Category: junk thought

Truths of Youths

Despite my love of double negatives – that is, my love of spotting them, not of using them – I’d somehow never noticed that Mick Jagger is actually full up on satisfaction; overloaded with the stuff, apparently.

If only he could have a moment of non-satisfaction against which he could compare his constant contentment, maybe his life would feel fuller for having the contrast.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a7cHPy04s8]

Of course, this is just one of those things that I became familiar with at such an early age that I never thought to question it – much like the wooden nature of George Washington’s teeth.

A forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh came to the dental museum, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, to supervise laser scans on one of the four known sets of Washington’s dentures. The dentures are made from gold, ivory, lead, human and animal teeth (horse and donkey teeth were common components).

– MSNBC

Planted Knowledge

Herbs I’m one of those people who believes in synthesizing folk-knowledge and science, but I’m also a firm believer in hearing out the voice of reason. That’s why I found this article in the Irish Times so interesting.

‘PLANTS HAVE been trying to kill us, not cure us,” says Dr Henry Oakeley, the garden fellow at London’s Royal College of Physicians.

Now, before you think this is some madman rambling on about The Day of the Triffids, hear him out.

Citing as an example the use of blue liverwort, Hepatica nobilis , once cultivated as a liver tonic because its three-lobed leaf form mirrored the shape of the liver, he says, “It was absolute rubbish. They had no idea how the body worked.

I once believed that herbal remedies were discerned on a trial and error basis – in some cases it’s true, but, in others…

In the 1880s, at the height of its popularity, those taking it to cure feelings of “liverishness” were stuck down by jaundice because the plant was in fact toxic to the liver.

I can almost envision a Victorian-era version of Anne Landers, or even Sanjay Gupta, utilizing their broadsheet column to espouse the value of Valentine’s candy boxes as protection against heart disease.

Oddly, the whole thing strikes me as very much in the same vein as the more modern popular wisdom regarding birds exploding after consuming wedding rice.

In a recent [1996] column, Landers warned readers that throwing rice at weddings is unhealthy for our feathered friends: “Please encourage the guests to throw rose petals instead of rice. Rice is not good for the birds.”

“This silly myth pops up periodically, and it is absolutely unfounded,” responded rice expert Mary Jo Cheesman at the USA Rice Federation. Many migrating ducks and geese depend on winter-flooded rice fields each year to fatten up and build strength for their return trek to northern nesting grounds.

– Snopes

– and, hopefully, I don’t need to remind anyone regarding the truth surrounding the once mythologized “Spanish Fly”.

Spanish fly, or cantharides as it is sometimes called, is often given to farm animals to incite them to mate. When ingested, preparations containing cantharides once excreted in the urine irritate the urethral passages, causing inflammation in the genitals and subsequent priapism […] cause[s] painful urination, fever, and sometimes bloody discharge. They can cause permanent damage to the kidneys and genitals.

– wikipedia

The Irish Times article goes on to mention several herbs that do actually have medicinal applications, along with accompanying blurbs as to how they were discovered and observed to work. The lesson – as it is regarding many topics – is that research is an important step before jamming some odd bit of vegetation into your gullet.

Finally, the doctor closes with this great bit of foresight:

“I promise you, in 50 to 100 years’ time, people will be as rude about most of the medicines we take today as I am about peony root.”

(Dang – I’ve just discovered I’ve been scooped on this story by a posting at BoingBoing. My apologies to anyone who finds this all to be old news.)
Alchemical Guide to Herbs & Foods

Killer Chinese Knock-Off

Despite my peace-loving ways, I tend to spend more time than I should considering the future of war.

Do you recall the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the monolith-touching ape realizes he might smash bone if he utilizes a femur as a club? Combat is still all about tool use, and the more advanced the bludgeon, the more likely the victory.

Centuries ago, those who could afford chain-mail outlived those who had only leather. Eventually, however, those who could muster a suit of plate-armour laughed mockingly at the poor schmucks who could only obtain a suit of chain – the chortling ceased with the inception of gunpowder.

I don’t need to run through each technological turn, but it’s obvious that the links lead us straight down the line to automatic rifles and fighter jets.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKyf8MGnNM0″]

There’s something almost tender about the slow, questing, feet of this Chinese robot known as FROG-1. It feels, to me at least, like watching a lion cub take its first steps, and nevermind that it’s likely the future of applied death-dealing.

Obviously inspired by Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog, the knock-off still has a long way to go before being a threat on the battlefield, but it’s certainly coming – and, as go the superpowers, so too the world. We need no more evidence of that than the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Our ancestors used to speak of swords being converted to ploughshares, and there’s no doubt that this technology will have some fantastic civilian uses – but the truth is, the adage once operated in both directions: in a time of war, the local blacksmith could just as easily form weapons from that which once provided food.

What will we do, if it comes down to it? Entrust the local TV repairman to assemble a defense from plasma flat-screens and abandoned VCRs?
Types of Armour

Bits of Legend

a still from the film The Orphanage
Part of the beauty of folk legends is their tendency to contain just enough reality to make them seem plausible to a worried mind, while never really properly conveying the facts.

For example, have you heard of the haunting of Gore Orphange?

For over a century visitors to Gore Orphanage Road have reported strange experiences of glowing lights, apparitions and chilling cries of unseen children.

[…]

Orphan children ran away from the home, often wading through the Vermilion River to escape to Vermilion. The children told horrific stories of abuse, neglect and slave labor. The children were said to eat a diet of calves lungs, hog heads and sick cattle – if they were fed at all.

– Gore Orphanage & Swift’s Hollow

I suspect the popular name for the place was what kept the institution in the public consciousness – although, like many details in such cases, the attribution is incorrect.

Light of Hope, the actual name of the orphanage, was established in 1902 by a religious zealot named Reverend Johann Sprunger. The orphanage was located on Gore Road.

– Gore Orphanage & Swift’s Hollow

The environment within might have been harsh, but then, so were most, if not all, orphanages of the same period. To be sustained in the realm of folklore, it required something more.
The remants of the burnt school in Collinwood

176 elementary school students were burned or trampled to death when they became trapped in a stampede situation and couldn’t escape a fire that was consuming their school. The children began descending down the stairs to the exit after the fire alarm was sounded, but the front stairwell was blocked by flames. According to witnesses, the children at the front broke from the lines and tried “to fight their way back to the floor above, while those who were coming down shoved them mercilessly back into the flames below.” Those who made it to the rear exit found it locked. Outside rescuers unlocked it but found it opened inward, so it was impossible to move against the press of dozens of desperate bodies.

– Gore Orphanage & Swift’s Hollow

Amongst even the locals, the death of so many little ones became nearly immediately associated with the orphanage on Gore Road, despite the fact that the fire took place forty miles east of the site.

It’s that kind of connection between only vaguely related items which can add up to a generational spook tale.
Then there’s this excellent bit of myth regarding the supposed ghosts of “Mudhouse Mansion”.

One legend tells of a government official who lived there after the Civil War and still kept slaves, locking them in one of the outbuildings at night. One night the slave dug his way out, entered the house, and slaughtered the entire family.

– Forgotten Ohio

A neat little story regarding the balance of power and corruption, but, of course, there’s a problem: Ohio was never a slave state.

Oddly, however, there seems to be a thread between the two locations and their mythologies – properly enforced government regulation is apparently the best preventative measure against hauntings.

The Reality Of The Situation

When I was a boy, I was unnerved by graveyards. It wasn’t that I was expecting a ghost to come rambling up from amongst the headstones, it was more the mental image of so many corpses, in various states of decomposition, so close underfoot.

Legend tripping, also known as ostension, is a name recently bestowed by folklorists and anthropologists on an adolescent practice (containing elements of a rite of passage) in which a usually furtive nocturnal pilgrimage is made to a site which is alleged to have been the scene of some tragic, horrific, and possibly supernatural event or haunting.

– wikipedia

It’s easy to dismiss weird tales, and such night-time adventures, as simply titilation for the morbidly-curious, but, as I’ve mentioned previously, it’s my contention that such bits of odd ritual play an important role in our social development.

The concept of legend tripping is at least as old as Mark Twain’s 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which contains several accounts of adolescents visiting allegedly haunted houses and caves said to be the lairs of criminals. Tom Sawyer is based on lore that was current in Twain’s own boyhood, and by Twain’s time the main features of the ritual were already in place.

– wikipedia

It seems obvious to me that this sort of thing was going on well before Twain’s time – likely as long as we’ve been sitting around fires, swapping tales, or coming across caves and copses that, for reasons beyond our understanding, set us on edge.

Despite not understanding the source of their thrill, I believe every tipped gravestone is a rude-finger in the direction of the vandal’s inevitable death, and every climbed step in a haunted house is another proof to the adventurer that the reaper’s grasp is limited, and possibly even defiable.

Still from the movie Candyman

Of course, not all such adventures end in back-patting and story telling, and not all dangers involved are supernatural.

Frances G. Reinehr’s 1989 book [Bloody Mary] tells the true story of long-time Lincoln resident Mary Partington, who became known as “Bloody Mary.” Mary’s old-fashioned dress and her house with no electricity caught the attention of area teenagers, who made a sport out of taunting and harassing her. Mary received her cruel nickname after shooting and killing a youth who attempted to break into her house. She was not charged with a crime on the grounds of self-defense.

– NebraskaHistory.org

What will be interesting to see, in the coming century, is how these legends, and challenges, change.

Just as “The Phantom Hitchhiker” is no longer mounting a carriage, will we one day see something akin to a haunted forum? A blog at which it is said the occasional viewer sees a message from the dead – a message which eventually spells their doom?

Will preteens, tucked into sleeping bags and gathered around the glow of a netbook, one day giggle nervously over a cursed registration page?

Still from the videotape featured in The Ring

Liam Neeson, Knife Fighter

Liam Neeson cut 'Hangover 2' — From CNN.com

My first reaction: “He just went at it with a cleaver?”

My second reaction: “He edited the film?”

My final discovery: “Liam Neeson cut from ‘Hangover 2′”

Instant Scarcity

Friendly Society Despite having created a robust world-wide network of information, it seems to me, now more than ever, that we’ve placed our history in peril.

The picture above is of a membership card to a friendly society, essentially an early form of insurance/mutual fund. Having been signed off on in 1884, the card sat, waiting in the back of an accordion file, till it was once again exposed to the light in 2011 – nearly a hundred and thirty years later.

Paper yellows, certainly, but look at the condition of that bit of red-tape: if the dues were up to date, even the most ornery of sticklers would be hard-pressed not to accept it in exchange for a claim.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFZo5PqvEak”]

In July 1962, a 1.44 megaton (6.0 PJ) United States nuclear test in space, 400 kilometres (250 mi) above the mid-Pacific Ocean, called the Starfish Prime test, demonstrated to nuclear scientists that the magnitude and effects of a high altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link.

– wikipedia

Future tests, unfortunately, only went on to prove that an atomic detonation over a populated area would result in damage to electronics exponential to the aftermath of Starfish.

Still from the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

What would archeologists make of our efforts, a thousand years from now, if all they had to observe from our culture were soda bottles and partially-decayed DVDs? Will they assume we were largely illiterate, having been enthralled by the semi-mythical device known as Telly-vision?

That sort of future doesn’t require an incident nearly as dramatic as a nuclear war, either – in a time of shortage, anything may be scavenged and re-purposed.

An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia, it emerged on Wednesday.

– Guardian.co.uk

I’m not saying that we should all give up on the internet, nor am I implying that you should crank up your deskjet and get to printing every website you value, but we do need to consider the fragility of the basket we’ve constructed, even as we continue to plunk our eggy output into its depths.

(Big thanks to @elliesoderstrom (check out her blog, The Gig) for keeping Georgia on my mind.)

The Wile E. Coyote Problem

As a child I found watching the trials and tribulations of Wile E. Coyote quite frustrating. After ordering, constructing, and deploying whatever Acme device he’d chosen to assist in capturing his dinner, the result was always the same: he’d come tantalizingly close to a full belly, only to be defeated by a sudden cliff or tunnel entrance.

Then he’d give up.

USS Macon (ZRS-5) was a rigid airship built and operated by the United States Navy for scouting. She served as a flying aircraft carrier, launching Sparrowhawk biplanes. – wikipedia

The USS Macon

I feel, unfortunately, that airships have a lot in common with Mr. Coyote – humanity made an effort to utilize the sky-behemoths, but, once issues were encountered, we simply discontinued the attempt.

The cause of the loss was operator error following the structural failure and loss of the fin. Had the ship not been driven over pressure height (where the cells were expanded fully and lifting gas released) Macon could have made it back to Moffett Field. – wikipedia

The loss of the Macon, and its sister ship, the Akron, were the end of large-scale North American attempts at rigid-structure airships. A combination of World War II, and the Hindenburg, were enough to seal the deal globally.

Instead of checking our equations, touching up the paint on the fake tunnel, and adjusting the straps on our rocket skates, we dropped everything and went on to trying to drop an anvil on the bird’s head.

Consider what the skies might have been under the Imperial Airship Scheme:

The Burney Scheme, known after Sir Dennistoun Burney, was proposed to Vickers in 1921 for the construction of commercial airships for establishing airline services between Britain and the colonies of the British Empire. The Admiralty became involved because it saw the scheme as a means of continuing airship technology and operational experience at modest cost via subsidies, just as it subsidized British passenger ships – wikipedia

– but then, I suppose, many ideas get left behind. There may be an alternate universe out there in which a businessman from New York is considering the lost concepts of the Wright brothers, while bedding down for his second night on board a Virgin Airways zeppelin to London.

Hindenburg cutaway

Coincidentally, the man in charge of the Macon? Lt. Commander Herbert Wiley.

The Psychological Warfare Of The Worlds

War of the Worlds tripod Tonight, once the episode is posted, we’re heading out to view a re-creation of the classic Orson Welles radio production of The War Of The Worlds, and I’m quite excited. I also find it interesting that, due to the panic caused by the original, conspiracy theories still abound regarding the broadcast.

In the 1999 documentary, Masters of the Universe: The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, writer Daniel Hopsicker claims the Rockefeller Foundation funded the broadcast, studied the panic, and compiled a report available to a few. – wikipedia

While I’d never heard that particular angle, I do recall reading this second theory in my youth.

There has been continued speculation the panic generated by War of the Worlds inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, avoiding a similar panic. U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of UFO investigatory Project Blue Book wrote, “The [U.S. government’s] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous The War of the Worlds broadcast.” – wikipedia

Of course the Government’s “UFO” files are full of references to the broadcast: this would be something like an investigation of 1950s family structure turning up mentions of Beaver Cleaver – it doesn’t make Martians, or the Beav, any more real.

Unfortunately, not every legacy of the episode was a positive one.

In February 1949, Leonardo Paez and Eduardo Alcaraz produced a Spanish-language version of Welles’s 1938 script for Radio Quito in Quito, Ecuador. The broadcast set off panic in the city. Police and fire brigades rushed out of town to engage the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was fiction, the panic transformed into a riot and hundreds attacked Radio Quito and El Comercio, the local newspaper. In the days preceding the broadcast, El Comercio had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of unidentified objects in the skies above Ecuador. The riot resulted in six (or more) deaths, including those of Paez’s girlfriend and nephew. Paez moved to Venezuela after the incident. – wikipedia

Telling Tails

Behind the scenes of Planet Of The Apes Warning: Those with weak stomachs may find this post a bit rough.

I’m in a bit of a time crunch today, but I wanted to throw out an idea for your consideration. First, from the wikipedia:

Infrequently, a child is born with a “soft tail”, which contains no vertebrae, but only blood vessels, muscles, and nerves, although there have been several documented cases of tails containing cartilage or up to five vertebrae. […] A man named Chandre Oram, who lives in West Bengal, a state in India, is famous because of his 33-centimetre (13 in) tail. It is not believed to be a true tail, however, but rather a case of spina bifida.

While it’s not technically a ‘true’ tail, here’s a bit of Mr Oram from Japanese television.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUHYwUTVWWc]

– and, to add to your possible discomfort, here’s a clip I’ve little further information on, but which demonstrates a, uh, less-mushy ‘real’ tail.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnxzqeT466A]

I/We consider these oddities, and possibly even off-putting, but the reason I mention it is this: how long will it be – twenty years? – until bioengineering advances can activate our ancient attributes on demand, and allow those interested (I’m looking at you, Furry community) to grow custom prehensile-tails?

I’m not a huge fan of the aesthetics, but it would be handy to have an extra grip on my coffee.