North America. In honor of the president’s contribution, the sloth’s name was later formalized to Megalonyx jeffersonii.

2. A Bone-headed Approach

To this day, the Brontosaurus remains one of the most popular and recognizable dinosaurs in history – an impressive feat for an animal that never existed. The confusion started in 1879, when collectors working in Wyoming for paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh found two nearly complete – yet headless – sauropod dinosaur skeletons. Wanting to display them, Marsh fitted one specimen with a skull found nearby, and the other with a skull he found in Colorado. Voila! – the Brontosaurus was born.

(Image credit: Flickr user yuan2003)

Unfortunately for Marsh, the skeletons were later exposed as adult specimens of a dinosaur already discovered, the Apatosaurus. The error was formally corrected in 1903 by Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum, and scientific papers haven’t called the animal Brontosaurus since. Seventy more years passed before researchers determined that the skulls Marsh borrowed really belonged to the Camarasaurus, a discovery of his archrival, Edward Drinker Cope. Pop culture, however, missed the memo altogether.

3. Getting Your Head Screwed on Right

Paleontology’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, Marsh and Cope had a nasty and long-running professional rivalry. Although they’d actually started out as friends (with each even naming a discovery after the other), by 1870 their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. A year earlier, Cope had assembled a skeleton of the sea reptile called Elasmosaurus. However, in his rush to publish his discovery, he placed the head on the wrong end, giving everyone the impression that the animal had a very long tail instead of a very long neck. Marsh poured ample salt in that wound by making fun of Cope’s error in print (suggesting he rename the animal “twisted lizard”) and constantly ridiculing it at parties and exhibitions. Given the stakes, he might as well have slapped Cope across the face with a glove and insulted his mother. As it was, all Cope could do was try and buy up all the published examples of his posterior-backwards construction.

Incorrect image of Elasmosaurus published by Cope.

The feud only grew from there. The two men fought over allegations that, on a tour of Cope’s digging operations in New Jersey, Marsh bribed collectors to send key fossils to him. And in 1877, a part-time collector in Utah incited a whole new string of cutthroat arguing by trying to sell bones from his site to both of them. Other feud highlights included a series of snippy “he said, he said” pieces in the New York Herald and the time the Smithsonian confiscated much of Marsh’s fossil collection after Cope accused him of misusing tax dollars to hoard fossils for himself.

For all the angst it caused them, though, Marsh and Cope’s constant one-upmanship was great for science. During their 20-some years of bickering, the two added 136 new species (including Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus) to the nine that had previously been discovered in North America.

4. Pulling Teeth

Henry Fairfield Osborn was a giant in the field of paleontology, but he also has one giant mistake to his name. In 1922, while serving as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn received a fossil of a tooth found in Nebraska. Suffering from a bout of overconfidence, the normally careful scientist published a paper announcing (based on one tooth, mind you) that he’d discovered Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, the first anthropoid ape unearthed in North America.

Amédée Forestier's illustration of Nebraska man

Taking into account that all of this was happening just three years before the Scopes Monkey Trial, word of a missing link was a pretty big deal. Add to that British anatomy professor Sir Grafton Elliott Smith touting the discovery as a potential breakthrough, and artist Amedee Forestier drawing a famously speculative picture of the “Nebraska Man” (and Woman) in the widely read Illustrated London News. Although Osborn never hypothesized where (or if) his ape fit into the evolutionary chain, he used the discovery to fuel his war of words with anti-evolution blowhard William Jennings Bryan. Osborn made sure to note the irony of the tooth having come from Bryan’s home state, and even suggested calling the ape Bryopithecus in honor of “the most distinguished primate which the state of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

Unfortunately, in this particular case, said distinguished primate got the last laugh. Upon further examination, it was determined that the tooth belonged to a millennia-old peccary – otherwise known as an ancient pig. In fairness to Osborn, the similarities between human and peccary teeth had already been noted in scientific literature, so it wasn’t that wild a guess. Of course, that didn’t stop creationists from pouncing on the mistake.

5. Creating a Monster

Long before there was a science called paleontology, people were trying to come up with explanations for giant bones found in the ground. And often, those explanations pointed to mythological creatures. Of all the fairy-tale creatures accused of inhabiting the ancient world, the griffin might claim the most direct connection to actual fossils. Usually depicted in folklore as a lion with an eagle’s head and wings, the griffin was said to fiercely guard its gold. The hybrid animal appears consistently in the art of ancient Rome, Greece, and Persia, and its legend apparently originated with Scythian nomads who wandered east toward Mongolia’s Gobi desert.

Griifin (left) and Protoceratops fossil

So how do fossils fit in? The Gobi is filled with the fossils of both the Protoceratops, a lion-size dinosaur with a birdlike beak, and of the similarly beaked Psittacosaurus. And while there were no massive hoards of gold around, the skeletons were often found guarding something arguably more valuable – hoards of eggs. The ancients were wrong about griffins, but that may have had more to do with misdiagnosing evidence than with legend or superstition.

6. Talk About Your Stale Food

Herodotus is considered the world’s first historian, but he came this close to also being the world’s first paleontologist. While traveling in Egypt, he noticed that the bricks used to build the pyramids had unusual, circular shapes petrified in them. What he saw were the sediment-preserved remains of ancient single-celled organisms. Of course, what he thought he saw were the remains of lentils eaten by the pyramid builders after a hard day of lugging around 2-ton pieces of stone.

Herodotus was pretty far off, but he redeemed himself later in his book Histories. In it, he noted that he saw shells in Egypt’s mountains, and rather than attribute them to a shellfish feast for pyramid builders, he correctly surmised that the animals lived in a sea that once covered the desert. “The Delta,” he wrote, “is formed of the deposits of the river, and has only recently, if I may use the expression, come to light.” Regardless, by overlooking the importance of the organisms he found, Herodotus unintentionally delayed for centuries the discovery of one of science’s most important fields. He made his observations in the 5th century BCE, and it took until the 1700s for serious thinkers to realize they were looking at extinct animals. We’re just saying, he could have saved us all a lot of time.

7. Lady in Red

Reverend William Buckland

When it comes to the battle between faith and science, it’s hard to be more conflicted than William Buckland. Both an ordained Anglican priest and a top-notch anatomist, Buckland holds the claim to fame for finding the oldest human remains on record – only he didn’t believe that’s what he’d found. As a Biblical literalist, Buckland strongly supported the notion of Noah’s flood. So, when he made a groundbreaking discovery by digging up prehistoric elephant and hyena bones in a Yorkshire cave in 1822, he concluded that they simply belonged to animals that had perished in the flood.

But that wasn’t all. A year later, while excavating a Welsh cave full of prehistoric animal remains, Buckland found a human skeleton deep in the sediment. Stained red by the surrounding iron and wearing ivory beads, the “Red Lady of Paviland” was, according to Buckland, a woman of ill-repute linked to the nearby remains of a Roman camp (as it couldn’t possibly be as old as all the other bones around it). Later research identified it as a 27,000-year-old man, but Buckland was too caught up in his religious devotion to accept the idea of ancient people in his homeland (or that a man would wear such extravagant jewelry).

8. A Tender Subject

An illustration of Scrotum humanum and the book containing it.

The first time a scientist attributed a fossil to an actual dinosaur was 1677, when museum director Robert Plot identified a bone fragment found in Oxfordshire, England, as part of the thigh bone of a (human) giant. Nearly 100 years later, scientist Richard Brookes gave the unknown species the unfortunate name Scrotum humanum because, well, the fossil did resemble a giant man’s nether regions when positioned a certain way. Naturally, it was (drum roll, please) William Buckland who found other pieces of the dinosaur nearby and gave the specimen the more suitable name Megalosaurus. Don’t worry, though. Buckland didn’t abandon his flood theory; he just figured this was a really big lizard that had drowned. He did, however, make the fossil the subject of the first-ever formal scientific paper on dinosaur remains.

9. Iguana Fix This

After its discovery in 1822, the Iguanodon became one of the first dinosaurs to achieve celebrity status. Depending on whom you believe, the massive plant-eater’s tooth was found by either Dr. Gideon Mantell or his wife. Regardless, Gideon was the one who realized the fossil came from an extinct category of reptile much larger than any still around.

Thanks to Mantell’s obsessive drive to find more bones, Iguanodon turned into a bit of a sensation, helped along by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who made life-size models of Mantell’s animal. Most famously, at an 1853 dinner at London’s Crystal Palace, 21 prominent scholars dined inside Hawkin’s scale model of an Iguanodon.

The Crystal Palace Iguanodon

These sculptures were true to Mantell’s description of the animal. Unfortunately, that vision was terribly, terribly wrong. Among the mistakes? The animal walked on all fours (it turned out to be a biped) and had a horn on its nose (the hornlike bone was actually a spiked thumb). The Iguanadon has since undergone a massive makeover, as did Mantell. After his wife left him, he moved to London and became a full-time paleontologist. In 1838, he sold his fossil collection for the then-massive sum of 4,000 pounds (about $20,000).

10. For the Birds

Archaeopteryx fossil photographed in 1880.

There’ve been plenty of hoaxes in paleontology, from Piltdown man to the Cardiff Giant. Yet what makes the story of the Archaeopteryx so painful is that it wasn’t a fake at all. The animal’s crime? Sharing features with both birds and dinosaurs, and being discovered around the time that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was stirring up so much trouble.

The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found in 1860, and it was nothing more than an impression of a feather. Though initially skeptical, German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer verified that it was an ancient feather – but maybe not from a bird. So, a month later, when the same limestone quarry yielded a headless reptilian skeleton with the imprints of attached feathers, von Meyer looked pretty smart. While a number of key scientists needed to see it for themselves before believing the thing was real, other anti-Darwin paleontologists (most notably Andreas Wagner of Germany and Sir Richard Owen of Great Britain) jumped at the chance to dismiss the animal as a full-on reptile rather than a step on the evolutionary path to birds. But they were wrong. Later, when the clear reptile-bird link became indisputable, anti-evolutionists went from nitpicking the classification to calling the whole thing a hoax. As recently as 1990, physicist Lee Spetner famously (and falsely) claimed that the feathers were added to a reptile fossil by making impressions in cement and adding it to the mix. Despite efforts to smear their good name, six Archaeopteryx skeletons have now been found, all with the same bird-reptile blend.

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The article above, written by Jeff Fleischer, is from the July-August 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

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It’s time to unlock your body’s full potential.

1. Friends in High Places

In 2003, a 28-year-old Swedish man named Johan Adolfsson took a nine-hour flight from Thailand to Australia with eight extremely lethal snakes -four king cobras and four emerald tree boas- strapped to his inner thighs. His plan to cash in on the $3,500 booty for black market serpents was dashed when Australian officers captured him as he passed through customs at Sydney airport. Sadly, it too late for some of the snakes; all four king cobras died midflight.

2. Live by the Seat of Your Pants

The business of trafficking exotic animals is a multibillion dollar industry -and it’s more than just shoving reptiles into pairs of Dockers. In 2010, agents at Mexico City International Airport noticed a bulge moving under a nervous passenger’s t-shirt: Roberta Cabrera, 38, had 16 rare, 6-inch titi monkeys in pouches fastened to his chest with a special girdle. Two were dead. In separate incidents, airline passengers have also been caught with two pigeons, six lobsters, 14 songbirds, and 44 lizards crammed into their slacks.

3. Skirt the Issue

Mammals aren’t the only creatures customs officials have to watch for. In 2005, a 45-year-old woman was detained by customs in Melbourne International Airport after she’d arrived from Singapore. “During the search, officers became suspicious after hearing ‘flipping’ noises coming from the vicinity of her waist,” the Australian Customs Service later told the press. They found she had 51 exotic fish -all alive, hallelujah!- swimming in water-filled baggies hidden inside specially made pockets, which were concealed under her skirt.

4. Love Your Curves

In November 2010, two women were caught leaving a T.J. Maxx in Oklahoma with four pairs of boots, three pairs of jeans, a wallet, and one pair of gloves hidden in rolls of fat around their boons and bellies. All told, they’d squeezed $2,600 worth of loot under their excess body fat. The police officer on the scene later struggled to explain the situation to reporters from a local television crew: “These two were actually concealing them in areas of their body where excess skin was, underneath their, um, and their armpits, and things of that nature.”

5. The Cast System

People have been hiding objects inside of fake casts for centuries. In March 2009, a 66-year-old Chilean man one-upped his predecessors by wearing a real, functional cast that was entirely made of pure cocaine. A little more than two pounds of pressed blow, to be precise. What’s more, the cast was covering an actual injury; the Chilean had broken his own shinbone in a failed attempt to make his ruse seem believable. After the police in Barcelona caught him entering Spain, they rushed him to the hospital to treat his broken leg.

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The article above, written by Haley Sweetland Edwards, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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How the KKK helped get children out of the factories and into the classroom.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan liked to think of themselves as white knights. And when it came to compulsory education for schoolchildren, believe  it or not, they actually were. To understand how this bizarre heroism came to pass, you have to go back to the 1820s, when about half the laborers in America’s cotton mils were children under the age of 15. Adults had a serious hankering to get those kids out of the workforce -not because they were concerned for their well-being but because adults resented the competition. After all, employers could get away with paying children much lower wages, and the little ones had energy to burn. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, vice president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, put the situation bluntly: “Wherever child labor prevails there is a corresponding decrease in employment for adults.”

In fact, getting rid of the kids was one of the first causes to unite the American label movement. When labor leaders realized they couldn’t just turn youngsters out in the streets to fend for themselves, they proposed a one-two punch of ending child labor laws and requiring school. Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law. In 1837, its state legislature barred factory owners from hiring anyone under age 15 who hadn’t attended public school for at least three months during the previous year. The law was ignored, and factory owners kept hiring kids anyway. Five years later, Massachusetts passed a second law, which went after factories more directly, limiting the amount of time children could work. When this law was ignored as well, the state made education compulsory in 1852.

By 1884, 16 states had instituted laws that forced children to go to school. Business owners, enamored with their short, low cost labor pool, denounced the status as “communist” and “un-American.” But the percentage of children in the workforce in cotton mills fell nonetheless; by 1890 it was just 10 percent. And not coincidentally, adult workers were awarded higher wages and better working conditions over the same period. From 1840 to 1880, average wages rose as much as 150 percent, while at the same time, the average workday fell from 13-14 hours to 10-11 hours.

At the turn of the century, labor unions lobbied for compulsory education nationwide, and they soon found an unexpected ally. The Ku Klux Klan supported the idea of public schools as a way of forcing immigrants to conform to white, Protestant culture. By 1918, labor unions had succeeded in getting compulsory education laws passed in every state. Two years later, a Catholic organization in Oregon demanded that the laws be amended to include private schools. The KKK took a more outspoken stance, and its membership grew quickly in support of the public school system.

But the fight wasn’t over -just because more kids were forced to go to school didn’t mean that they couldn’t work in factories. After all, there were always nights, weekends, and summer vacations, right? In 1923, a Klan newspaper warned that big business wanted to keep child labor legal to “secure a cheaper class of labor and hold the price paid to the American citizen down to a minimum at all times.” The Klan was nearing the apex of its size and clout, with more than 3 million members. Since a good portion of its ranks were poor whites, the Klan was more sympathetic to this group’s economic interests. It went on a full-throttle campaign to get kids out of the factories for good.

Around the same time that the national KKK began strongly advocating for a federal ban on child labor, a rift opened up between the Northern Klansmen and Southern industrialists. In the ensuing public relations battle, the industrialists tried to win points with Southern voters by portraying the debate over child labor as another fight against the Yankees. But the pull of the KKK was too great, and the Klan won a victory for children nationwide -well, white children. Southern business leaders agreed to child labor laws, but only as long as the adult minimum wage remained low and African-American children were prohibited from attending white public schools. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standard Act officially ended child labor, but it didn’t do much to help black kids living under Jim Crow. The result: White children across the country were guaranteed an education at the expense of black children in the South.

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The article above, written by Erik Sass, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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During the Golden Age of Hollywood, big-budget movies were classy affairs, full of artful scripts and classically trained actors. And boy, were they dull. Then came Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies. With Corman behind the camera, motorcycle gangs and mutant sea creatures filled the silver screen. And just like that, movies became a lot more fun.

Escape from Detroit

For someone who devoted his entire life to creating lurid films, you’d expect Roger Corman’s biography to be the stuff of tabloid legend. But in reality, he was a straight-laced workaholic. Having produced more than 300 films and directed more than 50, Corman’s mantra was simple: Make it fast, and make it cheap.  And certainly, his dizzying pace and eye for the bottom line paid off. Today, Corman is hailed as one of the world’s most prolific and successful filmmakers.

But Roger Corman didn’t always want to be a director. Growing up in Detroit in the 1920s, he aspired to become an engineer like his father. Then, at age 14, his ambitions took a turn when his family moved to Los Angeles. Corman began attending Beverly Hills High, where Hollywood gossip was a natural part of the lunchroom chatter. Although the film world piqued his interest, Corman stuck to his plan. He dutifully went to Stanford and received a degree in engineering, which he didn’t particularly want. Then he dutifully entered the Navy for three years, which he didn’t particularly enjoy. Finally, in 1948, he set his sights on something he did want -to make his mark in Hollywood.

Rising from the Ocean Floor

Corman’s career began at the bottom. He started in the film business as an entry-level reader for 20th Century Fox, wading through the worst scripts at the studio. The job was thankless, but the incompetent writing inspired Corman to give screenwriting a try. He moved to Paris to focus on his craft and eventually sold a script to Allied Artists Pictures. However, the resulting film was so awful that Corman vowed never to let a studio meddle with his work again. From that point on, Roger Corman was determined to make his own movies.

It was a bold statement at the time. Because Hollywood studios owned all the theater chains, movies couldn’t be shown without studio backing. But in 1948, the Supreme Court decided the system constituted a monopoly, and it forced studios to sell off their theaters. Suddenly, every Ed Wood with a camera could get his movies on the big screen. But without big stars or big budgets, indie flicks had to find other ways to attract audiences. And so the “exploitation movie” was born. The films shamelessly drew in crowds with shocking subjects, jazzy titles, and special effects -three things right up Corman’s alley.

In fact, part of Roger Corman’s legend sprang from the fact that he could create an entire movie out of a single good special effect. One of his earliest films, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), was conceived when Corman posed as a major producer and convinced inventors to lend him their new, one-man submarine for his “next project.” With a spiffy prop secured, all Corman needed was the little stuff -a title, a story, a screenplay, actors, and money. After scrounging up $12,000, he concocted a film about a man-eating, mutant sea creature that terrorizes good-looking tourists until a dashing marine biologist rams the beast with a submarine. (clip) Then he sold the movie for $100,000. All in all, it provided Corman with his trademark recipe for success -cheap production values, a wild sense of humor, and pulp-fiction plots all whipped briskly into a hefty profit.

Little Shop of Hormones

It wasn’t long before Monster caught the attention of American International Pictures (AIP), a production company that believed in the then-revolutionary idea of marketing movies to teens. And Corman fit right in with their mission. With AIP’s backing, Corman began churning out an unbelievable six movies a year. At that pace, logic and continuity went out the window. Vikings appeared on screen wearing sunglasses, and actors were reused in multiple roles. In one Western, a cowboys shoots at himself dressed as an Indian. But with the cheapskate director behind the camera, it wasn’t just the actors being repurposed; it was also the scenes. Corman liked some of his footage so much that he used it in other movies, again and again.

Corman also ruthlessly jettisoned elements that bogged down big-budget Hollywood films -elements such as nuanced characters and storylines. Instead, Corman focused on bells and whistles. In Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), he drew on his engineering background, meticulously placing a horror scene every five minutes throughout the film. (trailer/full movie) With a running time of 62 minutes, only the basics of plot and humor survived. The final product wasn’t art, but it wasn’t boring, either.

Surprisingly, the faster Corman made his movies, the better they turned out. Another cornerstone of his legend is the making of The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which he reportedly conceived, wrote, and filmed in less than one week to take advantage of a leftover stage set before it was torn down. The result (which included an early Jack Nicholson appearance) was one of Corman’s finest movies. (trailer)

Tripping Ahead

Roger Corman aspired to make more than just cheapo flicks. In the 1960s, he began directing bigger-budget films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, starring Vincent Price. These became instant classics of gothic cinema. The success encouraged Corman to flex his creative muscles further and make what his peers thought impossible -a serious film. The Intruder (1962), starring newcomer William Shatner, told the story of a man fighting racism in the South. (clip) The movie was shot on location in Missouri, but when the locals discovered that the script addressed the evils of segregation, they physically chased the crew out of town. Although the film played well to critics and was hailed as a masterpiece in Europe, U.S. audiences hardly got a chance to see it. American theaters refused to show the incendiary film, and the movie flopped. The director learned his lesson and never made another “message” film again.

Not one to sulk, Corman reverted to what he knew best -fast, cheap entertainment. His assembly-line productions required a huge amount of manpower, and in the process they attracted an entire generation of young directors and actors. Martin Scorsese, Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone all apprenticed under Corman, accepting minimum-wage work in exchange for the opportunity to study his low-budget ways. As legendary director James Cameron once put it, “I trained at the Roger Corman Film School.”

But the younger generation provided more than just cheap labor. They also gave Corman a window into America’s growing counter-culture of motorcycle gangs, hippies, and LSD. The result can be seen in his definitive LSD movie The Trip (1967). The fact that he dropped acid before filming (to create a more “authentic” experience) only added to the lore. (trailer)

Through the years, Corman’s films became increasingly anarchic, putting him at odds with the older producers at AIP. The final straw was his 1971 flick Gas-s-s-s, in which  mysterious gas wipes out everyone over the age of 25, and wild subcultures dominate the Earth. (clip)  AIP re-edited the entire film without Corman’s permission, dramatically decreasing its grooviness. Corman retaliated and formed his own company, New World Pictures, where he continually refined his aesthetic. In his own words, he aimed to produce “contemporary dramas with a liberal-to-left-wing viewpoint and some R-rated sex and humor.”

How B-Movies Joined the A-List

Working with Hollywood’s future luminaries, New World raised trashy cinema to an art form during the 1970s. Ironically, Corman’s company also brought legitimate art films to the masses. It distributed the works of critically acclaimed foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini to drive-in theaters. Corman knew the films’ casual attitude towards nudity would appeal to the drive-in crowd, while their artistic merits would draw in the intellectuals. Bergman, for one, never decried the crass commercialization of his work, but rather rejoiced at the thought of drunken teenagers necking to his brand of existential dread.

During the 1980s, Corman’s empire slowly dwindled, as companies such as Miramax muscled him out of the foreign-film market. His movies also suffered as VHS killed off smaller theaters, meaning his exploitation films were forced to go straight to video. Worst of all, he lost his pool of talented young directors and writers to the big studios, which were replicating his style of action movies, emphasizing thrills and humor over plot and character. The only difference was that instead of calling them “exploitation movies,” the studios called them “blockbusters.”

In fact, Hollywood’s obsession with blockbusters originated with the success of one movie. The plot? A man-eating sea creature terrorizes good-looking tourists until a marine biologist hunts it down. The movie was Jaws. But it sounds an awful lot like Monster from the Ocean Floor, doesn’t it?

Bonus: Roger Corman’s Frugal Hall of Fame

The Movie: Waterworld (1995)
The Problem: Upon reading the script, Corman famously announced, “We can’t do this. It’ll cost $5 million!”
The Solution: Corman sold the screenplay to Universal Studios, which produced it for $175 million. The movie bombed at the box office.

The Movie: The Terror (1963)
The Problem: After completing The Raven ahead of schedule, Corman had a leftover set and actors, and nothing to do with them.
The Solution: Make another movie. Written in five days and shot in two, The Terror makes absolutely no sense. Corman let his crew take turns directing it, so in the end, the film fell into the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill (one of Quentin Tarantino’s greatest influences), and even Jack Nicholson -thus earning it the “Most Great Directors Ever to Make One Bad Movie” award. (trailer/full movie)

The Movie: Cockfighter (1974) Tagline: “he came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.” (trailer)
The Problem: The sport of cockfighting was a source of shame in the South, and many people were uncomfortable seeing a movie about it.
The Solution: Corman downplayed the cockfighting by adding sex scenes to the film’s trailer, despite the fact that those scenes didn’t appear in the movie. When Cockfighter‘s director, Monte Hellman, argued that this was false advertising, Corman simply inserted the sex scenes into the film. Cockfighter turned a nice profit.

The Movie: The Big Bird Cage (1972)
The Problem: Women in prison make for great exploitation movies, but it costs money to film in a prison. (trailer)
The Solution: A little barbed wire and some bamboo huts in a Philippine jungle helped Corman invent an entirely new (and incredibly cheap) genre -women in prison camp! The increased sweatiness didn’t hurt sales, either.

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The above article by Ian Lendler is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cub has been inching towards capitalism -mostly in the form of tourism. Can Havana once again become “the Latin Las Vegas”?

Communist countries aren’t known for being vacation hot spots, and for good reason. To have a thriving tourist sector, you need luxuries to offer and visitors willing to spend money on them. That’s the stuff of capitalism. And yet, Cuba attracts about 2 million sightseers every year, mostly from Europe and Canada. That number is especially remarkable considering that two decades ago, Cuba’s tourism industry was not only nonexistent, it was outlawed.

FROZEN DAIQUIRIS

Cuban tourism was banned in 1960 as part of the Communist Revolution. Shortly after Fidel Castro came to power, his regime closed the island’s internationally renowned hotels. He also cracked down on prostitution, gambling, and illicit drugs -trades that had made the country a den of hedonism. As Castro saw it, tourism was a form of capitalist exploitation in which the rich pleasured themselves on the backs of the poor. He felt that Americans used the island as a playground with little concern for the welfare of those who lived there. In his new country, Cuban citizens would be equal; no one would stay at luxury hotels until everyone could stay at luxury hotels.

(Image credit: Flickr user Tom Graham)

Cuba got by without tourism for nearly 30 years, mostly by exporting sugar to its top trading partner, the Soviet Union. But after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, billions of dollars disappeared from Cuba’s coffers overnight. To keep the country from going bankrupt, Castro announced a five-year era of austerity, which he dubbed the “special period.” Never in the history of politics has the word “special” been used more euphemistically. Castro cut mass transit and food rations by 80 percent -moves so drastic that they caused the average Cuban to lose 20 pounds. But cutting costs alone wouldn’t make the country solvent again; Cuba needed new trading partners and new industries. So, very reluctantly, Castro re-opened the tourism sector.

THE TOURISM APARTHEID

During the 1990s, the Cuban government poured $3.5 billion into rebuilding the tourism industry, restoring old hotels, nightclubs, beach resorts, and churches, some of which date back 500 years to the Spanish colonial era. Still, because tourism is antithetical to the communist ethos, Castro tried to keep the sector as separate from most Cubans as possible. Cuban citizens weren’t allowed to enter tourist establishments, and by the same token, tourists weren’t allowed into areas designated for regular Cubans. To further distance citizens from foreigners, Castro’s regime created two separate currencies: the peso for Cubans, and convertible pesos, or CUCs (pronounced “kooks”), for tourists.  Most businesses in Cuba accepted one currency or the other, but not both.

In effect, Castro had blocked contact between tourists and the vast majority of the population, Suddenly, Cubans were second-class citizens in their own country, just as they had been before the Revolution. The new system became known as “tourism apartheid.”

(Image credit: Flickr user somebody_)

But the creation of the tourism sector in Cuba had some progressive aspects to it, as well. As vice-president during the 1990s, Raul Castro ushered in some small but significant reforms that allowed for limited private enterprise. For example, in 1995, Cuba legalized paladeres -privately owned, family-run restaurants. Two years later, the country started allowing citizens to turn their homes into casas particulares -bed-and-breakfast hotels open to Cubans and foreigners alike.

Tourism has also brought back the capitalist practice of tipping. Taxi drivers, musicians, tour guides, waiters, bartenders, and bellboys are coveted occupations because they receive tips, one of the few ways to get ahead on the island. A Cuban guitarist earning just $200 a month in tips makes 10 times the average government wage -far more than most Cuban doctors.

THE POWER OF THE SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

Since assuming the office of president full-time in 2008, Raul Castro has continued to make small changes to foster free enterprise. Aside from ending tourist apartheid, he’s also granted hundreds of thousands of new licenses to family businesses. Outside the tourism sector, he’s passed massive agrarian reform, allowing farmers to sell their produce directly to consumers. And now that a few people in Cuba have disposable income, Raul has made it easier for them to spend it. In the past three years, he’s made it legal for Cubans to rent cars, renovate their homes, and buy computers, cell phones, DVD players, and other electronics -all of which had previously been banned. Although Cuba is still not a market economy, it’s impossible to deny that times are changing.

The American government has been responsive to the expanding freedoms. In 2009, president Obama made it easier for Cuban-Americans to send money to their families back in Cuba. Then, in January of 2011, Obama made it legal for any American to send up to $500 every three months, so long as the money goes toward funding private enterprise in Cuba. In other words, if you have a friend in Havana, and you want to help him start a restaurant, all you have to do is write him a check. The embargo may soon come to an end, and not because Americans renounced the Cuban economy, but because they helped rebuild it, one small business at a time.

(Image credit: Flickr user Frans Persoon)

CAN AMERICANS VISIT CUBA LEGALLY?

Yes, they can, and it’s getting easier to do all the time. Although it’s still illegal for Americans to visit Cuba simply for pleasure, since 1999 the United States has allowed Americans to travel to Cuba for journalistic and educational purposes. If you’re a reporter on assignment or a doctor attending a medical conference, it’s perfectly legal to fly there. Also, as of 2009, Cuban-Americans are allowed to visit their relatives in Cuba as frequently as they’d like. Under the old rule, they were only permitted once every three years. In fact, today, there are nonstop flights to Havana from New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and that list stands to expand.

There are plenty of ways to visit Cuba illegally, too. Tourists simply fly to Mexico or Canada and then catch another plane there. The Cuban government won’t stamp your passport anymore; they know that some Americans have gotten into trouble when they returned to the United States with a Cuban seal on their books. These days, Cuban officials at customs simply hand you a tourist visa, which gets stamped instead. So unless you try to smuggle a carton of cigars back in your suitcase, odds are, the government will never know you were there. An estimated 20,000 to 60,000 Americans travel illegally to Cuba every year.

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The article above, written by Jennifer Drapkin, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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1. Italy’s Orange Battle

(Image credit: Flickr user tristam sparks)

Every year, townspeople in Ivrea, Italy, celebrate the three days before Lent by pelting one another with oranges. According to legend, the feudal lord of medieval Ivrea was so stingy that he gave his peasants only one pot of beans every six months. In protest, the villagers would throw the beans into the streets. Over the years, the beans were replaced by oranges, which grow plentifully throughout Southern Italy. The custom now known as the Orange Battle involves revelers standing on parade floats and launching the fruit at fellow participants. And it’s not uncommon to see a little blood mixed in with all that orange juice. Visitors can join in, but you’ll probably want to bring some goggles and a helmet.

2. Cheese Rolling at Cooper’s Hill

(Image credit: Flickr user Will De Freitas)

Each spring, a large wheel of cheese is rolled down a steep hill in England, and dozens of British men go tumbling after it. They risk sprained ankles, broken bones, and massive bruising. The big prize? The winner gets to keep the cheese.

While no one knows exactly how or why the first cheese race took place, local legend pegs the tradition on the ancient Romans. The event hasn’t always been smooth rolling, though. It hit a rough patch during World War II, when rations made dairy difficult to come by. Instead of sprinting after a full hunk of Double Gloucester, contestants raced after a tiny slice placed inside a wooden wheel. A far greater threat to the competition came in 1997, when so many competitors were injured that authorities implemented some major changes. The following year, the cheese was allowed to roll down the hill, but no one could run after it. Thankfully, the toned-down version of the sport lasted just one year. In 1999, authorities introduced a few more safety measures and then let the cheese chasing resume. The games at Cooper’s Hill have been going strong ever since.

3. The Lopburi Monkey Festival

(Image credit: Flickr user Adam Baker)

Like many places in Thailand, the city of Lopburi is overrun with macaque monkeys. They swing freely through the streets, hitch rides on top of cars, and snatch food from the hands of unsuspecting tourists. But even though the animals are annoying, the Thais worship them. According to Hindu legend, a god named Hanuman (the Monkey King) once ruled this region. In his honor, the city celebrates once a year by feeding its 2,000-plus monkeys a huge buffet overflowing with tropical fruits, flavored rice dishes, and modern treats such as Coca-Cola.

4. Night of the Radishes

(Image credit: Flickr user Laura Ramos)

When Spanish explorers brought radishes to Mexico in the 16th century, farmers near the modern-day city of Oaxaca quickly started farming the veggies. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to buy them. Not knowing what to do with all the extra produce, venders began carving the radishes into ornate shapes and using the vegetable sculptures to lure customers to their produce stands. Amazingly, it worked. The novelty items became so popular that farmers began leaving their radishes in the ground long after harvest season, letting them grow into bizarrely shaped behemoths. Now, December 23 is known as Noche de Rabanos (Night of the Radishes). Oaxacans celebrate it each year by gathering in the town square to display and admire elaborately detailed radishes modeled into saints, nativity scenes, and even the town itself.

5. Turkey’s Greasy Wrestling Competition

(Image credit: Flickr user Charles Roffey)

The Turkish sure do love their olive oil. In fact, they’re so obsessed with the stuff that it plays a leading role in one of their treasured national pastimes—the Kirkpinar wrestling contest. At nearly 650 years old, the tournament is one of the world’s longest continuously-running sporting events. It’s also one of the most popular. Each June, more than 1,000 competitors cover themselves in a slick coat of olive oil before entering the ring. All that grease makes for some comically slippery bouts, but that doesn’t stop the Turks from taking this event seriously. Millions of spectators turn out for the three-day tournament, and the champion (crowned the “Big Hero”) is honored as the country’s preeminent sports star.

6. La Festival Gastronomico del Gato

In the small Peruvian farming town of La Quebrada, people have a strange way of honoring their ancestors; every September, they gorge themselves on cats. The locals host the epic feline feast to pay homage to the town’s settlers—impoverished slaves who once survived on nothing but cat meat. Despite outrage from animal-rights activists and feline lovers around the world, the festival only grows more popular each year. Recent feasts have even offered more creative options for foodies, such as cat Milanese and grilled cat with Peruvian black mint. Devotees say it tastes like (what else?) chicken.

7. The West Virginia Roadkill Cook-Off

(Image credit: Pocahontas County, WV)

Never let it be said that West Virginians can’t poke fun at themselves. The annual Roadkill Cook-Off embraces the state’s hillbilly image by celebrating a 1998 law that allows people to cook any meat found on the side of the highway. The festival’s motto—“You kill it, we grill it!”—sums up the menu perfectly; it’s a smorgasbord of scavenger’s delights, including deer fajitas, BBQ buzzard, and squirrel gravy over biscuits.

8. Greece’s Clean Monday Flour War

(Image credit: Flickr user SleEEpinGBeaUty)

Many parts of the world go crazy during Carnival, but in the Greek seaside town of Galaxidi, it’s all about the day-after festival, known as Clean Monday. That’s when locals pummel each other with bags of multicolored flour, powdering the entire town like a doughnut. The food coloring in the flour is strong enough to stain old buildings, so before they unleash more than 3,000 lbs. of the stuff in the streets, the people of Galaxidi cover much of the city in plastic.

9. The Mame-Maki Ritual

For centuries, the Japanese have marked the beginning of spring as a time to drive evil spirits out of their homes. The most common method for achieving this is the mame-maki ritual, during which families toss roasted soybeans around their houses and chant “bad luck out, good luck in!” At the end of the ritual, participants pick up and eat a bean for each year of their lives, assuring good fortune for the year ahead. Nowadays, children can be seen madly tossing beans onto the street, while celebrities and monks alike host parties in large temples and shower the crowds with soy.

10. Shepherd’s Shemozzle

(Image credit: Hunterville Huntaway Festival)

Leave it to the Kiwis to out-weird us all. Hunterville, New Zealand, is home to the Shepherd’s Shemozzle, a 2-mile race in which shepherds and their dogs trek through an obstacle course that offers a different eating challenge each year. Past trails have included sheep’s eyes and oil-marinated bugs, but the 2008 contest may have been the strangest of them all. Contestants had to run 50 meters while clenching raw bull testicles in their teeth. Then, before the taste was out of their mouths, they had to eat a brick of dry Weetabix cereal, followed by a raw egg and a warm can of beer.

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The above article was written by Brendan Spiegel. It is reprinted with permission from the May/June 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.

People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.

Armed with mounting evidence, Wrangham believes that fire-kissed foods are what separated man from beast, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and evolve into the intelligent creatures we are today.

THE MISSING LINK

The story starts roughly 2 million years ago in the age of the habiline -the so-called “missing link” between humans and apes. Habilines walked upright, made primitive stone tools, and had brains the size of oranges (roughly half the size of our brains today). Like chimpanzees, they subsisted mainly on fruits and veggies, with the occasional bit of raw meat on the side. They had strong teeth to chew all that plant matter, and big guts to process all that fibrous material. For them, digestion took an extremely long time. In fact, it’s believed that their bodies were constantly engaged in processing food. (Even today, chimpanzees spend more than six hours a day just chewing.)

So, how did Homo habilis evolve into Homo erectus? The dominant theory since the 1950s has been that meat-eating was responsible for the shift because it required habilines to gradually develop human intelligence. There’s something to the idea: To hunt game, our apelike ancestors had to reply on more than just physical prowess; they had to be clever and cooperate. The better they got at hunting, the smarter they became.

But the “meat made humans” hypothesis rankled biologist Richard Wrangham. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, Wrangham argues that meat-eating alone cannot account for the tremendous physical changes that occurred in the evolution of humans. Instead, he believes that man’s discovery of fire -and more importantly, cooking- did the heavy lifting.

(Image credit: Banksy work, photo by Flickr user Lord Jim)

For decades, many scientists dismissed cooking as a pleasant byproduct of civilization, a symbol of man’s dominion over nature. But Wrangham builds the case that cooking was crucial to human evolution because it made digestion so much more efficient, increasing the amount of energy our bodies derived from what we ate. As a result, humans became better able to think, hunt, sing, dance, paint on walls, and invent new tools. Ultimately, the top chefs were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass along cooking techniques to their offspring, along with the physical evolutionary changes that come with them -namely, bigger brains.

The idea that cooked food offers more energy than uncooked food doesn’t immediately make sense. After all, recent studies show that cooking can leach food of its calories and nutrients. To understand the answers, we need to look inside -literally.

GUT FEELINGS

Back in the early 19th century, digestion was a mysterious process. But all that changed in 1822, when a 28-year-old Canadian soldier named Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot in the belly, leaving portions of his lungs and stomach exposed. Thanks to the quick-thinking work of U.S. Army surgeon William Beaumont, the blast didn’t kill St. Martin. However, it did leave him with a fist-sized hole in his stomach that never closed. Immediately, Dr. Beaumont spotted an opportunity; it was a chance to observe human digestion as it happened.

Alexis St. Martin

Beaumont began introducing foods directly into St. Martin’ stomach and watched what happened. He observed the young man digest cooked lean beef; raw, salted beef; raw cabbage, soup, and cooked potatoes. The doctor quickly realized that the more tender and cooked the food, the more swiftly and easily it passed through the bowels. One experiment was especially telling. At noon one day, Beaumont introduced both boiled beef and raw beef into St. Martin’s stomach. By 2 PM, the boiled beef was gone, but the raw beef exhibited only slight maceration.

St. Martin’s stomach showed that consuming cooked foods makes digestion easier and more efficient. Because it’s already warmed and chopped into pieces, it saves the body work. According to Wrangham, that’s why human colons are so much shorter than those of other primates. Digestion is more efficient, which makes longer digestive tracts unnecessary. It’s also why humans have small, blunt teeth and weak jaws compared to apes, who spend their days chewing through tough, raw food.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RAW FOODS

The flip side of eating cooked foods is that humans are no longer adept at eating raw meals. Simply put, our tummies are just not made for that anymore. But the notion runs contrary to the growing raw food movement in America. Proponents claim that strict raw food diets can lower cholesterol and blood pressure and promote weight loss -all of which is true. But the unbalanced diet comes with problems. A recent German study found that, of the women they followed on totally raw diet, 50 percent of them ceased to menstruate entirely. Additionally, men on raw food diets reported significantly decreased sex drives. So, while catwalk-model proportions might be all the rage, for our ancient ancestors, such reduced reproductive capabilities would have been disastrous.

In the end, we don’t just need hot meals to satisfy our hunger; we need them to fuel our libidos. In a sense, prepared foods are old-fashioned aphrodisiacs. For Homo sapiens, cooking is as natural as the birds and the bees.

A Window Into the Stomach -and the Soul

So, whatever happened to Alexis St. Martin, the man whose stomach helped the world understand digestion? In 1833, more than a decade after he started working with Dr. William Beaumont, St. Martin cut ties with the medical community. The man with the transparent stomach got fed up with being a scientific freak show. When he died in 1880, at the age of 86, St. Martin’s family kept his body for four days to make sure it rotted, and then buried it in an unusually deep grave, hoping to deter any medical interest in his remains.

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The article above, a portion of the special section Shocking Moments in the History of Food written by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

(Image credit: Flickr user Mevrouw Cupcake)

With more than 80% of the world’s output produced in the United States, pecans have been an American favorite since the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (both of whom grew them in their gardens). The nuts even helped fight communism during the Space Race! Apollo astronauts regularly munched on pecans during their missions.

CASHEWS Because You’re Worth It

(Image credit: Flickr user Alisa Cooper)

Cashews are one of the only nuts never sold in their shells. That’s because cashew shells contain a toxic liquid that causes nasty skin rashes. In fact, the oil is so caustic that, in the West Indies, it’s used to give extreme facial peels. Women spread it on their mugs, and in a few days, the skin completely blisters off, revealing a smooth, clear complexion underneath.

ALMONDS The Lustiest Nut of All

(Image credit: Flickr user Michael Porter)

For thousands of years, almonds have been associated with the birds and the bees. Pagans used them as fertility charms, and ancient Romans gave them as wedding presents. Even today, they’re involved in a mass reproductive ritual right here in the United States. Every February, close to one million beehives are trucked to California so that the bees can pollinate almond trees. It’s the largest managed pollination event in the world.

BRAZIL NUTS Why People are Falling for Them

(Image credit: Flickr user Eric Kilby)

Collecting Brazil nuts is a dangerous job. The trees grow up to 200 feet in height, and the nuts are encased in fruit pods that can weigh up to five pounds. In fact, falling fruit has brought many nut gatherers to an untimely end.

MACADAMIAS A Tough Nut to Crack

(Image credit: Flickr user Kate’s Photo Diary)

Cracking a Macadamia nut takes about 300 pounds per square inch of pressure, which is roughly equivalent to six elephants standing on top of you. Other than humans, Hyacinth Macaws are the only animals that crack them for food.

FILBERTS & HAZELNUTS Go Ahead and Confuse ‘Em!

(Image credit: Flickr user Gilles Gonthier)

Even though filberts and hazelnuts look identical and both grow on a species of the Hazel shrub, they are technically different nuts. (Filberts have harder shells.) Nonetheless, in 1994, the Nut Growers Society of America voted to refer to both of them as hazelnuts. Why? Because ordering a “grande Filbert latte” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

PISTACHIOS The Nut with an Open Policy

(Image credit: Flickr user dnmarcelino)

These easy-to-eat nuts are so beloved that they even have a behavioral theory named after them -The Pistachio Principle. The idea is that if you have to shell your own pistachios, you’ll feel full faster than if you were eating them unshelled. The principle, while based on pistachios, applies to anything that requires work to eat.

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The article above, written by Stacy Conradt, appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the November – December 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

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President Cleveland

When Grover Cleveland contracted cancer, it didn’t kill his career; it killed someone else’s.

In early June of 1893, President Grover Cleveland discovered a large tumor on the roof of his mouth. The cancer was progressing quickly. Doctors determined that if the patient were to survive, the growth had to be removed. But the procedure was complicated, and Cleveland’s doctors feared the surgery could trigger a stroke. There was also a 15 percent chance in those days that the president could die under the knife. After weighing his options, Cleveland chose to have the tumor removed, under one condition: The operation had to be conducted in total secrecy. The president feared that Wall Street -already reeling from falling stock in the midst of a depression- would panic if news of his illness leaked. Even his vice president, Adlai Stevenson, was to be kept in the dark.

On the morning of June 30th, under the cover of night, President Cleveland and six of the nation’s finest physicians assembled on board the Oneida, a yacht anchored in New York harbor. Sitting in a deck chair, the president smoked cigars and chatted amiably with the men as the boat set sail for Long Island Sound. The following morning, the doctors scrambled below deck to prepare for the surgery. In lieu of an operating table, a large chair was bound to the mast in the yacht’s parlor. A single light bulb, connected to a portable battery, would provide all the light. The doctors boiled their instruments and pulled crisp white aprons over their dark suits. Shortly after noon, the president entered the parlor and took his seat.

Using nitrous oxide and ether as anesthetics, the doctors removed the tumor, along with five teeth and much of Cleveland’s upper left palate and jawbone. The procedure lasted 90 minutes. It also took place wholly within the patient’s mouth, so that no external scars would betray the clandestine operation.

Four days later, on July 5, Cleveland was dropped off at his summer home on Cape Cod.

He healed remarkably fast. By the middle of July, he was fitted with a vulcanized rubber prosthetic that plugged the hole in his mouth and restored his normal speaking voice. All the while, the public was told that the president had merely suffered a toothache.

THE HEALTH CARE CONTROVERSY

Elisha Edwards

On August 29, The Philadelphia Press published an expose by Elisha Jay Edwards. The headline read, “The President a Very Sick Man.” Edwards, the paper’s Manhattan correspondent, had been tipped off by a New York doctor who’s heard rumors of a secret surgery. After some additional digging, Edwards located Ferdinand Hasbrouck, the dentist who had administered the anesthetic to Cleveland, and verified the details.

The Philadelphia Press story was remarkably accurate. In fact, it still stands as one of the greatest scoops in the history of American journalism. But it wasn’t perceived that way by the public. The Cleveland administration categorically denied the charges and launched a smear campaign to discredit and embarrass the reporter. Newspapers denounced Edwards as a “disgrace to journalism” and a “calamity liar.” The tactics were effective. The public sided with Cleveland, who’d built his reputation as the “Honest President.” Meanwhile, Edwards’ career was effectively ruined. For the next 15 years, the veteran reporter could barely find work. In 1909, he landed a job as a columnist for a struggling young newspaper called The Wall Street Journal. But Edwards’ career was still tainted by the allegations that he’d faked the story about Grover Cleveland.

Dr. W.W. Keen

One of the doctors who performed the surgery, W.W. Keen, always regretted how Edwards had been so unjustly maligned. In 1917, a quarter-century after the operation and a decade after Cleveland’s death, Keen finally decided to do something about it. He published a confessional in The Saturday Evening Post, hoping to “vindicate Mr. Edwards’ character as a truthful correspondent.” The admission was successful. The old newspaperman was inundated with congratulatory letters and telegrams, and the outpouring deeply moved him. Edwards even wrote to Keen to thank him for restoring his reputation.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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How a coffee shortage killed the Confederacy.

Even in the midst of the Civil war, there was still one thing that the North and the South shared -a serious addiction to caffeine. In that respect, the Union clearly had an advantage. Not only did the North have more than two-thirds of the population and control most of the heavy industry, railroads, and financial reserves in the country, it hoarded supplies of the highly-addictive little bean, leaving the Confederacy to wage its own war against java deprivation.

COFFEE: IT’S WHATS FOR BREAKFAST, LUNCH, AND DINNER

Throughout the Civiil War, coffee was a as prevalent in battlefields as it is in offices today. In fact, the Union army was fueled by the stuff to the point that, if there was no time to boil water, the Boys in Blue would chew on whole beans as they marched. And at night, Union campsites were dotted with tiny fires, each boiling a pot of coffee like a million miniature Starbucks.

Beyond caffeine cravings, Union troops loved their coffee because it was, literally, the best thing on the menu. Before the advent of helpful (and tasty!) artificial preservatives, a marching soldier’s rations were neither varied nor particularly appetizing. Typically, they consisted of salted meat, unleavened bread (accurately christened “hardtack”), and a little sugar and salt. It didn’t help that Union supply chains were riddled with corrupt food contractors who charged the government top dollar for rotten, stale, and insect-ridden foodstuffs. Coffee, however, was almost always fresh because it was delivered in whole-bean form  -making it difficult for even the most dishonest supplier to skimp on quality. Not that they didn’t try, of course. In fact, officials began requesting coffee as whole beans after some crooked contractors tried to up their per pound profits by slipping sand and dirt into packages of ground coffee.

In 1861, hoping to cut down on the time soldiers spent roasting and grinding beans, the army switched to a concentrated proto-instant coffee. The new concoction, called “essence of coffee,” was made by boiling prepared coffee, milk, and sugar into a thick gloop, which soldiers then reconstituted by mixing it with water. The product reportedly tasted every bit as bad as you’d imagine, and thanks to the corrupt dairymen who sold the army spoiled milk, it also tended to cause diarrhea. Needless to say, the Union army was soon back on the bean.

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

Noxious as essence of coffee was, Confederate soldiers would have gladly downed a cup or two. But, because of a Union naval blockade, coffee (along with weapons, machinery, medicine, and other vital materials) was in short supply in the South. Before the war, a pound of beans would have set you back 20 cents in Yankee dough. Once prewar stockpiles ran out, however, the same amount was running as high as $60 in Confederate money. (Despite the undervalued currency, that was still a lot.)

There was some coffee that made it into the Confederacy -usually carried by steam-powered blockade-runner ships. But, for the most part, Southerners had to rely on coffee substitutes, including various forms of roasted corn, rye, okra seeds, sweet potatoes, acorns, and peanuts. Unfortunately, all these imitations lacked potency, tasted awful, and upset the bowels. The only slightly better alternative was tea made from the leaves of the native yaupon shrub. The good news was that it contained caffeine; the bad news was that it was incredibly difficult to digest. Luckily, there was one surefire way for Southern folk to get their coffee -by making peace with the Union. Soldiers on the front lines often called informal truces so Rebels could swap tobacco for Yankee coffee then dash back to the camps before they were reported missing.

DRINK TO YOUR HEALTH

In the latter stages of the war, coffee beans that actually did make it to the South proved too valuable to be used by civilians or soldiers. In 1863, Samuel Moore, the surgeon general of the Confederacy, prohibited coffee use for anyone other than patients for whom its stimulant effect would prove beneficial. Lacking some of the basic necessities, however, hospital administrators often traded any java they received for medicines that would do more than just give a wounded man a caffeine buzz.

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The above article by David A. Norris is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2006 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Vital. Maligned. Mysterious. How well do you really know the potato?

During the 16th century, Europeans fell in love with a number of exotic plants from the New World. But the potato wasn’t one of them. It would take two centuries and a spectacular PR campaign for people to even consider eating the ugly vegetable. But once the potato took root, it determined the fortunes of nations as no other crop has ever done before.

STARCH RIVALS

Spanish explorers brought potatoes back from South America in the 1500s. They’d been introduced to the veggie by the Incas, who grew hundreds of varieties of spuds. But the tuber had few takers in Europe. Since God hadn’t mentioned potatoes in the Bible, the clergy preached that the starch was the Devil’s handiwork. Also, because the gnarly potato can look like a leper’s hand, rumors quickly spread that potatoes caused leprosy. Needless to say, the talk did little to boost the vegetable’s popularity.

While most Europeans wouldn’t touch the potato, they didn’t mind growing them to feed their livestock. Then something strange happened. During a series of failed harvests in the early 1700s, farmers watched in horror as many of their favorite crops died; meanwhile, the potato flourished. Rulers across Western Europe took note and began actively encouraging their people to cultivate potatoes, going so far as to hand out free seeds, along with pamphlets abut how to grow them. The Austrian government took a more straightforward approach: They threatened peasants with 40 lashes if they refused to convert to the potato.

Parmentier

Some countries began to embrace the crop, but France remained a holdout. Finally, in the midst of a terrible famine in 1770, the government got so desperate that it offered a prize to anyone who could find a food capable of curbing the problem. Agriculturalist and pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier won the essay contest for his rousing defense of the potato. Parmentier believed that the humble starch could prevent the masses from starving to death, and both the scientific community and the monarchy endorsed his ideas. But it would take more than a prize-winning essay to sway France’s working class and its aristocracy, neither of which trusted the suspicious-looking, leprous root.

SPUD MAGNET

Parmentier was determined to save his countrymen, even if it meant tricking them into giving the potato a try. In 1785, he organized a series of promotional stunts to win public opinion. At a royal banquet, he served potato dishes to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and presented them with potato flowers; the king pinned a flower to his lapel and the queen wore a garland in her hair. The occasion instantly sparked a passion for potatoes among the nobility, who were slaves to royal fashion.

Winning over the elite was simple; but Parmentier soon realized that regular folk weren’t so easy to convince. The scientist redoubled his efforts to boost the potato’s image, this time using even more creative tactics. He planted a field of potatoes just outside Paris and posted armed guards around the perimeter, rousing the curiosity of the locals. What crop could be so valuable that it needed armed soldiers to protect it? When the potatoes were ready to be harvested, Parmentier removed the guards, and the peasantry rushed in to steal what they could of the crop. The trick worked, and before long, the potato was loved by the whole country. The tuber’s stock was on the uptick, but by that point, royalty had fallen out of vogue. A few years later, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were executed. Despite his affiliation with the monarchy, Parmentier outlasted them both. In 1802, he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by Napoleon for his work with the lowly potato.

FAMINES AND FEASTS

Potatoes became so popular so fast that, by the close of the 18th century, they’d fueled their own population boom. Europe’s numbers spiked, spurring famed British economist Thomas Malthus to make a grim prediction. Malthus believed that crops such as the potato would create a surplus population, and at some point, the population would outstrip society’s ability to feed itself. In Mathus’ bleak view, apocalyptic war and famine were inevitable.

While that hasn’t happened yet, over-reliance on the potato was the near undoing of Ireland. By the early 19th century, potatoes had become essential to the Irish diet. Most of the nation’s population was composed of poor tenant farmers, whose farms were so tiny that no other crop could provide enough sustenance for their families; it was potatoes or nothing.

But in 1845, disaster struck. Blight hit the potato harvests and wiped out half the crop. The following year, three-quarters of the crop failed, and for the next two years, almost no potatoes grew at all. Around one million people died in Ireland, either from starvation or disease, and another million emigrated to America and Europe to escape the famine. By the time the blight ended, Ireland lost one-quarter of its population.

Thankfully, during the past 150 years, both the potato and the Irish population have made a comeback. Today, the vegetable is once again reaching new markets, and thanks to “clean seed” technologies -where germ-free seeds are made readily available to farmers- blight is less likely. China is now the world’s largest producer of potatoes, and one-third of all the world’s potatoes are harvested in China or India. Potato consumption in developing countries is also increasing. While Europeans are still the heartiest potato eaters, ingesting around 190 pounds of potatoes per person per year, Latin America and Asia are quickly catching up.

In fact, the potato’s stock only seems to be going up. As the prices of cereals and grains approach historic highs, the world is once again relying on the humble spud to provide food security to a volatile food market. And it’s easy to see why food organizations are lining up behind it. The hardy staple needs less water and energy to grow than most crops; it’s stacked with starch and vitamins; and the potato can be harvested just three months after planting. In an effort to further promote the crop in developing nations, the United Nations dubbed 2008 “The Year of the Potato.” And while potatoes can only be part of the equation, keeping the hungry fed and Malthus’ predictions at bay has become a big part of the vegetable’s legacy -a far cry from the Devil’s food and harbinger of leprosy it was once thought to be.

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The article above, a portion of the special section Shocking Moments in the History of Food written by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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NOTHING SAYS TECHNOLOGY LIKE FLOWERS

The flower business might seem old-fashioned, but 1-800-FLOWERS is anything but behind the times. In the 1980s, it was one of the first businesses to operate a 1-800 number, taking calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And in 1991, during the Gulf War, the company made the risky move of ramping up its television ads on CNN. At the time, other businesses were pulling their ads from the channel, not wanting to be associated with the station’s non-stop war coverage. But Jim McCann, president of 1-800-FLOWERS, saw it as an opportunity. He bought 24 ads for the price of one. The Gulf War made CNN the biggest cable new network in the world, and 1-800-FLOWERS reaped the benefits.

Then came the emergence of the internet. McCann launched 1-800-FLOWERS.com in 1995, and the company became the first merchant to sign a contract with AOL. By 1995, well before Google was conceived, 1-800-FLOWERS.com had deals in place with at least 13 other online service providers. And the innovation hasn’t stopped. In July 2009, 1-800-FLOWERS.com became the first company to complete an e-commerce transaction entirely on Facebook.

WISTERIA HYSTERIA

On October 3, 2004, Americans met the ladies of Wisteria Lane -the famously fictional street that’s home to TV’s Desperate Housewives. In a matter of months, the rest of the world had been introduced to them, too. According to a 2006 survey of 20 countries, the program was the third most-watched TV series in the world, with 120 million viewers. (That’s one of out every 55 people on the planet!) But not everyone watches the same cast members. In Latin America alone, there are five separate adaptations; each is a scene-for-scene remake using local actors.

Yet, nothing compares to the impact the show has had in Saudi Arabia. In May 2009, Wikileaks unearthed a diplomatic cable about the program, which reported that it’s helped dissuade Saudi youth from radical Islam by giving them a favorable impression of the United States. According to the cable, “Saudis are now very interested in the outside world and everyone wants to study in the U.S. if they can. They are fascinated by U.S. culture in a way they never were before.”

In a country where women can’t vote, drive, or walk outside without a male guardian, the ladies of Wisteria Lane are showing them that life has more to offer, particularly in the way of drama.

FLOWER GIRLS

There’s a reason why so many grandmas are named Rose and Daisy. During the first half of the 20th century, women were basically expected to name their pink bundle of joy after a flower. But as the nation entered the 1960s, the hippie generation became more interested in planting on vans than using them for baby names. Recently, however, floral names have begun cropping up again.

Watch Modern Family and you’ll see Lily; read Us Weekly and you’ll hear about Violet Affleck and Iris Law. While Rose has yet to make a full comeback, other flower names are definitely in bloom. Just check out the graph below:

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Just as people can be named after flowers, flowers can be named after people. Here are some of our favorite celebrity buds.

Barbra Streisand Rose A notorious diva, Barbra Streisand once said that if a flower were ever named after her, she wanted it to smell good and be disease-resistant. Botanists bred this sweet, purple bloom with a hearty immune system just for her.

Julia Child Rose If you’re wondering what sort of mouth-watering qualities land you the Child name, this one’s the color of butter and smells of licorice.

Chihuly Rose This rose is fittingly named after Dale Chihuly, the master craftsman who’s created some of the world’s most colorful and elaborate glass sculptures. The petals of the Chihuly Rose change color with the light, turning from yellow to orange to red.

Dolly Parton Rose This hybrid tea rose has big double blooms, just like its country-crooning namesake.

George Burns Rose In honor of George Burns’ 100th birthday in 1996, botanists created a ruffled flower with streaks of red, yellow, pink, and orange. They also gave it a lemony scent, making it as colorful and zesty as the comedian himself.

Jackson and Perkins, the iconic rose-peddling company, will allow anyone to name a new rose variety after themselves. All it requires is a small fee of $75,000.

(Title image credit: Flickr user Bart Everson)

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The article above, written by David Goldenberg and Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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World War II Bulgaria didn’t have a Schindler, and it didn’t have a list. It had a white-bearded mystic named Peter Deunov and an entire nation standing behind him. Together, they saved Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jews from the Holocaust.

Bulgaria wasn’t in the best position during the Second World War. Fenced in by the Soviet Union on one side and Europe on the other, it was forced into the middle of the action. That’s why it’s all the more impressive that Bulgaria is one of only three mainland European nations where the entire Jewish population survived the Holocaust. (Denmark and Finland were the other two, but their relatively small Jewish populations were geographically isolated.) For staying strong in the face of Hitler and his Nazi directives, the Bulgarians credit one man—Christian mystic Peter Deunov. As Albert Einstein would later say, “The whole world bows down before me. I bow down before the master Peter Deunov.”

Philosophical Fitness

Peter Deunov’s philosophy wouldn’t appear to be anything revolutionary at first. He based his beliefs on those of Christ and preached universal love and religious tolerance—only with a more mystical, cosmic slant. Known as Master Beinsa Douno, he garnered a following in Bulgaria in the early 20th century for his teachings, now known as Esoteric Christianity. In fact, during Deunov’s time serving as the Vatican’s ambassador to Bulgaria, the future Pope John XXIII called him “the greatest philosopher living on the Earth.”

But Deunov had his controversial qualities, too. A strong believer in astrology and phrenology (determining personality traits based on the shape of people’s skulls), Deunov also considered physical fitness to be crucial to spiritual development. He designed health camps for his disciples that included climbing to the 9,600-foot summit of Musala, Bulgaria’s highest peak. In addition, he promoted strict vegetarianism and liberal doses of water. But perhaps most controversial was his belief in Paneurhythmy (“sublime cosmic rhythm”), sacred dances Deunov invented to utilize “positive energies.” Unnerved by some of his more unusual ideas, the powerful Bulgarian Orthodox Church went so far as to denounce his teachings.

But far beyond scaling mountains and preaching the joys of good health, Deunov advocated world peace. Unfortunately, that too was seen as contentious by some. During one of his lectures in 1917, he spoke out against Bulgaria’s entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers. Although Deunov would later prove to be right about that decision, that didn’t stop the government from exiling him for a year.

Avoidance Tactics

At the start of World War II, Bulgaria picked the losing side again. Hoping to reclaim the ancestral lands it’d lost during WWI (Thrace and Macedonia), Bulgaria joined the Axis powers in 1941. And although the Nazis did gain control of those territories, Bulgaria reclaimed them in name only. What’s worse, Hitler forced the Bulgarian government to pass oppressive laws against its Jews as part of the deal.

Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria

Thanks to a tolerant national population, Bulgaria’s Tsar Boris III was able to avoid enforcing anti-Semitic policies—at least for a while. Eventually, though, the political and military pressure from Hitler became too great. In March 1943, Boris was bullied into signing off on the deportation of 11,343 Jews from Thrace and Macedonia to Auschwitz. Of them, only 12 survived. When the deportation became public knowledge, most Bulgarians were so outraged that Boris went into hiding. Anything he faced would be a lose-lose situation—whether it was the wrath of the Nazis or the wrath of his own people. When Hitler demanded the deportation of all Bulgarian Jews, Boris caved.

Hide and Go Seek

What happened next was one of the most fateful strokes of luck in history. The signed directive from Boris passed through the ranks and into the hands of one of Deunov’s followers, who quickly informed his guru. Eager to stop the deportation, Deunov sent one of his most trusted devotees, a senior official named Lyubomir Loulchev, to try and change Boris’ mind. Deunov knew that Boris respected him (in large part because Deunov had “predicted” the devastating results of WWI), but he also knew the tsar respected Loulchev. Deunov told Loulchev: “Find the tsar and tell him that if he lets Bulgarian Jews be sent to Poland, that will be the end of his dynasty.”

Unfortunately, locating the tsar wasn’t an easy task. Boris was still in hiding, and not even his most trusted advisors knew his whereabouts. Loulchev desperately searched the country, but he was running out of time, so he returned to Deunov for help. According to one biographer, Deunov meditated on Boris’ location in his room for a few minutes, then opened the door and said one word: “Krichim,” the name of an obscure town in southern Bulgaria. Loulchev left for the town immediately and arrived to discover a very surprised tsar.

Not long after, Boris called for the release of all Bulgarian Jews awaiting deportation. It’s uncertain whether the about-face was the result of Loulchev’s appeal to Boris’ conscience, the power of Deunov’s advice, or the pressure he discovered he was receiving from other top Bulgarian officials. Members of the parliament had banded together to try and protect their Jewish population, but with the tsar in hiding, their hands were tied. Deunov’s involvement changed all of that.

The Fury of a Führer

Hitler was more than a little irritated by this turn of events, as well as by Boris’ refusal to engage in war with the Soviet Union. In August 1943, the Führer summoned the tsar to a private meeting in East Prussia—a trip from which Boris never recovered. He returned exhausted and depressed, and died mysteriously just days later, at age 49. It’s widely suspected (but still unproven) that foul play was involved.

Tsar Boris and Adolf Hitler

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a happy ending for Deunov, either. In 1944, Soviet forces invaded Bulgaria, and the Christian guru died two days before Communist authorities could arrest him for his spiritual teachings. The government continued to harass and persecute his followers until the fall of Communism in 1989.

Since then, however, there’s been a rise of interest in Deunov’s philosophies, and his teachings have slowly spread throughout Europe. But even those Bulgarians who aren’t particularly inspired by his religion still respect Deunov for his vital role in saving 48,000 Bulgarians from the Holocaust. But perhaps the main reason he’s remembered so fondly is because he inspired his nation to do the right thing. In 1998, the Anti-Defamation League honored the entire country of Bulgaria with its Courage to Care Award. And while due credit has been given to Boris III, Bulgarians also remember that the tsar could just as easily have allowed his Jewish subjects to perish (as he’d done to Jews in the ancestral lands) were he not convinced otherwise. Of all the Bulgarians who played a role in their nation’s proudest moment, none are more esteemed than Peter Deunov.

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The article above, written by Mark Juddery, appeared in the September – October 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

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1. The Kiss of Judas: A Betrayal or Just Misunderstood?

Nothing ends a good “bromance” quite like flagrant, murderous betrayal. A long time ago, a wandering preacher named Jesus was doing pretty well for himself—building up a following and promoting religious teachings—until one of his buddies sold him out to the authorities. In exchange for 30 pieces of silver, Judas Iscariot kissed Jesus on the cheek and, by doing so, identified him to Roman soldiers.

Although Judas double-crossed his best friend for a paltry sum, some scholars argue that Judas is the secret hero of Christianity. The claim is based on a recent translation of The Gospel of Judas, a text written by Jesus’ followers a couple hundred years after his death. In 1978, a farmer discovered the mysterious text in Egypt and sold it to an antiques dealer. Years later, a National Geographic Society team got hold of it. They restored and analyzed the document, and in 2006, they announced that the text painted Judas as a man of valor. According to their interpretation, he was actually Jesus’ most trusted friend, because he agreed to fake a betrayal so that Jesus could die a martyr and then be resurrected.

Soon after the National Geographic Society released its findings, other scholars started picking the interpretation apart. Chief among them was April D. DeConick, a Rice University biblical studies professor, who claimed the team made some critical errors, including translating several passages to mean the exact opposite of what they were intended to communicate. DeConick contends that the Gospel says Judas was a “demon” rather than a “spirit,” as interpreted by National Geographic, and that he was set apart “from the holy generation” rather than “for the holy generation.” With just a few tweaks in translation, Judas has gone right back to playing the bad guy.

2. The Kisses You Can Share with a Quaker

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Beatrice Murch)

The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, is a small Christian sect best known for rejecting all forms of violence, embracing progressive politics, and dedicating themselves to simple, restrained living. They’ve promoted a more harmonious world by founding causes such as Amnesty International, not to mention lending their name to oatmeal.

So we were surprised to learn that when teenage Quakers get together, their favorite activity is a free-for-all kissing game that often ends in bruising and rug burn. Alternately known as Ratchet Screwdriver, Bloody Winkum, or Wink, the game dates back to the early 1900s. To play, participants divide themselves into girl/boy pairs with one boy left over to be the “Winker.” The pairs sit on the floor, with each boy hugging a girl from behind. When the Winker winks at a girl, she tries to scramble across the room to kiss him, while her male partner does his best to hold her back. Hilarity (and release of pent-up sexual frustration) ensues.

But not everyone finds this game so hilarious. In 2002, the Children & Young People’s Committee of the Quakers in Britain issued a statement discouraging the game at official functions. And while that may not seem surprising, the reasoning is. The committee frowns upon the game because younger children and adults don’t get to play, thus making it ageist. Due to their egalitarian values, Quakers seldom segregate by age at get-togethers, and the committee didn’t want the very young or the very old to feel left out.

3. The Kiss that Proved No Means No

Gentlemen, a word: When a lady rejects your advances, you’d do best to listen. Take, for example, the story of Thomas Saverland, an English gentleman who was at a party in 1837 and, as a joke, kissed Miss Caroline Newton by force. In response, she bit off a chunk of his nose.

Saverland took her to court, where the judge found his case more hilarious than harrowing. The judge ruled, “When a man kisses a woman against her will, she is fully entitled to bite off his nose, if she so pleases.” A smart-mouthed barrister then added, “and eat it up, if she has a fancy that way.”

4. The Kiss That Said “Welcome to America!”

At the turn of the 20th century, immigration processing at Ellis Island was quite an ordeal. Immigrants had to prove they weren’t carrying any of a long list of illnesses, mental impairments, or moral defects. If you were sick (and it was curable), then you’d be detained in the hospital until you got better. The whole process could take hours, days, or months. And even then, you could be turned back. Also, ladies traveling alone and anyone with less than $20 in their pockets had to wait for a sponsor or family member to meet them. If no one was there to greet you, you were sent back.

Of course, all of this was further complicated by the fact that immigrants couldn’t go down to the pay phone and call Aunt Bertha when they landed. Instead, when relatives heard that the right ship had docked, they trucked over to Ellis Island and waited desperately by the Kissing Post—a giant wooden column just outside the room where the final stages of immigration took place. Ellis Island staffers gave the Kissing Post its name because families and lovers were generally swept up in emotion as they reconnected with their long losts. Today, the Kissing Post continues to be a symbol of hope and togetherness as the pillar that supports the American Family Immigration History Center. If you’re one of the 100 million Americans descended from immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, there’s a good chance the History Center there can help you find a picture of the ship that carried your ancestors.

5. The Eskimo Kiss: A Tale Taller than the Abominable Snowman

Popular wisdom claims that Eskimos rub noses because kissing on the lips would cause their mouths to freeze together. Not only is this completely untrue, but Eskimos don’t rub noses at all.

The myth of the Eskimo kiss was created by Hollywood in an early “documentary” called Nanook of the North, which took America by storm in 1922. To film it, director Robert J. Flaherty recorded real Inuits in the Arctic. However, in order to accommodate the huge, awkward cameras of the day, he staged all the scenes and built a three-sided igloo for interior shots. Nanook, the main character, wasn’t really named Nanook, and the women playing his wives weren’t really his wives. As for the term “Eskimo kiss,” that too was constructed by Flaherty to explain how one of the wives was nuzzling her baby. In actuality, the woman was giving her baby a kunik, an expression of affection in Inuit culture. Typically in kuniks, adults press the sides of their noses against the cheeks of their babies and breathe in their scent. Who kuniks whom differs from culture to culture, but it’s never a romantic gesture. Inuits kiss on the lips, just like everyone else.

6. The First Guy-on-Guy Kiss to Hit the Big Screen

Movie experts often credit Sunday Bloody Sunday, a 1971 film about a love triangle among two guys and a girl, with being the first mainstream feature film to depict two gay men kissing. That’s true, but it wasn’t the first time two guys kissed on screen. Apparently, straight men had been doing it for decades.

In 1927, two soldiers kissed tenderly in the silent movie Wings, which won Best Picture at the first Academy Awards. When the film was released, no one raised an eyebrow about the scene, partially because kissing in the trenches was remarkably common during World War I. According to British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Santanu Das, letters and accounts of the war are peppered with stories of soldiers kissing, embracing, and giving each other pet names like “my Palestine Wife.” Das believes the war succeeded in breaking down the traditional limits on emotional and physical intimacy between men, allowing soldiers to form relationships that went beyond what was permissible at home. While it’s surprising to us today, that Wings scene didn’t even cause a stir in 1920s America.

7. The Kiss that Gave Artists Their 15 Minutes

If it weren’t for kissing, Andy Warhol might never have become The King of Pop Art. In 1963, Warhol was still a little-known commercial illustrator. But that all changed when he bought a silent-film camera and started shooting his friends and acquaintances kissing in unbroken, four-minute-long shots. The result was a series called Kiss, which took the art world by storm. In fact, New York’s Gramercy Arts Theater played a new “kiss” each week. The series helped cement Warhol’s place in the artsy underground, and it also launched the careers of several kissers.

8. The Prepubescent Kiss that Changed the Law

When first-grader Johnathan Prevette pecked his classmate on the cheek in Lexington, N.C., he quickly became a poster boy for everything that was wrong with America in 1996. After Johnathan’s classmate complained to a teacher, the 6-year-old was taken out of class for the day, missing an ice cream party. When the school told Johnathan’s parents that he’d violated the sexual harassment rules, a media circus followed. Critics pointed to the Prevette case as a sign that political correctness had gone too far, adding that innocent play didn’t deserve such harsh punishments. After all, pundits asked, is a child really capable of sexual harassment?

But while Johnathan was making headlines, another legal battle was raging. A 10-year-old Georgia girl named LaShonda Davis had been repeatedly groped by a bully in her class, to the point where she contemplated suicide. She told several of the teachers at her school, but no one did anything. LaShonda’s parents had to call the police—and sue the school—before the abuse stopped.

Both Johnathan and LaShonda deserved protection under the law, and both cases played a role in molding the current standards. In response to the Johnathan Prevette case, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued new guidelines for identifying sexual harassment by putting the emphasis on common sense and telling schools to take age and maturity into account. But there was still a big question about whether schools should be accountable for students harassing each other. When LaShonda’s case went to the Supreme Court in 1999, their answer was yes, sort of. The Court decided that schools can be blamed, but only if they learn of the abuse and do nothing to stop it.

9. The Kiss That Could Send You to Jail

(Image credit: Flickr user bradleyolin)

In the city of Guanajuato, Mexico, there’s a smooching spot called el Callejón del Beso, or the Alley of the Kiss. According to local legend, the alley was once the final scene of a tragic love affair. A young woman and her lover were meeting there to run away together, but when her father discovered them, he stabbed his daughter in the heart. As she lay dying, her lover kissed her hand for the last time, and the alley got its name. Today, it’s said that anyone who kisses there will have seven years of happiness. Thanks to its romantic history, the alley has become a popular tourist attraction, although that’s starting to change. On January 20, 2009, the ultra-conservative mayor of Guanajuato authorized a new municipal ordinance cracking down on public displays of affection. If he has his way, lip-locking in the open will carry with it a fine of $100 and up to 36 hours in jail.

10. The Most Iconic Kiss in History

(Image credit: Victor Jorgensen)

On August 14, 1945, thousands of men and women embraced one another in New York City’s Times Square to celebrate victory over Japan. But two people—a sailor and a nurse—locked lips at just the right moment and became larger than life. More than a dozen men and at least three women claim to be the kissers in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph. Of the men, our favorite is George Mendonça, a Rhode Island fisherman and World War II navy recruit, who claims he grabbed the strange nurse and kissed her right in front of his girlfriend. In fact, Mendonça says his girlfriend, now his wife, is in the background of the photo.

While the mystery will probably never be solved, Alfred Eisenstaedt has left us with a juicy back story. In his autobiography, the famed photographer writes that he followed around a sailor who moved through the crowd, kissing anything wearing a skirt. When the sailor hit on a nurse whose white dress contrasted nicely with his dark suit, Eisenstaedt snapped the shot. But he failed to get their names. Coincidentally, another photographer, Victor Jorgensen, took the same shot from a slightly different angle and also forgot to get the subjects’ names. Jorgensen’s version ran in the next day’s New York Times, but as a working military photographer at the time, he didn’t own the rights to his work. So while Eisenstaedt received glory and royalty checks for his image, Jorgensen simply got a nice clipping to hang on his fridge.

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The above article was written by Maggie Koerth-Baker. It is reprinted with permission from the May/June 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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Gathering Iwatake at Kumano. Woodblock print by Hiroshige II.

When making soup requires scaling a cliff, and grabbing a few olives involves avoiding gunfire, it’s time to find some comfort food that’s a little more comfortable.

1. Iwatake

The annals of Arctic exploration are filled with accounts of frostbitten limbs and near starvation. In fact, many adventurers have reported being so hungry that they’ve scraped papery-crisp lichen off rocks and boiled it into passably edible food. One outdoorsman even claimed that if braised shoe leather was in a taste-test with lichen, the shoe leather would come out on top. And yet, this very same survival food is considered a delicacy in Japan. There, iwatake (iwa meaning rock, and take meaning mushroom) is so highly sought-after that harvesters are willing to rappel down cliff faces for the precious growths. (It takes about a century for the lichen to get to a worthwhile size.)

Needless to say, this is specialty work. As if the rappelling isn’t tricky enough, iwatake is best harvested in wet weather, because the moisture reduces the chance that the lichen will crumble as it’s pried off with a sharp knife. In its preferred preparation, the black and slimy raw material is transformed into a delicate tempura. And while iwatake in any form doesn’t taste like much, it’s esteemed for its associations with longevity. As for the harvesters? Their longevity’s more questionable. “Never give lodging to an iwatake hunter,” goes an old Japanese adage, “for he doesn’t always survive to pay rent.”

2. Bird’s Nest Soup

(Image credit: Flickr user SpirosK)

Cantilevered high off cave walls and cliffs along the seas of Southeast Asia are the nests of the white-nest swiftlet—a bird that’s managed to turn an embarrassing drool problem into a useful D.I.Y. project. The nests, sturdy constructions no bigger than the palm of your hand, are made from the birds’ spit. Yup, these swiftlets have specialized saliva glands powerful enough to turn their tongues into avian glue guns.

You’d think being stuck in caves high above the ground, and the fact that they’re birds’ nests, would protect them against humans—but no. Ever since sailors first brought the nests home for the Chinese emperor and his family in the first century CE, bird’s nest soup has been a favorite among the country’s elite. Never mind that it’s virtually tasteless; the dish is revered for health reasons.

Of course, acquiring the main ingredient is less healthy. Nest harvesters must stand on rickety bamboo scaffolding hundreds of feet off the ground in pitch darkness. They must also endure unbelievable heat and humidity as they try to avoid all the insects, birds, and bats that live in the caves. In addition, the extraordinary value of the nests means the zones are patrolled by machine-gun toting guards. Harvesting rights are multiyear, multimillion-dollar deals arranged with national governments, and poaching is ruthlessly prohibited. Unarmed fishermen have been shot dead after accidentally beaching in swiftlet territory, and local tour group operators pay exorbitant fees to avoid rifle-assisted leaks springing in their kayaks. It all underscores the fact that being a nest harvester is less of a career choice and more of a life sentence—especially considering that the skill is almost exclusively passed on from father to son.

3. West Bank Olives

(Image credit: Asa Winstanley)

Come the November harvest season each year, Palestinian landowners on the far side of the Green Line (which bounds the pre-1967 border between Jordan and Israel) cope with the standard hazards of olive picking. They deal with raw fingertips, accidental falls from the upper boughs of the trees, and backaches from stooping to gather fallen fruit. All that effort to glean olive oil, which has fueled the local economy for centuries. But the latter-day olive harvest involves a much more deadly threat. Some Israeli settlers are intent on driving the farmers away from the groves, and they’ve armed themselves with rocks and scope rifles to block the Palestinian landowners from their livelihood.

In recent years, Israeli police and Jewish peace activists have worked alongside the pickers to curb harassment, but the year-round tending of these ancient groves remains a life-threatening pursuit. Humans aren’t the sole targets, either. According to the Jerusalem Post, vandals burned or otherwise destroyed more than 1,000 olive trees in the West Bank in 2005. Sadly, it will require plenty of time and hard work on the part of the governing bodies before the farmers’ only concerns are workaday aches and pains.

4. Snapping Turtle

(Image credit: Flickr user Marc Haserodt)

Turtle soup was a staple of 19th-century gourmets, usually ladled out of huge tureens for the first course. And no wonder; turtle meat is tasty, fibrous, and chewy—kind of like barbecued pork. But getting the meat in the quantities Grover Cleveland and his ilk demanded meant getting the biggest turtles around, and in most of the United States, that meant going after snapping turtles. The traditional means of capturing the giant creatures (which grow up to 180 lbs.) is called noodling, which involves brave souls trawling along the banks of rivers, lakes, and ponds, and occasionally wading neck-deep to stick a boot into the turtles’ lairs. If a noodler hits shell, next in are the hands, which try to haul the critter out while avoiding its famously strong jaws.

On-the-job accidents come with the territory. According to outdoor expert Keith Sutton, author of Hunting Arkansas, “noodlers are nicknamed ‘nubbins’ as the result of unfortunate encounters with snappers.” Amazingly, the job isn’t over once the turtle is captured, either. Turns out, killing the animal is another exercise in raw nerve. We’ll spare you the details, except to say that it’s ill-advised to handle the animal’s head until at least a day after its execution. Even decapitated, the snapping turtle has a long memory.

5. Gooseneck Barnacle

(Image credit: Flickr user Morgan Sapp)

You’ve probably never seen gooseneck barnacles on a menu in the States, but it’s only a matter of time. Besides being a popular Christmastime appetizer in Spain and Portugal (where it’s known as percebes), it’s gaining ground in America and being harvested off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. But harvesting this rock-dwelling crustacean is no simple matter.

Barnacle fishers typically tie themselves to the rocks in a surge zone along the ocean and pry the creatures off between waves. To do this, they have to use a crowbar to break the animals’ self-adhesive, which is so resistant to tampering that scientists were long mystified by its chemical makeup. In other words, removing a barnacle takes lots of traction, which, given the waves, can be tricky. A poorly maintained tether, or a harvester too impatient to tie in, can easily end with a call to the Coast Guard. Of those brave enough to harvest gooseneck barnacles, one Coast Guard official said, “The best we can do is retrieve the bodies.”

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The article above, written by Christa Weil, appeared in the September – October 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

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Novels, movies, cartoons, tattoos… everything is better on the second draft.

1. THE CATCH IN CATCH 22: The Edit that became an idiom

In 1961, author Joseph Heller finally submitted his manuscript for Catch-18 to his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Although Heller had spent seven years perfecting the story, Gottlieb saw room for improvement. The editor taped the pages to his office wall and restructured the novel, giving more emphasis to the now-famous Major Major character and instructing Heller to delete entire 60-page sections. But most importantly, Gottlieb wanted to change the title. Earlier that year, writer Leon Uris had released Mila 18, and Gottlieb didn’t want any confusion between the two books. What followed was an exchange of frantic letters in which Heller and Gottlieb considered and rejected various numbers for the title. They decided 11 didn’t work because of Ocean’s 11; 14 was an “unfunny number;” and 26 just didn’t feel right. “I’ve got it!” Gottlieb blurted out one night in a eureka moment. “It’s Catch-22! It’s funnier than 18.” The edit stuck, and a major, major idiom was born.

2. AN AFFAIR TO FORGET: The Edit that Changed Hemingway’s Life

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway in 1922

The turmoil of Ernest Hemingway’s personal life continued long after his death thanks to the publication of his autobiography, A Moveable Feast. Released in 1964, three years after his suicide, the book was uncharacteristically poignant and sentimental. It even included a tender apology to his first wife, Hadley, whom Hemingway had cheated on with his second wife, Pauline. Yet, for decades, few people knew the apology existed. That’s because it was edited out of the text by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary.

As the author’s literary executor, Mary prepared the work for publication, and she removed the apology out of spite. Mary had always resented Hadley for being the literary giant’s favorite spouse, and Hemingway confirmed that belief in A Moveable Feast when he wrote, “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

Decades later, in 2009, Hemingway’s grandson Sean reinserted the apology into a new edition of the book. But that wasn’t the only serious edit he made. Sean also scrapped passages about his grandmother, Pauline, whom Hemingway blamed for ruining his first marriage. Of course, literary historians were quick to criticize Sean’s selective whitewashing. They claim that while Hemingway may have wanted to cut Pauline out of his life, he never intended to cut her out of his life story.

3. HALL MARKS: The Edit that Resulted in Two Masterpieces

Today, Woody Allen’s 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall is considered the quintessential romantic comedy. Clocking in at just 93 minutes, it’s also one of the shortest movies to ever win Best Picture a the Academy Awards. But the film wasn’t always so romantic… or so short. Annie Hall was initially shot as a murder mystery that ran two and a half hours long. Then the movie’s producers decided they wanted to go in a different direction. In addition to slicing out all the crime scenes, they requested a title change. It’s a good thing, too. Originally, the picture was called Anhedonia, a psychological term that refers to the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasing experiences. But when Anhedonia tested horribly with focus groups, the team tried out other titles -including Me and My Goy and It Had to Be Jew- before landing on the classic Annie Hall.

Were the producers right to worry about Anhedonia’s crime-comedy plot? Perhaps not. Sixteen years later, Allen recycled the story (and even rehired many of the same actors, including Diane Keaton) for his well-received 1993 film Manhattan Murder Mystery. Without the producer’s extreme edits to Annie Hall, it’s likely that only one of those classics would have been made.

4. WYNONA FOREVER: The Painful Breakup Edit

In 1989, Hollywood heartthrob Johnny Depp spotted fellow Hollywood heartthrob Winona Ryder at a movie premiere in New York, and an angsty romance sparked. Their whirlwind love story continued through the filming of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands the following year, and Depp and Ryder were soon engaged. Hoping for something more permanent than a ring, Depp had “Winona Forever” tattooed on his right bicep. But three years later, their love had faded. The tattoo had not. In the most physically painful edit on this list, Depp had the ink on his bicep amended to “Wino Forever,” reflecting another of his passions.

5. GUESS WHO’S GOING OFF SCRIPT? The Greatest Ad-Lib Edit on Film

At the end of his legendary acting career, Spencer Tracy decided it was time to start writing his own lines. In 1967, the ailing, 67-year-old Tracy was filming Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which an older white couple (played by Tracy and his longtime off-screen lover, Katherine Hepburn) meets their daughter’s black fiance. During the final scene, Tracy argues on behalf of the couple’s taboo relationship and then ad-libs a goodbye to Hepburn. Originally, the script read, “The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other,” to which Tracy added, “If it’s half of what we felt, that’s everything.” With this heartfelt edit, Tracy allowed his true emotion to pour out, and Hepburn teared up. After the scene was shot, the crew gave Tracy a standing ovation. The scene ended up being Tracy’s last great performance; just weeks later, the actor died of a heart attack.

(YouTube link)

6. VIRGIL’S LAST WISH: The No-Edit Edit

Since the earliest days of literature, writers have been dissatisfied with their work, and the Roman poet Virgil was no exception. Virgil believed his epic poem, The Aeneid, was so flawed that he wanted it to suffer the ultimate edit: He asked that it be burned upon his death. (In particular he hated the love scene between Venus and Vulcan, because he thought it was too racy.) However, several of Virgil’s friends, with support from Emperor Augustus, convinced the poet to alter his will and spare the work. But legend has it that before Virgil died in 19 BCE, he changed his will again, this time forbidding anyone from ever revising the poem. If he couldn’t perfect The Aeneid, he didn’t want anyone else to do it, either.

7. COKE ZERO-ED: The Product Placement Edit

It’s not unusual for songs to be edited for radio play. For example, the Black-Eyed Peas’ song “Let’s Get Retarded” was changed to “Let’s Get It Started” to avoid offending the mentally challenged. But when the British Broadcasting Company refused to play The Kinks’ 1970 anthem “Lola,” it was for a much stranger reason. While the BBC had no problem with the song’s lyrics, which included lines about sex and drag queens, it did balk at the song’s mention of “Coca-Cola.” Apparently, the government-subsidized network had a strict policy about in-song advertisements, and it considered the reference to be a product placement. (Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” was held up in 1973 for similar reasons.)

Ray Davies, lead singer of The Kinks, learned of the problem while he was on tour with the band in America . To get the song on the air, Davies rushed back to London and re-recorded the line, changing the lyric to the now-famous, “you drink Champagne, and it tastes just just like cherry cola.” Minor? Perhaps. But the quick fix allowed the song to be played on British radio, where it climbed to No. 2 on the UK charts.

8. POISONING THE WELLES The Edit that Ruined a Career

Following the critical success of Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane, RKO Pictures agreed to produce the director’s next project, The Magnificent Ambersons. But when Welles’ gloomy picture tested poorly with audiences, RKO president George Schaefer asked Welles to re-cut the entire film.

Welles happened to be in Rio de Janeiro at the time working on another project, so editor Robert Wise was handed the assignment. At the studio’s insistence, Wise chopped 50 minutes from the mournful tale. When Welles heard about this, he was horrified. He sent Wise urgent directorial notes, followed by a telegram that read, “REALLY DESPERATE.” The studios ignored his suggestions.

The film was released in 1942, and it was a box-office flop. Schaefer was fired, and Welles lost his contract with RKO. “They destroyed Ambersons, and it destroyed me,” Welles said of the hasty edits. Yet, this sorrowful tale about a sorrowful tale has a surprisingly happy ending. Even in its badly truncated form, The Magnificent Ambersons is now considered a classic.

9. SPLITTING HARES: The Edit That Created a Screen Legend

In 1938, Warner Brothers writer Ben Hardaway directed a short film featuring a very sneaky rabbit. The cartoon was called Porky’s Hare Hunt, but the bunny that starred in it didn’t have a name. So, the best creative minds in the business got together and dubbed the up-and-coming star “Happy Rabbit.”

Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was Bugs, also directed he next short starring Happy Rabbit. As the animators drew up early image for the film, one of them labeled a sketch of the rabbit “Bugs’ Bunny,” to make it clear that the drawing was part of Hardaway’s project. The label was mistaken for the name of the character, and soon enough, all the animators were calling Happy Rabbit “Bugs Bunny.” The tiny error created an icon, and, as they say at Warner Bros., that’s all, folks.

10. ANARCHY IN THE W.K.: The Edited World of Wikipedia

Right now in Wikipedia, a battle is raging. It’s known as the Edit Wars. Users of the reference site constantly change the contents of certain pages, fighting each other over the details. In fact, if you want to measure how controversial a subject is, just look up how many times its page has been edited. What topics are in the lead? At the end of 2010, George W. Bush had the mostly hotly-contested page, with 44,169 edits (10,000 more than any other entry). Meanwhile, Catholicism is the most disputed religion, with 20, 548 edits, beating Islam’s 16,813. The most controversial pop star? Michael Jackson, with 25, 391 edits, although he’s trailed closely by Britney Spears. Of course, she’s still young, so there’s time for her to usurp the King of Pop’s reign.

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The article above, written by David Wanczyk, is reprinted with permission from the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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HARRY TRUMAN -THE BUCK STOPPED THERE

Prior to becoming president, Harry Truman’s ventures in private business earned him more trouble than profit. He lost several thousand dollars investing in a fruitless zinc mine, and even more money funding a short-lived haberdashery in Kansas City. Eventually he began to view politics as a more stable career than business. Even as a senator, Truman was forced to borrow money and live more modestly, as he sent much of his income home to support his farm in Missouri.

Upon leaving the White House in 1953, Truman refused to exploit his former office as a stepping stone into the business world. This left him with just a small plot of land off which to live. He hoped that his memoirs would bring in extra cash, but between paying the ghostwriters and the taxes, Truman netted just $37,000 from the book. His insolvency grew so pathetic that President Eisenhower passed the Former Presidents Act in 1958, which created a pension for Truman. The former president made use of every last bit of it, leading an active life until his death at the age of 88.

THOMAS JEFFERSON -LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF  MONEYLENDERS

During the 1700s, tobacco rarely turned a consistent profit. So Thomas Jefferson, like many plantation owners of his time, lived in perpetual debt. Eager to look the part of a Virginia gentleman, Jefferson borrowed money for expensive clothes, furniture, and wine. He continued to indulge in this lifestyle through his presidency and into retirement. Jefferson’s beloved country estate of Monticello was especially draining on his finances. Its high ceilings and large windows led to excessive heating costs, and its flat roof and cavernous skylights leaked with every rainfall. by the time Jefferson was in his late seventies, the neglected bills had piled up and doubled with interest.

To lessen his financial woes, Jefferson started selling off the things he loved. He sold his entire collection of books to a Congressional library and even hatched a plot to give away a large parcel of land in a statewide lottery. When news of the lottery (and its purpose) reached his former colleagues, generous donations poured in. Despite these efforts, Jefferson died in debt. Two decades later, his grandson finally paid off the founding father’s tab.

ULYSSES S. GRANT -THE BOOK DEAL OF THE CENTURY

In 1881, former president Ulysses S. Grant settled into his retirement with what seemed like a prudent investment in his son’s Wall Street firm, Grant & Ward. But when the younger Grant’s partner, Ferdinand Ward, absconded to Canada with all the money, Grant found himself short $150,000.

Grant considered it a matter of personal honor to pay back the debt in full and rejected any financial assistance. He sold off much of his land, but it wasn’t enough to cover his losses. To generate more income, the former general wrote a series of articles about his Civil War exploits, which the ever-humble Grant doubted anyone would read. Surprisingly, the articles were a huge success, and Grant’s longtime friend Mark Twain convinced him to pen his personal memoirs. Completed just before his death in 1885, Grant’s autobiography became one of the best-selling books of its time -earning more than half a million dollars.

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The article above, written by Brian McMahon, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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WHAT BEGAN WITH LINCOLN…

Two years into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln instituted the first federal draft, calling for an additional 300,000 Union soldiers. Bad idea. His 1863 Enrollment Act allowed citizens to buy their way out of service, which incensed poor Irish immigrants. After all, they were forced to fight while the privileged paid to sit on the bench. As a result, draft riots broke out in New York City, causing $1.5 million in damage and as many as 100 deaths. Ironically, Lincoln had to deploy troops to quell violence. In the end, his draft conscripted about 150,000 troops -a quarter of which were substitutes paid by wealthier draftees.

…ENDED WITH NIXON

With the Vietnam War in full swing in 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned for president on the promise that he’d end the draft. Once he was in office, Nixon commissioned Thomas Gates, Eisenhower’s former secretary of defense, to study the feasibility of creating an all-volunteer military. In February 1970, the Gates Commission reported that the military could get by without drafting troops, but it took Nixon another three years to end the draft process altogether. During the Vietnam Era, between 1965 and 1973, a total of 1,728,344 men were drafted. There hasn’t been another draft in America since.

IF THERE WAS A DRAFT TOMORROW (5 THINGS TO NOTE)

Hey, fellas, remember when you turned 18 and had to register for the draft? Well, if there ever is one, it would start with the Selective Service System (SSS) holding a lottery to determine who gets drafted and in what order. Basically, your birthday would act as your lottery number. Some standard rules apply:

1. Men who turn 20 during the calendar year are called first.

2. Once all eligible 20-year-olds are called, the process moves up to the 21-year-olds, and then to the 22-year-olds, and so on, until all the 25-year-olds are called.

3. The last to be drafted are 18- and 19-year-olds.

4. If your number is called, you receive a notice telling you where to report for exams. You then undergo physical, psychological, and moral evaluations.

5. Once you are declared fit for service, you must report to the Military Entrance Processing Station within 10 days. You will then be placed in training, which will last three to six months. All told, draftees are expected to serve for two years.

SECOND DRAFT: THE NEW AND REVISED LAWS OF CONSCRIPTION

If there’s ever another draft, it won’t follow the same rules as Vietnam. Some changes in conscription laws have already been made, and several more are in the works.

Staying in school won’t keep the next round of draftees out of trouble. During Vietnam, many men evaded the draft by remaining in college for a long time (Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, for example). But in 1971, Congress passed legislation to limit school deferments. Now, students a only defer until the end of the semester, although seniors may defer until the end of the school year.

Women will get lottery numbers, too. Congress hasn’t legislated this yet, but since 1980, the National Organization for Women and other groups have been pressuring lawmakers to include women, claiming that the all-male draft is discriminatory.

If America activates the draft again, it would most likely create a specialized draft that targets linguists, medical personnel, and computer experts. In 2003, the Selective Service System stated in a memo, “While a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis.”

REAL EXCUSES YOU CAN USE TO DODGE THE DRAFT

You’re entering the priesthood. Just beginning the long process of divinity school can get you a deferment.

You steal. A lot. And you’ve been convicted for it. While this won’t guarantee an exemption, many convicts are declared “morally unfit” to serve in the military.

You farm. If your family depends on you -and there are no possible replacements (like your dad or brother taking over)- you can claim :hardship.”

You are a state congressman. Congress (and the SSS) figures you’re already doing enough to serve the country.

(Images by Flickr user Joe Mott)

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The above article by Eric Furman is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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One disturbing shade at a time.

SEEING RED

When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the early 1500s, they weren’t just shocked by the impressive Aztec temples, they were also stunned by Mexico’s bright red clothing. Europeans hadn’t yet discovered how to make a color that vibrant, and the conquistadors were mesmerized.

The Aztecs didn’t guard their secret particularly well, though. They showed the Spanish how to make the red dye by crushing the carcasses of cochineals, female beetles that live on cacti. When the conquistadors left to return to their homeland, they made off with the Aztec’s gold -and their fashion secret. For the next few hundred years, the Spanish made a fortune producing the crimson dye, keeping the source of the color closely guarded.

Red dye from cochineals is still used today in lipstick and food. After all, it’s organic! You can find it in juices, jams, and maraschino cherries. But if you’re squeamish about ingesting beetle juice, it’s easy to avoid. In 2009, the FDA required it to be declared on product labels.

PRETTY IN PINK

Pink, now the province of Paris Hilton and Barbie, was once considered the most appropriate color for clothing boys. In 1918, the hospital trade journal Infants’ Department explained the rationale behind the fashion trend: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

How did boys and girls swap colors? According to one theory, Hitler made homosexuals wear pink triangles on their uniforms in his work camps, and men have been wary of the color ever since. (Image credit: Flickr member *pinkpooch*)

PURPLE MAJESTY

Once upon a time, a dog belonging to Hercules went for a walk along the beach. When he returned to his master, the pup’s mouth was bright purple. Hercules’ girlfriend at the time, a nymph named Tyra, fell in love with the color, and she told Hercules that she wouldn’t see him again until he gave her a robe of the same shade. So Hercules, who had a weakness for nymphs, tracked the dog back to the beach and found the source: His dog had been eating sea snails.

The story of Tyra’s robe is a myth, but Tyrian purple -the color worn exclusively by imperial officers and clergy in ancient Rome- really does come from sea snails, specifically Bolinus brandaris. To get the regal color, Roman dye makers would pulverize the snails, boil them in salt, then leave them in the sun until the secretions from their glands turned purple. Eight thousand of the hapless snails were needed for one gram of the very expensive dye. (Image credit: Wikimedia user M.Violante)

BLUE BLOODED

Prussian blue -the pigment favored by Picasso during his Blue Period- was discovered completely by accident. Back in 1704, a Berlin dye maker known as Diesbach was trying to create a rich, red pigment from the cochineal beetle [see "seeing red" above]. In the process, he used a potassium-rich substance called potash and “animal oil,” a mixture of bones and blood. But when the potash and the blood combined with iron sulphate from the cochineal, it produced the world’s first synthetic blue pigment. As PBS painter Bob Ross would have said, it was a happy little accident.

SICKLY GREEN

When Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was investigating the chemical properties of arsenic in the 1770s, he used the toxic substance to make a verdant pigment known as Scheele’s green. In the process, he ingested way too much arsenic, essentially poisoning himself to death by the age of 43.

Sadly, that wasn’t the only life Scheele’s green would claim. In Europe, the color was used extensively in decorating. In fact, a study done in England at the end of the 19th century indicated that four out of every five wallpapers contained arsenic from Scheele’s green. Researchers of the time noted that when the wallpaper became damp, it gave off a “mouse-like” odor that caused illness and even death. In the 1930s, scientists confirmed that the smell was a lethal gas produced by a fungus feeding off arsenic in the wallpaper.

Interestingly, Scheele’s green may have even contributed to the death of Napoleon. During the last years of his life, Napoleon lived in exile in St. Helena, a humid island off the west coast of Africa. His bedroom was wallpapered bright green, and the air in St. Helena was definitely moist enough to grow fungus. In 2001, scientists analyzed samples of Napoleon’s hair and discovered arsenic levels as much as 38 times higher than normal.

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The article above, written by Michael Franco, is reprinted with permission from the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Anyone who says one person can’t make a difference has never heard the story of the Statue of Liberty.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

In 1865 a young French sculptor named Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi went to a banquet near the town of Versailles, where he struck up a conversation with Edward de Laboulaye, a prominent historian.

De Laboulaye, a great admirer of the United States, observed that the country’s centennial was approaching in 1876. He thought it would be a good idea for France to present America with a gift to commemorate the occasion. But what? Bertholdi proposed a giant statue of some kind… and thought about it for the next six years.

COMING TO AMERICA

By 1871 Bartholdi had most of the details worked out in his mind: The American monument would be a colossal statue of a woman called “Liberty Enlightening the World.” It would be paid for by the French people, and the pedestal it stood on would be financed and built by Americans.

The idea excited him so much that he booked passage on a ship and sailed to New York to drum up support for it. As he entered New York Harbor, Bartholdi noticed a small, 12-acre piece of land near Ellis Island, called Bedloe’s Island. He decided it was the perfect spot for his statue.

Bartholdi

Bartholdi spent the next five months traveling around the U.S. and getting support for the statue. Then he went back to France, where the government of Emperor Napoléon III (Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew) was openly hostile to the democratic and republican ideals celebrated by the Statue of Liberty. They would have jailed him if he had spoken of the project openly- so Bartholdi kept a low profile until 1874, when the Third Republic was proclaimed after Napoléon III’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

Bartholdi went back to work. He founded a group called the Franco-American Union, comprised of French and American supporters, to help raise money for the statue. He also recruited Alexander-Gustave Eiffel, soon to become famous for the Eiffel Tower, to design the steel and iron framework to hold the statue up.

A WOMAN IN A HURRY

By now the centennial was only two years away. It was obvious that the huge statue couldn’t be designed, financed, built, shipped, and installed on Bedloe’s Island in time for the big celebration. But Bartholdi kept going anyway.

Raising the $400,000 he estimated was needed to build the statue in France wasn’t easy. Work stopped frequently when cash ran out, and Bartholdi and his craftspeople missed deadline after deadline. Then in 1880 the Franco-American Union came up with the idea of holding a “Liberty” lottery to raise funds. That did the trick.

In the United States, things were harder. There was some enthusiasm, but not as much as in France. It was, after all, a French statue …and not everyone was sure the country needed a French statue, even for free. The U.S. Congress did vote unanimously to accept the gift from France… but it didn’t provide any funding for the pedestal, and neither did the city of New York. Neither did the state.

By now the Statue of Liberty’s right hand and torch were finished, so Bartholdi shipped it to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and had it put on display. For a fee of 50 cents, visitors could climb a 30-foot steel ladder up the side of the hand and stand on the balcony surrounding the torch. Two years later the statue’s head was displayed in a similar fashion in Paris, giving people a chance to climb up into the head and peek out from the windows in the crown. But while events like these generated a lot of enthusiasm, they didn’t raise as much money as Bartholdi hoped for.

LADY’S MAN

In 1883 the U.S. Congress voted down a fresh attempt to provide $100,000 toward the cost of the pedestal; the vote so outraged Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, that he launched a campaign in the pages of his newspaper to raise the money.

“The Bartholdi statue will soon be on its way to enlighten the world,” he told his readers, “more appropriate would be the gift of a statue of parsimony than a statue of liberty, if this is the appreciation we show of a friendly nation’s sentiment and generosity.” After two months of non-stop haranguing, he managed to raise exactly $135.75 of the $200,000 needed to build the pedestal.

NOTHING TO STAND ON

In June of 1884, work on the statue itself was finished. Bartholdi had erected it in a courtyard next to his studio in Paris. The original plan had been to dismantle it as soon as it was completed, pack it into shipping crates, and send it to the United States, where it would be installed atop the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island….

But the pedestal wasn’t even close to being finished. So Bartholdi left the statue standing in the courtyard.

In September 1884 work on the pedestal ground to a halt when the project ran out of money. An estimated $100,000 was still needed. When it appeared that New York was coming up empty-handed, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco became to compete to have the Statue of Liberty built in their cities.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…

Pulitzer

Furious, Joseph Pulitzer decided to try again. In the two years since his first campaign, his newspaper’s circulation had grown from a few thousand readers to more than 100,000. He hoped that now his paper was big enough to make a difference. For more than five months, beginning on March 16, 1885, Pulitzer beseeched his readers day after day to send in what they could. No reader was too humble, no donation too small; every person who contributed would receive a mention in the newspaper. “The statue is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America,” he told readers, “but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.Take this appeal to yourself personally.”

This time, the campaign began to get results: by March 27, 2,535 people had contributed $2,359.67. Then on April 1, Pulitzer announced that the ship containing the crated parts of the statue would leave France aboard the French warship Isere on May 8th. The excitement began to build, prompting a new wave of giving. By April 15 he’d raised $25,000, and a month later another $25,000 -enough money to restart work on the pedestal.

At this point, the makers of Castoria laxative stepped forward to help. They offered to chip in $25,000, “provided that for the period of one year, you permit us to place across the top of the pedestal the word ‘Castoria’,” they wrote. “Thus art and science, the symbol of liberty, and of health to his children, would be more closely enshrined in the hearts of our people.” The offer of a laxative for Miss Liberty was politely declined; Castoria kept its money.

ON A ROLL

By now the race to fund the pedestal had captivated the entire county, and money really began to pour in. People send in pennies, nickels, and dimes… and they also began buying copies of the World each day to keep track of the race; by the time the dust settled, the World’s circulation had exploded to the point that it was the most widely-read newspaper in the entire Western Hemisphere.

On June 19, the fundraising passed the $75,000 mark; on July 22, the Isere arrived at New York Harbor and began unloading its cargo; bringing the excitement -and the giving- to its peak.

Finally on August 11, Pulitzer’s goal was met. “ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! TRIUMPHANT COMPLETION OF THE WORLD’S FUND FOR THE LIBERTY PEDESTAL.” More than 120,000 people had contributed to the effort, for an average donation of about 83 cents per person.

Work on the pedestal now moved at a steady clip; by April 1886 it was finished, and the pieces of the statue itself were put into place. The internal steel and iron framework structure went up first; then the pieces of the statue’s outer skin were attached one by one. Finally on October 28, 1886, at a ceremony headed by president Grover Cleveland, the statue was opened to the public… more than ten years after the original July 4, 1876 deadline.

The statue was late -very late. But better late than never.

A WOMAN OF FEW WORDS

The verse most closely associated with the statue, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” weren’t added to the pedestal until 1903 …and only after officials realized what an inspiration the statue had become to the waves of immigrants arriving at nearby Ellis Island. The verses are part of “The New Colossus,” a sonnet composed by New York poet Emma Lazarus in 1883; she donated it to an auction at the New York’s Academy of Design to raise money for the statue’s pedestal.

(YouTube link)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504 pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

1. LET THEM EAT LOBSTER!

In colonial America, lobster wasn’t the delicacy it is today. In fact, it was so cheap and plentiful, it was a staple for prisoners and servants. One group of servants from Massachusetts actually grew so tired of eating lobster that they took the employers to court, where a judge ruled that lobster was to be served to them no more than three times a week.

2. JUDGE THEM NOT BY THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN

(Image credit: Flickr user Alex)

In their ocean habitat, lobsters are brown. (They turn red when you cook them.) However, there are a few notable exceptions. About one in every four million lobsters is born with a genetic defect that turns it blue. Sadly, these prized critters rarely survive to adulthood. After all, a bright blue crustacean crawling around on the ocean floor is simply easier for predators to spot. Yellow lobsters are even more uncommon, making up only one in 30 million. But if you end up with a yellow or blue one on your plate, don’t worry; lobsters of all hues are equally delicious.

3. A CENTURY OF MEAT

Most lobsters weight between 1.5 and 2 lbs., but one lumbering beast caught off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1977 measured 3.5 feet from claw to tail and weighed 44 lbs. How does a lobster put on that sort of weight? He was 100 years old.

4. SHOWING TOO MUCH LEG

Speaking of red lobsters: In 2003 the seafood chain Red Lobster ran a promotion offering customer $20 all-you-can-eat snow crab legs. The gimmick was both incredibly successful and a mistake. Hungry seafood lovers flocked to the restaurants, where most of them plowed through a lot more crab than the company anticipated. Even when Red Lobster raised the price to $24 per person, it still lost money on the deal.

5. EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEAFOOD, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

In 2010, Red Lobster restaurants across America began equipping their wait staff with computer-based “seafood expert encyclopedias.” The technology allows waiters to look up the answer to any seafood-related question posed to them. So ask away.

6. THE SILENT TREATMENT

In Disney’s 1940 animated film Pinocchio, Mel Blanc played the character of Gideon the cat, one of the scoundrels who introduces Pinocchio to the world of vice. Blanc, who famously voiced Bugs Bunny, recorded an entire movie’s worth of dialogue for Gideon. But during post-production, Disney decided the character would be cuter if he was mute. All of Blanc’s lines were cut, except for three burps, which you can hear during the brief scene at the Red Lobster Inn.

7. A PARENT’S JOB IS NEVER DONE

Red Lobster and Olive Garden are both owned by Darden Restaurants, a parent company that’s pretty overprotective. In 2010, Darden filed suit against a San Diego T.G.I. Friday’s for running a “never ending shrimp” promotion. Darden argued that the campaign combined Olive Garden’s “never ending pasta bowl” with Red Lobster’s “endless shrimp” in a way that “willfully attempted to confuse and mislead customers.” The case is still tied up in court, where lawyers are dealing with “never ending paperwork.”

8. OUT OF THE POT AND INTO THE FIRE

(Image credit: Crustastun)

In October 2010, British inventor Simon Buckhaven introduced the world to a lethal device known as the crustastun. It might look like a harmless computer scanner, but it’s designed to zap a lobster with an electric shock, killing it in less than two seconds. Animal-rights groups have praised the invention as a more humane method of killing lobsters -at least more humane than boiling them alive.

9. IMAGINE ALL THE LOBSTERS

In 1979, The B-52s song “Rock Lobster” became the band’s first to hit the Billboard Top 100. At the time, former Beatle John Lennon had been away from music for about three years, but after hearing “Rock Lobster,” he was inspired top start writing music again. Lennon said the song moved him because it “sounds just like Yoko’s music.” It’s unclear whether or not that was a compliment.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

When Spider-Man starts inspiring court rules and world-renowned chemists begin taking cues from Donald Duck, you know it’s time to look at the funny pages a little more seriously…

1. Superman Defeats the Ku Klux Klan

In the 1940s, The Adventures of Superman was a radio sensation. Kids across the country huddled around their sets as the Man of Steel leapt off the page and over the airwaves. Although Superman had been fighting crime in print since 1938, the weekly audio episodes fleshed out his storyline even further. It was on the radio that Superman first faced kryptonite, met The Daily Planet reporter Jimmy Olsen, and became associated with “truth, justice, and the American way.” So, it’s no wonder that when a young writer and activist named Stetson Kennedy decided to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, he looked to a certain superhero for inspiration.

In the post-World War II era, the Klan experienced a huge resurgence. Its membership was skyrocketing, and its political influence was increasing, so Kennedy went undercover to infiltrate the group. By regularly attending meetings, he became privy to the organization’s secrets. But when he took the information to local authorities, they had little interest in using it. The Klan had become so powerful and intimidating that police were hesitant to build a case against them. Struggling to make use of his findings, Kennedy approached the writers of the Superman radio serial. It was perfect timing. With the war over and the Nazis no longer a threat, the producers were looking for a new villain for Superman to fight. The KKK was a great fit for the role. In a 16-episode series titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” the writers pitted the Man of Steel against the men in white hoods. As the storyline progressed, the shows exposed many of the KKK’s most guarded secrets. By revealing everything from code words to rituals, the program completely stripped the Klan of its mystique. Within two weeks of the broadcast, KKK recruitment was down to zero. And by 1948, people were showing up to Klan rallies just to mock them.

2. Popeye Helps America Survive the Great Depression

Everyone knows Popeye’s secret. Whenever the cartoon sailor is on the verge of losing a fight, he squeezes open a can of spinach, pours the greens down his throat, and uses his supercharged muscles to pummel opponents. But fewer people know that the U.S. government is directly responsible for his dependence on canned vegetables.

In the 1930s, America was mired in the Great Depression, and the government was looking for a way to promote iron-rich spinach as a meat substitute. To help spread the word, they hired one of America’s favorite celebrities, Popeye the Sailor Man. It was a smart plan. In all of the comic strips to that point, Popeye’s superhuman strength had never been explained. But with the government’s campaign in place, Popeye was suddenly more than willing to share the secret to his strength. Sure enough, soon after Popeye took up spinach, American sales of the mighty veggie increased by one-third. Better still, American children rated it their third favorite food, right after turkey and ice cream.

But it wasn’t just spinach the government was endorsing. They were also pushing the merits of canned food. U.S. officials wanted Americans to know that cans were the perfect way to stock up on emergency rations.

While Popeye should be applauded for persuading a nation to eat its greens, he did mislead people a bit. The government’s enthusiasm for spinach was based in part on the calculations of German scientist Dr. E von Wolf, who’d discovered in 1870 that spinach contains iron. When calculating the results, he misplaced a decimal point, thereby making it “official” that spinach had 10 times more iron than it actually did. Not until years later were these figures rechecked. But by then, everyone was downing their spinach, hoping to be as tough as Popeye.

3. Captain Marvel Jr. Saves the Bad-Hair Day

Like most American kids in the 1940s, Elvis Presley fantasized about growing up to be like his favorite comic book superheroes. But it turns out that The King might have been more interested in their fashion statements than their special powers.

During his early teen years, Elvis was obsessed with Captain Marvel Jr., known as “America’s most famous boy hero.” A younger version of Captain Marvel, the character sported an unusual hairstyle that featured a curly tuft of hair falling over the side of his forehead.

Sound familiar? When Elvis set out to conquer America with his rock ‘n’ roll ways, he copied the ’do, thus making it one of the most famous hairstyles of the 20th century. But that wasn’t all. Captain Marvel also gets credit for the short capes Elvis wore on the back of his jumpsuits, as well as The King’s famous TCB logo, which bears a striking resemblance to Marvel’s lightning bolt insignia. Of course, Elvis never tried to hide his love for the Captain. A copy of Captain Marvel Jr. #51 still sits in his preserved childhood bedroom in an apartment in Memphis, and his full comics collection remains intact in the attic at Graceland. Plus, the admiration was mutual. Captain Marvel Jr. paid tribute to The King in one issue, referring to the singer as “the greatest modern-day philosopher.”

4. Donald Duck’s Scientific Breakthrough

In 1966, Danish engineer Karl Krøyer developed a method for raising sunken ships off the ocean floor by injecting them with polystyrene foam balls. However, when Krøyer tried to license his invention with the Dutch patent office, he was denied. Donald Duck had beaten him to the punch by 22 years.

Indeed, Krøyer’s concept could be traced back to a Donald Duck comic conceived by Carl Barks. In addition to being the most celebrated artist of the Donald Duck comics, Barks was known for his scientific prowess. So in a 1944 story, when Donald got a bump on his head that turned him into a genius, the duck managed to mumble, “If I mix CH2 [a methylene compound] with NH4 [ammonium] and boil the atoms in osmotic fog, I should get speckled nitrogen!”

Although it sounded like nonsense, it wasn’t. In 1963, chemists P.P. Gaspar and G.S. Hammond wrote a technical article about methylene that included a reference to the Donald Duck story. The final paragraph read, “Among experiments which have not, to our knowledge, been carried out as yet is one of a most intriguing nature suggested in the literature of no less than 19 years ago.” A footnote revealed that “literature” as the Donald Duck comic. It seems the web-footed children’s hero had deduced the chemical intermediate long before it had been proven to exist.

But why were these top American chemists looking to comics for inspiration? Apparently, Dr. Gaspar had been a lifelong Donald Duck fan, and he’d rediscovered Donald’s early reference to methylene while collecting old copies of the classic adventures. Gaspar never disclosed how much his work owed to Duckburg’s most famous resident, but then again, how many scientists would confess that they used comic books to bolster their research?

5. A Spider-Man Villain Keeps Folks Out of Jail

In a 1977 edition of Spider-Man, Peter Parker has the tables turned on him. The villain, Kingpin, tracks down Spidey using an electronic transmitter that he’d fastened to the superhero’s wrist. Although Kingpin loses in the end (he always does), one New Mexico judge saw beauty in his plan. Inspired by the strip, Judge Jack Love turned to computer salesman Michael Goss and asked if he could create a similar device to keep track of crime suspects awaiting trial. In 1983, Goss produced his first batch of electronic monitors. Authorities in Albuquerque then tested the devices on five offenders, using the gadgets as an alternative to incarceration. Today, the transmitters are a common sight in courtrooms across the country, usually in the form of electronic ankle bracelets. Most famously, Martha Stewart donned one while she was under house arrest in 2004. Perhaps she would have felt better knowing that the gadget had once nabbed Spider-Man, too.

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The article above, written by Mark Juddery, is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

(Image credit: Flickr user Jau Kay Kiang)

In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream. They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies. It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”

Ice Man Cometh

Nothing in Tudor’s early years indicated that he would invent an industry. He had the pedigree to attend Harvard but dropped out of school at the age of 13. After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family’s country estate to hunt, fish, and play at farming. When his brother, William, quipped that they should harvest ice from the estate’s pond and sell it in the West Indies, Frederic took the notion seriously. After all, he had little else to do.

Frederic convinced William to join him in a scheme to ship ice from New England to the Caribbean. Tudor reasoned that once people tried it, they’d never want to live without it. During the next six months, the brothers pooled their money and laid out plans to ship their product to the French island of Martinique, where they hoped to create a monopoly on ice.

No one believed the idea would work. In fact, no ship in Boston would agree to transport the unusual cargo, so Frederic spent nearly $5,000 (a big chunk of the seed money) buying a ship of his own. On February 10, 1806, The Boston Gazette reported, “No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”

It did. Although the ice arrived in Martinique in perfect condition, no one wanted to buy it. Tudor desperately explained how the cold blocks of ice could be used in the stifling Caribbean heat, but islanders weren’t convinced.

After an inauspicious start, William pulled out of the partnership. The following winter, Frederic was on his own. Remarkably, he drummed up enough money to send another shipment of ice to the Indies. But when a trade embargo left much of the Caribbean off limits for two years, Frederic was left twiddling his thumbs. Meanwhile, the Tudor family fortune had dwindled in a shady real estate deal in South Boston.

Despite financial woes, Frederic persisted, and his ice business finally turned a profit in 1810. But a series of circumstances—including war, weather, and relatives needing bailouts—kept him from staying in the black for too long. Between 1809 and 1813, he landed in debtors’ prison three times and spent the rest of the time hiding from the sheriff.

Breaking the Ice

Perhaps it was his Yankee entrepreneurial spirit, or perhaps monomania, but Tudor was obsessed with the idea that ice would make him rich. During the next decade, he developed clever new techniques to convince people that they actually needed ice, including a “first one’s free” pitch. While living in a South Carolina boarding house in 1819, Tudor made a habit of bringing a cooler of chilled beverages to the dinner table. His fellow boarders always scoffed at the sight, but after a sip or two, they’d inevitably fall in love with his ice. Tudor traveled around the country and convinced barkeeps to offer chilled drinks at the same price as regular drinks—to see which would become more popular. He also taught restaurants how to make ice cream, and reached out to doctors and hospitals to convince them that ice was the perfect way to cool feverish patients. The truth is that people never knew they needed ice until Tudor made them try it. Once they did, they couldn’t live without it.

By 1821, Tudor’s business was strengthening. He’d created real demand for his product in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and even Havana. But he still needed to refine his operation. Enter Nathaniel Wyeth, an innovator who became Tudor’s foreman in 1826. By using a horse-drawn plow to cut the ice into large grids, Wyeth invented a much faster harvesting method. He also put an assembly process into place. Laborers sawed the blocks apart and plunked them into canals to float them downstream. Then a conveyor belt would hoist the blocks from the water and carry them up to icehouses, where they’d be stacked up to 80 feet high.

Still, only one-tenth of the ice harvested made it to sale. What’s worse, the whole operation was incredibly unsafe. In addition to those towering stacks of ice, numb hands, sharp instruments, and frigid waters made the process dangerous. The 300-lb. blocks of ice could slide easily, knocking down men and breaking their limbs. Ice harvesters often developed “ice man’s knees,” which were bruised and bloody from days of shoving solid ice.

Despite these drawbacks, Wyeth’s ingenious methods were a major improvement on prior harvesting practices. With the inventor by his side, Tudor asserted his long-fomenting monopoly and became known as the “Ice King.” Tudor’s reputation solidified in 1833 when he shipped 180 tons of ice halfway across the world to British colonists in Calcutta. The venture was so successful that it reopened trade routes between India and Boston.

Back at home, Tudor continued to dominate the scene. By 1847, nearly 52,000 tons of ice traveled by ship or train to 28 cities across the United States. Nearly half the ice came from Boston, and most of that was Tudor’s. He also maintained ice-harvesting rights to key ponds throughout Massachusetts. Even Henry David Thoreau watched Tudor’s workers harvest Walden Pond and waxed philosophic about the scene in his diary: “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

The End of the Ice Age

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, finally rich again. By that time, everyone with access to a frozen body of water was in on the action. Ice boomtowns sprouted along the Kennebec River in Maine, where farmers found year-round employment. The 1860s became the peak competitive period of American ice harvesting, and Tudor’s company prospered. Even during the Civil War, when the South was cut off from ice supplies in the North, the ice industry continued to grow in New England and in the Midwest.

As American society grew more accustomed to fresh meats, milk, and fruit, the ice industry expanded into one of the most powerful industries in the nation. At the turn of the 20th century, nearly every family, grocer, and barkeep in America had an icebox. But ironically, America’s dependence on ice created the very technology that would lead to the decline of the ice empire—electric freezers and refrigerators. During the early 1900s, these appliances became more reliable, and by 1940, 5 million units had been sold. With freezers allowing people to make ice at home, there was little need to ship massive quantities across the country.

Today, the ice industry pulls in $2.5 billion a year, but it’s nowhere near as dominant as it used to be. Most of the business is from pre-packaged, direct-to-consumer ice (the stuff you buy for your beer cooler). Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful. The next time you put your lips to a slushie, or an iced tea, or a chilled martini, or a cold beer on a hot day, take a moment to thank the crazy Yankee who had the vision to turn water into money.

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The article above, written by Linda Rodriguez, is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

Recent advances in genetic research have allowed scientists to grow the brain of one animal inside he body of an entirely different species. Is this the dawning of a new era or a scene out of

The idea of splicing animals together isn’t a new one The ancient Greeks fashioned a chimera out of a snake, a goat, and a lion; the Japanese made a baku out of an ox, an elephant, and a tiger. Even today, people are inventing new creatures -only now, they’re using a lot more than their imaginations.

Just ask biologist Todd Streelman. Inside his lab at Georgia Tech, Streelman successfully bred a living animal with the brain of anther species. He started with a cichlid, a type of fish found in Lake Malawai, at the southern tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Over the past 500,000 years, hundreds of different species of the cichlid have evolved from a single ancestor, with each new species developing a distinct set of jaws, teeth, brain, and behaviors to fit their respective environments. Streelman took two species of cichlid fish -rock-dwelling cichlids and sand-dwelling cichlids- and figured out a way to grow a sand-dweller’s brain inside the skull of a rock-dweller. From a distance, that might seem like a simple trick in cross-pollination. But it’s no small feat when you consider that the brains of the two creatures are as different as those of chimpanzees and humans.

Todd Streelman

ANIMAL CROSSING

How’d he do it? The trick to Streelman’s success was figuring out how (and when) the brains of different species distinguish themselves during embryonic development. In the earliest stages of life, the brain of almost every animal starts out looking the same. It begins as a small sheet of rapidly dividing cells that are not yet designed for different functions. But this sheet of cells eventually rolls into a tube, and the cells turn into different types of neurons. The neurons then slowly forms connections uniquely tailored to the creature’s lifestyle. In humans, for example, the brain develops a large cerebral cortex capable of processing language and consciousness. In various species of cichlid fish, the forebrain changes and grows depending on its future environment. More specifically, the sand-dweller’s forebrain develops a large hind region for surviving in open water, while the rock-dweller’s forebrain develops a large front region to navigate Lake Malawi’s murky, cavernous bottom.

In both species, the size and shape of the forebrain is determined by the expression of a gene called Wnt1. In sand-dwellers, this gene sends out a strong signal, while in rock-dwellers, Wnt1′s signal is weak. As part of his study, Streelmen took rock-dweller embryos and placed them in water treated with lithium chloride -a salt that’s known to increase the strength of the Wnt1 signal. This caused the rear section of the rock-dweller’s brain to grow until its brain looked like that of a sand-dweller. In other words, by simply  changing the expression of a single gene, Streelman was able to Frankenstein a new fish.

Cichlid embryo

OF MICE AND MEN

While Streelman has proven that he can grow one species’ brain inside another’s body, there’s no telling if his patchwork creations can survive in their natural environments. To date, most attempts to manipulate neural development in animals have led to brains that look promising in the land but fail to function in the real world. In 2002, for instance, researchers manipulated a mouse’s genetic signals to increase the size of its cerebral cortex. The cortex grew dramatically, forming folds indicative of the intelligence in high-order mammals and humans. But the mutation proved fatal, and the mouse died before it was born.

Some scientists posit that the mouse’s death may have had more to do with the complex relationship between the animal and environment and less to do with ill-suited manipulation. Georg Striedner, and evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, has found that many animals go through a phase during early development in which they’re particularly vulnerable to injury, starvation, or disease. In order for an animal to survive, something in their external world has to protect them. For instance, many species go through a prolonged period of rapid cell division before their brains become neurons. This ultimately leads to a larger brain, but it also means that the animal’s brain is not fully formed at birth. Parrots are a good example. After parrots hatch, their brains aren’t particularly developed, which forces the babies to rely on their mothers for food. That means that the mothers’ feeding behaviors must have evolved at the exact same time that parrots evolved to have larger brains. Otherwise, parrots would have never become so smart.

Cichlid fish

The process of evolving new traits is clearly complicated. Labs can create animals with shiny new traits, but that doesn’t mean the animals can handle the complexity of the world around them. As for Streelman’s fish, no one knows how their manipulated brains will affect their behavior -or, for that matter, how they’ll fare in nature. In many ways, though, that isn’t the point. The goal of Streelman’s research isn’t to grow new and funky animals; it’s to learn how animals evolve. By discovering the relationship between the animal’s genome and its brain development, scientists ultimately hope to pinpoint the genetic basis of of human thought and behavior. It just may be that, along the way, creatures like the chimera and the baku become more than the stuff of ancient folklore.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

1. Big Name: Shewanella oneidensis

(Image credit: Flicker user Justin Burns)

Why It Deserves a TV Special: Shewanella can go without air longer than David Blaine. If there’s no oxygen available, this crafty bacterium can switch gears and consume metal instead. Thanks to this remarkable skill, shewanella can live almost anywhere—from the surface of the Earth to the bottom of the ocean. Not surprisingly, scientists see the bacterium as the perfect model for studying how life evolved during the early days of the Earth, when oxygen was scarce.

How It’s Saving the Planet: No one knows exactly how shewanella’s alternative breathing method works. What scientists do know is that the process transfers extra electrons to metals. When shewanella breathe in uranium and chromium (metals that can be toxic to humans), the extra electrons change the metals so that they can’t move through ground water. In other words, shewanella can actually stop toxins in their tracks. And that’s good news, because dangerous metals sometimes leak from factories and dumps, poisoning our water supplies. Because shewanella can stop these pollutants, scientists are working on ways to protect lakes and streams by surrounding toxic waste sites with the bacteria.

2. Big Name: Escherichia coli
You Know It As: E. coli

(Image credit: Flickr user Carlos Rosas)

Don’t Believe What You Read: E. coli has a reputation as the scourge of the salad bar, but the vast majority of E. coli strains won’t make people sick. In fact, E. coli is one of the most important bacteria inside your intestinal tract. Scientists love working with it, because it’s a simple organism that reproduces quickly and because it contains the component parts of more complicated life forms, such as RNA and DNA.

How It Backs Up Darwin: Believe it or not, this infamous bacterium has done a lot to further our understanding of evolution. Because of its stunning ability to reproduce quickly, E. coli is an excellent model for tracing genetic mutations. In June 2008, New Scientist reported on a research project at the University of Michigan that investigated 44,000 generations of E. coli. Twenty years ago, the researchers started with a single bacterium; then they separated its descendants into isolated populations and watched them grow. Around generation No. 31,500, one population developed the ability to metabolize citrate, a nutrient in the culture of the petri dishes. It was the equivalent of one group of people—say, Europeans—suddenly being able to digest dirt. The researchers figured this ability was based on several mutations that just happened to eventually combine into a useful trait. Try as they might, the other populations never hit on this exact combination. According to New Scientist, the experiment suggests there’s a lot of chance involved in evolution. One group can randomly develop a useful ability that the other groups never acquire, even given enough time and resources.

3. Big Name: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Adorable Nickname: Chlamy

(Image credit: Flickr user Orange Coast College Biology Department)

Its Place on the Family Tree: Prominent. One of the oldest forms of life, these single-cell algae live at the evolutionary branch that separates animals and plants, meaning they share characteristics with both. For instance, chlamy can transform light into energy like a plant, but it can also swim like an animal by propelling itself through water with flagella (the same wiggly tails that are attached to sperm cells). While chlamy can offer us insight into various aspects of evolution, it’s also helping us tackle human disaease. Because the algae’s flagella resemble cilia, the tiny hair-like structures that line your organs, scientists also use chlamy to model and understand the cilia’s role in illnesses such as kidney and heart disease.

How It Will Solve the Energy Crisis: One of the byproducts of chlamy’s photosynthetic process is hydrogen, an element people will need en masse to drive hydrogen-powered cars. Right now, hydrogen fuel is derived from natural gas, a non-renewable resource. Scientists are hoping that in time, however, chlamy will provide a cheaper, safer, and greener way to produce large amounts of fuel.

4. Big Name: Caenorhabditis elegans

(Image credit: Flickr user moneydick)

Why Scientists Love It: This microscopic roundworm is see-through. No, really. Thanks to its transparent flesh, biologists can easily watch what’s going on inside. And there’s a lot to see. Despite being less than 1 millimeter long, this multi-cell worm has all the physiological systems of much larger animals. Better still, 35 percent of its genes are related to ours. Another Big Advantage: C. elegans are easy to care for, needing only a petri dish for a home and E. coli to eat.

How It Will Help Us Live Forever: Scientists have used C. elegans to study what happens to individual cells and entire organisms as they age. There are two dominant theories of aging: One theory posits that aging is a cumulative process of wear and tear on cells, while the other maintains that genes control aging. A recent study of C. elegans at Stanford University provided evidence for the latter. The study found that as the worms aged, levels of three transcription factors (molecular switches that turn genes on and off) become unbalanced. These changes triggered the genetic pathways that turn spry young worms into decrepit old ones. And because it’s a lot easier to control transcription factors than it is to prevent all the things that can damage cells (injury, disease, radiation), scientists are optimistic about finding a way to keep us young forever. As Rutgers researcher Monica Driscoll told Scientific American, “Once you’ve figured out what a key molecule is doing in the worm, you can look for it in humans and expect the same things to happen.”

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The article above, written by Maggie Koerth-Baker, is reprinted with permission from the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Follow these five surefire steps and you’ll be stuck to the corner of envelopes in no time!

Step #1: KICK THE BUCKET

This is the hard part. According to the U.S. Postal Service, no living person can appear on an official stamp. No exceptions! (Clearly, the Postal Service is in the Elvis-is-dead camp).

Step #2: BE PATIENT

Don’t expect your stamps to arrive in time for your wake. The Postal Service has a rule that people can’t be honored in stamp form until five years after their death. But they do make an exception for recently deceased U.S. presidents. The USPS is willing to honor a former commander-in-chief on the first anniversary of the birthday following his death.

Step #3: CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY!

Even after you’ve been dead and buried for five years, the USPS will only issue stamps on significant anniversaries. For most personalities, that means waiting until what would have been their 100th birthday before landing the honor. Of course, what constitutes a “significant” anniversary is up for grabs. In 1993, the USPS issued an Elvis Presley stamp on what would have been the King’s 58th birthday. No one complained; more than 500 million Elvis Presley stamps were sold.

Step #4: DON’T BECOME A RABBI

Because of the whole separation-of-church-and-state thing, the USPS won’t issue stamps that commemorate “individuals whose principle achievements are associated with religious undertakings.” But the government bends this rule from time to time. When the Postal Service announced its slate of commemorative stamps for 2010, one of them featured Mother Teresa. Atheist groups blasted the stamp for its religious underpinnings, but the USPS responded that the stamp was intended to honor the nun’s humanitarian work more than her religious beliefs. Despite the controversy, the Mother Teresa stamp was officially released on September 5, 2010 -when she would have been 100 years old.

Step #5: DON’T SUCK UP TO THE COMMITTEE

Since 1957, the Postmaster General has appointed and maintained the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which consists of 15 leaders from diverse fields. They meet four times a year to discuss stamp proposals, and the committee’s roster often reads like a random assemblage of folks you’d never see at the same dinner party. Past members include Academy Award winner Karl Malden, author James Michener, and Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps (who served not one, but two terms on the committee, from 1983 to 2006). Phelps wrote extensively about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the group in his 2007 memoir, Undertaker’s Son: Life Lessons from a Coach. During his tenure, the committee received a deluge of 50,000 proposals a year and often felt pressure from members of Congress to approve certain stamps. Phelps wrote, “The pressure doesn’t work; if anything it turns off the committee.”

Current members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Board include Jean Picker Firstenberg, former head of the American Film Institute; Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale; and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who ended up having a “beer summit” at the White House in 2009. If you wind up having a drink with Gates, don’t bring up the stamp thing.

International Diplomacy & the Postal Service

Believe it or not, the U.S. Postal Service has been issuing commemorative stamps since 1893. (The first series celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World!) But the real reasons the USPS issues these stamps isn’t so much to celebrate patriotism; it’s to make money. When people collect stamps instead of using them for postage, the federal government turns a healthy profit. In 2006, the USPS estimated that 120 million Elvis stamps were never mailed, delivering more than $30 million to the Postal System’s coffers.

But not every commemorative stamp is a good idea. In 1994, the Postal Service planned to issue a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was trying to portray the historical event without offering a judgement on the bombing itself, but lots of people questioned its tastefulness. Japan’s foreign minister protested, as did the mayor of Nagasaki, who called the stamp “heartless.” The Japanese embassy in Washington took its case to the State Department in hopes of canceling the stamp before it was released. Eventually, protests grew so loud that the Clinton White House leaned on the USPS to ditch the stamp, and the Postal Service caved. But it held onto the theme. In 1995, the USPS replaced the mushroom cloud stamp with one depicting Harry Truman announcing the end of the war.

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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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How Toilet Paper Got on a Roll

The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.

Toilet paper took its next leap forward in 1890, when two brothers named Clarence and E. Irvin Scott popularized the concept of toilet paper on a roll. The Scotts’ brand became more successful than Gayetty’s medicated wipes, in part because they built a steady trade selling toilet paper to hotels and drugstores. But it was still an uphill battle to get the public to openly buy the product, largely because Americans remained embarrassed by bodily functions. In fact, the Scott brothers were so ashamed of the nature of their work that they didn’t take proper credit for their innovation until 1902.

“No one wanted to ask for it by name,” says Dave Praeger, author of Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. “It was so taboo that you couldn’t even talk about the product.” By 1930, the German paper company Hakle began using the tag line, “Ask for a roll of Hakle and you won’t have to say toilet paper!”

As time passed, toilet tissues slowly became an American staple. But widespread acceptance of the product didn’t officially occur until a new technology demanded it. At the end of the 19th century, more and more homes were being built with sit-down flush toilets tied to indoor plumbing systems. And because people required a product that could be flushed away with minimal damage to the pipes, corncobs and moss no longer cut it. In no time, toilet paper ads boasted that the product was recommended by both doctors and plumbers.

The Strength of Going Soft

In the early 1900s, toilet paper was still being marketed as a medicinal item. But in 1928, the Hoberg Paper Company tried a different tack. On the advice of its ad men, the company introduced a brand called Charmin and fitted the product with a feminine logo that depicted a beautiful woman. The genius of the campaign was that by evincing softness and femininity, the company could avoid talking about toilet paper’s actual purpose. Charmin was enormously successful, and the tactic helped the brand survive the Great Depression. (It also helped that, in 1932, Charmin began marketing economy-size packs of four rolls.) Decades later, the dainty ladies were replaced with babies and bear cubs—advertising vehicles that still stock the aisles today.

By the 1970s, America could no longer conceive of life without toilet paper. Case in point: In December 1973, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked about a toilet paper shortage during his opening monologue. But America didn’t laugh. Instead, TV watchers across the country ran out to their local grocery stores and bought up as much of the stuff as they could. In 1978, a TV Guide poll named Mr. Whipple—the affable grocer who implored customers, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”—the third best-known man in America, behind former President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham.

Rolling the World

Currently, the United States spends more than $6 billion a year on toilet tissue—more than any other nation in the world. Americans, on average, use 57 squares a day and 50 lbs. a year. Even still, the toilet paper market in the United States has largely plateaued. The real growth in the industry is happening in developing countries. There, it’s booming. Toilet paper revenues in Brazil alone have more than doubled since 2004. The radical upswing in sales is believed to be driven by a combination of changing demographics, social expectations, and disposable income.

“The spread of globalization can kind of be measured by the spread of Western bathroom practices,” says Praeger. When average citizens in a country start buying toilet paper, wealth and consumerism have arrived. It signifies that people not only have extra cash to spend, but they’ve also come under the influence of Western marketing.

America Without Toilet Paper

Even as the markets boom in developing nations, toilet paper manufacturers find themselves needing to charge more per roll to make a profit. That’s because production costs are rising. During the past few years, pulp has become more expensive, energy costs are rising, and even water is becoming scarce. Toilet paper companies may need to keep hiking up their prices. The question is, if toilet paper becomes a luxury item, can Americans live without it?

The truth is that we did live without it, for a very long time. And even now, a lot of people do. In Japan, the Washlet—a toilet that comes equipped with a bidet and an air-blower—is growing increasingly popular. And all over the world, water remains one of the most common methods of self-cleaning. Many places in India, the Middle East, and Asia, for instance, still depend on a bucket and a spigot. But as our economy continues to circle the drain, will Americans part with their beloved toilet paper in order to adopt more money-saving measures? Or will we keep flushing our cash away? Praeger, for one, believes a toilet-paper apocalypse is hardly likely. After all, the American marketing machine is a powerful thing.

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The article above, written by Linda Rodriguez, is reprinted with permission from the Jul/Aug 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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A store in Georgia Tech's student center is named for Burdell.

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Disavian)

George P. Burdell was a man born of a simple mistake. In 1927, someone in the admissions office at Georgia Tech accidentally sent student Ed Smith two registration forms instead of one. Sensing an opportunity for mischief, Smith filled out one form for himself and the other for George P. Burdell -a student he completely made up. When Smith arrived at the school, he kept the ruse going by enrolling Burdell in all his classes and even turning in assignments under his name. In fact, Smith did so much work on behalf of his imaginary friend that Burdell eventually graduated.

When other students found out about the hoax, they helped keep Burdell’s story going. According to his resume, Burdell flew 12 missions over Europe during World War II and served on MAD magazine’s Board of Directors from 1969 to 1981. In 2001, when Burdell was supposedly 90 years old, he nearly became TIME magazine’s Person of the Year after garnering 57 percent of online votes. Today, Burdell is one of Georgia Tech’s most celebrated alums. He even has a page on Facebook, where he keeps in touch with over 4,000 “friends.”

THE FANTASY HOCKEY PLAYER

Like many hockey players drafted in the 11th round of the 1974 NHL draft, Taro Tsujimoto never actually made it to the big time. But unlike the other players drafted with him, Tsujimoto didn’t exist. His name is in the record books because of Punch Imlach, the former general manager of the Buffalo Sabres. Imlach was so fed up with tedious late rounds of the draft that he decided to poke some fun at the league. He pulled a Japanese name from the local phone book and made up an imaginary team. Then, he simply told NHL president Clarence Campbell that his draft pick was Taro Tsujimoto of the Tokyo Kahanas. Sure, no one had ever heard of Tsujimoto, but that didn’t stop the NHL from making the selection official. Several weeks later, Imlach revealed his prank, but Sabres fans didn’t care. For years after the draft, Buffalo crowds would break into chants, demanding, “We want Taro!” (Image credit: twoeightnine design)

THE FICTION CRITIC

Very few film critics had anything nice to say about Rob Schneider’s 2001 comedy The Animal. One exception: movie reviewer David Manning of the so-called Ridgefield Press, who called the movie “Another winner”! In reality, Sony marketing executives created the fictional critic to promote the company’s worst films. In fact, The Animal was just one of many box office bombs that Manning enthusiastically praised. He also lent his critical support to Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, and The Patriot.

After reading about the deception in Newsweek, two California movie lovers, Omar Rezec and Ann Belknap, decided to sue Sony. They filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all filmgoers who saw the movies based on Manning’s “reviews.” In the end, Sony settled out of court, paying real money to anyone duped by the fake critic.

THE ELUSIVE ARTIST

Sometimes life imitates art, and sometime life mocks it. In 1998, Scottish novelist William Boyd wrote a book called Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960. The book was pure fiction but Boyd released it as a biography because he wanted to see how long it would take the art world to figure out that Tate never existed. To help sell the story, Boyd enlisted some powerful friends, including author Gore Vidal (who is liberally quoted throughout the book) and rock star David Bowie. When the book debuted, Bowie threw a huge party in Tate’s honor, inviting the most elite members of New York’s art scene. Journalist David Lister, who knew that Tate was fake, made the rounds at Bowie’s party and asked people what they thought of the artist. When they inevitably spoke of their familiarity with his work, Lister would hear them out, then let them in on the joke.

THE MYSTERIOUS ABORIGINES

In the early 1990s, two Australian artists had the same bad idea completely independently: to sell their work by pretending to be Aborigines.

One of the two artists was Leon Carmen, a cab driver living in Sydney. He invented a new identity for himself as Wanda Koolmatrie, an Aboriginal woman abducted from the bush in the 1950s and forced to live in white society. Carmen wrote an autobiography as Koolmatrie, and the book went on to win praise for its “distinctive new voice.” But when Carmen tried to write a sequel in 1997, the publisher caught on, and the incident became a national scandal.

The other artist, painter Elizabeth Durack, had more luck with her fake identity. In 1994, she began signing her work Eddie Burrup, supposedly a male, Aboriginal ex-convict. The paintings were selected for indigenous art exhibitions and won numerous prizes. But when the paintings began to draw serious interest from art collectors, Durack revealed herself as Burrup, claiming that she understood Aborigines well enough to paint as one of them. Aborigines disagreed, and they demanded that galleries stop selling her work. Strangely, the artist continued to paint as Burrup until her death in 2000.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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BRACES ON THE BLACK MARKET

In the early 2000s, an unusual fashion craze hit Thailand after magazines there began featuring pics of teenage girls sporting colorful braces. Suddenly, every girl on the block wanted to strap metal to her teeth, even if she already had a perfect smile. But because most orthodontists refuse to apply braces to flawless teeth, the girls took their concerns to the black market, where hucksters and swindlers happily slapped on fake braces -sometimes using superglue. (Not the best idea, as the glue’s side effects can include blood poisoning and nerve damage.) By early 2006, the craze had become so popular, and so dangerous, that authorities announced steep fines and jail time for anyone caught producing or selling fake braces. Unfortunately, neither the legal penalties nor the physical risks have done anything to diminish the fad. It looks like anxious parents will just have to wait for braces to stop being cool again.

NOTHING TO FEAR… EXCEPT TRUMPETS

The American Association of Orthodontists wants to put a few schoolyard rumors to bed. First off, wearing braces in a thunderstorm doesn’t increase your chances of being struck by lightning. Also, braces don’t set off metal detectors at airports or disrupt radio signals. But that doesn’t mean braces are completely harmless. In fact, the corrective metal reserves a special terror for trumpet players, notoriously chafing kids’ lips when they play. Thankfully, University of South Carolina music professor Dr. Keith Amstutz has a solution: the BRACEGUARD. The invention uses a piece of custom-molded plastic to separate players’ lips from the metal, allowing teens to toot their own horns pain-free.

CELEBRITIES STRAIGHTEN UP

In early 2002, Tom Cruise took his children to the orthodontist and found out that his own bite was askew. So, he did what any other world-famous movie star would do: He got braces. Instead of a mouthful of metal, Cruise opted for ceramic braces, which use bone-color brackets linked by one arch wire resting in front of the teeth. Cruise wore his braces for the next year, flashing them at movie premieres and award shows, and in doing so, he helped make it acceptable for adults to wear them. By 2004, one in five Americans with braces was an adult- a 37 percent increase from a decade earlier. During the past few years, stars from Danny Glover to Alyssa Milano have followed in Cruise’s toothsteps, changing what it means to smile like a movie star.

THE WIRELESS AGE

Recent advances in braces have made them less noticeable and more efficient. The latest development is “smart brackets,” which are embedded with microelectronic chip to measure the movement of each tooth and reduce the amount of time teenagers spend under the wire. But the future of orthodontics involves getting rid of braces altogether. Scientists are busy developing a new kind of tooth-straightening device called an eruption guidance appliance, or EGA. Designed for childen between the ages of 8 and 11, and EGA is a retainer-like tray that works at night to guide teeth as they grow in, making braces unnecessary later on.

ORTHODONTICS BY THE NUMBERS

5 Million: Number of Americans with braces.

5,410: Number of orthodontists in the United States.

650: Number of orthodontists in Caifornia (the most of any U.S. state).

30: Number of orthodontists in West Virginia (the fewest of any U.S. state).

$206, 190: Mean annual income for an orthodontist in the United States.

81: Number of Ugly Betty episodes that aired before Betty got her braces removed.

1: Number of The Brady Bunch episodes in which Marcia wore braces.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

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Sometime in Britain’s mythological past, King Llud Llaw Eraint had a problem with dragons. Specifically, two warring dragons -one white and one red- whose screams rang through the countryside, causing women to miscarry and livestock to become barren. So, the king lured the dragons in to a deep pit and got them so drunk that they passed out. While the dragons were asleep, he buried them deep underneath a mountain in Wales. “The white dragon is the Saxon,” the Welsh magician Merlin once explained. “The red dragon is Cymru [Wales], and so they will fight, red against the white, until at last the dragon of Wales is triumphant over the dragon of the Saxons.”

Today, the red dragon of Wales has reappeared. It’s everywhere in 21st-century Welsh culture -on the flag, on t-shirts, ashtrays, and bumper stickers, and on the tattoos of patriotic men and women. It embodies the spirit of the country. For 2,000 years, Wales has suffered though waves of invaders and conquerors, and each time, its people have emerged with a deepened sense of national pride. Its character is one of defiance -a red dragon always ready for battle.

THE OTHER DRAGON

Fight as it may, Wales was conquered at various times by the Celts, the Romans, the Normans, and the Saxons. It officially became part of England with the 1536 and 1543 Acts of Unification. On the one hand, Welsh law was abolished and English was declared the language of the land. On the other, its people had a new place to point fingers when things didn’t go right. And things often didn’t go right in Wales.

In the 18th century, Parliament restricted grazing on public lands. This forced many farmers to give up their livelihood and move to the city, creating a ready labor base for the coming Industrial Revolution. The first ironworks opened in the middle of that century, with slate quarries, coal, and other mining industries following soon after. The work was dangerous and difficult, but worst of all, it was low-paying. By 1793, many working families couldn’t even afford to buy corn. (Image credit: Flickr user Still Burning)

Things only got worse following the War of 1812. Food prices rose so high that working-class Welsh families were forced to boil grass for soup. For decades, riots were a widespread and continuous part of life.

By 1846, the British had become convinced that there was something seriously wrong with Wales. Parliament sent three investigators to examine Welsh education, and they came back with a report that declared the Welsh to be lazy, ignorant, immoral alcoholics. In response, Parliament outlawed the Welsh language in schools and even on the playground.

(Image credit: Flickr user Imaginary Grace)

The backlash was a widespread social movement to retain Welshness. Political thinkers in Wales considered breaking away from England, and in 1925, a Welsh nationalist party called the Plaid Cymru was formed just for that purpose. They gained some traction, but the effort was stalled when the Great Depression forced many to leave Wales in search of employment.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Independence movements continued to arise periodically, but without much luck. Then, in 1979, the British decided it was ready to get the country go. Parliament supported a referendum to form a Welsh Assembly, but -ironically- Welsh citizens voted the referendum down by a large majority. Why would a people with such deep national pride give up a chance to move towards self-rule?

As it turned out, the decline of the mining industry and the rise of unemployment during and after World War II left Wales feeling too feeble to stand on its own two feet. At the same time, many Welsh nationalists had become so extreme that they were burning down English-owned holiday cottages, attacking English business owners, and sending letter bombs to English citizens. As Welsh separatists became more and more militant, mainstream Wales started shying away from the idea of independence.

Eighteen years after the first referendum, another measure went before Welsh voters, proposing a Welsh Assembly with legislative powers and control over a £7 billion budget. This time, the vote passed by a narrow margin of 50.3 percent. Two years later, in 1999, the Welsh Assembly opened its doors in the capital city of Cardiff. (Image credit: Flickr user iwouldstay)

INDEPENDENT THINKING

Since then, it’s been a rocky road for the Welsh government. Political infighting marred the first years of the Assembly, breaking and forging alliances between parties. But now, there seems to be a sense of confidence -and a renewed interest in achieving an independent Wales. The Plaid Cymru, for one, is actively campaigning for full independence. The possibility of meeting that goal isn’t too far-fetched, either, given the power the party currently enjoys.

Other political parties disagree with Plaid’s aims. And there are plenty of other parties out there, including the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, the Conservatives, plus newer parties such as Cymru Yfory, or “Tomorrow’s Wales.” In general, the Welsh don’t want to return to British control, but they don’t support complete independence, either. According to a 2007 BBC survey, nearly 70 percent of the population wants to keep Wales within the United Kingdom. Even those who are sympathetic to the cause question how Wales will be able to deal with the economic and social conditions of self-rule.

(Image credit: Flickr user Brainless Angel)

Still, anti-English sentiment exists in a big way. In 2001, a Welsh television presenter was reported to the Commission for Racial Equality for admitting that she hates the English. The woman, Beca Brown, confessed to being prejudiced in a magazine column, but later claimed that she was being “ironic.” It wasn’t a huge scandal, in itself, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. As recently as 2007, radical Welsh nationalists threatened Prince Charles with “most serious repercussions” if he didn’t give up his Welsh holiday home. They claimed he would become a “legitimate target for republican action.”

Whatever happens, it’s clear that the red dragon is still fighting -sometimes with the mythic white dragon, and sometimes with itself.

(Welsh flag image credit: Flickr user Brainless Angel)

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The article above, written by Linda Rodriguez, is reprinted with permission from the Jul/Aug 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

Rockhopper Penguin (Image credit: Flickr user Marcus Borg)

For several hundred years, human activity on the Falkland Islands -roughly 300 miles of the Argentine coast- threatened its penguins’ survival. But the trend started to reverse in 1982, when Argentina and Britain began duking it out for control of the Falklands. Turns out, a war, a few landmines, and some unstable diplomatic relations might have been just enough to get the penguins back on track.

The Falkland Islands are small. Collectively, the 200-plus islands that make up the Falklands are only about as big as Connecticut. But through the years, they’ve managed to inspire some Texas-sized international contention. Ever since Argentina gained independence from Spain in 1816, it’s been vying for control of the Falklands in one form or another. Some Argentines even claims possession of the region today, even though Queen Elizabeth’s face graces every piece of currency, the Union Jack appears on the official flag, and every other government in the world recognizes British rule over the Falklands. Despire the fact that Argentina famously lost its military bid for control of the islands back in 1982, national polls still show 80 percent of Argentines want their government to take back the Islas Malvinas, as they’re known in the Spanish-speaking nation.

King Penguins (Image credit: Flickr user andym8y)

So what is it the Argentines so jealously covet? Hard to say. The Falkland Islands aren’t home to much, other than about 3,000 humans, 700,000 sheep, and a few fishing installations. What they do have, however, is an enormous population of penguins from five different species -the Southern Rockhoppers, the Magellanic, the King, the Gentoo, andthe Macaroni. Their names derive from, respectively, the ability to hop on rocks, a celebrated circumnavigator, a British ruler, a religious slur, and a slang reference to flashy dressers. With those five species combined, the Falklands are home to to a penguin army more than 1 million strong. That’s pretty impressive, but it’s believed the number was closer to 10 million only 300 years ago.

In the 18th century, the whale oil industry was booming, and the Falklands had their fair share of whales. Not coincidentally, the French, British, and Spanish groups began showing up on the islands to get in on the action. But whale oil isn’t exactly the easiest thing to produce. First, whales are brought ashore. Then their blubber is separated from their bodies, and the fat is rendered into oil in gigantic vats of boiling water. The Falkland Islands had plenty of whales, but they’re mostly void of timber, and burning whale oil to render whale oil seemed a little silly. So how did the settlers make their Falkland outposts survive? “Francoise, throw another penguin on the fire!” Yes, as it turned out, penguins made surprisingly good kindling, thanks to layers of protective (and, apparently, highly flammable) fat beneath their skin. And it didn’t hurt that they’re so easy to catch. Penguins are flightless and unafraid of humans, so anytime the rendering fires got low, whalers simply grabbed a penguin or two and tossed ‘em in.

Gentoo Penguins (Image credit: Flickr user andym8y)

ONE FISH, TWO FISH

Fortunately for the penguins, the whale oil business died out in the 1860s with the discovery of fossil fuels. That left the islands with little commercial industry, and the worst thing the penguins had to worry about for a while was the occasional egg theft. But peaceful human-penguin relations hit a roadblock again in 1982 when Argentina made its ill-fated attempt to reclaim the Falklands.

Although the British presence on the Falkland Islands has long been a sore spot for Argentina, no Argentine leader had ever tried to force a national claim to the land. At the time, however, the military government, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, was in a unique situation. Already unpopular at home because of his habit of kidnapping and killing opposition leaders, Galtieri started to get truly nervous when the Argentine economy began to sink. Fearing outright rebellion, Galtieri tried to enlist the spirit of nationalism by invading the largely unprotected Falkland Islands on April 2. He quickly declared victory over the British, but his success was short-lived. Unfortunately for Galtieri, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t believe in capitulating to dictators, even regarding land as inconsequential and unprofitable as the Falklands. The United Kingdom quickly struck back. In the ensuing two-month conflict, more than 1,000 Argentine servicemen died, and Galtieri’s political downfall was solidified.

Magellanic Penguin (Image credit: Flickr user Bruno Furnari)

When the dust cleared, Britain’s rulers realized they’d just spent several million pounds to assert control over the Falklands, and it was probably in their best interest to find some way to prove that the expense had been worthwhile. Fishing seemed like the best way to make the Falklands economically self-sufficient, so the British government set up an exclusive fishing zone around the islands and began selling permits to everyone from local islanders to gigantic international fishing companies. It was a fine plan, except that the penguins relied on those same fish for survival. Before long, competing with humans for food had become a far greater threat to penguins than whaling had ever been. In a single decade, the Islands’ penguin population dropped from more than 6 million to fewer than 1 million.

THE SPOILS OF WAR

The Falkland Islands War, and the dwindling supply of fish that came with it, seriously threatened the local penguins. But, ironically enough, it also led to their gradual comeback. Since the dispute, Britain and Argentina have approached one another on diplomatic eggshells, if at all. As a result, neither side has been willing to risk angering the other by drilling for oil off the Falklands coast -even though experts estimate that 11 billion barrels worth of oil lie buried out there. That’s good news for all of penguinkind. In other parts of the world, even small amounts of oil leaked from drilling stations have proved disastrous for penguins. The flightless birds rely on a very specific balance of oils on their feathers in order to maintain perfect buoyancy. When mixed with crude oil, penguins will either sink and drown or float and starve. But as long as tensions remain high between the two nations, the Falkland penguins are in the clear.

The Falklands War also left the penguins with a bizarre kind of habitat protection.  During Argentina’s occupation of the islands, its military laid landmines along the beaches and pastureland near the capital city to deter the British from reclaiming the area. So far, those landmines haven’t killed anyone, but the well-marked and fenced-off explosive zones have made for prime penguin habitat. The penguins aren’t heavy enough to set off the mines, but because sheep and humans are, the little guys have to minefields all to themselves.

Macaroni Penguin (Image credit: Flickr user Terry Saunders)

Today there is still an estimated 25,000 landmines in the Falkland Islands. Over the years, they’ve come in pretty handy not only for protecting the penguin habitat from over-grazing, but also for keeping out overzealous tourists. Consequently, Falkland Islanders have decided that maybe having landmines is not such a bad thing. Even though the British government is obligated to remove them by 2009, the islanders recently put forth a proposal calling for their government to instead clean up the same number of mines in greater-risk areas such as Angola, Cambodia, or Afghanistan. After all, signs warning “Keep away from the penguins” will never be as effective as “Keep away from the penguins -or die.”

Ed. Note: Although the British began removing the landmines in a 2009-2010 pilot program, thousands still remain there today.

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The above article by Hank Green is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2006 issue of mental_floss magazine.

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A classic in modern literature, “The Lottery” did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters. Here’s how Shirley Jackson outraged a nation with fewer than 3,500 words.

Spoiler alert: this article reveals the ending of “The Lottery”. If you haven’t read it, hop to it! It’ll take 15 minutes, tops.

In 1948, The New Yorker published the most controversial short story in its history: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a 31-year-old wife and mother living in Vermont. The simply told tale covers a ritual lottery in a sunny, rural town. But what starts out bathed in warmth and charm grows eerier and eerier, until the horrific purpose of the lottery is revealed in the story’s final paragraphs. Soon after the piece was published, angry letters poured in to The New Yorker. Readers canceled their subscriptions. And while many claimed they didn’t understand the story, the intense reaction indicated they understood it all too well.

“The Lottery” was published at a time when America was scrambling for conformity. Following World War II, the general public wanted to leave behind the horrors of war and genocide. They craved comfort, normalcy, and old-fashioned values. Jackson’s story was a cutting commentary on the dangers of blind obedience to tradition, and she threw it, like a grenade, into a complacent post-war society.

LUCK OF THE DRAW

Shirley Jackson was not the kind of person you’d expect to be a literary firebrand. Shy and high-strung, she dropped out of the University of Rochester in 1935. Her second stab at school was more successful. At age 20, she enrolled at Syracuse University, where she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Together, they published a short-lived literary magazine called The Spectre.

After graduating from Syracuse, the two got married and moved to New York City, where Jackson gave birth to the first of her four children. Soon after, in 1945, Hyman got a job teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. The family moved to North Bennington, a tiny, rural town that later became the setting for “The Lottery.” While Stanley taught, Jackson wrote. She penned a few offbeat stories for The New Yorker, but mostly she produced mainstream pieces for women’s periodicals such as Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal. After several years of living in Vermont, Jackson had another child and was carrying a third. From a distance, her life seemed tranquil and wholesome. But something darker was brewing inside.

On a sunny June day in 1948, while taking a long walk, that darkness emerged. Several months pregnant and pushing a baby carriage loaded with groceries, Jackson found the trip more difficult than she’d anticipated. The entire time, she couldn’t stop thinking about the book her husband had shown her on ancient rites of human sacrifice.

As soon as Jackson got home, she wrote the 3,378 words of “The Lottery.” It took her just two hours, and seemed to flow out of her nearly perfect. “Except for one or two minor corrections,” she remembered later, “It needed no changes.”

Her husband quickly recognized the story was genius, and Jackson sent it on to her editor at The New Yorker. Soon, her life would change.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

The tale begins pleasantly in a small, unnamed town. The day is “clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” and the people are gathering the square, children first. “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones,” we’re told -the first vague note of menace in the story. Soon, the adults arrive, joking, gossiping, and “speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes.” This is Everytown, USA, Jackson implies. But something is off. The villagers are piling up rocks.

Then the lottery begins. One by one, the head of each household draws a slip of paper from the box. Casual dialogue and deadpan description mask a building sense of danger. Only the occasional unexplained reference hints at the macabre. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn will be heavy soon,’” says Old Man Warner. It seems that whatever is taking place has been going on since time immemorial.

One of the townspeople, Bill Hutchinson, draws the unlucky slip of paper. Bill, his wife, and their three children must now draw from the box in turn. This time, Bill’s wife, Tessie, gets the marked paper. “All right, folks,” says Mr. Summers, the man in charge, “Let’s finish quickly.”

It’s only in the final short paragraphs of “The Lottery” that the story turns to outright horror. “The children had stones already,” Jackson writes. “And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.” As the stones hit Tessie, she screams “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.” The story ends with six infamous words: “And then they were upon her.”

WINNING THE LOTTERY

The editors at The New Yorker were taken aback when Jackson submitted “The Lottery,” but they also appreciated its literary virtues. In the end, the decision to accept it was one vote shy of unanimous.

The public wasn’t quite as accepting. People were outraged. The story’s reception came as a surprise to Jackson. But mostly, she was appalled by the readers who wanted to know where they could find a lottery to watch themselves.

Good or bad, “The Lottery” had everyone talking. Shirley Jackson had made a name for herself in fiction. Her publisher, Farrar Strauss, hurried to capitalize on the buzz by publishing a collection of her work, The Lottery and Other Stories. To promote the book, Strauss circulated rumors that Jackson had used voodoo to break the leg of publishing rival Alfred J. Knopf, billing her as a practicing witch. In truth, Jackson was known to dabble in mysticism and the occult. She read tarot cards and collected books on witchcraft and magic.

Today, the rumors surrounding Jackson’s life and the vitriol over her short story have been largely forgotten. What remains is “The Lottery” itself -the paradigm of a perfectly crafted narrative. While the tale begins on a sunny, summer day, it builds at a ferocious pace, from daydream to nightmare. The writing is tight and compelling, and the story is impossible to forget. As author Jonathon Lethem puts it, “It now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype.”

Just as those initial readers were drawn to the piece in spite of their indignation, generations of readers have since been simultaneously horrified and touched by the tale. Authors including Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, Richard Matheson, and Neil Gaiman all credit Shirley Jackson as a source of inspiration, and for decades, “The Lottery” has been taught in middle schools and high schools across America. As author A.M. Holmes pointed out, the story is introduced to students when they are “just waking up to the oddity of things, and the terror that is in everyday life.”

Until her death at the age of 48, Shirley Jackson kept writing short stories and novels, including The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which sparked multiple film versions. But it’s “The Lottery” for which she’s best known. The story has been adapted for radio, television, film, and even ballet. It’s been written about and dissected in countless theses, dissertation, and books. And its warnings about the danger of conformity are still relevant. “The Lottery” revealed an uncomfortable truth about the human psyche and, in doing so, became a classic piece of American literature.

(YouTube link)

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The article by Dan Saltzstein is reprinted from the January-February 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Subscribe today to get it delivered to you!

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1. Masdar City, United Arab Emirates The Greenest Town in the Middle East

The United Arab Emirates isn’t exactly known for its environmental consciousness. Many of its citizens live in large, air-conditioned homes in the middle of the desert, which is part of the reason the country produces more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than any other nation in the world. But Masdar City, a new suburb being built on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, hopes to change all that. As the world’s first carbon-neutral town, this 2.5-square-mile development not only expects to house nearly 40,000 people by 2020, it also plans to run entirely on renewable energy.

How does a city reach carbon neutrality? For starters, automobiles will be banned! Instead, folks in Masdar City will get around by using a public transit system of pods -battery powered vehicles about the size of minivans. Sleek and white with see-through black windows, these six-seaters will zoom around a central loop taking passengers to their destinations. When the transit system is completed, 3,000 pods will shuttle between 85 stations within the development.

In addition to this new spin on public transportation, Masdar City plans to get its energy from large, solar-paneled umbrellas shaped like flowers. During the day, the umbrellas will open up, storing energy and providing shade for pedestrians. At night, they’ll close to generate electricity. The suburb will also be surrounded by a perimeter wall that’s designed to block out the hot desert winds, thereby keeping the community cool. The massive barrier may look like something out of the Middle Ages, but like the rest of Masdar City, it’s actually part of the future.

2. Lyon’s Gate, United States The Coolest Place to Live in Arizona

In the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, Arizona -where summer highs regularly spike past 100°F- one community is keeping cool the eco-friendly way. Lyon’s Gate is a collection of 210 homes built to withstand the heat while also conserving energy. And according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the community’s houses are unbelievably successful. In fact, they require 80 percent less energy for heating and cooling than typical American homes.

A lot of that is due to the way houses in Lyon’s Gate are insulated. Most buildings in the Unites States rely on cheap, fiberglass insulation, which can leak out air. But the homes in Lyon’s Gate are protected by a spray foam that expands up to 120 times its original volume to fill in cracks and crevices.  Although spray foam is more expensive than fiberglass, it traps air much more effectively. The houses in Lyon’s Gate also beat the heat with vinyl windows, which block out solar rays four times more effectively than normal glass. And soon, you won’t need to move to Arizona to experience the benefits. Meritage Homes, the company that built Lyon’s Gate, already has plans to open similar green communities in several states across the country.

3. Dongtan, China Where No Grain of Rice Goes to Waste

Forty miles from downtown Shanghai, between the Yangtze River and the East China Sea, is Chongming Island -a massive expanse of mudflats and wetlands that occupies an area about the size of Los Angeles. These days, birds are the island’s only visitors. But soon, the eastern part of the island could be transformed into a dense, eco-friendly city called Dongtan, which aims to have 80,000 residents, 27,000 homes, and complete carbon neutrality.

The most exciting thing about Dongtan is how it plans to power itself: All of the city’s energy will be locally produced. To fuel the power plant, for instance, the city will use rice husks. Typically, after rice is processed in a mill, the husks -the protective covering on grains of rice- are discarded. But Chinese engineers have figured out a new way to transform them into energy. Even more surprising is the fact that Dongtan will make use of almost all its refuse, including sewage. Ninety percent of the city’s waste will be reused or repurposed to create fuel, compost, and fertilizer for its organic farms. And because almost all the garbage will be recycled, Dongtan won’t even need a landfill.

4. Jätkäsaari, Finland The Least Trashy Neighborhood in Europe

The Jätkäsaari district of Helsinki, Finland, is windy and barren -at least for the moment. Ship builders and cargo warehouses have abandoned the district for newer locations. All that remains are piles of old ship supplies and a grassy knoll that local kids use to play soccer. But all of that is about to change. In 2009, the city greenlighted plans to transform part of the area into a sustainable community. Over the next 15 years, it’s expected to provide commercial and residential buildings for 16,000 people.

To ensure that it has a minimal impact on the environment, Jätkäsaari plans to utilize a variety of green technologies, including “automated vacuum collection” in every building. This incredibly efficient system will suck away waste through chutes that connect to tubes running under the city, eliminating the need for garbage trucks. There will even be separate chutes for different kinds of waste -one for cardboard, one for paper, one for compost, etc. Once underground, the paper will be transported to paper mills; the compost will be sent to farms; and combustible items will be shipped to a furnace, where they’ll be burned as fuel. Watch out, garbage men of the world; your days may be numbered.

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The article by Rachel Stern is reprinted from the January-February 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Subscribe today to get it delivered to you!

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Image credit: Flickr user francesca!!

Got milk? Well, you wouldn’t if it weren’t for these world-churning events.

MILK

You can’t spell “milk production” without g-o-a-t-s. Well, technically you could, ..but not historically. Goats were most likely the first dairy animals ever domesticated. Archeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples in what is now Iran and Iraq were selectively breeding these four-legged eating machines as far back as 8,000-9,000 B.C.E. And, while they may not look like much to us modern Americans, the logic behind goat keeping is impeccable. Small, sturdy, and able to eat just about anything you put in front of them, they’re easier creatures to keep healthy, happy, and milk-producing (particularly in cool, mountainous climates) than their larger relatives like cows and sheep. Several breeds have hair that can be shorn and used for clothing. And, like all milk animals, they’re an excellence nutritional value for what you have to put in.

Ruminants, the class of animals from which humans get all their dairy products, have a gigantic four-chambered stomach that allows them to happily digest dry stalks, fibrous vines, and leaves that other animals (humans included) write off as inedible. Their secret: lots and lots of chewing, in addition to partial digestion and regurgitation, then more chewing, followed by a healthy dose of specialized tummy bacteria. Unlike, say, pigs, which eat basically the same food as people and are only useful as meat, ruminants don’t compete with their owners for sustenance. Further, the milk they produce over several years provides far more nutrition than the meat a single animal could ever hope to put out. In fact, it only takes a couple of goats to keep a whole family of people fed for a year.

The extinct auroch.

As the concept of domesticating and milking animals spread from the Middle East, farmers adopted local beasts as their milk-giving ruminant of choice. Depending on things like climate, geography, and population, various regions favored yaks, buffalo, cows, and sheep. All have their own special adaptations that make them better for certain environments and needs. Cows, for instance, were domesticated from long-horned wild aurochs around the same time and place as goats. Since at least 3,000 B.C.E. they’ve been bred primarily for their milk, which is richer than goats’ and due to their size, more abundant. However, as heavy eaters with a grass diet, cows really work best in temperate climates. Modern European cows are much smaller than their auroch ancestors, primarily because in captivity, the winter food supply was far less abundant. There is one notable exception to the ruminant rule, however: the camel. The only milkable domesticated animal that isn’t a ruminant, camels were particularly adapted to arid, desert regions, and as such, their milk has been a staple food in parts of Africa since 2500 B.C.E.

Image credit: Flickr user Jerrold Bennett

Amazingly, China is one of the very few Old World societies that didn’t develop some sort of reliance on milk. Most likely, this had more to do with the local flora than a dislike for dairy. Much of the natural vegetation in China, particularly during the ruminants’ rise, consisted of poisonous plants like wormwood and epazote, making it unsuitable for grazing. However, when nomads, and later Mongolians, came bearing milk, the Chinese were quick to take up the beverage. By 1300 B.C.E. they were using milk to dilute their tea.

BUTTER

Almost as soon as humans began relying on milk for sustenance, they were faced with another problem: How to make it last. Milk, as you’re probably aware, goes sour pretty quickly. And keeping those important nutrients in an edible condition for a longer period of time would have been a key concern. However, it is likely that the first solution to this problem came about by accident.

Image credit: Flickr user Klearchos Kapoutsis

Early in the history of domestication, travelers, shepherd, and farmers started carrying around drinks in bottles made from sheep or goat skin. Besides water and alcoholic beverages, the other drink that would have been toted around in this way was milk. Left to sit in these containers, cream would have likely separated out on top. Combine this with a day or more of being shaken around in a hip flask and it’s easy to see how one of those workers might have opened his milk jug and inadvertently discovered butter. By 2000 B.C.E. this haphazard churning process had become more standardized. In Arabia and Syria, women poured milk into larger jugs made from the whole leg and thigh of a goat. Then they suspended this jug from beams in the family tent and swung it around until butter formed.

Although it had the same nutrients as milk, butter could sit around longer and still be usable. It quickly became both nutritionally and symbolically important, figuring into countless mythologies as a signifier of abundance and creation. In some areas like Tibet, fermented dairy products like butter tea (along with butter itself) are still a staple of the diet.

YOGURT

Like butter, yogurt is also likely an accidental food. Let’ go back to those original shepherds and farmers, carrying milk around in skin pouches. If they were to skim off the cream or, alternately, remove the lump of butter the cream had formed, they’d be left with “skimmed” milk. Without refrigeration and under the blazing Middle Eastern sun, it wouldn’t have taken long for this milk to turn acidic, ferment, and curdle. The result: yogurt.

Another great way to preserve the nutrients from milk, yogurt could then be sun-dried or stored fresh under a layer of oil. And, long before the health food craze hit the U.S., yogurt fans were already extolling its medicinal properties. A medical text dating to 633 C.E. dubbed yogurt therapeutic. In fact, yogurt was introduced to Europe by a Turkish doctor as a medical treatment, and it saved the life of French king Francis I (curing him of his stomach troubles) in the 16th century.

CHEESE

Image credit: Flickr user DJ Mitchell

Once you have yogurt, it’s easy to get cheese. All you have to do is drain the watery natural yogurt, separating solid curd from liquid whey. Then it’s just a matter of salting the curd. Although the method has been refined and increased in complexity since, this is basically how the earliest cheese was made.

By 2000 B.C.E. cheese had become a luxury item in Egypt, with the recipes heavily guarded by priests and manufacturing scenes appearing in murals decorating kingly burials. It’s no wonder the product only became more beloved from there. For the ancient Greeks, cheese was the food of athletes. Romans, picking up on Greek tradition, gave each of their soldiers a daily 1-ounce cheese ration. And in Europe, cheese-making branched into a thousand local specialties that incorporated regional products and production secrets. For instance, real mozzarella, i.e. mozzarella di bufala, is made in the Capagna region south of Rome from the milk supplied by the 100,000 descendants of a herd of buffalo brought to Italy in 700 C.E.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss‘ book In the Beginning.

From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here’s a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss.

Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book!

In 1869, French craftsman Rousseau of Marseilles built the first in history’s line of unsuccessful monocycles. Sitting inside the monowheel, the rider steered the contraption by shifting his or her weight in the desired direction. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, the massive outer wheel remained directly in the driver’s line of sight at all times. Braking was also potentially hazardous, as stopping too abruptly would cause the rider to be propelled forward along with the outer wheel. But perhaps the biggest strike against the monowheel was the immediate comparison of any rider to a gerbil -something even the French wouldn’t tolerate.

2. The Daihatsu Trek

It’s a car! It’s a bed! It look suspiciously like a child’s toy! For the outdoorsman who has everything except a really expensive Big Wheel, there was the Daihatsu Trek. A single-passenger off-road vehicle, the Trek not only allowed drivers to travel to remote areas, it also gave them a place to bed down for the evening. With its collapsible seat, steering wheel, and roll bar, the boxy monstrosity from 1990 offered all the comforts of a really cheap motel room. And while we can’t be sure why the car never made it past the concept stage at Daihatsu, we can only guess members of the off-road focus groups felt silly driving a Transformer.

3. The Avrocar

A quasi hot potato of international engineering, the Avrocar was initially funded by the Canadian government, designed by a British engineer, and eventually assumed by the U.S. Defense Department as part of the Cold War weapons race. The UFO-like contraption was 18 feet in diameter, but only 3 feet thick. It featured vertical takeoff and landing and was designed to reach speeds up to 300 mph while remaining elusive to radar. Unfortunately, the two-person craft was never able to stabilize at heights above eight feet, nor travel faster than 35 mph. After eight years and more than $10 million, the project was abandoned in 1960.

4. The Dymaxion

(Image credit: Wikipedia user saschapohflepp)

Buckminster Fuller was many things -inventor, philosopher, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and bearer of a name that makes Frank Zappa’s kids feel average. Among his many architectural and engineering creations, Bucky tried his hand at automobiles. In 1933, using a V8 engine loaned to him by Henry Ford, Fuller built the Dymaxion car. Truly a wonder to behold, the Dymaxion was nearly 20 feet long, got 30-plus miles to the gallon, held up to 12 people, has a maximum speed of 120 mph, and could do a U-turn in 20 feet, thanks to a single rear wheel that controlled the steering. Unfortunately, the car’s steering appears to be at fault for a fatal accident at the World’s Fair, when the Dymaxion was rubbernecked by another car. Although later evidence placed fault on the driver of the other car, negative publicity surrounding the event caused investors to pull away from the project, and Fuller was freed up to build geodesic domes and work on his friendship with John Denver. The fortunate outcome of the Dymaxion’s failure? Denver’s hit tune, “What One Man Can Do.” which was written for Fuller.

5. Da Vinci’s Clockwork Car

Leonardo da Vinci is renowned for his forward-thinking sketches and intricate designs, which included blueprints for a bicycle, a submarine, and a helicopter. But you can’t win ‘em all. Da Vinci also desig