Sea otters have a pouch under their arms. That’s where they carry the rocks they use to crack open shellfish.
THE MAYOR OF
FLAVORTOWN
Food Network star and restaurateur Guy Fieri may not be known for being a great chef, but he sure can whip up a fantastic word salad.
“If it tastes really good and it’s funky, it’s funkalicious.”
“I wanna be the ambassador to Chimichanga Flavortown.”
“That’s dreamy and creamy.”
“That’s a lean, mean pinto bean.”
“The flavor jets just turned on. They’re trying to shut down the flavor fire I’ve got going on in my mouth.”
“Holy-moly, Stromboli!”
“They make a porchetta you won’t forgetta.”
“I just want to smear this all over me.”
“His seafood is so fresh it’ll slap ya!”
“I could put this on a flip-flop and it would taste good.”
“The crust is just bomb-dot-com flaky.”
“You’re like a blackjack dealer at the Flavortown Casino.”
“Those are the culinary buoys in the shipyard of Flavortown.”
“So much salami, call my mommy!”
“These ribs are like the hub on the flavor wheel of life.”
“I’m gettin freaky with your tzatziki.”
“Shut the front door, son of Tatum O’Neal, that’s dynamite.”
“That’s slamma jamma in Alabama.”
“Dude, I’ve been stricken by chicken.”
“You’re takin’ the gobble full throttle.”
“Do you have a garden hose? Something I can clean up with?”
“Peace, love and taco grease!”
Not that George Washington. Belgium’s George Washington invented a process for making instant coffee in 1906.
DUSTBIN OF HISTORY:
CHALMERS GOODLIN
Some people make history. Others nearly do, and spend the rest of their lives wishing they had. Say hello to Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin.
THE WALL
In the early 1940s, while America was still fighting World War II, the U.S. government began looking into the possibility of supersonic flight. At the time, it wasn’t clear that such a thing was even possible. During the war, when fighter pilots in the heat of battle were forced to dive at top speed, as they approached Mach 1—the speed of sound (about 760 mph at sea level)—their planes became very unstable. The flight controls stopped functioning, the planes shook violently, and many times the aircraft disintegrated in midair, killing everyone on board. This led to the belief among many aeronautical engineers of the day that the speed of sound was an actual physical barrier—a sound barrier—beyond which humans would never fly.
Other engineers weren’t so sure. It was difficult to reproduce the conditions of supersonic flight in a wind tunnel, and this, in turn, made it difficult to design planes that would fly properly at supersonic speeds. That, these engineers reasoned, was why so many planes broke apart when they approached the speed of sound. They believed that once the flaws were corrected it could be possible to fly faster than Mach 1.
BULLETPROOF
One object that was known to travel smoothly and stably at supersonic speeds was the .50-caliber bullet fired from Browning machine guns. So when the Bell Aircraft company landed a U.S. Army Air Forces contract in 1945 to build a test plane that would attempt to fly faster than the speed of sound, designing it in the shape of a “bullet with wings” seemed like a good place to start.
The test pilot Bell Aircraft hired to fly the rocket-powered plane, soon to be known as the X-1, was a man named Chalmers Goodlin. The 23-year-old was hired because he had been one of the best combat pilots in the war. Also in his favor: he was a Hollywood casting agent’s dream of what a fighter pilot should look like. He was tall, dark, handsome, and he had a swashbuckling charm about him that—along with his skill as a pilot—had earned him the nickname “Slick.” Though the X-1 program was a secret, Bell’s public relations department made no secret of the fact that the company had a dashing young test pilot in its employ. He even appeared in Gillette razor ads that billed him as the fastest man alive. “You couldn’t open a magazine without reading about Slick,” another test pilot remembered. And unlike U.S. Army Air Force pilots, who made less than $10 a day, Goodlin’s pay was very generous, with lucrative “risk bonuses” for really dangerous flights.
Georgia peach? South Carolina produces more peaches than Georgia does.
HITTING TURBULENCE
On October 11, 1946, Goodlin made his first unpowered flight in the X-1. It was dropped from the bomb bay of a modified B-29 Superfortress bomber and Goodlin had to glide in to a runway below. After a few more such flights were completed, the powered flights began. There were more than 20 in all, and on each flight Goodlin increased the airspeed by 0.02 Mach, nudging ever closer to the speed of sound.
And just as the World War II pilots had experienced when they dove at too high a rate of speed, Goodlin reported that as he approached the speed of sound, the X-1 began to buffet wildly and the flight controls became unresponsive. One reason for having so many flights was to allow the engineers to modify the X-1 from one flight to the next, and in the process improve the plane’s performance in the process. But even with the changes, the flights remained an extremely jarring experience.
This led to the belief among many aeronautical engineers of the day that the speed of sound was an actual physical barrier—a sound barrier—beyond which humans would never fly.
Perhaps a little too jarring for Goodlin: after 26 test flights in two different models of the X-1, he told his superiors at Bell Aircraft that he wanted to be paid a $150,000 bonus (equivalent to more than $1.5 million today) if and when he flew faster than the speed of sound. Considering that he was risking his life in an experimental aircraft that, in spite of all its modifications, still performed poorly in a task that many people believed was impossible to begin with, $150,000 may not have been unreasonable compensation. But Bell balked at paying the bonus, and when they did, he refused to make any more flights until he received the money.
GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER
The Army Air Force was already frustrated by the slow progress of the X-1 program, and when they learned that Goodlin was refusing to fly, they took away control of the program from Bell Aircraft and looked for a military test pilot to fly the X-1. The pilot they chose was 24-year-old Chuck Yeager, who’d flown 61 combat missions during the war and downed 11 enemy planes. He’d been working as an Army Air Force test pilot since the end of the war, making $283 a month…and his pay did not increase when he agreed to fly the X-1.
Lowest temperature recorded in the continental United States: -70°F at Rogers Pass, Montana (1954).
Yeager had only a high school education. That hadn’t hurt his military career so far, and now his limited education may have even given him an advantage because, unlike many aeronautical engineers with advanced degrees, he didn’t quite grasp the concept of a sound barrier, and didn’t believe it existed.
During the war and as a test pilot, Yeager had flown many different kinds of aircraft, but he had never flown a rocket plane. So he asked Slick Goodlin to brief him on the X-1. No dice: “Slick said he’d be glad to check me out in the X-1 as soon as the Air Corps made out a thousand-dollar contract,” Yeager recounts in his 1985 autobiography. “I told him, ‘Well Slick, if you flew that thing, I guess I can too.’ ”
WILD BLUE YONDER
The scuttlebutt around Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) in California, where the X-1 test flights were being conducted, was that Slick Goodlin had gotten out just in time. So many people were convinced that Yeager would die trying to break the sound barrier that they nicknamed his test flights “Slick Goodlin’s Revenge.”
But the naysayers were wrong. After several test flights of his own, on October 14, 1947, Yeager was dropped from the belly of a B-29 Superfortress aboard the X-1,
then he lit the rocket engines and soared into the history books as the first person to break the sound barrier, proving in the process that the sound barrier wasn’t really a barrier after all. Yeager realized what he’d accomplished when his Machmeter needle twitched briefly at Mach 0.98, then pegged off the right side of the scale. “I thought I was seeing things. We were flying supersonic! And it was smooth as a baby’s bottom.” The turbulence that materialized as a plane approached the speed of sound disappeared at speeds greater than Mach 1, and in the years to come better aircraft designs would eliminate it even at subsonic speeds.
He didn’t quite grasp the concept of a sound barrier, and didn’t believe it existed.
INTO THE DUSTBIN
Yeager remained anonymous for another eight months while the Air Force (which had become an independent branch of the military a few weeks before Yeager’s flight) worked to keep the X-1 program a secret from America’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. But word leaked out within weeks of the flight, and in June 1948 the Air Force made it official. Overnight, Yeager became the most famous pilot since Charles Lindbergh, a fame that would not be eclipsed until Alan Shepard became the first American in space in 1961. Even today Yeager is more famous than all but a handful of most prominent NASA astronauts.
Wood you believe? America’s first water pipes were made from hollowed-out logs.
As for Slick Goodlin, he faded into obscurity, his fame never again reaching the heights he’d known when he appeared in Gillette razor ads. He held a variety of jobs in the aviation industry for the rest of his career, including working as a test pilot for the fledgling Israeli Air Force and running a company that bought and sold used aircraft. He grew bitter at having missed his chance at history, and he feuded publicly with Yeager repeatedly over the years. He even denied refusing to fly the X-1 unless he received $150,000. According to Goodlin’s version of the story, Bell Aircraft agreed to pay him the money, “but the Air Force wanted a man in uniform to break the sound barrier—better PR. And to make Yeager look like a hero, they made up the story about me refusing to fly,” he told Air & Space magazine in 1989.
Goodlin continued to fly airplanes into the 1990s, when he suffered a stroke and had to surrender his pilot’s license. He avoided flying on commercial airlines—he was convinced that commercial jets were death traps. He died in 2005 at the age of 82, having never flown faster than the speed of sound, though he did consider flying to Europe aboard the Concorde supersonic passenger jet. But he never did, not because he thought the Concorde was dangerous (though he probably believed that too), but because the tickets cost too much.
17 ATHLETES WHO CHANGED THEIR NAMES
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. Muhammad Ali
Walker Smith Jr. Sugar Ray Robinson
Eldrick Woods Tiger Woods
Ron Artest Metta World Peace
Mike Stanton Giancarlo Stanton
Jon Koppenhaver War Machine
Lloyd Bernard Free World B. Free
Maybyner Rodney Hilário Nenê
Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Edson Arantes do Nascimento Pelé
B. J. Upton Melvin Upton Jr.
Milton Henderson Jr. J. R. Sakuragi
Robert Earl Moore Ahmad Rashād
Shammgod Wells God Shammgod
Mark Duper Mark Super Duper
Chad Johnson Chad Ochocinco Chad Johnson
Sharmon Shah Karim Abdul-Jabbar Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar
Prodigy: Prince wrote his first song at age 7. It was called “Funk Machine.”
FOOD MYTHS
Read on, and eat with a little more confidence.
Myth: We need to consume dairy products for strong, healthy bones.
Truth: Chalk this one up to decades of advertising and public relations from trade organizations like the National Dairy Council. Many kids were raised to drink milk with every meal, told that it’s packed with calcium to help them grow up big and powerful, with strong bones. While it’s true that milk has calcium, it’s not the only food that has calcium. Dark leafy vegetables like collard greens, mustard greens, bok choy, and kale all contain calcium levels similar to milk, and they also contain vitamin K, a nutrient that promotes bone health…and which isn’t found in dairy products at all.
Myth: People with high cholesterol should avoid eating eggs because they’re loaded with cholesterol.
Truth: While one egg does contain a lot of dietary cholesterol, a human’s blood cholesterol levels aren’t much affected by what’s in eggs, or most other foods for that matter. What raises a person’s cholesterol levels are foods high in saturated fat and trans fat. Eggs have very little saturated fat (and no trans fat), so they’re not really dangerous.
Myth: Chinese food makes people feel lousy because it’s loaded with MSG.
Truth: MSG (short for monosodium glutamate) is a crystalline food additive that enhances the flavor of food, adding an extra-savory quality. It was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese chemist, and it quickly became a component of cooking throughout Asia. By the 1950s, it was widely used in the United States in packaged foods and also in the many then-exotic Chinese restaurants popping up around the country. In 1968 the New England Journal of Medicine published a piece from a doctor who complained that he experienced weakness, pain in his limbs, and palpitations every time he ate at a Chinese restaurant. He theorized that it was MSG or too much salt, and the notion that the culprit was the strange and foreign MSG (as opposed to good old salt) caught on with the general public.
Suddenly, millions of people claimed to have what the media soon dubbed “Chinese food syndrome.” Chinese restaurants posted signs in their windows proclaiming their food to be “MSG free,” to keep customers coming in, assuring them that eating there wouldn’t lead to achy bones, a rapid heartbeat…or insomnia, sluggishness, or intense headaches. Numerous studies have since completely debunked the idea that MSG leads to those symptoms (except for a very small percentage of the population that is allergic to glutamate, a naturally occurring protein). So what’s to blame for people who felt so awful after a Chinese meal? After “Chinese food syndrome” became a thing, it was probably just the power of suggestion. Or maybe the fact that the food in many Chinese restaurants tends to be extremely salty, extremely sugary, and loaded with fat and calories. (Mmm, good!)
The chocolate that’s in between the cookie layers of a Kit Kat bar contains ground-up Kit Kat bars.
Myth: Adding salt to water makes it boil faster.
Truth: On a grand scale, yes, that’s true—adding a huge amount of salt to water will change its chemical makeup and thus lower its boiling point from its standard 212°F. But that would take almost an equal amount of salt to water, which would give you unpalatable salt water. Sprinkling a dash of salt into a boiling pot of water actually raises the boiling point slightly…but it doesn’t make it boil any quicker.
Myth: You burn more calories digesting celery than there are in the celery itself.
Truth: A large celery stick has only around 10 calories. Celery is mostly water, and most of its calories come in the form of cellulose—a type of fiber that passes through the body almost entirely undigested. All of that digestive work, not to mention the effort it takes to chew the stuff, led to the idea that celery has “negative” calories, meaning the body uses more calories to process the celery than are present in the celery. It doesn’t: chewing and digesting a stalk uses about the same amount of calories found in a stalk. If there’s a calorie deficit, it’s minuscule.
ART IMITATES LIFE (AND DEATH)
The 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri tells the story of a fictional character named Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). She’s a grieving mother who rents three billboards to shame the local police into solving her daughter’s murder. They read: “Raped while dying.” “And still no arrests?” “How come, Chief Willoughby?” The idea came to writer/director Martin McDonagh about 20 years earlier when he was taking a bus through Rose City,
Texas, and saw signs with a similar message. (The first one read “Raped while dying.”) McDonagh recalls that they “flashed by and it stuck in my mind, just bubbling away…the pain and rage and sadness of the person who would put that out there…calling out the cops, and graphic about the crime. I decided it must have been a mother. So Mildred literally just popped out, fully formed—that pain and the bravery to go out of your way to stand up to the police publicly.” He was close; the signs were put up by a grieving father, who still believes that his son-in-law killed his daughter, but the case was never solved.
In 2015, researchers at the University of California invented a process for un-boiling an egg.
SAVE FERRIS!
Take the day off and enjoy these behind-the-scenes facts about one of the best teen movies ever made: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), the story a clever Chicago teen, his girlfriend, and his best friend, who just want to skip school and have fun.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off takes place over the course of about ten hours. Writer-director John Hughes wrote the screenplay in just six days.
Hughes took the name Bueller from his childhood friend Bert Bueller.
John Candy wanted to play the role of Ferris’s best friend, Cameron Frye, but Hughes thought the 36-year-old Candy was too old for the part. It went to Alan Ruck…who was 29 at the time of filming.
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