STILL FARTIN’
Increasing the fiber in his diet did not improve Hitler’s condition; if anything it made him even gassier than he’d been before. (But the vegetarian diet may have made his farts less smelly, and he may have been willing to settle for that.) By the mid-1930s, Hitler was the ruler of Germany…and still farting like a horse. His attacks were most severe right after meals; during dinner parties it was common for him to suddenly leap up from the table and disappear into his private quarters, leaving stunned guests to wonder why the Führer had gone and when he might be back. On many nights he did not return at all.
In 1936 Hitler happened to meet Dr. Morell at a Christmas party. After pulling the doctor aside Hitler poured out his problems, describing his intestinal distress and his eczema: itchy, inflamed skin on his shins, so painful that he could not put on his boots. By now Hitler had given up trying to cure himself and allowed Germany’s best doctors to examine him. They put him on a diet of tea and dry toast, but all that did was leave him feeling weak and exhausted. Morell listened attentively…and then promised to cure both problems within a year. Hitler decided to give him a try.
So what kind of a doctor was Theodor Morell? Part II of the story is on page 312.
CHEST HAIR: $7 MILLION
Sometimes a celebrity’s livelihood depends solely on a single physical trait or
talent. Should they suddenly lose their good looks or their lovely voices,
their careers are just as suddenly over. Solution: insurance.
THE SCAR POLICY
You’ve probably heard stories about singers insuring their voices for large sums of money. It’s for real. Technically, it’s known as the “surplus lines” market, which covers any strange or specific risks not normally covered by life or disability insurance. It’s also extremely expensive, and available only after all other insurance policies have been maxed out. So although anybody can get a policy, it’s usually only the rich and famous who do.
Few American insurers deal in surplus lines, but foreign companies do—it’s what made the British firm Lloyd’s of London famous. Their first celebrity client: silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who feared physical disfigurement that would end his career as a matinee idol. Fairbanks asked Lloyd’s to write a “scar policy” for him.
FAME…
Here are some other celebrities with highly specific insurance.
• Ben Turpin. He is believed to have been the first celebrity to insure a trademark feature. Turpin was a vaudeville and silent film performer who had crossed eyes. Should they ever have straightened, he would have received a $20,000 payout.
• David Beckham. The English soccer star has insured his legs for $70 million.
• Rod Stewart. His singing voice is insured for $6 million. (He can’t make a claim unless he loses it completely, so he can’t collect yet—it’s supposed to sound that gravelly.)
• America Ferrera. The star of Ugly Betty was hired by Aquafresh to promote teeth-whitening products. To protect the investment, the company insured Ferrera’s smile for $10 million.
• Tom Jones. He’s as famous for his machismo and sex appeal as for his songs “It’s Not Unusual” and “What’s New, Pussycat?” He will collect $7 million if an accidental, catastrophic occurrence ever destroys his most notable and macho asset—his chest hair.
• Mariah Carey. She has a five-octave singing range and she’s one of the most successful solo recording artists of all time, with 18 #1 hit singles. But her image is apparently more important to her than her voice: Her legs, not her voice, are insured for $1 billion. Other stars with insured legs: Betty Grable (for $1 million in the 1940s), Angie Dickinson, Brooke Shields, Mary Hart, and Tina Turner (for $3.2 million).
• Michael Flatley. After starring in the touring Irish dance troupe Riverdance, he went on to start his own show, called Lord of the Dance. To ensure his livelihood, he bought a $39 million policy for his dancing feet.
• Jimmy Durante. In the 1940s, he had his highly recognizable nose insured for $50,000.
• Keith Richards. Should he ever accidentally cut off one of his guitar-playing fingers, he will receive $1.8 million.
…AND FORTUNE
Less-famous people who have taken out specific insurance policies:
• Food critic Egon Ronay has a $400,000 policy for his taste buds.
• In 1959 the 40 members of the Derbyshire Whiskers Club, a British “beard appreciation group,” paid £20 each to insure their facial hair against fire and theft.
• A British soccer fan insured himself against “psychic trauma” in case England lost the 2006 World Cup. They didn’t win—no word on whether the man had a mental breakdown or received a payout.
• Harvey Lowe, who won a national yo-yo contest in 1932 when he was 13, insured his hands for $150,000.
• In 2007 Florida woman Domitila Hunnicutt won a Most Valuable Legs contest sponsored by the maker of Jergens Lotion. Her prize: a one-year $2 million insurance policy for her legs. (After one year, she was on her own.)
THE 49TH STATE
2009 marked the 50th anniversary of Alaska becoming the 49th U.S. state. Here’s a timeline of how it happened.
BACKGROUND
Alaska has been inhabited since about 12000 B.C., when nomadic tribes from Siberia first crossed over the Bering Land Bridge—now covered in water and called the Bering Sea—into Alaska. All natives who live there, including the Inuits and Aleuts, are descended from those nomads. Despite being just a few miles away (three miles at the closest point), white settlers from Russia didn’t come to Alaska until the 1730s, when the area became known as “Russian America.”
• 1859: After losing the Crimean War in 1856, Russia needs money, so it offers to sell the territory to the United States. The U.S., however, is more concerned with trying to avert the impending Civil War, and declines the offer.
• 1867: Russia offers Alaska to the U.S. again, and this time it accepts. Secretary of State William Seward agrees to purchase the 586,000-mile area parcel of land for $7.2 million, supposedly for use as a strategic point on the Pacific Rim. The purchase is widely criticized as “Seward’s Folly” because Alaska is perceived as a useless, frozen wasteland. It’s classified as the Department of Alaska and placed under the control of the War Department.
• 1884: With a total population of about 30,000 people (natives and white settlers), a civic infrastructure to keep the peace becomes necessary, so the federal government appoints judges, clerks, and marshals to serve in Alaska. In order to have a body of laws to enforce, this coalition—a mere 13 people—adopts the legal code of Oregon.
• 1896: Gold is discovered in Alaska. About 30,000 more people move there. Along with the economy, crime in Alaska grows, so in 1900 Congress sends more judges…and enacts a tax code.
• 1912: Congress creates a territorial legislature of eight senators and 16 representatives, and one non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives for the newly renamed Alaska Territory.
• 1916: Alaska’s House delegate, a former territorial judge named James Wickersham, proposes the first bill to make Alaska a state. Congress doesn’t need to rule on it because Alaskans themselves aren’t interested—the majority of Alaska’s 58,000 people feel no tangible connection to the United States.
• 1933: Alaska’s Congressional delegate Anthony J. Dimond petitions Congress to build military airfields and army garrisons in Alaska, as well as a highway to link the territory to the mainland U.S. The reason: Dimond believes Japan is a growing threat. He is convinced that the Japanese fishermen who work off Alaska’s coasts are military spies gathering information about weak spots in Alaska’s harbors. Dimond argues that Alaska is as much a key to the Pacific as Hawaii, especially since that’s why the U.S. annexed it in the first place. Nevertheless, Congress declines the requests.
• 1942: A few months after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and the U.S. enters World War II, Congress allocates funds to build military facilities
and a highway to Alaska through Canada.
• 1946: The Alaska Territory’s two highest-ranking politicians, Governor Ernest Gruening and Delegate Bob Bartlett, organize a territory-wide referendum on statehood. Due to frustration over “taxation without representation,” at this point Alaskans are overwhelmingly in favor of statehood, and the referendum passes, 67 to 33 percent.
• 1948: Based on that vote, Bartlett presents another statehood bill to Congress. It never makes it to the House floor, dying in the Public Lands Committee. Committee chairman Hugh Butler opposes statehood because he thinks Alaska’s remoteness will make it a hotbed of Communism. He also thinks Alaska’s low population, about 100,000, doesn’t warrant statehood.
• 1949: A grassroots group called the Alaska Statehood Committee forms to aggressively promote statehood. They solicit labor organizations, state governors, newspaper editors, and celebrities to join the cause. Among those who speak out in favor: James Cagney, Pearl S. Buck, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who writes in her newspaper column, “It seems extraordinary that an area of North America as important to our country as Alaska is should not be admitted as a state.”
• 1950: Bartlett avoids Butler’s Senate committee by submitting a statehood bill first to the House of Representatives. If it passes there, then it would have to get Senate approval, he figures. The bill passes the House 186–146. But in the Senate, the controlling coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats vote it down out of the fear that Alaska would send liberal Democrats to Congress, tipping the balance of power.
• 1952: The Alaska Statehood Committee sends members of Congress bouquets of Forget-Me-Nots—the official flower of Alaska. Friends of ASC members in the continental U.S. receive Christmas cards that year that readMake Alaskans’ future bright
Ask your Senator for statehood
And start the New Year right.
• 1955: In an attempt to force Congress’s hand, the Alaskan Constitutional Convention meets at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to draw up a state code, even though Alaska isn’t a state. It also organizes elections for one congressman and two senators to send to Washington, another attempt to force Congress into making it a state. Congress doesn’t recognize or seat them, because Alaska isn’t a state.
• 1957: After two years of inactivity, the statehood debate is revived when Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn endorses the idea. When asked what changed his mind after years of opposition, Rayburn says, “Bob Bartlett,” referring to the delegate’s years of tireless lobbying for statehood. Senate Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson pledges the support of all Democrats (liberal and Southern) should Alaskan statehood come to a vote. It does, and passes the House 217–172, and the Senate 64–20.
• 1959: On January 3, President Eisenhower signs an official declaration making Alaska the 49th state.
DUMB CROOKS
Proof that crime doesn’t pay.
EGG ON HIS FACE
One night in July 2009, 18-year-old Daniel Barr of Stras-burg, Pennsylvania, and a bunch of his friends were driving around and decided it would be fun to throw eggs at a police car. They found a parked cruiser and hurled a dozen eggs at it. They might have gotten away with the crime…had they not chosen a police car that was occupied by a police officer.
TAKE THE MONEY AND (DON’T) RUN
In January 2008, a 53-year-old man and his 20-year-old accomplice (names were withheld in police reports) set out to rob the Vernon, British Columbia, branch of the CIBC Bank. The older man went into the bank to commit the actual robbery, while the younger man stayed in the getaway car, listening to the radio. When the older man returned, the car wouldn’t start—the battery was dead. They quickly got out of the car and ran down the street, but were apprehended a few minutes later. Why? The CIBC Bank is located next door to a police station.
KNIFE? CHECK. MASKS? CHECK. GAS? UH…
Lonnie Meckwood and Phillip Weeks robbed the Quickway Convenience Store in Kirkwood, New York, at knifepoint. They got away with the money and the clerk was unharmed. Here’s the dumb part: Meckwood and Weeks were caught by police less than a mile away from the convenience store when they were spotted standing on the side of the road, next to their car… which had run out of gas. (The store they’d just robbed was also a gas station.)
LIQUID COURAGE
Thirty-three-year-old Shawn Lester stormed into a Charleston, West Virginia, convenience store, filled up a cup at the soda fountain, then demanded all of the money in the register, claiming he had a gun. But before the clerk could get any money out, Lester got cold feet and didn’t want to go through with the robbery. He started to walk out of the store…with his drink. The clerk told Lester he had to pay for it, so he did—with his debit card. Even though he signed the receipt “John Doe” (and didn’t actually steal any money), police easily traced the debit card and arrested Lester at his home.
HEY, I KNOW THAT GUY!
Donald Keene was at a New Chicago, Indiana, police station to report a crime when he happened to see a wall of photos of the area’s most-wanted criminals. One of the photos looked familiar: It was a man wanted for breaking into a home and stealing jewelry, video games, and a shotgun. Keene instantly recognized the man—it was him. He casually mentioned it to the police officer he was speaking with…and was immediately arrested.
IT’S JUST POLITE TO LEAVE A NOTE
One day in June 2009, an employee at Ziggy’s, a hardware store in Spokane, Washington, found a plastic bag filled with small, crystallized rocks on the floor near the checkout. Thinking that it was crystal methamphetamine, the employee called the police. But before they arrived, 34-year-old Christopher Wilson walked in and asked if anyone had found a bag of crystal meth he thought he may have lost in the store. The employee lied and told him they hadn’t, so Wilson left his name and phone number, just in case the drugs turned up. Wilson returned home…where police arrested him a few minutes later.
CUFF ’EM, DAN-O
In 2009 a Massachusetts man showed up at a police station and asked to have a pair of handcuffs removed. Earlier that day, the man’s sister had put the cuffs on him as a joke, but then lost the key. On a whim, the police decided to run the man’s name through their computer and discovered that he had several outstanding warrants. (He was promptly given a brand-new set of handcuffs.)
“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
—Isaac Asimov
INVENTED WORDS
Most English words took decades, even centuries, to achieve their modern form. But not these��they were invented overnight.
FACTOID
Coined by: Norman Mailer
Story: In 1973, while writing his biography of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer was trying to describe made-up facts that are believed because they’re printed in a magazine or newspaper. He combined the word “fact” with the suffix -oid, which means “like.” The term held this “invented fact” meaning until the 1990s, when CNN Headline News began displaying trivia and statistics on the screen beneath the title “Factoid.” Result: Now it also means “little fact.”
AGNOSTIC
Coined by: Thomas H. Huxley, 19th-century biologist
Story: Huxley’s belief that people can only truly understand what they can see with their own eyes earned him the “atheist” label, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t distance himself from it. So one night at a party in 1860, “I invented the word ‘agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters.” Huxley combined the prefix a-, meaning “without,” and gnostic, a word derived from the Greek gnostos, meaning “knowable,” and used by early Christian writers to mean a “higher knowledge of spiritual things.” The definition has since changed subtly from “admitted ignorance of spiritual things” to the “questioning of spiritual things.”
GROK
Coined by: Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction writer
/> Story: It appears in Heinlein’s 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, as a Martian word that means “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.” Although the humans in the novel never really grokked the meaning of the word, it has since been adopted by popular culture “to understand a concept, opinion, or philosophy on a deep, profound level.”
YES-MAN
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