FISH STORY
Leicestershire, England, police officers arrived at the scene of an auto accident and immediately noticed that the inside of the car was soaking wet. The driver, 23-year-old Sophia Underhill, told officers, “I think I’ve killed my fish.” (She had been transporting her pet goldfish, Bercy, from her family home in London.) Sergeant Mark Watling frantically searched the car for the pet, to no avail. A short time later, officers clearing glass from the road found the fish—15 feet from the car. They rushed the fish to paramedics, who were able to revive it in a cardboard box of water. “Thankfully,” Sergeant Watling told reporters, “this incident ended happily.”
NO TANKS
Somebody tossed the contents of a fish tank into a street drain in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. A passerby saw the plants and pebbles, along with some dead fish...but one small goldfish still seemed to be alive. A crowd gathered as local residents tried to remove the drain grate—but they couldn’t do it. So they called the RSPCA, but they couldn’t get it off, either. So they called the city’s council, and after a three-hour, 11-person rescue attempt, William—the name they gave the goldfish—was saved. RSPCA inspector Sue Craig was displeased with whoever dumped William. “Goldfish may not be as cute as cats or dogs,” she said, “but they still deserve our respect.”
Nothing to envy: A dog can recognize its own urine markings a year after making them.
NO QUIERO TACO BELL
In August 2003, a Chihuahua in a New York City park was attacked by a domesticated hawk, part of a program to keep the park pigeon- and rat-free. Bystanders rushed over to aid the dog, which was later treated for puncture wounds. Falconer Thomas Cullen, in charge of the park’s four hawks, defended his bird’s actions, saying, “I’m absolutely certain my bird mistook it for a rat.” The program has been grounded until further notice.
LEMME OUT!
In 2004 an Austrian man was involved in a car crash on an icy highway. When he got out he heard a hissing noise, so he opened the hood, expecting to see a leaky radiator. But what he saw was an angry cat stuck in the engine compartment. It had been there for the entire 40-mile car trip and the crash that ended it. Mechanics had to remove part of the engine to free the cat, but it survived the accident unharmed and was reunited with its surprised owner, the driver’s next-door neighbor.
THE HOSE KNOWS
In November 2003, 12-year-old Menelaos Fischer of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, lost his pet hamster, Jinny. He’d only had it for a month when it escaped from its cage. Then one day about six weeks later, his father heard a scratching sound in his shop vacuum. The hamster? Yes! Jinny must have crawled up the vacuum hose—which is similar to the hamster’s “tube” cage—and made itself at home. The animal probably foraged for food at night and brought it back to the shop vac. “My best Christmas present,” Menelaos wrote to the local paper, “is something money can’t buy.”
A Groaner: What kind of coffee was served on the Titanic? Sanka.
Franklin Roosevelt had White House matches stamped “Stolen From the White House.”
LOST IN TRANSLATION
On page 56 we told you about a British company’s poll of the world’s most difficult-to-translate words. Here’s their list of the 10 English words voted most difficult to translate:
AND THE WINNERS ARE:
10. Kitsch. “An item, usually of poor quality, that appeals to common or lowbrow tastes.” (Need examples? Stop by Uncle John’s house.)
9. Chuffed. A British word. Comes from chuff (“puffed with fat”) and means “proud, satisfied, or pleased.”
8. Bumf. More Brit-speak. A shortened version of bumfodder, it once meant “toilet paper,” but now refers to paperwork in general.
7. Whimsy. “A quaint or fanciful quality.”
6. Spam. The luncheon meat, not the junk e-mail.
5. Googly. A term from cricket, a sport played in England and its former colonies. Means “an off-breaking ball with an apparent leg-break action on the part of the bowler.” To explain the meaning of googly, you first have to explain the game of cricket—that’s what makes this word so difficult to translate. “I am from Lithuania,” says translator Jurga Zilinskiene. “We simply do not have googlies in Lithuania.”
4. Poppycock. “Nonsense; empty writing or talk.” From the Dutch word pappekak, which translates literally as “soft dung.”
3. Serendipity. Finding valuable, useful, or pleasant things that you haven’t been searching for; happy accidents.
2. Gobbledygook. Wordy, unintelligible nonsense.
...and the most difficult-to-translate word in English is:
1. Plenipotentiary. “A special ambassador or envoy, invested with full powers to negotiate or transact business.”
In an average year, 13 Americans are killed by vending machines that fall on them.
ROCKS ON THE GO
They say that the desert can play tricks on you. If that’s the case, then California’s Death Valley is the trickiest of them all.
MOVE ON OVER
While traveling through the hot California desert in 1915, a mining prospector named Joseph Crook made a startling discovery: the rocks had trails behind them—as if they had slid across the desert floor all by themselves. That portion of desert is now known as Racetrack Playa in northwestern Death Valley National Park, and curious people travel from great distances to witness one of nature’s most puzzling mysteries: the moving rocks of Death Valley.
Happy Trails
These otherwise ordinary rocks are somehow transported across a flat desert plain, leaving erratic trails in the hard mud behind them. The stones come in every size and shape, from pebbles to half-ton boulders. The tracks they leave also vary. Some rocks travel only a few feet; others go for hundreds of yards, although they may have started right next to each other. The trails go every which way, crossing and looping, even doubling back on themselves. Many rocks carve zigzag paths along the playa (Spanish for “beach”), and some have even made complete circles. But nowhere is there a trace of what propelled the rocks—no footprints or tire tracks, nothing to reveal what force pushed the hundreds of pounds of rock.
Weird Science
Although geologists have yet to prove their method of movement, they’ve offered quite a few theories—most of them having to do with wind, rain, and in some cases, ice. (Some people contend that aliens are to blame.) Even recent GPS studies of the rocks fail to give a concrete explanation. The fact of the matter is that Death Valley is the deepest hole in the Western Hemisphere and one of the warmest places on Earth—a veritable “hotbed” of strange phenomena. All scientists know for sure is that yes, the rocks move—a lot. But to this day, no one has ever seen one in motion.
Makes sense: The Vietnamese call it the American War.
(BAT) BOMBS AWAY!
Here’s a batty bit of World War II history you may not have heard before.
BAT MAN
In the days and weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a lot of people wrote letters to President Roosevelt. Some wrote to express their sympathy with the victims or their outrage at the attack; others made suggestions about how to fight back against Japan.
One man, a dentist from Irwin, Pennsylvania, wanted to talk about bats. His name was Lytle S. Adams, and he had recently been to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, home to one of the largest bat colonies in North America. When Adams learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, his thoughts returned to the bats he’d seen—could they be useful to the war effort? He was convinced they could.
COM-BAT
In his letter to the president, Adams explained that bats are capable of carrying more than their own weight in flight. In many species, for example, the mother bat carries two or even three of her young as she searches for food. If bats could carry their children, Adams reasoned, why couldn’t they carry tiny bombs?
The dentist’s plan went further: Bats hate sunlight, so if bats carrying time-delayed incendiary devices could be release
d over a Japanese city shortly before dawn, as the sun rose, the bats would seek refuge from the light. Many would roost in the eaves and attics of buildings—a great number of which were made of flammable materials like wood, bamboo, and paper soaked in fish oil. When the firebombs detonated, thousands of tiny fires would start in buildings all over the city.
Not only that, bats typically hide out of sight in hard-to-reach places, and that would make the fires difficult to detect. By the time they were discovered, the fires would be well established but still small enough at first (each bat would weigh less than half an ounce, so the bombs would have to be small, too) that people would have a fighting chance to escape. Casualties would be lower than with conventional firebombs, which weighed hundreds of pounds and engulfed entire buildings on impact, giving occupants no warning and no chance to escape. For all their destructive power, Adams believed that “bat bombs” could be a more humane weapon of war than regular firebombs.
Why not moronology? Morology is the study of ridiculous conversation.
How many fires could be started with bats? “Approximately 200,000 bats could be transported in one airplane,” Adams wrote, “and still allow one-half the payload capacity to permit free air circulation and increased gasoline load. Ten such planes would carry two million fire starters.”
ASSAULT AND BAT-TERY
Perhaps the most impressive feature of bat bombs was not their destructive power, but the psychological impact they could have on the Japanese. The bats would be dropped by planes before dawn, and by the time the bombs went off, the planes would be long gone. Entire cities would ignite spontaneously and burn to the ground...with no warning and no explanation.
“The effect of the destruction from such a mysterious source would be a shock to the morale of the Japanese people as no amount of ordinary bombing could accomplish,” Adams wrote to Roosevelt. “It would render the Japanese people homeless and their industries useless, yet the innocent could escape with their lives.”
How flammable were Japanese cities? When a woman living in Osaka, Japan, knocked over her hibatchi-type cookstove in 1911, 11,000 homes burned to the ground. And it was raining.
TO THE BAT CAVE!
President Roosevelt forwarded Adams’s letter to Colonel William J. Donovan, who would soon head the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. “It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into,” FDR wrote. “This man is not a nut.”
Dr. Adams got the go-ahead to assemble a 20-person staff and begin working out the details on how such a weapon might be built. What species of bats would be best? What kind of firebomb would be used? How would the device be attached to the bat? How would the bats be dropped over cities? There was a lot to figure out. Here’s what they came up with:
High life: 74% of New York City residents live at least one flight of stairs above ground.
The Bats
The researchers decided early on that they would use a species called the Mexican free-tailed bat. They weighed about half an ounce but were capable of carrying a load of as much as three-quarters of an ounce. Tens of millions of them made their summer homes in caves in Texas and other southwestern states. Just as important, these bats hibernated in the winter. That meant they could be put into artificial hibernation so that the bombs could be attached, then kept in cold storage until they were ready to be released over Japan.
The Incendiary Bombs
One of the researchers assigned to the project was an incendiary bomb specialist—a chemist named Louis Fieser. He devised a tiny bomb that weighed a little over half an ounce and consisted of a timer and a thin plastic capsule measuring three-quarters of an inch in diameter by two inches long, filled with a jellied gasoline he’d invented, napalm.
Initially the designers planned to attach a bomb to each bat’s chest with a piece of string and a surgical clip that mimicked the way baby bats latched onto their mother’s fur with their claws. But that turned out to be too complicated, so they switched to a simple adhesive and just glued the bombs to the bats.
The “Bombshell”
If you just threw a bunch of hibernating bats out of an airplane, their fragile wings would break the moment they hit the airstream at 150 mph or else they would fall all the way to the ground—and die on impact—before they could emerge from hibernation. So the researchers designed a protective bomb-shaped canister to put the bats into. The “bombshell” was cigar-shaped and had fins, just like a regular bomb—except that it was filled with bats and was poked full of holes so they could breathe.
Inside the canister, the hibernating bats were packed into cardboard trays similar to eggshell cartons, and these cartons were stacked one on top of the other. Each bombshell held 26 cardboard trays, each of which held 40 bats. That meant each bomb would contain 1,040 bats.
Look before you leap: All bullfrogs close their eyes when they jump.
HOW IT WORKED
•The bombshell was designed so that when it was dropped from a plane, it would free-fall to an altitude of 4,000 feet, at which point a parachute would deploy, slowing its descent.
•When the parachute opened, the bomb’s outer shell would pop off and fall away. The stacked cardboard trays, which were tied to one another with short lengths of string, would then drop down and hang from the parachute about three inches apart, like rungs on a rope ladder.
•As the cardboard trays dropped into position, a tiny wire would be pulled from the incendiary device attached to each bat. Just like pulling a pin from a hand grenade, when the string was pulled, the firebombs would be armed and set to go off in 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or whatever interval the bombers chose.
•The bats, now exposed to the warm air and floating slowly to earth, would have enough time to warm up, emerge from their hibernating state, climb out of their individual egg-carton compartments, and fly away to seek shelter.
•When time ran out, the incendiary device glued to their chest would explode into flames, incinerating them instantly and setting fire to whatever structure they had taken refuge in.
BAT-TLE GROUND
A bombshell filled with bats and tiny firebombs sounded clever, but would it really work? Dr. Adams’s team built a prototype, loaded it with 1,040 bats fitted with dummy bombs, and dropped it from a plane in a remote region outside Carlsbad Air Force Base in New Mexico. The test went off nearly without a hitch: the parachute deployed, the trays dropped open, and the bats awakened from hibernation and flew off in search of shelter from the sun.
The only snafu was that the researchers misjudged how far winds would carry the bat trays. Instead of landing in the middle of nowhere (the project was top secret, after all), the bats ended up flying to a ranch and roosting in the barn and ranch house. The researchers caught up with the creatures half an hour later and collected them as the mystified rancher looked on (he never did learn what the bats were carrying or what they were for).
More of your brain is used to control your thumb than your stomach.
BAT REVENGE
But the real proof of the power of bat bombs came later that day when Louis Fieser, the incendiary specialist, wanted some film footage of a bat armed with a live incendiary bomb actually exploding into flames. He took six hibernating bats out of cold storage and set their bombs to detonate in 15 minutes, figuring that in such a short time, the bats would still be hibernating and wouldn’t fly away.
What Fieser failed to take into consideration was that on a hot New Mexico afternoon, the bats would come out of hibernation quickly. All six bats woke up within 10 minutes, escaped, and roosted in the rafters of various buildings of the airfield where the test was being conducted. Five minutes later the bombs went off, and every building on the airfield—the control tower, barracks, offices, and hangars—burned to the ground.
BAT TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Believe it or not, bat bombs were found to be more effective than conventional firebombs. One study concluded that a planeload of conventional firebombs w
ould start between 167 and 400 fires, whereas a planeload of bat bombs would start between 3,625 and 4,748 fires.
So how many bats died in combat during World War II? Not even one. After spending 27 months and $2 million looking into the feasibility of bat bombs, the Pentagon canceled the program in March 1944. The military claimed that the bats were too unpredictable to be useful, but Jack Couffer, a research scientist who worked on the project, has a different theory. Couffer speculates in his memoirs that the government knew the Manhattan Project was making steady progress toward the world’s first atomic bomb, and the military decided to focus on that instead.
Which explanation is true? Only the U.S. government knows for sure. Sixty years later, the reasons for the cancellation of the program, like the blueprints to the incendiary device itself, are still classified.
“A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.”
—Turkish proverb
Mel Gibson turned down the role of James Bond.
AMAZING LUCK
There’s no way to explain dumb luck—some folks just have it. Here are a few examples of people who lucked out...in midair.
HEADIN’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY
Howard Hamer had only just begun his ascent from the Chiloquin airport in Oregon when his plane inexplicably lost power. Hamer searched for a place to set down his homemade Lancer 235 aircraft and decided that an emergency landing on the northbound lane of U.S. 97 was his best option. But as he was watching for oncoming traffic while attempting to keep the plane’s nose pointed up, Hamer didn’t see the truck right beneath him. Apparently the truck driver didn’t see him, either. When they crashed, the propeller got caught on the truck’s sleeper cabin, and the tail of the plane landed on the truck’s flatbed. Amazingly, both the driver and the pilot walked away unharmed.
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Page 37