• Another German composer, Robert Schumann, claimed he got ideas for all his musical ideas from two imaginary musicians named Eusebius and Florestan.
• When she was a child, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott developed an intense crush on her neighbor, author Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote dozens of love letters to him, but never sent them. Instead, she sat in a tall walnut tree outside of his house in the middle of the night, singing.
• Animal instincts: Robert Louis Stevenson had a hobby of reading the Bible out loud to sheep. Irish poet William Butler Yeats liked to try to hypnotize hens.
• Charles Dickens is said to have walked 20 miles every day. He also always arranged his bed so it faced north-south, and he liked to touch objects three times for good luck.
• Many artists have a series of rituals they go through to get inspired. Eighteenth-century German poet Friedrich von Schiller could write only with his feet resting on a block of ice. He also needed to inhale the fumes given off by rotting apples.
• Poet Gertrude Stein could write only while seated in the driver’s seat of her Ford, which she nicknamed “Godiva.” And she wrote only on random scraps of paper she’d found.
• To relax after he finished Gulliver’s Travels in 1724, Jonathan Swift wrote a book called Human Ordure. The book, a thorough exploration and appreciation of poop, was published under the pen name “Dr. Sh*t.”
• French author Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) started every day the same way: He ate an apple at 7 a.m. under the Arc de Triomphe.
• When American novelist Anne Rivers Siddons (Peachtree Road) is ready to start writing a new novel, she reportedly gets in the mood by surrounding herself with a nest made of papers. Then she walks into walls, as if in a trance.
• Henry David Thoreau claimed that he could talk to forest creatures. “I talked to the woodchuck in quasi forest lingo, baby talk, at any rate in a conciliatory tone, and thought that I had some influence on him,” he once wrote.
Canadian performer with the most celebrity impersonators: Shania Twain.
* * *
TWO PEEBLES IN A POD
Darryl R. Peebles, a minister in Graham, North Carolina, typed his name into an Internet search engine in 2005 to see if anyone in the world shared his name. He found one: Daryl R. Peebles of Tasmania, Australia. The American Peebles wrote to the Australian Peebles and the two struck up a correspondence, uncovering many bizarre similarities. Both were born in 1949, both have three children, both have children who were born in 1975 and 1977, and both enjoy magic and ventriloquism.
Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down.
NOW THAT YOU’RE DEAD
Apparently, being dead is not the end of the world. In some cultures a dead body can have a full life even if it isn’t full of life. For instance, you might be dead, but you can still be…
…MARRIED
In the rural village of Chenjiayuan, China, the local Confucian-based religion holds that a man will have an unhappy afterlife if he dies as a bachelor. Solution: minghun, or “afterlife marriage.” The bachelor’s grieving parents seek out the parents of a young dead women who died unattached. The two are then married in an official ceremony.
…A SOUP
In the Chinese province of Zhejiang in 2003, ancient skeletons were discovered in a cave that was excavated during the construction of a tourist resort. The discovery revived an ancient lost custom that locals had followed for thousands of years: “ghost soup.” According to the tradition, the bones of long-dead female corpses were boiled down to a stock to make a soup, which was then taken as medicine, believed to cure a wide range of ailments.
…THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
The Malagasy ethnic group in Madagascar has a custom that requires the dead to be dug up every five to seven years, dressed in fancy clothes, and given a massive, days-long party with food, drinks, and music. The body is then reburied, where it quietly waits for its next shindig.
…DOING SHAKESPEARE
Del Close, a theater producer and comedian, died in 1999 at the age of 64. He’d once played Polonius in Hamlet, but the part he really wanted was Yorick—the dead man whose skull Hamlet holds up in memory. So, he stipulated in his will that his body be cremated and his skull preserved and given to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for a future production of Hamlet, with a credit in the program listing Yorick “played” by Del Close.
World record: Al Gliniecki tied 39 cherry stems into knots in three minutes using his tongue.
INSECT ODDITIES
What in the hellgrammite are those things?!!
HELLGRAMMITES
Hellgrammites are aquatic insects in North and Central America that look like centipedes with beetles’ heads, fronted by two scary-looking pincers. They can grow up to four inches long and are very aggressive—they attack, tear apart, and eat other insects in the water (or out; they get around fine on land, too). They feed for one specific purpose: After two to five years, they crawl into a muddy spot by a stream or lake shore and form a cocoon, in which they will spend one winter. In the spring they emerge as the equally scary-looking Dobsonfly, a stick-like creature with four long, lacy wings. But the most noticeable thing about them are their huge jaws. A male’s mandibles (pincers) are about half the length of its two-inch-long body, and are not used for eating—they are used only to grasp a female in order to mate with her. After all that time as a hellgrammite, they live only a few days, mate, and die. Extra: The Dobsonfly’s jaws are of no use for fighting, either, so they have a special defense system: When attacked, they release a foul-smelling spray from their rear ends to scare the predator away.
CATERPILLAGE
Insect experts in Hawaii discovered a new species of caterpillar in 2005. Hyposmocoma molluscivora, or “flesh-eating caterpillars,” as they are unofficially known, are tiny, only about a third of an inch long, and they use their silk to capture prey and eat it alive. This species is strictly a carnivore, eating no vegetation at all, a characteristic shared by only about 200 of the 150,000 known species of caterpillar—and it’s the only one that eats snails. They crawl along branches, disguised by a silk casing that they carry along with them, littered with leaves and other detritus. When they come upon a snail, they approach it very slowly; sensing danger, the snails will either attach themselves to a leaf or simply fall to the ground to thwart a predator. But if the snail is too slow, the flesh-eater weaves its silk and attaches the snail to the leaf. The caterpillar then corners the snail as it inevitably retreats deep into its shell…and eats it alive. Then the caterpillar takes pieces of the snail’s shell and attaches it to its silk casing, either as camouflage, or, who knows—maybe as souvenirs.
The McDonald’s “golden arches” can be identified by more people on Earth than the Christian cross.
TERMINAL TERMITES
In 1999 researchers at Boston University discovered that Damp-wood termites send “seismic signals” to their colonies when danger is present—even though sending the signals rather than fleeing the danger means they’ll die. The researchers built an artificial two-part termite nest from plexiglass, with the two parts separated by mesh the bugs couldn’t penetrate. Then they introduced Metahizium anisopliae, a fungus whose spores are lethal to the termites, to one side of the nest. The researchers watched as the termites on the infected side started doing a shaking “dance,” thrusting their bodies forward and backward, up and down (the motion was proven to not be convulsions from the poisonous fungus spores). The termites in the other side of the nest, sensing the vibrations caused by the shaking, fled the nest completely within an hour. And the ones doing the shaking? “We thought the ones at risk might flee themselves,” said lead researcher James Traniello. “But they didn’t. They continued to communicate, which we think is another example of self-sacrificing behavior in social insects.”
BIG-BUTT ANTS
Okay, we confess: We just liked the name. But they earn a spot on our odd-insect list because they’r
e on the menu in restaurants in some parts of the world. Hormiga culona, the scientific name for these South American insects which means “big-bottomed ant” (honestly), can grow to an inch long, and, not surprisingly, the rear section of their bodies is oddly large. They’ve been eaten in Colombia for centuries, roasted in salt and eaten as a snack, and also mashed into a spread for toast. Recently they’ve become a global phenomenon, and are sold as an expensive delicacy in France and England. They’re said to taste like buttered popcorn.
Ancient Greeks believed that onions were an aphrodisiac.
THE GREAT LONDON
SMOG OF 1952
On page 65, we told you the story of a strange natural disaster that killed thousands of people in Africa. Here’s the story of a deadly man-made disaster that occurred in a different part of the world.
WEATHER REPORT
If you were living in London, England, in the first week of December 1952, the weather wouldn’t have seemed unusual, except perhaps that it was a little colder than normal. But on the morning of December 5 it began to change: An area of warm, still air began to form a few hundred feet above the city streets, causing what’s known as a temperature “inversion.” That may not sound like much, but it was about to cause atmospheric conditions in London to take a deadly turn for the worse.
Normally the air hundreds of feet off the ground is cooler than the air at ground level, and the higher you go the cooler it gets. That’s a good thing in a polluted city like London of the 1950s. When hot smoke leaves the chimneys of homes and factories and the exhaust pipes of buses and automobiles, it rises quickly and climbs to an altitude high enough for it to disperse. It is only able to do that because it is hotter, and therefore lighter, than the surrounding air.
But what happens when the polluted air is about the same temperature as the surrounding air, such as was the case when the smoke and exhaust hit that layer of warm air over London? The polluted air stops rising. And if there’s no wind to disperse it, it accumulates. That’s what happened in London on December 5th—it was as if a giant lid had been placed over the city to prevent the smoke and exhaust from escaping.
KING COAL
You may have lived in a city with smoggy air, but it was probably nothing compared to London of the 1950s. Firewood was a scarce and expensive commodity in the British Isles, and for centuries people had burned coal instead. The coal in London that December was especially bad: England had accumulated enormous debts during World War II, and one of the ways it was paying them off was by exporting its clean, hard, valuable “anthracite” coal, forcing Londoners to burn the cheaper, softer, and much dirtier “bituminous” coal in fireplaces, factories, and power plants.
It is a crime in Bixley, Ohio, to use a slot machine in an outhouse.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Have you ever seen what coal looks like when it is burning? If you’ve ever seen an automobile tire on fire, it’s pretty much the same thing, at least visually: When bituminous coal burns, it gives off a filthy, choking black smoke.
Now picture a tire burning in the fireplace of every home in a city of more than eight million people, and picture those fires burning 24 hours a day. Imagine hundreds more tires burning in every factory in London, and still more tires being burned in power plants to generate the city’s electricity. Add to that all the automobile exhaust generated by one of the world’s largest cities, and the diesel fumes given off by the thousands of London buses that had recently replaced the city’s network of electric trams. Now breathe deeply…
GASP!
London’s air quality was bad even on a good day, and now that the smoke and exhaust was accumulating above the city, it became positively deadly. Scientists calculated that coal fires and other sources of pollution in London of the early 1950s belched an estimated 1,000 tons of smoke, 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and 140 tons of hydrochloric acid into the air every day. They released an estimated 370 tons of sulfur dioxide too, which, when combined with oxygen and moisture in the air, formed 800 tons of sulfuric acid.
On the morning of December 5, the smog around London was dry and smoky, not at all unusual for a cold winter morning. Then, thanks to the temperature inversion, the air quality and visibility deteriorated markedly over the course of the day. By evening the air pollution had become so acrid that many people suffered fits of uncontrollable coughing. Who wouldn’t cough? The hydrochloric and sulfuric acid in the air had a pH of about 2—about the same as the acid in a lemon. The mass of warm air that held the pollution in place hadn’t dispersed by the following morning, or the day after that, or the day after that. As smoke, soot, exhaust, and acid continued to be released into the air, pollution climbed to the highest levels the city had ever seen.
In the Jonestown Massacre, Jim Jones’s followers actually drank Flav-R-Aid, not Kool-Aid.
LOST IN THE DARK
“Seen,” it turns out, was just a figure of speech: By December 7, the air was so thick with smoke and soot that visibility in many parts of the city had dropped to less than one foot—people literally could not see their hands in front of their faces. Some of the first casualties of the Great Smog of 1952, as it came to be known, were drownings—people who died when they became disoriented and fell into the Thames River.
Have you ever tried to drive your car when you can’t even see to the end of the hood? Transportation slowed to a crawl as passengers got out and walked in front of or alongside vehicles to help their drivers see the way. Many people gave up and abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the street—which made driving even more difficult—or blindly followed the lights of cars ahead of them, even when they turned into their own driveways. Some homeowners offered lost drivers who’d followed them home a room for the night, rather than let them risk their lives finding their own way home in the oily, choking black smog.
FROM HEAD TO TOE
Anyone who did manage to make it home arrived covered in soot, looking like a coal miner or a chimney sweep, with the stench of sulfur in their nose and a bitter, acrid taste in their mouth. When they changed out of their clothes, they saw that the soot had penetrated all the way to their underwear, which had been burned by the acid in the air. And the air inside was no better than the air outside: Offices and factories suspended operations when their workers could no longer see what they were doing, movie theaters cancelled screenings when audiences couldn’t see the screen, and at least one live theater had to shut its doors because the actors couldn’t see each other onstage. At the city’s Smithfield livestock show, the cattle asphyxiated before they could be slaughtered, and had to be disposed of.
Ewe’ve got to be kidding! Breeders in Russia once claimed to have bred sheep with blue wool.
NO BIG DEAL
As crazy as it sounds, few people who hacked and wheezed their way through the smog thought much about it at the time. London had been famous for its “pea soup” smog as far back as the 1300s, and people just accepted it as a fact of life. The word “smog” itself was coined in London in 1905 to describe the combination of smoke and fog that was a common occurrence in the city. People learned to deal with it just as they would a spell of bad weather: They waited it out, and a few days later things got better. That’s what they did in December 1952—and sure enough on December 9th, 4 days and 18 hours after the air first began to turn black, a fresh wind blew into London and pushed the dirty air out to sea. Life returned to normal.
But what’s even harder to understand today is how no one at the time—not even the city’s medical professionals—seemed to grasp the terrible toll that the smog would take on the health of Londoners. Even at the height of the crisis, the city officials issued no warnings instructing people to stay inside or to wear masks if they did go outside. Apparently the first people to realize that something unusual was afoot were the city’s undertakers and florists, who ran out of caskets and flowers because so many people had died.
The first official recognition that the Great Smog of 1952 was more
than just another bad air day came three weeks after the fact, when the registrar general published the mortality statistics for the first weeks of December. Only then did people understand that they had just gone through a major environmental disaster… without even realizing it.
BY THE NUMBERS
For the week ending December 6, which included the first two days of the smog, the number of deaths in Greater London came to 2,062, or 295 deaths per day—not much higher than normal. But as the amount of pollution in the air intensified in the days that followed, the death toll soared. Nine hundred people—more than three times the daily average—died on December 8th, and another 900 died on December 9th, with the death toll remaining well above average for another two weeks.
In all, more than 4,000 people died during and immediately after the smog; another 8,000 died in the weeks and months that followed. Many thousands more suffered permanent lung damage, making the Great Smog of 1952 one of the deadliest environmental catastrophes in recorded history. Most of the victims were the very young, the elderly, or those who suffered from pre-existing lung conditions, such as asthma, bronchitis, or pneumonia, which were themselves often the result of a lifetime spent breathing the air in one of the most polluted cities in the world.
Peak time for suicides on the London Underground: 11:00 a.m.
D.O.A.
Ironically, the enormous scale of the catastrophe may have been one of the things that kept people from realizing just how bad it was. When the air turned black, the hospitals in and around London were deluged with people who were coughing and choking uncontrollably and unable to breathe, and many of these people did die in the hospital. But many others were too sick to get to the hospital on their own and had to call for ambulances, which could not find their way through the blackness. By the time the ambulance finally did arrive, in many cases the patient had already died and was taken straight to the morgue or a funeral home instead of to the hospital. The fact that these people did not even live long enough to be seen by a doctor may have prevented public health officials from realizing the full magnitude of the disaster until the death statistics were published.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd Page 8