Goldilocks was originally named Silver Hair.
Citizen Cane
In the 1700s, a British gentleman had to buy a license for the privilege of carrying a walking stick and had to abide by a series of strict rules. In order to get the license, he had to agree not to gesture with or wave the walking stick in the air, hang it from his clothing, or tuck it under his arm. Very few gentlemen disregarded these rules, and there was never a cane mutiny.
In ancient times, it was believed that seeing your image on
a shiny surface like a mirror or a calm pond of water would
enable you to see the reflection of your spiritual self.
It only made sense that if that were true, anything to disturb
the image would bring bad luck to the physical body—
this is where the superstition of seven years of bad luck
from breaking a mirror originated.
Don’t Be Such a Chicken
In the 1300s, the Black Death was treated with live pullets. The bird’s tail feathers were plucked, and the bird was placed on the patient’s infected sores. When the bird became infected and died, it was replaced with another. The “live pullet treatment” was believed to draw the poisons out of the patient—but it didn’t work. The only plus side to this treatment was that it was more enjoyable to spend time with someone who had the plague if they had a chicken on their head.
Myth
If you touch a baby bird, its mother won’t recognize
its scent and will abandon it.
Truth
No. Animals with a keen sense of smell, like dogs, might react
negatively to the smell of another animal on their pups (they wouldn’t
abandon them, though), but birds have some of the poorest olfactory
senses in the animal kingdom. Basically, you could rub dog poop on a
chick, and its mom wouldn’t know the foul smell from the fowl smell.
Here I Come to Save the Day!
The American Family Association (AFA), a watchdog group from Tupelo, Mississippi, filed a complaint with CBS about an episode of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventure cartoon that aired on April 23, 1988. The AFA complaint stated that the heroic rodent was seen snorting cocaine. The Reverend Donald Wildmon, on behalf of the AFA, described the questionable scene as follows: “Mighty Mouse is down in the dumps, and he reaches in his cape, pulls out a substance, and sniffs it through his nostrils, and from that point on in the cartoon he is his normal self.” CBS producer Ralph Bakshi explained that in “The Little Tramp,” Mighty Mouse was sad because he was in love with Polly Pineblossom but she didn’t feel the same way about him. Polly had sold Mighty Mouse a broken and withered flower that turned to dust when he took it from her, and later on in the episode, he inhaled the flower pieces. The case never went to court, and Mighty Mouse was never called to the stand. One thing Reverend Wildmon never asked was what type of flower was it—I bet it was an opium poppy because everyone knows mice are hopheads.
Quotable Misquotes
Many actors are attributed with sayings, clever puns, or sharpwitted comebacks that they never actually said. Like these:• “Smile when you say that, pardner.” What Gary Cooper really said to Walter Huston in the 1929 movie The Virginian was, “If you want to call me that, smile.”
• “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” In his first Tarzan role, Johnny Weissmuller’s character wasn’t even this articulate. In the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man, Weissmuller introduces himself to costar Maureen O’Sullivan by slapping his chest and saying, “Tarzan.” He then gently pokes her on the chest and announces, “Jane.”
Michelangelo is credited with having created the only
shopping list known to have become a work of art.
Michelangelo’s cook was unable to read, so the Renaissance
master drew a picture of wine, fruit, bread, and spaghetti—
and you can bet it didn’t land on someone’s refrigerator door.
Quicker Than a Grindstone
At the beginning of the Victorian era in Great Britain, Thomas Saverland approached Caroline Newton in a jocular fashion and attempted to kiss her. She rejected his advances and then chewed him out—well, actually she just chewed off a piece of his nose. Saverland took Newton, the nose gnasher, to court in 1837, but she was acquitted. The judge ruled: “When a man kisses a woman against her will, she is fully entitled to bite his nose, if she so pleases.” I wonder if the judge polled the jury and then counted the “ayes” and the “nose.”
Chinese checkers did not originate in China, and the game doesn’t use checkers. The game was created in England, and it is played with marbles on a star-shaped board. It was popular in the United States and even Japan long before the Chinese ever heard of it.
Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. In one scene, the HAL 9000, the talking supercomputer, contacts NASA to explain a malfunction with the sentence “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” On April 13, 1970, while the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13 played “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded. Commander Jim Lovell contacted Mission Control to explain a malfunction with the sentence “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
If you suffer from triskaidekaphobia, a morbid fear of the
number 13, you would have guessed that the space flight
was in for trouble: Apollo 13 launched at 13:13 Houston time,
and the explosion occurred on April 13.
The Retriever of Zenda
In Pike County, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1924, a neighbor of Governor and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot was accused of killing Mrs. Pinchot’s cat. The governor was enraged and immediately had the crazed cat killer arrested, personally presiding over the murderer’s hearing and then holding the case over for trial. The accused was allowed no legal counsel, and serving as judge and jury, Pinchot sentenced him to life imprisonment—the governor reportedly treated the defendant like a dog. Which in this case was fitting, because the accused was a dog, a male Labrador retriever named Pep. The dog was collared and taken to the state penitentiary in Philadelphia, where the warden, after being hounded by the governor to incarcerate the animal, finally gave Pep a prison ID, No. C2559. Since Pep was a male dog, he never became anybody’s bitch—and after serving six years of his sentence in prison, Pep died of old age in 1930.
Myth
According to the Bible, angels have wings.
Truth
No. The Bible mentions angels but
never describes them as having wings.
This angelic image became popular
because painters and sculptors took it upon
themselves to give angels wings.
A Unique Groundbreaking Experiment
In 1958, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet accidentally released a nuclear bomb that landed in a Mars Bluff, South Carolina, family’s vegetable garden—creating a thirty-five-foot-deep crater. The bomb exploded, destroying the house of Walter Greg and several other homes and injuring six people. Fortunately, the explosion was only the detonating device, which is TNT, and didn’t trigger the nuclear material. Needless to say, Mr. Greg’s tomatoes were ruined. Air force officials apologized.
According to the Brookings Institution,
a Washington, D.C., think tank, the United States
lost eleven nuclear bombs in accidents during
the Cold War that were never recovered.
Knocking Over a Stonewall
During the Battle of Chancellorsville, on the night of May 2, 1863, Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson took a small group of men to uncover a possible weakness in the Union’s position. When he returned, he wasn’t greeted by a hail of cheers but by a hail of bullets from a North Carolina regiment that thought he and his men were Yankee cavalrymen. Although his wounds didn’t seem life threatening at first, Jackson
contracted pneumonia after having his left arm amputated and died eight days later. So remind me what’s so “friendly” about friendly fire.
“Government figures showed yesterday
that wholesale charges last month were at their
lowest level since the early seventies.”
(Daily Express, 1/13/1987)
“The deceleration in wholesale price rises
is nearing its end.”
(Guardian, 1/13/1987)
The Pride of Idaho
When a new territory in the Pike’s Peak mining area, with Denver as its center, needed a name, Dr. George M. Willing, an eccentric lobbyist, suggested the name Idaho. Willing claimed the name was an Indian word meaning “Gem of the Mountains.” But shortly before Congress agreed on the name, it was discovered that Dr. Willing had invented the word Idaho, and the territory became Colorado instead. However, two years later, when another mining territory in the Pacific Northwest needed a name, some remembered Idaho but forgot that the name had been a hoax—so on March 4, 1863, the territory of Idaho was established. When statehood was achieved in 1890, the name had stuck, and therefore the United States has a state based on a phony Indian name—possibly making it the greatest practical joke of all time.
The Douglas fir isn’t a fir tree—it’s actually a pine tree.
Indians with No Reservations
Naming Idaho might have been the greatest practical joke of all time—unless you look at the etymology of the name Des Moines. In June 1673, Father Jacques Marquette gathered with representatives of the Peoria Indian tribe near the mouth of what is now the Des Moines River. He asked the Peoria the name of their rival tribe that lived farther along the riverbank and was told they were called the Moingoana. (Moines was derived from this word.) But 330 years later, researcher Michael McCafferty of Indiana University, while researching the now-extinct Miami-Illinois language, and basing his conclusions on another linguist, David Costa, discovered that the literal translation of the word Moingoana is, in polite terms, “the excrement-faces.”
Fortune cookies, along with the check, are the
traditional conclusion to a Chinese dinner—or
should I say the traditional American conclusion to
a Chinese dinner. Fortune cookies were invented in
the United States and are not served in China.
The Reflecting Pool
A party was thrown on August 1, 1985, for lifeguards of the New Orleans Recreation Department to celebrate their first season in which no one became a victim of drowning. Of the 200 partygoers, more than half were lifeguards, and four additional lifeguards were stationed on duty. When the party concluded, they were one guest less—thirty-one-year-old Jerome Moody was found dead on the bottom of the Recreation Department pool. File this one in the drawer marked Irony.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (along with
the Volstead Act, which defined “intoxicating liquors”) was
ratified on January 16, 1919. But not everyone wanted to jump
off the wagon. Rhode Island never ratified the Eighteenth
Amendment nor accepted the conditions of prohibition.
A Shot at Legal History
Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-1871) was a highly controversial Ohio politician who provoked much hostility by being a leader of the Copperhead faction of antiwar, pro-Confederate democrats during the American Civil War. Convicted as a traitor, his sentence of two years in prison was changed by President Abraham Lincoln to exile to the Confederacy. After the war, he moved back to Ohio and became a prominent lawyer who was known for his impassioned speeches, but during his final case, he really shot off his mouth. On the night before the trial, he was showing his colleagues that his client, Thomas McGehan, was innocent of murder and that the victim, Tom Myers, had actually shot himself. To demonstrate his theory, he shoved a pistol in his pocket, withdrew it, cocked the hammer, pronounced, “There, that’s the way Myers held it,” and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered Vallandigham’s body just the way it entered Myers’s, and the result was just as deadly. “My God, I’ve shot myself!” Vallandigham exclaimed. Shortly after this occurrence, and based on Vallandigham’s deadly demonstration, his client, Thomas McGehan, was acquitted of all charges and released from custody. The judge rested the case, and Vallandigham rested in peace.
A Highly Charged Article
Alfred Nobel became a millionaire several times over and changed the face of mining, construction, and warfare as the inventor of dynamite. On April 12, 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludwig died of heart trouble, and a leading French newspaper inadvertently ran an obituary on Alfred Nobel. “The merchant of death is dead,” the article read. “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Nobel was upset to find out not that he had died, but that, when his time was up, he would be remembered only as one who profited from death and destruction. To make sure that he was remembered fondly, Nobel bequeathed the bulk of his estate ($4,223,500—and remember that’s 1896 money) to establish the Nobel prizes, awarded to those influential in advancing the causes of peace, literature, and the sciences. So in essence, Nobel had to die before he realized what his life was really about.
Starved for Attention
Sarah Jacobs, a Welsh teenager, became a celebrity in the 1870s for being able to go without eating for months at a time. Her parents put the young girl on exhibit, charged admission, and claimed their daughter had gone more than two years without eating a single piece of food. Spectators were intrigued by the emaciated girl, but Welsh officials were concerned the exhibit was a fraud and the young girl was in danger of starvation at the hands of her greedy parents. They placed Sarah under the care of a professional nurse, whose job it was to verify whether Sarah consumed anything—thereby proving one way or another if her parents were telling the truth. After nine days, officials were certain that Sarah’s parents had been lying, and they were arrested and sent to prison for fraud. How did they know the claims were false? Because at the end of the ninth day, Sarah, who wasn’t given any food during the observation, died of starvation. That’ll show her parents!
Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone
In 1997, in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an alarming number of assaults were reported in supermarkets, grocery stores, and bakeries. The assaults weren’t on women—they were on baked goods. Thanks to security cameras, the identity of the “Cookie Crumbler” was finally unwrapped—it was thirty-seven-year-old advertising executive Samuel Feldman. Feldman never squeezed the Charmin, but he did squeeze $800 worth of cookies, 3,087 loaves of bread, 227 bags of dinner rolls, 175 bags of bagels, and more, for a total of $7,000 worth of baked items. Feldman didn’t gently caress the croissants or pet the pumpernickel, he squished everything so hard, it wasn’t fit to sell and had to be discarded. At his trial in 2000, Sharon Feldman, Samuel’s wife, came to his defense by pleading, “Freshness is important [to Samuel].” She tried to convince the jury her bread-abusing husband was only concerned his family had the freshest baked goods available. Sharon really buttered up the jury, and they almost rolled over in Samuel’s favor, but the judge wasn’t going to let this “loafer” off. He ruled that Feldman was guilty and his behavior was “not just odd, it was criminal.” I wonder if he was sentenced to just bread and water.
Or Is It a Repocracy?
If the United States is a democracy, then the Founding Fathers must have believed a democratic country was the way to go, right? First of all, the United States of America isn’t a democracy—it’s a republic. (Remember, “and to the republic for which it stands.”) The men who framed the Constitution disagreed on a lot of things, but on one point they stood united—that a democracy was the worst possible form of government. The idea that our country is built on “majority rules” is far from the truth. The Founding Fathers knew that a democracy would quickly lead to mob rule—that’s why our system of government is set up the way it is. We el
ect senators and congresspeople to represent us in Washington, D.C.; we vote for them, and they’re supposed to vote the way we want. If they don’t vote the way we want, we vote them out of office at the next election. It’s that simple and that complicated—but it’s still not a democracy.
Can’t Keep a Good Man Down
Did you ever wonder where Edgar Allan Poe got his inspiration when writing ghoulish tales of people buried alive like “The Premature Burial”? Well, it wasn’t all fiction in the days before modern medicine and proper embalming techniques. In fact, several ingenious inventors patented, for the nearly departed, “grave signals”—or what I like to call “Dead Ringers.” The first such patent, from 1843, was a spring-loaded coffin lid (good only before one is buried, of course). In 1868, Newark, New Jersey, inventor Franz Vester patented a postburial contraption that consisted of a tube directly over the face thatextends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave, said tube containing a ladder and cord, one end of said cord being placed in the hand of the person laid in the coffin and the other end of said cord being attached to a bell on top of the square tube, so that, should a person be interred ere life is extinct, he can, on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the grave by the ladder; or, if not able to ascend by said ladder, ring the bell, thereby giving an alarm and thus saving himself.
Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages Page 12