During the American Revolution, patriotic brides wore red dresses to symbolize rebellion.
Then, on September 1, 1980, the Marathon of Hope ended near Thunder Bay, Ontario. The cancer had come back and spread to Fox’s lungs. After running for 143 days straight, through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Quebec, and Ontario—more than 3,300 miles—he had to abandon the quest and return home for treatment. Terry Fox died on June 28, 1981, just shy of his 23rd birthday, but his strength and determination remain beacons for an entire generation of Canadians.
FOX’S LEGACY
•During the actual run, Fox raised $1.7 million for cancer research.
•The day after the run ended, the Four Seasons hotel chain announced plans to sponsor an annual marathon in Fox’s honor.
•That same week, a Terry Fox telethon raised $10 million.
•Fox was awarded the Companion of the Order of Canada (similar to a knighthood or a Presidential Medal of Freedom) and the Order of the Dogwood, British Columbia’s highest civilian honor.
•In 1980 the Canadian press named him Canadian of the Year.
•An 8,700-foot Rocky Mountain peak was named Mount Terry Fox.
•A stretch of highway near the end of Fox’s run was renamed the Terry Fox Courage Highway.
•Fox was memorialized on two postage stamps, had a Canadian Coast Guard ship named after him, and was named Canadian Athlete of the Decade (beating out Wayne Gretzky).
•In 1999 Terry Fox was voted Canada’s greatest national hero of all time in a magazine survey.
•As of 2004, annual fund-raising Terry Fox Runs have donated more than $340 million to cancer research.
The Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam, B.C., houses 100,000 artifacts from Fox’s life and the Marathon of Hope. One room is stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes of letters and get-well cards. All kinds of people from all walks of life are represented, showing just how far Terry Fox reached. He only made it halfway across Canada, but he touched every corner of the country.
A musk ox is actually a sheep.
NICE CROOKS
If they were really nice, they probably wouldn’t be crooks to begin with. But what else would you call a thief who apologizes?
GIMME TEN
At 5:00 a.m. on November 17, 2003, a man walked into a 7-Eleven in Santee, California, pulled out a gun, and told the clerk to give him $10. The clerk gave the man the money, and the man ran off. At 10:00 a.m. the same man returned to the store, put $10 on the counter, and apologized for the robbery. The clerk didn’t wait for the apology—he immediately pressed the “panic” button under the counter. The police arrived and arrested the thief, who explained that he had stolen the money to buy gas for his car.
BEER NUT
Twenty-one-year-old Nicholas Larson stole a cash register from the Bonnema Brewing Co. in the town of Atascadero, California. Apparently he couldn’t stand the guilt, because the next day he called the brewery to apologize. The kicker: He turned himself in for the theft—even though the register had been empty.
SHOOTING BLANKS
A man walked into a Kansas liquor store, pulled out a gun, and told the clerk, “Give me everything in the register.” The clerk told him that it was empty—there was no money. “That’s okay,” the robber responded. “There aren’t any bullets in the gun. I was just kidding.”
CHANGE OF HEART
In January 2002, Ronald Van Allen went into the Savings Bank of Manchester in Manchester, Connecticut, and handed the teller a note. “This is a robbery!!” it read. “All I want is the money from the cash drawer. No one has to get hurt or shot but me. Sorry for your inconvenience.” Van Allen left with $2,000, but four days later, he walked into the Manchester police department with a bag full of the money, apologized, and turned himself in. “I wish all of our cases were solved like this,” said Detective Joseph Morrissey.
What’s another word for cellulite? Fat.
ANCIENT WISDOM
Very little has changed about human nature in the last 2,500 years, which may be why these pearls of wisdom still hold up today.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
—Lao-Tzu (5th century B.C.)
“Let him who would move the world, first move himself.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.”
—Chuang–Tzu (369–286 B.C.)
“What you cannot enforce, do not command.”
—Sophocles (496–406 B.C.)
“The road up and the road down are one and the same.”
—Heraclitus (540–480 B.C.)
“Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.”
—Horace (65–8 B.C.)
“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”
—Hypatia (350–415 A.D.)
“Slight not what’s near, while aiming at what’s far.”
—Euripides (480–406 B.C.)
“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”
—Copernicus (1473–1543 A.D.)
“After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.”
—Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.)
“It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing.”
—Aesop (620–560 B.C.)
“Remember: Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.”
—Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.)
“We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains.”
—Li Po (701–762 A.D.)
The adult literacy rate in Iceland is 100%.
WOMEN IN SPACE, PART I
If you’re interested in the history of space exploration, you’ve heard of the Mercury 7. But have you ever heard of their (unofficial) female counterparts, the Mercury 13? Here’s their story.
THE RIGHT STUFF
On April 9, 1959, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced the seven astronauts who would take part in the Mercury Program. The goal: To put an American into orbit. It was America’s first manned space program, and competition for the seven slots had been fierce. An original list of 508 military test pilots was winnowed down to 32 candidates, who were then subjected to a battery of intense medical, psychological, and spacecraft-simulator tests. Eighteen made the final cut, and from these the “Mercury 7”—Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Donald “Deke” Slayton—were chosen.
WHY NOT WOMEN?
One of the people who helped design the medical tests was Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II, a specialist in aviation medicine and chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee. Lovelace wondered how well women might do if they were subjected to the same tests. He took an even greater interest in the idea in the summer of 1959, when he made a trip to the USSR to study the Soviet space program. There he learned that the Russians were already looking into sending a woman into space. There were even rumors that the very first Soviet cosmonaut might be a woman.
Apparently, the Soviets felt that women had a great deal to offer the space program and that in some ways, they were better suited for space travel than men were. A typical female needed less oxygen, ate less food, and weighed less than a typical male. That would make for a smaller payload; no minor consideration at the dawn of the Space Age, when rockets were smaller and less powerful. Every pound that could be shaved from the total weight was critical. But were women physically and mentally tough enough for spaceflight? The Russ
ians thought so, and so did Dr. Lovelace. But he wanted to test them to find out for sure.
First sugar-sweetened cereal: Post’s Golden Crisp, introduced in 1949.
CRITICAL TESTING
The Mercury 7 astronauts had undergone three phases of testing to qualify for the space program. Phase one—medical testing—was conducted at Lovelace’s clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Testing women there wouldn’t be a problem, since it was a civilian facility, and he could run it as he pleased. But the second and third phases—psychological and spacecraft-simulator testing—were a different matter: For the Mercury 7, the tests had been done at Wright Air Development Center in Ohio. The female test subjects had no official ties to NASA, so the Air Force simply wasn’t interested in testing them.
Lovelace decided to conduct phase-one testing at his clinic anyway. Then, if those results were promising, he thought he might be able to convince the Air Force or some other branch of the military to make its facilities available for further tests.
GETTING STARTED
Lovelace established several basic criteria for his subjects: they had to be 35 years of age or younger (he later raised the limit to 40), had to be in good health, and had to have a four-year college degree. They also had to have a commercial pilot’s license with at least 1,000 hours of flying experience. That summer he met a 28-year-old pilot named Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb at an aviation conference in Florida. Cobb, who had more than 10,000 hours of flying experience and three world aviation records to her name, had just been named Pilot of the Year by the National Pilots Association. Lovelace invited her to be the first woman he tested.
Nothing in Cobb’s experience could have prepared her for the grueling week she spent at Lovelace’s clinic in February 1960. In one test, she had to swallow three feet of rubber hose so that doctors could study her gastric juices. In another, she had ice water squirted into her ears to knock her off balance and test her equilibrium. She also had colon exams, three barium enemas a day, and countless X-rays. Over a six-day period, she submitted to more than 80 different medical tests.
Q: Which U.S. state touches only one other U.S. state? A: Maine.
FLYING COLORS
Cobb tested so well against the Mercury 7 astronauts that Lovelace worried that if he went to NASA with her results alone, they’d dismiss her as a fluke. So he asked Cobb to come up with a list of 24 other female pilots he could test, to be sure that her results weren’t an anomaly. Eighteen of the women agreed to come to Albuquerque, and of these, 12 tested well enough to qualify for the next phase...if there was to be a next phase.
The other 12 women:
•Bernice “B” Steadman, 35, commercial pilot and owner of a flight school in Flint, Michigan
•Marion Dietrich, 34, pilot and reporter for the Oakland Tribune in California
•Dietrich’s identical twin sister, Jan, 34, flight instructor and commercial pilot
•Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, 21, flying instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma
•Jean Hixson, 37, World War II engineering test pilot and flight instructor who’d become a school teacher in Akron, Ohio
•Myrtle Cagle, 36, flight instructor in Macon, Georgia
•Sarah Gorelick, 27, electrical engineer with AT&T in Kansas City, Kansas
•Rhea Hurrle, 30, executive pilot for an aircraft company in Houston, Texas
•Irene Leverton, 34, charter pilot and flight instructor in Santa Monica, California
•Gene Nora Stumbough, 24, flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma
•Geraldine “Jerrie” Sloan, 30, owner of an aviation business in Dallas, Texas
•Jane “Janey” Hart, 40, airplane and helicopter pilot, wife of U.S. Senator Philip Hart, and mother of eight
THE MERCURY 13
Because Lovelace had to fit these tests into the clinic’s regular schedule, most of the women were invited to Albuquerque individually as openings became available. And because he insisted on secrecy—he wanted to keep the testing under wraps until he had the results—few of the female pilots even knew who the other members of the group were. In some cases the women did not meet each other until years later—they were a group in name only. The name? Originally called Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees, (FLATS), they later became known as the “Mercury 13.”
The Great Pyramid of Giza is made of 2.3 million blocks, each weighing 2 1/2 tons.
Now that Lovelace had a pool of women who had tested well against the results of the men, he was ready to move on to phase two (psychological tests) and phase three (spacecraft-simulators). But where would he conduct these tests?
Cobb found a psychiatry professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine who was willing to conduct the phase-two testing on all 13 women. And the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine agreed to test Cobb in its simulators in Pensacola, Florida. If she tested well, the other 12 FLATs would be invited, too.
COLD WATER
Cobb went through phase-two testing in Oklahoma. Again, she passed. Then she went to Pensacola for phase-three testing...and scored as well as any experienced Navy pilot. That was all the Navy needed—it began making plans to test the rest of the FLAT team. Before it did, however, it contacted NASA to confirm that the space agency actually wanted the women tested.
It didn’t. “NASA,” the space agency explained, “does not at this time have a requirement for such a program.” With that, the Navy backed out. Just six days before the testing was scheduled to begin, each of the Mercury 13 received a telegram from Dr. Lovelace. “Regret to advise that arrangements at Pensacola cancelled,” it read. “Probably will not be possible to carry out this part of the program.”
For Part II of the story, fly over to page 403.
GOING UP? Elevators are the safest form of transportation: they have the record of only one fatality per every 100 million miles traveled. Stairs, on the other hand, are five times more dangerous. (It’s harder to trip in an elevator than on the stairs, and you don’t fall as far.)
It takes about 63,000 trees to print an average Sunday edition of the New York Times.
COMIC BOOK SCIENCE
No one says that science has to make sense in comic books—no one except Uncle John, that is. He wanted to know whether his favorite comic book heroes were using science fact... or science fiction. Here’s what we found out.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
Comic Book Science: In The Incredible Hulk #1 (May 1962), Dr. Bruce Banner invents a “gamma bomb.” It accidentally goes off. To save his friend, Rick Jones, Banner leaps in front of Jones and takes the full assault of the gamma ray blast. And he pays a terrible price: Whenever he gets angry, he unleashes the monster inside, which is called The Hulk.
Could It Happen? No. Gamma rays are an extremely powerful form of electromagnetic radiation. Given the dosage to which he was exposed, Banner wouldn’t have turned into anything except The Incredible Corpse—he would have suffered a painful death from incurable radiation sickness within two days of his exposure.
BATMAN
Comic Book Science: In Detective Comics #27 (May 1939), young Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his parents by a cheap thug, sparking a quest for vengeance and leading him into a life of crime-fighting as Batman. Since he has no special powers, Batman relies on his intellect, strength, and, later, a battery of mini-gadgets contained in his utility belt to help him wage war on crime. Some of the contents of the utility belt: explosives, fingerprint equipment, oxyacetylene torch, smoke capsule, infrared flashlight, and camera.
Could It Happen? Yes. In a world before computer chips and microcircuitry, most of the items would have seemed very futuristic, but each is scientifically and technologically sound. In fact, many of them are in use today. The Batplane, the Batmobile, and the Bat Cave’s crime lab are all feasible as well.
SUPERMAN
Comic Book Science: In Action Comics #1 (June 1938), Superman started life as a baby named Kal-El on the planet Krypton. Shortly before Krypton is d
estroyed, his father places the infant in a rocket ship and sends him to Earth, where the difference between Earth’s gravity and Krypton’s give the child super strength and the ability to jump enormous distances (X-ray vision and flying came later).
Q: What percentage of the world has type O blood? A: More than 46%.
Could It Happen? No. To account for Superman’s amazing strength—easily 1,000 times the average earthling’s—the gravity on Krypton would have to be approximately 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s. To produce gravity of that magnitude, Krypton would have to be 3,000 times as massive as our sun. And that, according to the basic laws of physics, is impossible.
THE FLASH
Comic Book Science: In Showcase #4 (September 1956), a bolt of lighting strikes the laboratory of police scientist Barry Allen, thoroughly drenching him with a wild mixture of electrified chemicals and giving him the power of super speed.
Could It Happen? No. The Flash travels amazing distances in record time: on at least one occasion, he circumnavigated the globe without stopping for lunch. An active 160-pound man normally consumes about 3,000 calories per day. If the Flash were to run 3,000 miles—say, from Los Angeles to New York—it might take him only a few minutes, but he’d burn roughly 375,000 calories doing it. Unless he stopped to eat a meal every second, he’d probably starve to death somewhere around Bakersfield.
DONALD DUCK
Comic Book Science: In Walt Disney Comics #104-02 “The Sunken Yacht” (May 1949), Donald and his three nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewey raise a sunken ship by filling the hold with Ping-Pong balls, something the boys (okay, they’re ducks) read in their Junior Woodchuck handbook.
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Page 20