by Uncle John’s
Whorepresents.com.
Pen Island sells…pens at:
Penisland.com
Therapist Finder locates a therapist in your area:
Therapistfinder.com
Speed of Art is a design firm, not a swimsuit flatulence company:
Speedofart.com
Regency Technologies disposes of old computer or “IT” equipment, including running an IT scrap service, which explains the URL:
Itscrap.com.
Benjamin Dover is a financial planner and author:
Bendover.com
For information on New York State’s many canals:
Nycanal.com
Dave Robins is a tree surgeon, or arborist, in France. He named his business from the French word for forests, les bocages:
Lesbocages.com
Although Americans are tough, they’re not that tough; this site represents a scrap metal dealer:
Americanscrapmetal.com
Dickson makes data-entry and data-crunching software, and they probably get a lot more web traffic than they expect at:
dicksonweb.com
For a quick-reference guide on the expert web sites for information in insurance, travel, and Internet services (and that’s it):
expertsexchange.com
When visiting the Hocking Hills region of Ohio, book lodging through Old Man’s Haven Cabin Rentals:
Oldmanshaven.com
WHEN BEER ATTACKS
October 17, 1814, began like any other dismal London day, but it was about to get more dismal than usual. Several giant wooden vats of aged stout stood inside the Horse Shoe Brewery, a massive building that rose above the squalid slums of the St. Giles parish in central London. At half past four that afternoon, a brewery worker noticed that an 800-pound metal hoop had slipped off the lower section of one of the vats. He left a note for his supervisor about it and got back to work. About an hour later, workers heard a very loud, creaking noise coming from that vat.
And then all ale broke loose. More than 3,500 barrels’ worth of 10-month-old porter erupted from the compromised vat. A 15-foot-high wall of a dark, full-bodied ale with a slight hint of mahogany took out more tanks. Then the torrent of beer crashed through the brewery’s outer wall.
With no warning, a tsunami of stout, wood, and metal laid waste to several homes and businesses near the brewery. One unfortunate servant at the Tavistock Arms Pub was crushed when a wall collapsed on him. Seven women and children were killed in their homes. According to local legend, another man died a few days later of alcohol poisoning.
BAD LIBATIONS
BUM RUM
A bar owner in Nicaragua brewed a small batch of rum and put it in cans. Bad idea: The cans once contained insecticide, and he hadn’t washed them out very well. Eleven people were poisoned by drinking the tainted rum. When he was tried for 11 counts of poisoning, the barkeep tried to prove his innocence by proudly drinking a large glass of the rum. He died a few minutes later.
MAGNUM, P.O.
In 1989 New York wine merchant William Sokolin attended a ritzy $250-a-plate Bordeaux dinner for wine enthusiasts at New York’s famed Four Seasons restaurant. He announced to the nearly 200 guests that he had acquired a bottle of 1787 Chateau Margaux, which Sokolin estimated to be worth around $520,000. And then it was worth nothing when he bumped it against a piece of furniture, poking two holes in the very old and very fragile bottle, from which most of the wine immediately leaked out.
STUMPED
Aman without an arm walked into a Bellingham, Washington, urology clinic in October 2011. “I hope that’s a Halloween costume,” said one of the urology techs. But the bloody stump was real. The armless man—whose name wasn’t released, so we’ll call him Stumpy—refused to cooperate with the urology techs, but they’d seen him before and assumed (correctly) that he lived in the woods near the urology clinic. Once Stumpy calmed down, he was transferred to a nearby hospital.
Police later found his campsite, his severed limb, and the device that had severed it: a 16-foot-tall guillotine. Stumpy had constructed it himself “in the medieval style.” (No word on what he planned to use it for.) The arm was raced to the hospital, but doctors were unable to put Stumpy back together again.
“POLICE LATER FOUND HIS CAMPSITE, HIS SEVERED LIMB, AND THE DEVICE THAT HAD SEVERED IT: A 16-FOOT-TALL GUILLOTINE.”
A SHORT INTERVIEW
In May 2012, actor Martin Short appeared on The Today Show to promote his movie Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. Hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb asked Short a few questions about his kids, then Gifford started praising Short’s wife. “He and Nancy have got one of the greatest marriages of anybody in show business,” she said. “How many years on for you guys?” Short answered, “We, umm, married 36 years.” Gifford leaned in and said, emphatically, “But you’re still like in love.” Short paused for a second, then answered, “Madly in love. Madly in love.” Gifford asked, “Why?” Short answered, “Cute. I’m cute,” to laughs, and the interview was soon over.
However: Short’s wife, actress Nancy Dolman, had died of ovarian cancer in 2010. Short left the Today set without saying anything about what had happened, but a producer told Gifford what she had done, and she made an apology on the air immediately. After the show, Gifford tweeted, “I send my sincerest apologies to @MartinShort and his family. He handled situation w/enormous grace and kindness and I’m so grateful.” Bonus gaffe: “@MartinShort” is not Short’s Twitter handle. (It’s “@MartinShortSays.”) But Short did accept Gifford’s apology, telling E! News, “It’s live television and people make mistakes.”
BASEBALL ERRORS
TRIPLE DIP
In the fourth inning of a game between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Brewers on July 27, 1988, the Brewers’ Jim Gantner was on first base when Jeffrey Leonard hit a light tapper to the first-base side of the pitching mound. Yankees pitcher Tommy John tried to field the ball with his bare hand…and flubbed it. (Error.) He got control of the ball and threw it to first…over the head of first baseman Don Mattingly and down the right-field line. (Error.) Right fielder Dave Winfield got the ball and threw it toward home in an attempt to get Gantner out. John cut off the throw and threw it home…over the head of catcher Don Slaught. (Error.) John tied a record for pitchers, making three errors in one inning—but he’d done it on one play. “I think there were too many negative ions in the air,” John said after the game.
HANKS A LOT
The 1924 World Series went about as far as it could go: a decisive game seven and into 12 innings. The score was tied at three when the Washington Senators’ Muddy Ruel hit an easily catchable pop-up fly into foul territory behind home plate. It should have been an easy out for New York Giants catcher Hank Gowdy, but somehow, someway, Gowdy got his foot caught in his catcher’s mask. Instead of snagging the ball, he tripped over and fell down. Ruel, still at bat, then hit a double, and then scored the run that enabled Washington to win the World Series.
OFF THE DOME
On May 26, 1993, the Cleveland Indians were playing the Texas Rangers when Indian Carlos Martínez hit a long fly ball to right field. The Rangers’ José Canseco ran back after it, looked as if he was about to catch it, lost sight of it…and then the ball hit him right on top of the head and bounced over the wall. Home run.
ITCHING TO PITCH
Three days after Canseco’s gaffe, the Rangers were down 12–0 to Cleveland in the eighth inning. Since the game seemed unwinnable, Canseco asked his manager, Kevin Kennedy, if he could pitch—something he hadn’t done since high school. Kennedy let Canseco take the mound. Not only did Canseco pitch badly—he surrendered three walks, allowed two hits, and three runs—he also injured his arm. Canseco had only a few at-bats in the next several games, and six weeks later finally had to have reconstructive surgery—and was out for the rest of the 1993 season.
LESS THAN PERFECT
On June 2, 2010, Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was about to complete a perfec
t game—pitching all nine innings and allowing no hits, walks, or runs. At the time, it had only been accomplished 20 times in Major League Baseball history. Galarraga had one ball and two strikes on the Cleveland Indians’ Jason Donald. Galarraga threw, and Donald hit a soft grounder between first and second base. First baseman Miguel Cabrera ran to his right to get it as Galarraga streaked toward first. Cabrera snagged the grounder and tossed it to Galarraga, who caught it and tagged first at virtually the same time Donald got there. Umpire Jim Joyce called Donald safe. The crowd, the announcers, the players—most especially Galarraga—were stunned into silence. Donald, who had just been called safe, cringed and put his hands on his helmet—because even he knew he was out, and that Galarraga had been robbed of a perfect game. Footage of the incident—which was replayed thousands of times on sports shows all over the country in the following days—showed clearly that Donald was out. Galarraga got the next batter out, and the game ended—just another game. Umpire Joyce, a 23-year veteran and considered one of the best umps in the game, met with Galarraga and the press after the game and admitted that he’d gotten the call wrong. “I just cost the kid a perfect game,” he said, tearfully apologizing to the Tigers pitcher. Galarraga quipped to reporters, “Nobody’s perfect.”
PLEASE HANG UP AND TRY AGAIN
AT&T used to invite customers to “reach out and touch someone,” but for much of January 15, 1990, the only thing AT&T users could reach out to was a dial tone. At the time, AT&T handled 115 million calls a day, routing them through a nationwide network of switching stations. Around 2:00 p.m,. a station in New York went offline for a routine four-second diagnostic. Back online, an engineer informed the other stations it would start delivering calls again, which it did, 10 milliseconds later.
The close timing of the two messages confused a second switching station, causing it to reset. During the reset, a backup switch received two more closely timed messages, which caused it to reroute its calls. Which caused a third switching station to go offline, which shut down a fourth, and so on, until all 114 switching stations were down in less than three seconds.
At first AT&T thought they’d been hacked. The real problem: The switches had done exactly what they were programmed to do. When the company updated the computer system a year earlier, a programmer flubbed a line of code that would have kept the switches from resetting. It took AT&T nine hours to get the network back online. Between 50 and 70 million calls had been were lost.
STAGED DEATHS
Floored. In 1870 the James Robinson & Co. Circus and Animal Show wanted to drum up some publicity for its touring cavalcade prior to a performance in Middletown, Missouri. As the clowns, circus performers, and animals paraded through town, the circus band was ordered to play while standing on the roof of a cage that held two lions. Despite concerns that the roof wasn’t strong enough, circus managers forced the band to play on, and they did, up until the moment the roof caved in, plunging the musicians into the den of hungry lions, who tore them limb from limb and ate most of their bodies. Ten band members started the parade; only three survived the mauling.
No Tell-ing. Annie von Behren starred in an 1882 production of the play Si Slocum. One scene called for the actor playing opposite her, her real-life fiancé, Frank Frayne, to shoot an apple off of her head with a rifle—with his back to her. More than 2,300 people watched one night as Frayne pulled the trigger, releasing a bullet that missed the apple entirely in favor of von Behren’s forehead.
PRESIDENT LANDON
The Literary Digest was among America’s most popular and credible news and opinion magazines in the 1920s and ‘30s. More than a million Americans got their news, news analysis, and editorial opinions from TLD by 1927.
One of the magazine’s most popular features was an exhaustive presidential straw poll in which it asked around 10 million Americans who they planned to vote for. It accurately predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1920 to 1932. TLD conducted the poll once more in 1936, declaring that the Republican challenger, Kansas governor Alf Landon, would defeat incumbent Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, 57 to 42 percent, and with 370 electoral votes, a massive landslide for Landon.
Actual result of the 1936 presidential election: Roosevelt beat Landon 60.8 percent to 36.5 percent, and carried 46 of 48 states for an electoral college total of 523–8, the biggest landslide in history to that point.
How did TLD get it so very wrong? The people they polled did not represent a cross-section of the American electorate. In 1936 America was deep into the Great Depression. People struggled to feed and clothe themselves, and one of the casualties was magazines. Only the wealthy could afford a subscription to a magazine such as The Literary Digest. TLD included its own readers in its poll, but the bulk of survey respondents came from two other groups: owners of cars and telephones, both of which were exorbitantly expensive and also available only to the wealthy, and heavily Landon-favoring, voters of 1936.
The poll cast so much doubt on The Literary Digest’s credibility that it directly led to the magazine’s end. Less than two years later, it was bought out by a competitor, Review of Reviews. That magazine went out of print less than a year later.
SILENCED MARINER
NASA’s first mission to study the inner solar system was the Mariner Program, 10 unmanned space probes that visited Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Mariner 1, launched on July 22, 1962, was supposed to be a three-and-a-half-month flyby of Venus to gather information about its atmosphere.
Just after liftoff, the rocket carrying Mariner 1 veered off course when a computer misunderstood the rocket’s trajectory. A ground-based radar system had failed to account for the “radio echo,” the time it takes a signal to reach its target and return to the ground. That 43-millisecond miscalculation meant that instead of going toward Venus, Mariner boomeranged back to Earth.
Fearing the rocket might crash into a populated area, mission control sent a self-destruct command to the probe. Less than five minutes after liftoff, Mariner 1 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. The mistaken course correction came from a line of code transcribed by a programmer working from a handwritten formula. Several theories exist about the specific mistake, but NASA’s explanation is that the programmer missed a single hyphen. That hyphen cost $18.5 million.
THREE SPORTS GAFFES
FETCH!
Fewer than 300 pitchers have ever struck out more than 1,000 batters in the entire history of professional baseball. Atlanta Braves pitcher Charlie Leibrandt made it to that number in 1992. After he struck out his 1,000th batter in a game against the San Francisco Giants, the catcher paused the game and handed Leibrandt the milestone ball, which he threw into the Braves dugout for safekeeping. The problem: neither the catcher nor Leibrandt had called time-out or asked for a new ball, meaning the ball he’d thrown into the dugout was still technically in play. The runner on first realized it at about the same time as Leibrandt, so while he hustled to the dugout to retrieve the ball, the runner stole second base.
THE SLOW STEAL
The 1926 World Series came down to a decisive seventh game between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. The Yankees came up to bat in the ninth inning, with the Cardinals up 3–2, and two outs. With a full count, Babe Ruth earned a walk—the tying run. Power hitter Bob Meusel came up to bat, and if he got a hit, Ruth would score. Instead, Ruth, well known for being heavyset and slow, and successful at base stealing only 50 percent of the time, decided to steal second base on the first pitch. Cardinals catcher Bob O’Farrell easily threw him out. Game over, series over, Cardinals win.
BUT WHO’S COUNTING?
The University of North Carolina was heavily favored to win the 1993 NCAA college basketball tournament, but the big story was the University of Michigan’s “Fab Five” lineup of freshmen and sophomore starters who had made it all the way to the final. Among the five were future NBA superstars Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, and Chris Webber, an All-American that year. In the final game, Nor
th Carolina led 73–71 with just 19 seconds left. North Carolina’s Pat Sullivan missed a free throw, and Webber quickly rebounded it and began to take it up the court.
Just past midcourt (and after traveling, which wasn’t called), Webber called time-out, allowing Michigan to reset the clock and inbound closer to their net, and hope to turn at least a two-point play. The big problem with that common late-game strategy was that Michigan didn’t have any time-outs left. Webber was called for a technical foul, and North Carolina got the ball back, sunk two free throws, and won the game.
MARRIAGE ACCIDENTS
HUSBAND-DAD
A 60-year old Ohio widow named Valerie Spruill learned a chilling truth in 2004: Her dead husband was actually her father! Sometime earlier she had found out that a “family friend” she grew up with was actually a prostitute…and her mother. Apparently, her father was only 15 years old when he knocked up a “woman of the night,” and the little baby—Valerie—lived a very full life before finding the awful truth. When Spruill’s story made national news in 2012, she served as a warning that familiar familial relations are not always what they seem to be.
HUSBAND-BROTHER
A South African couple had the picture-perfect relationship. After falling in love at first sight when they met at college in 2006, the lovebirds dated for five years. Then they became engaged. Then they finally got around to meeting each other’s single parents. To everyone’s surprise, the parents already knew each other. They’d been together in the 1980s and had two kids. After splitting up (mom cheated on dad), the sibling toddlers were separated and raised 50 miles apart. Making matters even more complicated: The sibling-bride-to-be was eight months pregnant. “I can’t think straight right now,” the horrified grandma-to-be told reporters. At last report, the sibling couple had split up.