ROBERT FALCON SCOTT (1868–1912)
From a diary entry entitled “Message to the Public,” the last thing that Robert Falcon Scott is believed to have written, which was meant to explain and defend the South Pole trip to the British people: “We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint.”
Settlers first brought fireworks to America in the 1600s.
THE DATAR FLOP
History is full of inventions that were just a little too far ahead of their time. Here’s one of them.
GOING UNDER
In 1948 Canadian navy engineer Jim Belyea was assigned to worry full-time about the new Russian submarines. There was reason to worry: These new subs were faster and able to stay underwater for longer periods than the German U-boats the Allies had battled just a few years earlier, and Canada’s top brass were concerned that the Russian subs could converge on a convoy of ships for a coordinated underwater ambush. They ordered Belyea to develop a countermeasure that would keep a lid on the Russians. And he did.
Belyea’s big idea was the “Digital Automated Tracking And Resolving” system, or DATAR for short. It would be able to create a visual display of the positions and movements of all attackers and defenders in a sea battle, but it required stretching the limited capabilities of 1940s computers. Not just that, he wanted to link together every Canadian navy ship and submarine so they could share battle information instantaneously. If one ship saw a new attacker coming, the operators could instantly give its location, speed, and direction to the others. Every ship’s sonar and radar information would go into the mix, too, so that all ships would constantly be on the same page. Instead of the chaotic system of radio operators shouting over each other to report ship information, Canadian officers could instantly see every bit of known information about their battle zone on a glowing cathode ray screen. The brass loved it.
GETTING THE BALL ROLLING
Belyea got the okay to make a prototype, with the hope that it might someday be used on the 100 new ships the navy had just ordered. He began working with the Canadian subsidiary of Ferranti, a U.K. electronics firm, and by 1953, they had a prototype ready for testing. It was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. For one thing, it could store data for 500 ships on its magnetic drum, an early form of the modern hard drive. And there was another advancement: DATAR had a brand-new tool for entering data: the very first trackball, invented by engineers Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff. (The trackball’s main moving part was a small bowling ball from Canadian five-pin bowling.)
The average American skips 50 breakfasts per year. 17% never eat breakfast at all.
WAR GAMES
That fall Belyea’s team tried out the system with a three-ship convoy on a simulated Lake Ontario battle zone. It worked exactly as planned. That success put Canada way ahead of American and British engineers, and there was more on the line than just the cost of the system—there was prestige. Canada’s nascent electronics industry had a chance to lead the world in technology and sell the system to the well-financed navies of the U.S. and England, not to mention all of their NATO allies.
Canada promptly (and eagerly) demonstrated DATAR to American and British military officials, and they were duly impressed. It’s been reported that one American officer was so convinced it was a fake, he crawled under the table to see if there was somebody under there manipulating the dots on the screen. But when invited to partner with Canada in financing further implementation, both countries declined. While there might have been a reluctance to admit being bested by Canada, they had other, more practical reasons as well.
BUGS IN THE MACHINE
For one, DATAR was going to be very expensive to build and debug. Worse, it was huge and heavy, making it cumbersome even on full battleships, much less on submarines. Finally, DATAR used vacuum tubes—almost 20,000 of them. That many tubes in one place require a lot of electricity, a refrigerated room to neutralize the copious heat they generate, and continuous vacuum tube replacement. The tubes burned out relatively quickly; the DATAR prototype was frequently nonoperational, sometimes for days at a time.
The Canadian navy couldn’t afford to do it alone, and the Americans and British wouldn’t budge. So the Canadians offered to rebuild the system using a new American invention that was proving to be much smaller, lighter, cooler, longer-lived, and less of an energy hog: the transistor. No dice. The Americans and British came, saw, and decided to build their own systems…and DATAR was shelved for good.
You’re five times more likely to be in a car accident at 35 mph than you are at 65 mph.
GODFATHER, MEET
THE GODFATHER
What happens when one of Hollywood’s most famous movie mobsters meets up with the genuine article? Here’s the story of one of the most unusual “sit-downs” in mob or movie history. Bada-bing!
CONNECTED
Even if you’ve never heard of Rocco Musacchia, if you’re a fan of gangster films like Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Donnie Brasco (1997), and Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), you’re familiar with his work. Musacchia works as a “technical advisor” on mob films. He teaches Hollywood actors how to act like gangsters—“how a wiseguy dresses, how he walks and talks and wears his hat,” as he puts it. He grew up around such real-life characters in Brooklyn and has maintained his contacts over the years.
In the summer of 1989, Musacchia was working on The Freshman, starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. In the film, Brando parodies his role in The Godfather by playing a mobster named Carmine Sabatini, who just happens to look and even dress like The Godfather’s Vito Corleone.
LET’S EAT
One evening after filming a scene in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York, Brando and his co-stars went to a nearby Italian restaurant to eat dinner and watch the prizefight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns.
The evening got off to a bad start. Hearns was widely thought to have won the 12-round bout, but the judges scored it a draw, which drove fight fans like Brando crazy. Making matters worse, Brando was on a diet: He had to settle for a plate of broiled fish while everyone around him feasted on some of the best Italian food in the city. He was in a foul mood, but he perked up when word filtered into the restaurant that John Gotti, the infamous head of the Gambino crime family, had just walked into his headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club, right across the street.
In the early 19th century, celery was considered as fancy as caviar or foie gras.
AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE
What happened next depends on whose version of the story you believe. In his autobiography, Brando claimed Gotti sent over one of his goons with an invitation to drop by the club. “That’s nice,” Brando claimed he said in reply. “I was curious, and with four or five other people from the picture, I went across the street.”
Musacchia remembers the event differently. He knew Gotti and offered to introduce Brando to the Dapper Don. Brando, says Musacchia, could hardly contain his excitement: “His eyes lit up. Nothing else ever impressed him. He was the biggest movie star in the world and here he was, literally star-struck.”
Whichever version is true, Brando, Broderick, and a third actor, Bruno Kirby (who played the young Peter Clemenza in The Godfather II), were soon making their way across the street with Musacchia to meet John Gotti in his lair.
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
According to Gotti’s daughter Victoria, the visit went off without a hitch. “Brando was telling jokes all night and doing magic tricks,” she said. “Dad was doing what he does best, telling stories. And they just enjoyed each other’s company.”
Brando paints a different picture in his memoirs: According to him, the meeting was not the fun-filled encounter that one might expect. When Brando entered the Ravenite Social Club—“a shabby store-front…filled with Mafiosi,” as he put it, Gotti and several of his cohorts were seated around a table playing cards. Gotti did not rise to greet Brando, though he did shake Brando’s
hand. Brando interpreted this to mean that Gotti did not want to lose face in front of his men by fawning over a Hollywood star, even if this was the guy who played Don Corleone. Gotti was not about to let down his guard.
The Dapper Don introduced Brando to his men, one of whom joked, “Will the real Godfather please stand up!” That got a laugh, but when Brando tried to add to the levity by joking that nobody made any money betting on the Leonard/Hearns fight, Gotti said nothing. Instead, he gestured toward the big sign on the wall that read,
THIS PLACE IS BUGGED. WHATEVER YOU SAY
WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU.
Comic-book Smurfs that didn’t make it into the cartoon series: Alchemist Smurf, Finance Smurf, Mango Smurf, and Pastrycook Smurf.
THE CARD FATHER
Brando liked to perform magic tricks and often carried a deck of cards to use as an icebreaker around awestruck fans. This room was about as tense as any he had ever been in, so he took out his cards. Gotti must have thought he wanted to play poker, because when he saw the cards he snapped, “If you wanna play in here, you don’t deal.”
“Take a card,” Brando told him. Gotti picked a card. Brando told him to put it back in the deck and shuffle the cards. Gotti complied. Then when Brando asked for a hanky to cover the deck of cards, every goon in the joint pulled theirs out in unison and waved it at Brando. “The place looked like a washline on Monday morning,” he remembered. Brando selected a hanky, used it to cover the deck of cards in his hand, and told Gotti to pull the hanky away. Gotti pulled, and when he did, the deck was gone—the only card Brando still held in his hand was the one Gotti picked.
It was a clever trick and a nice little icebreaker, but then Brando sabotaged his own efforts by joking to Gotti, “You know, you could make a living this way.”
And that’s when the evening screeched to a halt. “I didn’t say anything more,” Brando remembered, “because suddenly the whole room had become as quiet as a tomb at midnight. Suddenly I realized what everyone was thinking: Had I tried to make a fool out of the boss in front of his crew?” As Gotti stared in silence, Brando decided one brush with death was enough. He and his party said their good-nights and beat it out of the Ravenite Social Club as fast as they could.
ART IMITATES LIFE
The evening wasn’t a total loss. If you ever get a get a chance to watch The Freshman, you’ll see that in several of his scenes with Brando, Matthew Broderick has a terrified look on his face—the look that someone might have if, say, they ever met a real mobster in the flesh. According to Musacchia, that’s exactly what it was. Broderick, he says, “had this totally astonished look on his face the whole time in front of Gotti, that he duplicated later in the film.” (Convicted of 13 murders and other crimes in 1992, Gotti was given a life sentence and died in prison in 2002.)
IT’S A WEIRD,
WEIRD WORLD
Just when we thought we’d seen all the weirdness this world has to offer, it goes and offers up some more.
WHERE THE DOORS HAVE NO KNOBS
In 2010 a building in Japan underwent a major renovation: Workers rebuilt the walls so that the doors look like doors, but they’re really paintings. The actual doorways are hidden; the only way to enter the rooms is to find small cracks in the walls and open them up from there (one doorway splits a wall-mounted deer head in two). Other rooms are only accessible behind sliding bookcases. Making the place even more confusing are the black-and-white carpet’s eye-boggling overlapping circle patterns. So what is this crazy-making building? A fun house? An eccentric millionaire’s home? No, it’s Clinic Akasaka, a mental-health facility in Tokyo. It was designed by a famous architect named Nendo, who explained that “the clinic aims to provide patients with something extra, a further richness in their daily lives that they did not have before starting treatment.” (No word on how the mental patients took to the new floorplan.)
YOU DAMN, DIRTY SKUNK APE!
The American West has Bigfoot. Florida has Skunk Ape. Leading the search for Bigfoot’s “smaller, smellier cousin” is Dave Shealy, an RV park owner in Ochopee. He’s researched the elusive creature for more than a decade and even says he’s got blurry video footage of it sloshing through the Everglades. Skunk Ape made headlines in May 2010 after dozens of campers reported strange shrieks emanating from the swamps at night. Shealy explained that the shrieks are the male Skunk Apes’ mating calls. He also issued a warning: “Women who are in their ‘time of the month’ must be careful when hiking the area because the cryptoids are attracted to the scent of menstruation. They’re also aroused by used lingerie, so female campers shouldn’t hang their undies out to dry because that’s like raising a flag and inviting them in.”
A1 Steak Sauce was created for and named by King George IV of England.
REMOTE CONTROL
When multimillionaire couple Frank and Jamie McCourt purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004, they vowed to do everything they could to put a winning team on the field. They weren’t kidding. The McCourts secretly hired a Russian physicist named Vladimir Shpunt who supposedly has remote healing powers he calls “V energy.” Despite knowing very little about baseball, Shpunt watched the games on TV from his Boston home and sent his positive vibes toward the players. “It’s very big work,” he told reporters after he was outed in 2009, “but I like this team to win.” In an e-mail written to team executives after the Dodgers won the 2008 N.L. West division title, the McCourts gave a “special thank you to Vlad for all of his hard work.” They didn’t release his salary, but according to the LA Times, it was “in the six figures.”
IT’S AN OLD STORY
An Indonesian woman identified only as Turinah claims she was born in 1853. As of 2010, the 157-year-old’s mind is still sharp—she does housework and can see, hear, and talk just fine. She even smokes clove cigarettes, a habit she said she took up before electricity was invented. According to Indonesia Statistics Bureau official Jhonny Sardjono, “There’s no authentic data to prove Turinah’s age, but judging from her statements and the age of her adopted daughter, who’s 108 years old, it’s difficult to doubt it.”
DEM BONES
You have 206 bones in your body. A Danbury, Connecticut, man named Dan Aziere has a lot more than that—he suffers from a rare disease called multiple hereditary exostosis. “They grow around every joint,” he says, “and there are a lot around my rib cage.” So far, the 41-year-old auto insurance claims adjuster has undergone 19 operations, which have removed 42 of the extra bones, but he estimates that there are about a dozen more still inside him. Most people who suffer from the genetic disorder (including Aziere’s father, brother, and two of his children) only have a few extra bones and aren’t negatively affected. But even though Aziere has a severe case, he still does okay (his only problem is that a botched surgery left him without any feeling in one of his legs). “I can water ski,” he says, “but I can’t barefoot water ski.”
Most appearances on the cover of Sports Illustrated: Michael Jordan, with 49.
THE MADDEN CURSE
Every year since the 1998–99 football season, the NFL star selected to appear on the cover of the popular football video game, Madden NFL, subsequently suffered devastating injuries, poor on-field performance, or really bad luck. Is that a coincidence…or is the game cursed?
M ADDEN NFL 99
The Athlete: 49ers running back Garrison Hearst
Cursed! Hearst was selected to appear on the cover of the first Madden game, released at the beginning of the 1998-1999 football season. His previous season had been fantastic, with the third-most rushing yards in the league, and the most ever in 49ers history. In 1999-2000 he helped the San Francisco 49ers to the postseason…and in the team’s first playoff game gruesomely broke his ankle. Foot surgery led to the extremely rare condition of osteonecrosis—the death of a bone in his foot. Hearst was sidelined for the next two seasons.
MADDEN NFL 2000
The Athlete: Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders
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p; Cursed! Sanders is still considered one of the best running backs of all time, and that year, at the age of only 30, was on pace to break Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record in just another year or two. Yet after appearing on the Madden NFL cover, he retired out of the blue just before the season began. He wasn’t injured, and gave no explanation for his leaving. (Years later he admitted it was because he was sick of losing with the lowly Lions.)
MADDEN NFL 2001
The Athlete: Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George
Cursed! George’s previous season had been the best of his career. In the fourth quarter of the Titans’ first 2001 playoff game, George bobbled what should have been an easy catch—it went right into the hands of Baltimore Ravens defender Ray Lewis…who returned it 50 yards for the touchdown that sealed the win for the Ravens and knocked the Titans out of contention. George’s career went downhill after that: He was traded two years later, and he retired in 2004.
In 1925 con man Victor Lustig “sold” the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers (twice).
MADDEN 2002
The Athlete: Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper
Cursed! Culpepper led Minnesota to the NFC Championship game the year before. Post-Madden NFL, he led the team to a dismal 4–7 record—then injured his knee and missed the last five games of the season.
MADDEN NFL 2003
The Athlete: St. Louis Rams running back Marshall Faulk
Cursed! Faulk injured his ankle, had his worst season in six years, and his team finished a disappointing 7–9. Faulk’s numbers declined after that, and he retired just two years later.
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