Now I Know Read online

  NOW I KNOW

  THE REVEALING STORIES BEHIND THE WORLD’S MOST INTERESTING FACTS

  DAN LEWIS

  Avon, Massachusetts

  DEDICATION

  To Stephanie, Ethan, Alex, Annie, and my parents.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  And, the Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

  OMG WTF IQ

  OMG, Prime Minister

  Major Fraud

  Bat Bomb

  Beating the Bomb

  Beating the Odds

  Turning Yellow Into Gold

  Sable’s Stable

  The Money Pit

  The Halifax Tragedy

  Wash Out

  Everyone’s Tea Time

  Deep in the Heart of Wartime

  The Sentence of One Hand Clapping

  The Man with the Golden Arm

  De Grote Donorshow

  Donor

  Pain in the Red

  Red Light, Green Light

  Fandemonium

  Fans and Peanuts

  Killing Charlotte Braun

  Lunch and a Murder

  The Passion of the Money-Laundering Extortionist

  Stolen Smile

  Unvandalism

  Dissolving Medals

  A City Fit for a King

  Cola Enforcement Agency

  Mr. Acid

  High and Outside

  Performance Enhancing Injuries

  Wood Medalist

  Out of Sync

  To Kill a Sparrow

  The Cobra Effect

  The Aptly Named Snake Island

  Where the Bodies Go

  Slaying the Silver Ball

  The Free City of Tri-Insula

  The North in the South

  Where the Bags Go

  Finding the Titanic

  The Two Soviets Who Saved the World

  Blame Cuba

  Invading Canada

  The Pig War

  Bacon of the Sea

  McLibel

  McHotDogs

  Potato Parties

  Fire Horse Women

  Pumpkin Saving Time

  Trick of Treats

  One-Armed Bandits

  The Zong

  The Overwater Railroad

  Rats!

  The Assault of Amagansett

  War Games

  Missile Mail

  Space Mail

  Star-Spangled Moon Banners

  Marooned on the Moon

  D-Day’s Doomed Dry Run

  If Day

  Unhip to Be Square

  Limonana

  A Date with Destiny

  Super Seed Bank

  Thou Shalt Not Die

  Norwegian Wood

  A Festivus for the Peruvians

  Ice Cream, You Scream

  Put on a Happy Face

  The Perfect Crime Scene

  The Usual Suspects

  Pruning Up

  Temporary Blindness

  The Bird is the Word

  A Princely Meal Fit For a Pauper

  The Greatest Thing Since

  Color by Number

  Orange Goes Green

  Gone Bananas

  Radioactive Red

  Bull’s Eyes

  Blood Falls

  Leaving Marks

  No Man’s Land

  Garbage City

  The Trash Collectors

  Pork Project

  The Great Syrup Caper

  Oil Baron

  Onion Ring

  Lift Off

  Skyscraper Caper

  To Infinity and Beyond

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Truth is stranger than fiction. Someone once said that. I have no idea who, but he or she is right—the most astonishing things around us aren’t made up; they’re real. Mark Twain once allegedly observed why: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

  For more than three years, I’ve been writing about these interesting facts and the fascinating stories behind them. For example, everyone knows that airlines occasionally lose luggage, but what happens when they find it months later? If it never goes back to its owner, where does it go? We know that people landed on the moon. But what would have happened if they couldn’t get home? And what happens to the stuff they left behind, like the American flags?

  In this book, you’ll find the answers to those questions, and the stories behind 100 of the world’s most mind-blowing pieces of trivia. Each entry includes a fact, the story behind that fact, and a related bonus fact. I’ve tried to connect them all in some way, piggybacking off one another, but they don’t form a logical line. You’ll zigzag from McDonald’s (why can’t you get a hot dog there?) to Daylight Saving Time (and pumpkins … you’ll see!) pretty quickly. We’ll look at the strangest reality TV show in history (it’s Dutch) and somehow wander to the world’s strangest traffic signals (they’re North Korean), all in the span of about ten pages. Together, we’ll jump around from one thing to another, always finding something interesting along the way. Chances are, wherever you wind up, it’ll be someplace interesting. (For more of this sort of thing, go to my website, www.NowIKnow.com. There you’ll find a lot more random facts and the stories behind them—did you know Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service … on the day he was fatally shot?)

  As each story proves that truth is stranger than fiction, you’ll be able to declare now I know—and that’s half the battle. So welcome to the world of the utterly strange, which couldn’t be made up because it couldn’t be true, except that, as we all know, it is. Somehow.

  AND, THE TWENTY-SEVENTH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET

  WHY THE “AND” SYMBOL IS CALLED AN AMPERSAND

  The English alphabet contains twenty-six letters, with two of the letters—“A” and “I”—themselves also constituting words. However, another character—the ampersand (&)—was also, at times, included in the alphabet. And amazingly, the word “ampersand” is probably a by-product of the symbol’s inclusion.

  The ampersand was developed along with the rest of the alphabet back in the early years of Rome in the seventh century B.C.E. Romans would occasionally combine the letters “E” and “T” into a similar symbol, representing the word “et” meaning “and.” It was included in the Old English alphabet, which was still in use into medieval times. When Old English was discarded in favor of the modern English we are familiar with, the ampersand maintained its status of “member of the alphabet” (to coin a phrase) to a degree, with some regions and dialects opting to include it until the mid-1800s.

  Except that it was not yet called an ampersand. The & sign was, rather, referred to simply as “and”—which made reciting the alphabet awkward. As Dictionary.com states, it was (and is) odd to say “X Y Z and.” So, people didn’t. Instead, our lexicon developed another saying: “X, Y, and Z, and by itself, ‘and’ ”—but instead of saying “by itself,” the Latin phrase per se came into favor. The result? “And per se, and,” or, muttered quickly by a disinterested student, “ampersand.”

  Why the inclusion of the ampersand in the alphabet fell out of use is anyone’s guess, but there is a good chance that credit goes to the ABC song we are almost all familiar with—that is, the one that shares its tune with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (and borrows from Mozart’s “Ah Vous Dirai-je, Maman”). That song was copyrighted in 1835, around the time that the ampersand started falling out of favor with the rest of the ABCs.

  BONUS FACT

  Although Old English included the ampersand, it did not include a few letters we use today, notably “J,” “U,” and “W.” “J” and “U” did not become letters until the sixteenth century (they were, instead, represented by “I” and “V,” respectively), and
“W” became a letter independent of “U” soon after.

  OMG WTF IQ

  THE CENSORING OF A SUPER-COMPUTER

  If you’re a Jeopardy! fan, and particularly one who watched the show in 2004, there’s a nearly 50 percent chance you’ve seen Ken Jennings on the screen. That year, Jennings, a software engineer from Utah, won seventy-four consecutive episodes spanning 182 calendar days (due to weekends, the show’s week off in the summer, and interruptions from various tournament and special episodes). His total prize money from his seventy-four wins and one second-place finish exceeded $2.5 million.

  Jennings earned another $800,000 from subsequent Jeopardy! appearances to date. In 2005, he returned for the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions, involving 145 of the game’s biggest winners over the previous two decades. Jennings came in second, earning $500,000. And in February 2011, he and the champion of the Ultimate Tournament, Brad Rutter, faced off against Watson, a computer built by engineers at IBM.

  Watson beat the two human champions, earning $1 million for a pair of charities. Jennings earned $300,000 and Rutter $200,000 for third place. (Each of the humans donated half their winnings to charity as well.) Watson’s programming team fed the computer more than 200 million pages of data from sources such as Wikipedia, news articles, dictionaries, and thesauruses. Although Watson succeeded in beating Jennings and Rutter, its creators realized that it had a flaw—Watson had a difficult time, to say the least, understanding slang and the nuances of the English language. Around the same time the Jeopardy! episode aired, Team Watson introduced a new data source to the machine’s databanks—entries from the slang and shorthand website Urban Dictionary.

  Founded in 1999, Urban Dictionary invites users to suggest and vote on words and phrases that have entered our collective lexicon but aren’t generally accepted, at least not by sources such as Merriam-Webster’s or the OED. Over the years, the website has gained acceptance in more formal environments; for example, according to www.thesmokinggun.com, it was used as a source by federal prosecutors when a suspect posted to Facebook about how he intended to “murk” someone. (“Murk,” per Urban Dictionary, means, “to physically beat someone so severely, he ends up dying from his injuries.”) But it also includes a bunch of terms that contain vulgarity and, when used without an appreciation for the connotation of the terms, shouldn’t be used in certain environments.

  Watson lacked that appreciation. As reported by Fortune, the computerized Jeopardy! champ “couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity,” even using some choice, bovine-related language when telling its programmer-researchers that they were incorrect about something. The researchers added profanity filtering to Watson’s programming, but this proved inadequate given the extensiveness of Urban Dictionary.

  Finding no alternative—unless one wants to build a genius robot that swears like a sailor—the researchers removed Urban Dictionary from Watson’s database.

  BONUS FACT

  Ken Jennings’s incredible Jeopardy! run almost got derailed before it truly started. On his first episode of the show, the Final Jeopardy! question (or, in Jeopardy! parlance, “answer”) was “She’s the first female track and field athlete to win medals in five different events at a single Olympics.” Jennings, with $20,000 going into Final Jeopardy!, led his two opponents. In second place was Julia Lazarus, who had $18,600. Lazarus waged $3,799, but got the answer incorrect, writing “Who is Gail?” (she later told host Alex Trebek that she had no idea what the correct answer was), bringing her total to $14,801. Jennings wagered $17,201; if he got the answer right, he’d win, but a wrong answer would send him home (and in last place for the day). He wrote “Who is Jones?”—a somewhat ambiguous response. Trebek immediately stated that the judges “will accept that; in terms of female athletes, there aren’t that many.” (The right Jones? Marion.)

  OMG, PRIME MINISTER

  WHERE OMG COMES FROM

  OMG, as anyone under the age of twenty-one (and practically everyone else, at this point) knows, stands for “oh my god!” The acronym is commonly used in text messaging but it predates the era of ubiquitous cell phones. In fact, it predates the era of ubiquitous phones—cellular or otherwise.

  The Oxford English Dictionary has long been the standard-bearer of what belongs in the English language and what does not. Unlike other dictionaries, which stay faithful to a long-established vocabulary of words, the OED tries to adapt to the lexicon of the day. So when words and similar terms enter our collective parlance, the OED’s editors may end up adding them to their dictionary. In March 2011, “OMG” was one of the added terms, along with “muffin top” (“a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers”) and “LOL,” meaning “laugh out loud.”

  But the OED doesn’t simply define the word. It also attempts to track down the term’s origins. Sometimes, it fails, of course; take for example the term “rubber game,” which is the deciding game in a bridge match or baseball series. The term has been in use for decades, if not centuries, but no one—at least no one the OED can find—knows where it comes from.

  OMG, on the other hand, has a known first use. It isn’t from the mid-1990s, when the Internet started on its path to ubiquity, or even from the 1980s, when services such as Prodigy and Compuserve dominated the early digital communications space. The term OMG dates back to 1917 and, strangely, involves Winston Churchill, at the time a British Member of Parliament, and, of course, the future Prime Minister of that nation. That year, the recently retired Admiral of the British Navy, John Arbuthnot Fisher, wrote Churchill about rumors of new honorifics potentially coming down from the crown. Specifically, per the OED, he wrote: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!”

  The OED doesn’t mention Churchill’s reply, if any, and does not explain why Admiral Fisher needed to both use the acronym and immediately write out its full meaning. The OED does, however, provide the next earliest known use—1994, in an online newsgroup about soap operas. The author asked the rest of the group, simply, “OMG, what did I say?”

  BONUS FACT

  On June 1, 1943, actor Leslie Howard—best known for his portrayal of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind—died when the Nazi Luftwaffe shot down the civilian airplane he and a dozen others were aboard. (The UK did not consider the route to be part of the war zone; the Germans clearly disagreed.) But the actor’s death was, according to one widely believed account, not simple chance. As the theory goes, the Germans targeted the plane because they were led to believe that Winston Churchill, who was in Algiers and hoping to return to Great Britain, was on the plane. He, of course, was not.

  MAJOR FRAUD

  HOW A DEAD MAN FOUGHT THE NAZIS

  During World War II, the British government tightly controlled information about casualties. Providing such details—who died, when, and where—could provide the Nazis and the other Axis powers with information they’d not otherwise have, and risk British and Allied efforts around the globe. At the same time, the government felt obligated to communicate the war’s events to its citizenry. These two desires were in obvious tension, and the government found a happy medium by releasing death notices to the newspapers.

  Although these death notices came with the risks noted above, they also offered opportunity. On June 4, 1943, the Times published the announcements of the death of three officers and that of actor Leslie Howard. One of the officers was a member of the Royal Marines, a Major William Martin, who drowned in late April of that year.

  Kind of. Major Martin hadn’t actually died. He couldn’t have—because he never actually existed.

  With the war in full swing at the end of 1942, seizing control of the Mediterranean was high on the Allies’ list of military objectives, and the eventual success in North Africa would make that even more likely. But capturing other locations could be an even larger boon. Sicily, for example, served as a key island; as Winston Churchill reportedly com
mented, “Everyone but a bloody fool would know” that Sicily had to be next on the Allies’ punch list.

  So the UK decided to try and play Hitler for a bloody fool. The plan, called “Operation Mincemeat,” was developed in part from a memo written by future James Bond author Ian Fleming. Operation Mincemeat involved leveraging the Nazi intelligence department’s cozy relationship with Spain by planting some disinformation on the Spanish shore. The disinformation came in the form of a pair of dossiers outlining, among other things, the Allies’ plans to invade Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica, all while feigning an attack on Sicily. To deliver these dossiers into the hands of the Spanish and, ultimately, the Germans, British intelligence’s MI5 unit called the fictitious Major Martin into duty. Or, more accurately, they threw a corpse wearing his clothes—and holding the dossiers—into the sea.

  In January 1943, a thirty-four-year-old homeless Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael died of liver failure caused, indirectly, by ingesting rat poison. Michael’s death was difficult to determine and his parents had already died, making him—his dead body, that is—a solid stand-in for the Royal Marine that British intelligence was about to create. Michael’s body was dressed in a manner suitable for Martin’s rank and stature, even down to the high-quality underwear. (Quality underwear was rationed at the time and difficult to obtain, but a major in the Royal Marines would certainly be wearing some.)

  Intelligence created a backstory for him, including a fiancée named Pam, and gave him love letters, a receipt for an engagement ring from a London establishment (dated April 19, 1943), and a picture of her (really of a clerk in MI5). To finish the ruse, Major Martin was given ticket stubs to a London theater, dated April 24, and—to make him appear careless—an ID card marked “replacement.” All these items were placed in a briefcase, along with two copies of the Mediterranean war plans, one for British troops and one to be forwarded to U.S. commanders. The second copy was created simply to justify the use of a briefcase in the operation.

  The body was taken aboard a British submarine, which surfaced on April 30. That day, the corpse was tossed into the waters, the briefcase tied around the loop of the fallen major’s trench coat. It washed up on shore as planned. The official cause of death by the Spanish medical inspector was “drowning” and, because Martin’s belongings suggested that he was a Roman Catholic, the examiner declined to perform an autopsy. The documents, after a few days, made their way into German hands—despite British “efforts” to recover them. On May 13, the Spanish returned the body to the British so that it could properly buried, and it was clear that the briefcase had been opened and its content analyzed.