Permafrost Preserves Spanish Flu
26. During the early 20th century, a Spanish flu outbreak swept through the Americas and caused widespread suffering and death among those infected around the world. Eleven people in Longyearbyen, in the North Sea, died from the flu. The very low temperature there formed a permafrost layer at burial depth, which accidentally preserved traces of the flu. As a result, it became illegal to die there because disturbing the soil would likely bring the disease back. Even so, scientists who study epidemics such as the Spanish flu use samples from people who died in Longyearbyen.
27. Sixty years after his death, George Washington was still so admired as an American president that when freed slaves were allowed to select surnames, more African-American former slaves took Washington as their last name than Lincoln.
28. In the United States, the most criminals executed by electric chair in one day is six. They were all German saboteurs who entered the USA during World War 2 as part of Operation Pastorius. The record for the most people hanged in one day is also in the USA, at 38, held by Mankato, Minnesota, where Dakota Natives were hanged for their uprising after the Dakota War of 1862. This was despite the fact that Lincoln reduced the sentences of 264 others who also would have been hanged for taking part in the uprising.
29. During the American Civil War, the Battle of Bull Run was nicknamed the Picnic Battle because many Washington civilians came out for picnics and watched from the sidelines. But when the fighting began and the Union started to lose, they fled, trampling injured soldiers and dead bodies and generally interfering with the battle. Such picnics were fairly common during the Civil War and also took place at Gettysburg.
30. There is a community in the UK, around Hartlepool, whose residents are known as Monkey Hangers. Local folklore says the name comes from an event in which a monkey was hanged in Hartlepool, England. During the Napoleonic Wars, a French chasse marée ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool coast. The sole survivor was a monkey, reportedly dressed in a French uniform to entertain the crew. When locals found the monkey, some held an improvised trial on the beach. Because the monkey could not answer their questions and they had seen neither a monkey nor a Frenchman before, they decided it was actually a French spy. After being found guilty, the animal was sentenced to death and hanged on the beach.
31. Educated people in the 15th century generally knew the earth was not flat. Writings from before Aristotle described the earth as a sphere, and such texts were fairly widespread in Columbus’s time. Columbus aimed to show that the earth was small enough to make a journey from Europe to India feasible.
32. In 1918, British MP Noel Pemberton Billing sparked a major scandal by accusing actress Maud Allan and Margot Asquith, the wife of the former Prime Minister, of leading a homosexual ring that was undermining the war effort. His evidence included Allan’s performance in a play by Oscar Wilde and Asquith’s attendance at the show. He laid out his claims in an article called “The Cult of the Clitoris”, where he said the exiled Albanian prince kept a black book listing all the homosexuals in Britain who were being blackmailed. Maud Allan, who was in fact homosexual, while Asquith was not, sued for libel but lost. At the trial, one witness said he had seen the Albanian prince’s black book and claimed the judge’s name appeared in it.
33. In Monza, Italy, King Umberto I went to a small restaurant for dinner with his aide-de-camp, General Emilio Ponzia-Vaglia. While the owner took the King’s order, Umberto noticed that he and the restaurateur looked almost identical, both in face and build. The two men then talked about their remarkable likenesses and found many more similarities. They had both been born on the same date, March 14, 1844, and in the same town. They had also each married a woman named Margherita. The restaurant owner had opened his place on the same day Umberto was crowned King of Italy. On July 29, 1900, Umberto was told that the restaurateur had died that day in a mysterious shooting accident, and as he expressed regret, he was then assassinated by an anarchist in the crowd.
34. Elmer McCurdy was a very incompetent train robber. Once, he tried to blast open a safe to reach some silver coins and ended up melting both the safe and the coins. Another time, he attempted to rob a train, but the only things taken were some whiskey and about $15 from the conductor. After that, he hid out on a farm, drank all the whiskey, and got into a shootout with the sheriff, dying in 1911. That was not the end of his story. He was taken to the funeral home and embalmed with a large amount of arsenic because they expected it would be some time before anyone claimed him. They were right, because no one did. The funeral director then decided to profit from him by putting him on display as the Oklahoman Outlaw and charging admission. Visitors had to place the money in his mouth. The funeral director’s children used to put Elmer on roller skates and frighten other children with him. Eventually, two men arrived to claim their brother Elmer, but they were actually sideshow operators. Elmer was now on the circuit, traveling around. He was sold several more times, ended up in a museum, and was rented out. He appeared in a movie theater lobby as a drug addict who tried to rob a store and was shot, used to promote an anti-drug film. Over the decades, he began to look rough, dried out, and missing a few fingers and his hair. He was then rented out to a display at Niagara Falls, but was returned because they thought he was a very creepy wax figure. By then, no one remembered that he was actually a real dead man. He was sold to the Pike, an amusement park in Long Beach, California, and hung in Laff In The Dark, their ghost and funhouse ride. In December 1976, while filming an episode of “The Six-Million Dollar Man” in Laff In The Dark and moving things around, a painted neon orange dummy had its arm broken off. It was a real arm. He was eventually taken to the coroner, later identified, and finally buried in Boot Hill in Oklahoma under concrete so he would not wander off again.
35. The first person sentenced to the electric chair died in a horrible manner. Someone forgot to wet an important part of the machine, and he suffered bubbling skin, melting eyes, a foaming mouth, and other injuries. The electricity was so powerful that he convulsed violently enough to weaken the straps. He twitched so badly that his index finger dug into the palm of his hand. The whole room smelled of burning flesh, and the odor even got into some clothes. Many of the people who came to watch fainted during the execution. Even worse, they heard him wheezing after the electricity was switched off.
Machiavelli’s Disastrous Encounter
36. Niccolo Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, once became so aroused that he went to see a prostitute, but she was so unattractive that he vomited on her. His account of the incident is both disgusting and funny. “What the hell, Luigi, you can see what fortune can do to men. You had just finished fu*king your woman when you want another one. I’ve been in Modena for several days when I came across an old woman who washes my shirts. She asked me to come to her hovel because she wished to show me some fine shirts. Innocent prick that I am I went in. There was a woman over in the corner. ‘This is the shirt that I wanted to sell you,’ the hag said. I was terrified. But I fu*ked her. I found her thighs flabby and her c*nt damp. Her breath stank. But I was horny. When I was finished I took a torch and looked at her. I nearly dropped dead. The woman was ugly. She had a tuft of hair on her head but her head was bald. Her forehead was scarred. One eye looked up, the other down. Her eyes were filled with mucus, and she had no eyebrows. Her nose was twisted into a funny shape. Her mouth looked like Lorenzo de’ Medici’s but was bent to one side. She was toothless and saliva drooled out of her mouth. Her upper lip had a mustache. I looked at her stupefied. “What’s the matter sir?” she asked me. As soon as she opened her mouth, such a stench came out that my eyes and my nose were assaulted and my stomach indignant. They could not bear it, and I vomited all over her.”
37. The night of November 15, 1917, is remembered as “The Suffragists Night of Terror.” Thirty-three women campaigning for the right to vote were taken from outside the White House and jailed. They were beaten, forced to stand or hang all night with their hands tied above their heads, thrown around and slammed into iron furniture, and humiliated by guards. One woman lost consciousness after her head was bounced off an iron bench, and her cellmate became so upset, believing the unconscious woman had died, that she suffered a heart attack. Medical treatment was withheld until the next morning. These women were seized from the street and put in jails where they were mistreated without access to the council, all because they dared to ask Woodrow Wilson to let them vote.
38. Apollo 10 was tied to several mysteries, ranging from eerie “music” heard by the crew on the Moon’s far side to the continuing search for Snoopy and possible recent sightings of its long-missing S IV-b stage. Still, the most intriguing Apollo 10 mystery must be the notorious “Rogue Turd Incident.” A puzzling piece of turd suddenly appeared and was seen by Commander Tom Stafford. He was heard saying, “There’s a turd floating through the air.” In the Apollo 10 mission transcript, which is more than 500 pages long, pages 414 and 415 describe the astronaut’s encounter with the floating turd. The identity of the culprit is still unknown.
39. In 18th century London, d*ldos were highly sought after. George-Louis Lesage (1676-1759), who visited England in 1713, observed that women in St. James’s Park were always carrying baskets filled with dolls that appeared to be in great demand among young women. Rather than legs, the dolls were held up by a cloth-covered cylinder about six inches long and one inch wide. Lesage reported that one young woman said hers was too large and wanted to trade it for a smaller one, but the seller declined, saying it would be impossible to resell.
40. During World War 2, the Japanese were having trouble producing enough of anything and were failing. Even so, they still believed victory was possible if they could secure one major success. One commander said he lost confidence when he learned that the US had two specially designed “Ice Cream Ships.” These vessels were originally built to make concrete while underway and use it to construct ports and airstrips in the Pacific. However, too many were made, so US leaders decided to convert two of them into ships that produced ice cream for American troops fighting in the Pacific, where they had little reminder of home. The Japanese naval officer was horrified that the US had so many supplies that it could afford to waste money, fuel, food, and sailors on ships with no purpose or weapons other than providing soldiers with ice cream in the tropics during a war he had thought his side was winning. He recalled that his men lacked food, clothing, boots, ammunition, fuel, ships, guns, aircraft, training, and nearly everything else, while the US had so much that it could squander resources on ice cream. The fact that these ships were selected because the huge concrete mixers arrived on each ship in sets of three, letting GIs and sailors choose Vanilla, Chocolate, or whatever fruit was available, often frozen strawberries, further destroyed his opinion.
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