by Lewis, Dan
So far, we don’t know whether the toilets-for-marriage-licenses program will have an effect on the problem. But the problem is significant enough to warrant this otherwise absurd-sounding requirement.
BONUS FACT
Ghana is looking at another way of dealing with the same problem, but their solution doesn’t involve marriage. It involves recycling. According to GOOD, “fecal sludge” (their words) may be able to be used as an industrial fuel—basically, a (rather gross) biodiesel. The theory is, if that happens, markets will form to purchase the sludge before it becomes an everyday pollutant, thereby creating the financial incentive necessary to prevent haphazard dumping of latrines. The initiative has serious support behind it—it is backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
UNMOUNTAIN MAN
HOW FAR CAN YOU GO WITH A HAMMER, CHISEL, AND SOME NAILS?
In 1992, Canadian singer Celine Dion released a single titled “Love Can Move Mountains.” The song, which peaked at #36 on the Billboard U.S. Hot 100 chart and at #8 overall on Canada’s equivalent, probably should not have its title taken literally. But no one bothered to tell that to an Indian laborer named Dashrath Manjhi.
Manjhi hails from a small village in the northeast of India near the city of Gaya. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s—sources differ on the exact date—his wife, Falguni Devi, fell ill and required medical care. According to DNA India, between Manjhi and Devi’s village and the nearest hospital stood mountainous terrain, with no road running through it. The couple traveled around the mountains—a forty-five-mile (seventy-five-kilometer) trek—but by then, it was too late. Devi died, and Manjhi thereafter committed himself to making sure no one befell a similar fate. So he started tunneling.
For the next two decades, Manjhi worked day and night, carving a road from his village through the mountain; according to the Hindustan Times, he used only a hammer, chisel, and nails. By the time he completed the project in the 1980s (again, sources differ on the end date), Manjhi had dug a tunnel 360 feet long, twenty-five feet high, and thirty feet wide. Residents of his community could, due to his tireless work, now get through the mountain, which was no small victory. Manjhi’s road cut the required travel distance from his area to the neighboring one dramatically, from a forty-five-mile distance to only about half a mile.
Unfortunately, that was only part of the job. Connecting the mountain pass to the main roadway required a public works project, and while the local government originally agreed to fund that, the project was put on hold in 2007. Manjhi died later that year and received a state funeral in honor of his work, and it is unclear if work on the road has resumed. But another project, perhaps more fitting, is underway. According to the Indian Express, the local government is building a hospital, named after Manjhi, near his village.
BONUS FACT
There’s a mountain about thirty-five miles north of Melbourne, Australia, which was first summited in 1824. From its peak, the explorers expected to be able to see Port Phillip Bay, the body of water just to Melbourne’s south, but when they arrived at the top, they learned that the tree cover prevented such a majestic sight. They named the mountain after their experience, and today, if you’d like, you can go for a hike on what has since been called Mount Disappointment.
DORMANT AND TIRED
THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION THAT WASN’T
Kruzof Island is in the North Pacific Ocean, one of many Alaskan islands that run down what would otherwise be the Canadian coastline. It’s not too far from the state capital, Juneau. Kruzof Island is home to Mount Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano stretching about 3,200 feet to its summit. Mount Edgecumbe is a tourist attraction—it makes for a manageable hike and is generally safe. The most difficult part about climbing the mountain is getting to it in the first place—Kruzof Island does not have a permanent human population, and therefore there are no regular transports to the mountain. The closest town, Sitka, Alaska, is on a nearby island. To climb Edgecumbe, one typically leaves from Sitka.
In general, placing a city near a volcano is a bad idea, but Edgecumbe has been dormant for millennia—its last known eruption was more than four thousand years ago. But in 1974, the town of Sitka got a scare. Edgecumbe, apparently, started to awaken from its long slumber. On the first day of April in that year, a plume of black smoke rose from the top of the mountain. Conditions in the area were unusually clear, and people from Sitka could easily see the now-festering volcano. Was Edgecumbe no longer dormant?
The Coast Guard went to check, dispatching a helicopter to fly over the volcano’s crater and check for—well, who knows? What the helicopter pilot saw, though, was not an eruption. Rather, it was a message in the snow, spray painted in large black letters:
“APRIL FOOL”
Sitka was the target of an extravagant prank.
The prankster’s name was Oliver Bickar, better known as Porky to his friends and family. The middle-aged man came up with the idea in 1971—three years earlier!—and started preparing. He collected dozens of old tires in an airplane hangar and waited. The conditions were near perfect on, coincidentally, April Fool’s Day 1974. He convinced some friends (and a helicopter pilot) to help him transport his collection of tires to the mountain’s summit, douse them all in kerosene, and light them on fire. He even went to the trouble of getting clearance for his prank from the FAA and local police—just to make sure that they didn’t get arrested, and to make sure local officials could prevent a panic outbreak. (They forgot to or neglected to inform the Coast Guard.)
Not only did Bickar not get in trouble for his prank, but, as recounted by the website The Museum of Hoaxes, he actually got a lot of good press about it and positive reactions from locals. Even a Coast Guard admiral congratulated Porky on a prank well pulled.
BONUS FACT
Juneau, Alaska, is only accessible by air or sea—all cars and trucks in the city are brought in on barges or ferries. Road construction and maintenance is expensive, given the environment of the area. None of Juneau’s roads leave the city.
THE PRIDE OF GEORGIA TECH
THE BIG MAN ON CAMPUS (WHOM YOU’LL NEVER SEE IN CLASS)
In 1931, George P. Burdell graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as Georgia Tech) with a BS in Ceramic Engineering. A few years later, Burdell received a master’s degree from this same institution. One of the college yearbooks lists him as a member of the basketball team and his engagement was announced in the major Atlanta paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He’d leave Georgia Tech soon after, entering military service in World War II—for a time he was listed as being part of the air force, flying a dozen missions over Europe. But Georgia Tech was Burdell’s home. He’d return to the school, enrolling in countless other classes, and remained active in the campus community, writing letters to the editor of the college paper; he is so ubiquitous at football games that he is regularly singled out by the public address announcer. There is even a store in the student center named after him. At Georgia Tech, George P. Burdell is a popular fellow.
He is also entirely fake.
In 1927, William Edgar Smith was admitted to Georgia Tech—but, accidentally, received two enrollment forms. While most people would simply throw away the second, Smith decided to pull a prank, enrolling a second, fake person as well as himself. Smith combined the names of his high school principal (George P. Butler) and the maiden name of a family friend (Burdell) and came up with the amalgam for his prank. From that point forward, Smith had Burdell mirror his actions at Georgia Tech. If Smith enrolled for a class, so would Burdell. When Smith turned in an assignment, he’d turn in a slightly adjusted one for Burdell. When Smith took an exam, he’d do so twice—one for him, one for his “ghost.” Burdell graduated and is an official alumnus, even though he never existed.
Other students have been carrying on Smith’s legacy ever since, mass-enrolling him in classes despite the university’s best efforts. (Multiple times the university upgraded its systems to prevent Burdell from appearing
on the class rolls; the students proved savvier, defeating these attempts time and time again.) Burdell’s inclusion in the air force, on the George Tech basketball team, and everywhere else is the byproduct of an organically developed ruse over the course of nearly a century—with no end in sight.
BONUS FACT
As old as the Burdell hoax is, it may not be the longest-running one. In late 1917, American journalist H.L. Mencken wrote a column in the New York Evening Mail titled, “A Neglected Anniversary,” retelling the unsung history of the bathtub. Mencken’s history of the washbasin was undisclosed fiction, alleging (among other things) that President Millard Fillmore popularized the bathtub in the United States by installing one in the White House in 1850. While made up, some of these “facts” have been cited as true as recently as 2008 (in a Kia commercial, of all things).
LOST AND FOUND
THE MISSING PERSON LIVING IN SAVANNAH
Benjaman Kyle is missing.
Benjaman Kyle also lives in Savannah, Georgia. If you had his address, you could go visit him, and he’d be there, doing whatever he does each day.
But if you go to the Doe Network, an organization that helps locate missing people, he’ll be there. In fact, his case file is 1007UMGA. But unlike everyone else in the Doe Network’s database, Kyle is not in there because no one knows where he is—rather, it’s because no one knows who he is.
On August 31, 2004, Kyle was found unconscious behind a Burger King, near a dumpster. He was naked, beaten, and bitten by fire ants. His wallet and ID were gone—as was much of his memory. He could not recall any of the events of the past twenty years. He did not know what his name was, where he was from, and did not even recognize his own face. The mystery man adopted the name “Benjaman Kyle” in part because the initials—B.K.—are also Burger King’s. He believes that his true first name is “Benjaman” (with the curious spelling) and therefore uses that name, but there is little to no evidence that he is correct.
His memory is shattered, but over the course of the past few years, he and others have pieced together some likely information about his life before the summer of 2004. He recognizes certain landmarks from Indianapolis, Indiana, which others have used to conclude that he lived in the area sometime in the late 1950s to early 1960s. His spotty but detailed recollection of certain parts of the University of Colorado, Boulder, library and other locations around the campus strongly suggests that he attended the university in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Together, these pieces of information suggest he’s approximately sixty years old.
Kyle also has extensive knowledge of how the restaurant and food preparation business works, and he remembers how to operate the machinery. (While he lost his memory, many of his acquired skills remain intact.) Unfortunately, he cannot remember his Social Security number—until recently, he was unable to get an ID card issued and therefore, unable to gain employment. That changed in 2011, when a local government agency helped him get a government-issued ID, and he later found work as a dishwasher.
BONUS FACT
Ben Pridmore of England is a memory champion. He can memorize the order of multiple decks of playing cards in a matter of minutes and once memorized the order of twenty-seven decks of cards—1,404 cards total—with only an hour of study. Most incredibly, Pridmore once committed to memory the correct order of a single deck of cards—in twenty-six seconds.
INVISIBLE CHILDREN
WHEN 7 MILLION KIDS VANISHED FROM THE GOVERNMENT’S EYE
In the spring of 1987—if you ask government accountants, at least—roughly 7 million American children vanished without a trace. Seven million, gone. According to a report by the Scripps Howard News Service in 1990, at least 400 people were being investigated for crimes relating to the disappearance of these children.
The criminal conspiracy of the century? Hardly. Just some garden-variety tax fraud.
The U.S. federal income tax law is a muddled, 70,000-plus-page mess of rules and requirements. One of the better-known rules, though, is that parents can claim their children as “dependents,” since the children rely on the adults for sustenance, shelter, and basically everything else. Claiming your children as dependents will save you some money when tax season comes around. (The allowance is so well known that it’s not uncommon for obstetricians to half-jokingly tell expectant parents that they’re better off having their new arrival come before the first of the upcoming year, so the child counts in the current tax year.) The quick math takeaway: more children equals less taxes.
But if your budget-balancing strategy is to have more kids, well, that’s a pretty horrible idea. Kids are expensive—they cost more than the tax money they’ll save you, easily. So some people, apparently, decided to lie to the government instead. Thousands of people wrote down that they had children, getting some relief from Uncle Sam in the process, and just pretended that the kids existed. Hey, free money, right?
That all changed when Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1986. One of the provisions required that if you claimed a person over the age of five as a dependent, you had to include his or her Social Security number on your tax filing. Just like that, 7 million children formerly claimed as dependents no longer were.
While some of those children actually existed—perhaps the parents hadn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t apply for a Social Security number for them—there’s good reason to believe that in many cases fraud was the order of the day. The IRS commissioned a study to find out where all the children had gone, and the results were startling. At least 60,000 families claimed four or more dependent children in 1986 and then, in 1987, claimed none at all. Even more egregious: more than 11,000 tax filers claimed at least seven (seven!) fewer children than they had the year prior. Nearly 5 percent of those 11,000 faced criminal charges for what constituted obvious fraud.
Most of the “missing” children were, therefore, never found. But the IRS found something else—$2.8 billion in additional taxes collected, compared to the prior year.
BONUS FACT
In the state of New York (as of 2013), food items sold for at-home consumption are not subject to sales tax, while food sold for eating at, say, a restaurant, is taxed. Sometimes, it’s obvious which side of the line your purchase falls on, but that’s not always the case. Take, for example, bagels. As USA Today reported, if you were to buy a bagel or two at a local bakery, you’d pay no tax. But if you asked that bagel to be sliced for you? Prepare to pony up an extra 8 percent. An “altered” bagel—and slicing it constitutes an alteration—is assumed to be intended for on-premises consumption.
REPETITIVE NUMBERS
WHY A LOT OF PEOPLE THOUGHT THEY HAD THE SAME ID NUMBER
Social Security has been part of the American economic and political landscape since its inception in August 1935. As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, which aimed at alleviating poverty among senior citizens, as at the time, roughly 50 percent of them were living below the poverty line. Social Security created a tax on payrolls, the revenue from which would be used to pay monthly benefits to seniors, as well as a lump-sum payment upon death.
In order to create this system, the federal government created Social Security Numbers (SSN)—unique identifiers that allowed the system to track all the collections and payments. Unfortunately, as we know today, identity theft is rampant, in part because the SSN system does little to protect our numbers from becoming available to anyone. Take the case of Hilda Schrader Whitcher, whose SSN was used by 5,755 people in the year 1943, alone.
But Whitcher was not the victim of identity theft thousands of times over. Rather, her number was given out in wallets.
In 1938, just a few years after the Social Security Act became law, a wallet manufacturer decided to include sample cards in their leather products, encouraging purchasers to use their new wallets to carry around Social Security cards. (As it turns out, this was bad advice; the Social Security Administration advises that you not carry a
round anything with your SSN on it.) The cards were labeled with the word “specimen” so as to not confuse the wallet’s new owner into thinking that the card provided contained a true SSN. Whitcher was the secretary of the executive who came up with the fake-card idea, and it was her number—078-05-1120—that was emblazoned on the sample card.
The wallet was a retail success, finding distribution across the country when Woolworth, at the time the biggest single retail chain in the nation, decided to carry it. Unfortunately, as Whitcher would later find out, thousands of people began using her number as their own—sparking all sorts of inconveniences for her, including a visit from the FBI. In total, roughly 40,000 people have claimed SSN 078-05-1120 as their own since the fake cards were first printed. This misuse went on for decades. As recently as 1977—nearly forty years after it was first placed on sample cards—Whitcher’s number was still being used by about a dozen people.
While Whitcher and Woolworth learned the “do not make documents with fake SSNs, even as samples” rule the hard way, another organization did not heed their lesson. In 1962, this organization printed a pamphlet aimed at answering common questions about how the Social Security system works, and on the front of the pamphlet was a picture of a card with a sample number—219-09-9999. That number was, of course, erroneously adopted by confused pensioners and employees alike. But the embarrassing part?
The organization that published the pamphlet was the Social Security Administration.