Forbidden Knowledge Part 13

6 Well-spread Fabrications

The fifth-century-BCE dramatist Sophocles once said that "a lie never lives to be old." Clearly, Sophocles never heard the one about suicidal rodents, or about the world-famous animator frozen in suspended animation. Here's hoping that, at the very least, these lies don't live to be any older.

_01:: Elephants and Mice In spite of what you may have seen at the circus, elephants aren't afraid of mice. Actually, they're not afraid of anything, which is why it's not all that hard for poachers to kill them for ivory. For decades, circuses have featured elephants rearing up and trumpeting with fear upon catching "sight" of a scurrying mouse. But in reality, the elephants probably can't even see the mouse in questionthey have notoriously poor eyesight. Due to their excellent memories, however, elephants can learn a variety of tricks, including rearing up on their hind legs when ordered to do so by whip-brandis.h.i.+ng circus trainers. And while we're dispelling elephant rumors: There's no such thing as an elephant graveyard. When elephants are ready to die, they just fall down and do it, like the rest of us.

_02:: Betsy Ross In all likelihood, Betsy Ross did not design, or for that matter even sew, the first postUnion Jack American flag. Ross, a seamstress who took over her husband's upholstery business after he died fighting in the Revolutionary War, purportedly sewed the flag based on a pencil sketch from George Was.h.i.+ngton himself. But no evidence has ever been found to back up the Ross family story. In fact, most historians believe the flag was either based on the British East India Company's flag or designed by Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and early member of Congress. Regardless of who designed it, the Continental Congress officially adopted the Stars and Stripes in 1777, on June 14, which, in an amazing coincidence, happens to be Flag Day.

_03:: Disney's Remains Despite the ubiquitous rumor to the contrary, Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen after his death. Disney, who won more Academy Awards (26) than any other person, expressed a desire to be cremated, and his wish was carried out two days after his death on December 15, 1966. There's scant evidence, in fact, that Disney even knew that cryogenic freezing existed. At any rate, it's highly unlikely that cryogenic freezing could have saved Walt. Putting aside the fact that most scientists think frozen bodies will never be resurrectable, Disney's lung cancer necessitated the removal of his left lung a month before his death. So even if future scientists could have brought Walt back from the dead, he would have been awfully short of breath.

Touch of Evil It was a fascinating story how struggling musician Charles Manson auditioned for The Monkees back in 1965. Fascinating, and false! Manson was behind bars when the tryouts took place.

_04:: Lemmings The poor, oft-maligned lemmingsyou couldn't blame them for being suicidal, if they are, which they aren't. The notion of lemming suicide extends back at least to Freud, who in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) explained the human death instinct in the context of lemmings. But the notion didn't really take hold until Walt Disney's 1958 so-called doc.u.mentary White Wilderness. .h.i.t the big screen. For his film, the lovable animator s.h.i.+pped dozens of lemmings to Alberta, Canada, herded them off a cliff, filmed them falling to their deaths, and pa.s.sed it off as nonfiction. In reality, though, lemmings aren't suicidal. They're just dumb. Lemming populations explode in four-year cycles in Scandinavia, and when the tundra gets crowded, they seek out new land. Being stupid, they sometimes fall off cliffs, but not on purpose.

_05:: Rice at Weddings These days, it's become common practice for eco-friendly couples not to feature rice throwing at their weddings. After all, the science-deficient theory claims, birds eat the rice, which expands in their stomachs and causes them to explode. Rice farmers from Thailand to Arkansas probably wish that rice-eating birds blew up, but quite simply, they don't. The fact is, nuptial rice poses no more danger to birds than combining pop rocks and soda does to kids. So, how'd the rumor come about? It all started in 1988, when old Ann Landers discouraged readers from the practice. Of course, the USA Rice Federation (motto: "Proving there is a federation for everything") immediately debunked Landers's story, but, surprisingly (and disappointingly), Ann Landers had a broader readers.h.i.+p than the USA Rice Federation.

_06:: Van Gogh's Ear In the fierce compet.i.tion for the t.i.tle of History's Most Tortured Artist, Vincent van Gogh certainly makes a compelling case. Impoverished, unloved, and underappreciated in his time, van Gogh led a miserable life, potently symbolized by his missing left ear. We've all heard the story: He chopped it off and Pony Express-ed it to a prost.i.tute in a perverse act of lovehere is an artist so tortured, even the prost.i.tutes didn't love him! But wait! He didn't chop off his entire earjust the lower half of it. And it wasn't about women at all. In a fit of rage after an argument with friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin, van Gogh cut his ear to symbolize the end of their friends.h.i.+p, believing that Gauguin had grown "deaf" to his needs. Some claim van Gogh later visited a brothel to give the half-ear to a prost.i.tute named Rachel (hey, we never said he wasn't crazy), but he certainly never mailed anything!

Playing the Palace:

3 Showy Leaders and the

Envious Imitators They Inspired

A smaller-than-average castle can give a guy a complex, so it's no wonder so many world leaders suffer from palace envy. The following are three characters who were pretty eager to overspend in an attempt to overcompensate.

_01:: Francis I and Henry VIII In the first half of the 16th century, the kings of France and England were more than contemporaries, enemies, or allies. They were personal compet.i.tors. England's Henry VIII, especially, felt it important to keep up with French counterpart Francis I, and boy did it show. When the two were vigorous young men, handsome Hank fancied that his impressive physique outshone that of flashy Frank. But this was more than just a beauty compet.i.tion. When Henry went on a state visit to France in 1520, he had an extravagant pavilion of gold cloth (like a luxury tent village) built to match that of Francis, nearby. The three-week diplomatic campout, known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, was a daily orgy of expensively compet.i.tive pageantry that nearly bankrupted both countries. The compet.i.tion didn't end there. Later, Henry spent heavily on arts and architecture, trying not to be outdistanced by the sophistication of Francis's capital.

_02:: Louis XIV and Leopold I and...

If a finance minister builds a house bigger than the king's, the king gets suspicious. That isn't exactly what happened to Nicolas Fouquet, who in 1661 threw a party for his boss, the "Sun King" of France, at Fouquet's magnificent new chateau, Vaux-le-Vicomte. Impressed, Louis XIV moved straight past the suspicion phase, and threw his host in jail. Then, he put Fouquet's former architects and builders to work on the royal estate outside Paris. Completed in 1682, the huge and incredibly ornate Palace of Versailles inspired envy in monarchs everywhere. In response, Leopold I of the Austro-Hungarian Empire commissioned a "hunting lodge" outside Vienna, the 1,440-room Schonbrunn Palace, completed in 1695. Other monarchs who retaliated with a Versailles of their own: "Mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Castle Herrenchiemsee) and Empress Elizabeth of Russia (the Winter Palace).

Touch of Evil As America's fifth president, James Monroe was so flattered by comments about his resemblance to George Was.h.i.+ngton that he dressed in the same style the Father of Our Country did. Sadly, that style was way out of date by then.

Scandalicious CAMBODIAN WIVES LASH OUT AGAINST ADULTERY (WITH BATTERY ACID).

Adultery is frowned upon in most societies, but in Cambodia it can mean taking your life into your hands. During the late 1990s, a rash of attacks by high-society ladies against their husbands' mistresses broke out. In the most famous case, Bun Ray, the wife of Prime Minister Hun Sen, hired hit men to murder Piseth Pilika, a Cambodian film star who was reputed to be a.s.sisting the prime minister with his homework after hours. Another infamous incident occured on December 5, 1999, when Tan Chhay Marina, a teenage actress and singer, was horribly disfigured when five liters of battery acid were dumped on her by the wife of Svay Sitha, an undersecretary of state.

_03:: Richard Nixon and Queen Elizabeth II U.S. president Richard Nixon liked a bit of pomp (with occasional circ.u.mstance). After all, Tricky d.i.c.k often saw other heads of state protected by guards in bright-colored uniforms with s.h.i.+ny trim or tall fur hats (as in Britain's famous Beefeaters outside Queen Elizabeth's official London residence). But what did the White House have? Guys in dark, plain security uniforms. Wanting a piece of the regal action, Nixon ordered a redesign of the outfits worn by White House guards (Secret Service Uniformed Division). Unveiled in 1970, the new duds featured gold-trimmed tunics and rigid, peaked hats reminiscent of 19th-century Prussia. The royalist look didn't go over so well with Americans. Critics howled. Comedians snickered. And the White House immediately threw out the Prussian hats. Within a few years the fancy duds (along with their chief proponent) were retired entirely.

Who Throws a Shoe? Honestly!

5 Grossly Mismatched Warfare a.r.s.enals

We know all's supposedly fair in love and war, but somehow these conditions still seem remarkably stilted.

_01:: Romans v. Celts At the beginning of their long march to supremacy, the Romans had an early advantage because they knew how to make steel weapons that were much stronger than their opponents' iron weapons. Iron swords and spearheads were relatively simple to make, requiring that the blacksmith melt down iron ore in a furnace, hammer the metal into a blade, and then shape and sharpen it on a forge. To make steel, the Romans understood, the blade had to be put back in the furnace for a long period to allow carbon from the coals to infiltrate the metal, making it stronger. The results for their enemies were often disastrous: in a series of battles the Romans fought against the Celts, who were armed with iron weapons, the Celts' swords became so badly deformed that the Celtic warriors had to bend them back to their original shape over their knees in the middle of combat.

_02:: English v. French at Agincourt When the English, led by King Henry V, fought the French in the battle of Agincourt, they had a secret weapon: Welsh subjects trained in the use of the longbow. Amazingly, these weapons of war were simply five-foot-high yew arcs that could be used to shoot eight arrows a minute, each arrow about three feet long. And the rapid-fire a.s.sault was too much for the French. With a total force of about 5,000 archers, Henry slaughtered the pride of French chivalry before Genovese crossbowmen in French employ were even in range. In fact, it was said that the ground was covered with so many white feathers from the arrow fletching that it looked like snow.

_03:: Spanish v. Aztecs and Incas When the Spanish invaded Mexico and Peru in the early 16th century, they wielded weaponry far superior to anything the Aztecs and Incas could have imagined. The 600 Spaniards who landed at the site of modern-day Vera Cruz in 1519, under the command of Hernando Cortes, carried firearmsmusketsand small cannons, and rode horses, all of which terrified the Aztec natives. And though the Aztecs fiercely fought back on foot with swords and spears made out of sharp pieces of obsidian, or black volcanic gla.s.s, set in pieces of wood, ultimately they were no match for the Spaniards. Despite Cortes's encountering a few setbacks, there was no contest, and he managed to subdue five million Aztecs with his tiny army. Similarly, beginning in 1530, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro subdued the Inca empire with 180 soldiers, fighting a native army of about 40,000 men.

_04:: English v. Mahdi in Sudan When the forces of British general Charles Gordon were surrounded and eventually destroyed by Islamic fundamentalist tribesmen at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1885, the blow to British prestige was tremendous. In fact, the imperialist nation was so embarra.s.sed that it decided the event demanded a total and overwhelming response. To get revenge, the British s.h.i.+pped a well-trained army to fight the native Muslim rebels in central Sudan. But the army wasn't just well trained; they were well armed, and were even carrying Gatling gunsprototype machine guns that drew ammunition from a long straight clip filing through the firing chamber. The result at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 was decisive and horrendous, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of native tribesmen with virtually no British casualties.

_05:: Germans v. Poles One of the better-known instances of grossly mismatched weaponry in warfare occurred in 1939 when n.a.z.i Germany under the dictators.h.i.+p of Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. At the time Poland was an underdeveloped nation that had become independent only 20 years before. Itching to get his hands on more real estate, and determined to "restore" Germany's "original" borders, Hitler sent modern German tanks, at the head of regular and mechanized infantry, cras.h.i.+ng into Poland. Simultaneously, the Fuhrer sent the German air force to pound Polish cities from the sky. The Stuka dive-bombers railed on the virtually undefended towns, and killed tens of thousands of people in Warsaw alone. It wasn't exactly a fair fight. The impoverished Poles fielded horse-mounted cavalry and peasant brigades armed with old-fas.h.i.+oned muskets in an effort to resist the Germans. Their air effort was even more pathetic: the few antiquated World War Iera biplanes were no match for the Germans. In three weeks, Poland was finished.

They Put the "No" in n.o.bel:

7 Geniuses and 1 Entire Science

That Never Won the Big One

Scientists are supposed to be above petty politics and popularity contests, right? Nope. Here are a few bright bulbs that never got the fancy n.o.bel gold medallion (or the 10 million Swedish krona that go with it). And you thought the Oscars were bad.

_01:: Joan Robinson, Economics Great Britain's Joan Robinson may be one of the most exciting figures in the history of "the Dismal Science." An acolyte of the great John Maynard Keynes, her work covered a wide range of economic topics, from neocla.s.sicism to Keynes's general theory to Marxian theory. Not to mention, her notion of imperfect compet.i.tion still shows up in every Econ 101 cla.s.s. Add to that the fact that Robinson's greatest work, The Acc.u.mulation of Capital, was published way back in 1956 but is still widely used as an economics textbook. So why no n.o.bel? The easy answer is that she's a female, and no female has ever won the n.o.bel in Economics. Others say that Robinson's work over her career was too eclectic, rather than hyper-focused like that of so many other laureates. Still others claim that she was undesirable as a laureate because of her vocal praise for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a thoroughly anti-intellectual enterprise.

_02:: James Joyce and _03:: Marcel Proust, Literature One wrote Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, almost universally regarded as two of the most brilliant works of the 20th century (in the case of Ulysses, the most brilliant). And the other is, well, Marcel Proust. Proust's towering work, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time, or, sometimes, Remembrance of Things Past) is considered one of the greatest literary achievements ever, combining seven novels and 2,000 characters for a celebration of life, consciousness, and s.e.xuality spanning 3,200 pages. James Joyce's works and stream-of-consciousness style are the basis of countless college courses, doctoral theses, and poetic ruminations. But the writings of Proust and Joyce were probably just too controversial and "out there" for the more conservative n.o.bel committees of their day. And n.o.bel's stricture against posthumous awards hasn't exactly helped, especially since the influence of these two artists has continued to grow long after their deaths. Most ironic, Proust and Joyce have been major influences on many writers who went on to win n.o.bels themselves, like Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Hermann Hesse. Other literary giants who have gotten the n.o.bel shaft? Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertold Brecht, Graham Greene, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few.

_04:: Dmitri Mendeleev, Chemistry Why would this guy deserve a n.o.bel Prize for chemistry? After all, his only achievement was to devise the entire periodic table of elements, the miracle of organization and inference on which all of modern chemistry is based. Mendeleev's table was so good, it even predicted the existence of elements that hadn't yet been discovered. But here's where politics rears its ugly head. In 1906, Mendeleev was selected by the prize committee to win the honor, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stepped in and overturned the decision. Why? The intervention was spearheaded by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who had himself won the prize in 1903 for his theory of electrolytic dissociation. Mendeleev had been an outspoken critic of the theory, and Arrhenius seized the opportunity as the perfect chance to squeeze a few sour grapes.

_05:: Jules-Henri Poincare, Physics Although Poincare was a mathematician, his genius was too universal to be confined to one category. Sure, he came up with all sorts of mathematical theories with crazy names: algebraic topology, abelian functions, and Diophantine equations. But he was into physics, too. Poincare laid the foundation for modern chaos theory and even beat Einstein to the punch on certain facets of the theory of special relativity. And one of his math problems, the Poincare conjecture, even remained unsolved for nearly 100 years! So why was Henri overlooked for the Big One? Due to Alfred n.o.bel's stipulation that his prizes go to those whose discoveries have been of practical benefit to mankind, the n.o.bel committees have often been accused of rewarding experimental discoveries over purely theoretical advances. Poincare's work in physics seems to be a victim of that prejudice.

_06:: Raymond Damadian, Medicine Lots of deserving folks have been pa.s.sed over for the n.o.bel, but few were as vocal about it as 2003 runner-up Raymond V. Damadian. He was the brain behind the science of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique that completely revolutionized the detection and treatment of cancer. But the 2003 Prize for Medicine went to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, two scientists who expanded on Damadian's discovery. Enraged at the slight, Damadian ran full-page ads in the the New York Times and Was.h.i.+ngton Post featuring a photo of the n.o.bel Prize medal upside down and the headline "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted." The ad featured quotes from other scientists backing up Damadian's claim, even a letter of protest to be cut out, signed, and mailed to the n.o.bel Committee. Some claim Damadian was slighted because his fundamentalist Christian belief in creationism made him anathema to the scientific community. Others say it was because his discovery wasn't really useful in medicine until Lauterbur and Mansfield improved upon it. Either way, 2003 left the poor scientist n.o.bel-less.

_07:: Mahatma Gandhi, Peace The Susan Lucci of n.o.bel Peace Prize contenders, Mohandas "Mahatma" (Great-Souled) Gandhi was nominated like crazy: 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. He certainly deserved it, as his nonviolent methods helped kick the British out of India and became the model for future Peace Prize laureates like Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi's final nomination came in 1948, and he was the odds-on favorite to win it that year. However, the "Mahatma" was a.s.sa.s.sinated just a few days before the deadline. Since the n.o.bel Prize is never awarded posthumously, the prize for peace went unawarded that year on the grounds that there was "no suitable living candidate." The decision was also motivated by the fact that Gandhi left no heirs or foundations to which his prize money could go.

_08:: Oh, and Anybody in Mathematics When dynamite inventor (that's not a comment on his abilities; he really did invent dynamite) Alfred n.o.bel stipulated in his will that his fortune be used to establish a fund to award five annual prizes "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," he mysteriously left out mathematics. All kinds of theories have popped up to explain the omission, the most salacious of which claim that n.o.bel hated all mathematicians because his wife was schtupping one on the side. Nope. The most likely reasons for n.o.bel's ditching math are (1) He simply didn't like math all that much, and (2) Sweden already had a big, fancy prize for mathematics, bestowed by the journal Acta Mathematica. Although math is still a n.o.bel bridesmaid, a prize for economics was added in 1968, thereby giving the extremely boring sciences their due.

Touch of Evil Before making a bang with dynamite and creating his famous prizes, Alfred n.o.bel lost his company to bankruptcy and his brother to a nitroglycerine explosion.

The Gra.s.s Is Definitely Greener:

3 Tiny Nations That Were Happy to

Colonize Africa

Historians call the gobbling up of territory at the end of the 19th century "the Scramble for Africa." And while the big European powerhousesGermany, England, Francegot much of the good stuff, there were plenty of sc.r.a.ps left for the little guys, too. Here are a few tiny nations that made out like bandits.

_01:: Portugal While most people think of Portugal lurking in its big brother Spain's shadows, the tiny nation was quite the world power in the 15th and 16th centuries, and had early established outposts in West Africa. By the 1880s, however, Portugal's star had fallen, and it moved to being a second-tier global player. Still, it was pretty crafty in its imperial ways. While the big countries were occupied with bickering with one other, Portugal decided it was still occupied with, well, occupying. It took over most of both Angola and Mozambique, and by 1900 the nation controlled about 8% of the continent. Because it was a poor country, though, it could do little for its colonies except exploit them, which it did with gusto. In 1961, revolutions that had been brewing for years finally burst out. Five years of war were followed by seven years of unrest, and in 1974, Mozambique won its independence. In 1975, the Portuguese wisely left Angola and turned out the lights on their imperial ways.

_02:: Italy Amazingly enough, Italy has the distinction of being the only European country to have had its b.u.t.t kicked by an African nation, when it tried to conquer Ethiopia. How so? Italy had formed a colony in neighboring Eritrea. And while they were negotiating a friends.h.i.+p treaty with Ethiopia, the Italians cleverly decided that simultaneously invading the African nation would be a good way to seal their pact. Not so. In the Battle of Adova in 1896, Ethiopians under Emperor Menelik II soundly defeated the Italians. The loss didn't sit well, obviously, and in 1936, Italy attacked Ethiopia again. This time it was literally airplanes and tanks against spears, and the Italians held on for five years. With the outbreak of World War II, though, British troops and Ethiopian freedom fighters drove the Italians out, and expelled Italy from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, too. So much for the Roman Empire's comeback.

_03:: Belgium If there was a single infernal spark to the Scramble for Africa, it was King Leopold II of Belgium. After all, it was Leo who convened meetings of European nations to compromise on divvying up the continent. In fact, the Belgian king was so anxious to build an empire, he used his own money to buy a huge section of the Congo River Basin, 80 times the size of Belgium itself! As exploitation was the name of the colony-building game, Leopold followed the recipe to a T. The monarch literally bled his African kingdom, mutilating and torturing its residents when they failed to meet crop quotas or pay taxes. By 1908, however, the international outcry was so loud over Leopold's excesses that he was forced to transfer control of the Congo to the Belgian government. From then on, the Belgian government ruled the area, mostly badly, until 1960, when it was finally given its independence.

Touch of Evil In 1821, the politically powerful American Colonization Society literally bought what would become a country. The land purchase in western Africa provided a home for freed slaves from America, and the citizens formed the independent republic of Liberia in 1847.

6 Musicians Who Always Felt Cheated Sometimes it isn't just the guitar that's gently weeping. The following six musicians definitely felt they got the short end of the stick as far as their bands were concerned.

_01:: Syd "Wish You Were Here" Barrett (1946) During the early 1960s, a London art student named Syd Barrett teamed up with four kids from the Regent Street School of Architecture to form an R & B group. Barrett named the band the Pink Floyd Sound after a blues record by Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and the group was off and running. Trading their sound in for a psychedelic one, the band became a huge hit around London. By 1968, however, Barrett's excessive drug use and mood swings made his onstage and offstage behavior a little too erratic and strange. The band brought in David Gilmour to cover the performances and Barrett was sacked within the year. Of course, Gilmour brought a heft of talent with him, and in 1973, Pink Floyd became an international success with the release of "Dark Side of the Moon." Some years later, they achieved superstardom with The Wall alb.u.m and movie. At the same time, Barrett was working on solo projects but continued in a downward spiral of bad health. While not much of a consolation, Pink Floyd did dedicate their 1975 hit "s.h.i.+ne On, You Crazy Diamond" to Barrett, a cut off their alb.u.m Wish You Were Here.

THOMAS CARLYLE'S HORRIBLE-TERRIBLE, NO-GOOD,

VERY BAD DAY.