by Lewis, Dan
Think this is another example of the insanity that is North Korea? You’re probably right—but it gets stranger. These female traffic controllers have been around since the 1970s but the platforms that shield them from the sun or rain are relatively new. North Korea’s state-run media agency, the Korean Central News Agency, reported on the addition of these platforms in 1998. The report has the markings of the dictatorial nation’s obsession with propaganda over truth, noting that “[t]he traffic controllers are moved by the warm affection shown for them by General Secretary Kim Jong Il who saw to it that the platforms with umbrellas are being set up this time after raincoats, rain boots, sunglasses, gloves and cosmetics as well as seasonal uniforms were provided to them.”
BONUS FACT
As ridiculous as the North Korean traffic solution is, it does, perhaps, solve one real problem—colorblind motorists who have trouble with traffic lights. Other countries have come up with less ridiculous solutions, such as a traffic light with different shapes for each color—a (red) square means stop, a (yellow) diamond means slow down, and a (green) circle means go.
FANDEMONIUM
THE KILLER IN YOUR BEDROOMS?
Travel to South Korea and purchase a regular, vanilla, oscillating fan. Plug it in and let it cool the room you are in. An hour or two later, max, you will most likely have to turn it back on. Chances are, the fan will have turned off automatically. Why? Because, as recently as 2006, the Korea Consumer Protection Board (KCPB) believed that falling asleep with a fan running can lead to death.
On July 18, 2006, the KCPB issued a consumer advisory that asserted the following:
If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and hypothermia. If directly in contact with a fan, could lead to death from increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration and decrease of oxygen concentration. The risks are higher for the elderly and patients with respiratory problems.
From 2003–2005, a total of 20 cases were reported through the CISS involving asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans and air conditioners on while sleeping. To prevent asphyxiation, timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated and doors should be left open.
“Fan death,” as it is called, is a commonly believed myth in South Korea. It is so common, in fact, that some South Koreans who moved to the United States to attend college admitted to believing the myth until well after they arrived in the States. And the Korean Wikipedia entry for fan death does not call it a myth but rather “controversial.”
But “fan death,” of course, is patently false. A leading expert on hypothermia, Gordon Giesbrecht of the University of Manitoba, went to the Korean press to debunk this assertion: “It’s hard to imagine, because to die of hypothermia, [one’s body temperature] would have to get down to 28 [degrees Celsius], drop by 10 degrees overnight. We’ve got people lying in snow banks overnight here in Winnipeg and they survive … Someone is not going to die from hypothermia because their body temperature drops two or three degrees overnight; it would have to drop eight to 10 degrees.”
Yet the myth—which has unknown origins and no scientific basis—continues to be widely accepted in South Korea to this day.
BONUS FACT
According to a study published in a 2008 issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, infants who sleep in rooms with fans running may have a lower incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome than those who do not.
FANS AND PEANUTS
WHY “TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME” IS A LIE
For over a century, baseball games have taken an elongated pause after the away team’s half of the seventh inning, in a tradition long known as the “seventh inning stretch.” Many Major League Baseball teams have traditions specific to their stadiums for this break. The New York Mets sing “Lazy Mary” and throw T-shirts into the stands. The Cincinnati Reds sing “Twist and Shout” and the Toronto Blue Jays lead fans in stretching exercises. But one tradition spans all thirty ballparks: a sing-along of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, popular American music was dominated by a group of composers and lyricists who worked primarily with sheet music publishers located on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. That street, known as Tin Pan Alley, featured household names such as George and Ira Gershwin as well as Irving Berlin, and produced “God Bless America,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and other songs that have withstood the test of time. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was one of them, written in 1908 by two men named Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer. The song they penned told of a young woman named Katie Casey who, as we learn in the first stanza, “was baseball mad” and attended every game she could afford. Her love of the game was so deep that “on a Saturday her young beau // called to see if she’d like go // to see a show, but Miss Kate said ‘No,’ ” because she wanted to go to a ballgame instead. The chorus is Katie Casey’s request that her gentleman caller take her to see a baseball game.
But Misters Norworth and Von Tilzer didn’t share Miss Kate’s love of the game. Although Katie Casey never missed a game, Norworth and Von Tilzer missed them all. Prior to writing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” neither of them had ever attended a baseball game.
Norworth, the lyricist, was (clearly) not inspired by the crowd nor the peanuts and Cracker Jacks. While he was riding the New York City subway one day, a sign reading “Baseball Today—Polo Grounds” caught his eye, and inspiration took hold. Von Tilzer set it to music, and a few decades later—no one is certain how, or when—the song became the in-game staple. Yet the pair weren’t fans of the game to which they gave such a gift. Von Tilzer wouldn’t attend his first Major League game until the 1920s and Norworth attended his first one in 1940.
Whether either of the pair was a fan of peanuts and/or Cracker Jacks is, to this day, unknown.
BONUS FACT
We don’t know where or when the “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” seventh-inning sing-along began, but one early example—perhaps the one that popularized it—was the result of a prank. In the 1970s, famed baseball broadcaster Harry Caray, then a play-by-play announcer for the White Sox, was known to sing along to the song while in the broadcast booth, but with his microphone off. Bill Veeck found out about this and one day—unbeknownst to Caray—he turned the broadcaster’s microphone on and piped Caray’s rendition to the fans. The fans loved it, and when Caray moved to the crosstown Cubs, he kept it up.
KILLING CHARLOTTE BRAUN
THE LOST PEANUTS CHARACTER
Peanuts, the iconic comic strip, debuted on October 2, 1950. In the first strip—four frames—Charlie Brown walks past two other children, Shermy and Patty (the latter being a character distinct from Peppermint Patty, who didn’t join the cast until the mid 1960s), as the two gossip behind his back. A few days later, the strip’s creator, Charles Schulz, introduced Snoopy to the world, and over the next decade, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, and many others joined the cast of characters. The vast majority of them were well liked for the nearly fifty-year run of the strip.
The exception? Charlotte Braun, who debuted on November 30, 1954, and was intended to be the female counterpart to Charlie Brown. (This becomes obviously true if you say both characters’ names aloud.) Before the next spring, Braun made her final appearance in Peanuts. In one sense, she was killed by a woman named Elizabeth Swain.
Swain wasn’t a character in Peanuts, though. She was a fan—one, who, like many other Peanuts fans, did not take well to Braun. The character was abrasive, loud, and didn’t have many friends in the fan community. As Henry L. Katz, a curator of popular graphic art at the Library of Congress would tell ABC News, the character was “a little too serious” and “didn’t have the warmth or the humor of the other characters.” In short, nobody liked Charlotte Braun.
Fans wrote letters to Schulz, objecting to the inclusion of Braun, and in one case Schulz wrote back. Elizabeth Swain—then in
her early twenties—received a letter from the noted cartoonist dated January 5, 1955. Schulz wrote:
I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her. Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?
Thanks for writing, and I hope that future releases will please you.
At the bottom, Schulz doodled a picture of Charlotte Braun, grimacing, with an axe buried in her head.
Swain, who would go on to become a research librarian, passed away in 2000, a few months after Schulz. She donated the letter to the Library of Congress (which, coincidentally, she worked for early in her career).
As for Charlotte Braun, she didn’t “die” on that day in January. She lasted a few more weeks. She appeared for the last time in the Peanuts strip on February 1, 1955, and Lucy inherited her brash, loud-voiced style.
BONUS FACT
The name Peanuts has nothing to do with Schulz’s vision for the strip. Schulz wanted to retain the name of his predecessor comic, Li’l Folks, but his syndicate thought the name was confusingly similar to the already popular Li’l Abner. The syndicate, not Schulz, decided on Peanuts, a reference to the peanut gallery on the Howdy Doody Show. Schulz’s take on the name? In a 1987 interview, he protested: “It’s totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity—and I think my humor has dignity.”
LUNCH AND A MURDER
THE REAL COLD CASE INVESTIGATORS
Prime-time television has trained us to believe that murder cases are investigated by multiple, highly experienced homicide detectives with access to seemingly endless resources. At their disposal are things such as high-level scientific testing labs able to extract fingerprints and/or DNA from seemingly nothing; machines that can take even the grainiest closed-circuit camera image and give us a perfect depiction of a suspect’s full face; and other tools bound only by the show writers’ imaginations. Reality, especially for small-town police departments, is very different. Many murders—often brutal ones that are given the full attention of local law enforcement—remain unsolved.
What can police departments like these do? Call Batman? Hardly. But they can call the Vidocq Society.
Founded in 1990, this group of forensic professionals—psychologists and prosecutors, homicide detectives and FBI profilers, scientists and coroners—gathers for lunch monthly in Philadelphia, hoping to give a cold case a fresh lead. The Society is named after Eugène François Vidocq, a French criminal turned vigilante crime fighter—a man who was perhaps the first private detective, and is regarded as the father of modern criminology. It was founded by three men—all of different backgrounds—who met during the course of crime-solving endeavors. Bill Fleisher is the most ordinary of the bunch—an FBI agent. Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist, is one of the forefathers of modern criminal profiling. Finally, the Vidocq Society counts among its cofounders the late Frank Bender, a self-taught sculptor with a particular knack for creating reproductions of people’s heads using only their skulls and photos of what they once looked like.
The Society began on a lark. The three had corresponded over the years but only first met, face-to-face, in May 1989. As expected, they began to talk shop, discussing the mysteries they were working on, informally collaborating and helping each other. One suggested that the trio make it a regular event; another suggested inviting other colleagues from across the law enforcement world. According to The Telegraph, they sent out twenty-eight invitations expecting only a reply or two. They received twenty-six acceptances, and with that, the Vidocq Society was born.
Each month, the Vidocq Society—at the Society’s expense (they pay for travel out of the group’s $100/year membership dues)—invites a law enforcement officer to present a cold case over lunch. Two specific requirements apply: The unsolved death has to be at least two years old, and the alleged victim mustn’t have been involved in criminal activity such as dealing drugs or prostitution.
To date, they’ve had some success, helping to solve a handful of crimes over the years, including a 2005 double homicide that made it into the TV show America’s Most Wanted. And in at least one case—the death of Huey Cox of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991—the Society managed to free a wrongfully accused man by demonstrating that the suspect police had charged with the crime was innocent of it.
BONUS FACT
In 1996, the Vidocq Society made an appearance in a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery, a joint version of the children’s novels. The Vidocq story was written by long-time Nancy Drew author Carolyn Keene. Keene—and for that matter, Hardy Boys author Franklin W. Dixon—don’t exist, and never have. Both authors are collective pseudonyms, used as a way for the publisher (the Stratemeyer Syndicate originally) to maintain a team of writers (and produce a high volume of books) under a consistent brand.
THE PASSION OF THE MONEY-LAUNDERING EXTORTIONIST
THE OFFICIAL MOVIE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS?
In 2004, Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ, the controversial movie that he directed and produced. The movie grossed over $600 million at the box office. On May 10, 2012, a man named Jorge Vazquez pleaded guilty to money laundering and extortion. In September, he’d be sentenced to seven years in prison. And as part of the plea deal, the U.S. government received 10 percent of the potential profits from the sequel to The Passion of the Christ.
Really.
The Passion of the Christ was written by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, a previously unknown writer. Fitzgerald did not make a lot of money off the film—in a lawsuit he later filed against Gibson, he claimed that he was led to believe that the film would be a small-budget film, leading him to take a relatively small payday for the script—and took a loan to fund future projects. When he defaulted on the loan, he sold his rights to the script he was working on, a sequel to Passion called Mary, Mother of Christ. The company that bought those rights was owned in part by a San Antonio man named Arturo Madrigal.
Back to Vazquez. When criminals plead guilty to a crime, they need to tell the court what they did wrong; this is called an “allocution.” In Vazquez’s allocution, he admitted that he and others kidnapped Madrigal’s brother in Mexico in an effort to get Madrigal to sign over his rights to the screenplay to Mary, which Madrigal did. (Vazquez claimed that Madrigal owed him money and said he was looking for leverage to get his debt repaid.) Vazquez then turned around and sold the script to a production company, receiving $1 million up front and a 10-percent stake in the movie’s profits.
According to MySanAntonio.com, the plea agreement came with a strange price—the government demanded that Vazquez give up his 10-percent cut of future earnings, with that money going into the Feds’ bank account.
Why the government believed that Vazquez had the right to give them those proceeds, is, at best, unclear, given that it was incarcerating Vazquez in part for his method of acquiring the rights. Certainly, Madrigal disagreed that Vazquez had any ownership of the screenplay. On the day Vazquez plead guilty, Madrigal sued Vazquez in an effort to reverse the latter’s sale of the script.
BONUS FACT
In recent years, a common Christmastime “prank” sprang up in the United States—thieves began stealing baby Jesus dolls from nativity scenes around the country. According to the Awl, from 2011 to 2012 there were well over 2,000 reports of such thefts. For many, it’s no laughing matter. In 2012, the New York Post reported that police treated one theft from a Brooklyn church as a hate crime. That same year, according to the Los Angeles Times, a Florida church, tired of having its baby Jesus statue stolen, outfitted their new one with a GPS device to catch a future thief.
STOLEN SMILE
THE INCREDIBLE HEIST OF THE MONA LISA
On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa—Leonardo da Vinci’s mast
erpiece—was stolen off the wall of the Louvre, leaving bare the four iron pegs on which it hung. The thief, later identified as then-Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, hid in a closet on Saturday, knowing that the museum would be closed the next day. He emerged from his hiding place on August 21, took the Mona Lisa off the wall, discarded its nearly 200 pounds of security devices and decorative frames, and carried the painting under his smock. He walked out the door and into freedom—until, twenty-eight months later, he tried to sell it, and was instead nabbed by the authorities.
Peruggia’s motivations, however, are almost certainly not those of the standard art thief, that is, he was not looking to simply (to understate the feat) fence the masterpiece and become an overnight millionaire. Rather, Peruggia was either a nationalist ideologue looking to reclaim the artwork on behalf of his native Italy, or, perhaps, a rube to a master criminal in the making.
The former theory is straightforward: Peruggia, an Italian by birth, allegedly believed that the Italian da Vinci’s work could only be properly displayed in Italy—so he stole it to fix that “problem.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Peruggia simply used this excuse—successfully, it turned out—to limit his jail time once caught. (Tried in Italy, he served seven months, with Time implying that his patriotic motives played into his short amount of time behind bars.) Some reasons not to believe Peruggia include the fact that he attempted to sell the painting (for the equivalent of $100,000) and not merely donate it; that he waited more than two years to move it; that he returned to France after his release; and that he was at least loosely affiliated with another criminal syndicate of art counterfeiters.
It is the art counterfeiters’ story that suggests that Peruggia’s motives were less honorable than patriotism.