Gentle Giant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MartinVanBurenBates.jpeg

Size was no impediment to Martin Van Buren Bates, a quiet schoolteacher who found that his enormous size (7’9″) served him better on the battlefields of the Civil War. The “Kentucky Giant” rose quickly from private to captain in the Fifth Kentucky Infantry; Union soldiers told of a “Confederate giant who’s as big as five men and fights like 50.”

After the war, Bates was touring Canada with a circus when he met Anna Haining Swan, another enormously tall person (7’5″), and they married in London, where Queen Victoria gave them two extra-large diamond-studded gold watches as wedding presents.

Their 18-pound child was stillborn, and they ordered an oversize house custom-built in Ohio, with 14-foot ceilings and giant furniture. “To see our guests make use of it,” wrote Bates, “recalls most forcibly the good Dean Swift’s traveler in the land of Brobdingnag.”

The pair toured again, and lost another son, this one 28 inches tall and weighing 22 pounds. “He looked at birth like an ordinary child of six months,” Bates wrote. But “with this exception our lot has been one of almost uninterrupted joy.”

When Anna died in 1886, Martin sold the house and married a woman of normal stature, with whom he lived peacefully until he died of nephritis in Seville in 1919.

| History · Oddities

Jimmy Hoffa’s Grave

Rumored whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body:

  • Buried in northern Michigan
  • Buried under the New Jersey Turnpike
  • Buried in an abandoned coal mine near Pittston, Pa.
  • Buried in Fresh Kills landfill, Staten Island, New York
  • Buried under the end zone at Giants Stadium in New Jersey
  • Buried in PJP Landfill in Jersey City, underneath the Pulaski Skyway
  • Mechanically converted to cement
  • Dissolved in an acid tank used to rechrome car bumpers
  • Rendered into fat at a rendering plant

His body has never been found, and in 1982 he was declared legally dead.

Ironically, his middle name was Riddle.

| Crime · Death

Prescription Abbreviations

Abbreviations used in prescriptions:

  • a.c. (ante cibum) – before meals
  • ad lib. (ad libitum) – use as much as one desires; freely
  • alt. h. (alternis horis) – every other hour
  • c (cibos) – food
  • D.A.W. – dispense as written
  • dc, D/C, disc – discontinue
  • e.m.p. (ex modo prescripto) – as directed
  • ex aq – in water
  • h.s. (hora somni) – at bedtime
  • L.A.S. – label as such
  • N.K.A. – no known allergies
  • noct. (nocte) – at night
  • NPO, n.p.o. (non per os) – nothing by mouth
  • p.c. (post cibum) – after meals
  • p.o. (per os) – by mouth or orally
  • s.a. (secundum artum) – use your judgement
  • sig – write on label
  • s.o.s., si op. sit (si opus sit) – if there is a need

Napoleon Bonaparte described medicine as “a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.”

| Science & Math · Trivia

Car Company Name Etymologies

Origins of car company names:

  • Cadillac: Named after the founder of Detroit, French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. Cadillac is a small town in the South of France.
  • Daewoo: “Great Universe” in Korean.
  • Mercedes: The first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, who worked for the early Daimler company around 1900.
  • Mitsubishi: “Water chestnut,” reflected as a stylized rhombus in the company’s logo.
  • Pontiac: A Native American Ottawa war leader.
  • Subaru: From the Japanese name for the Pleiades (Subaru was formed from a merger of seven other companies).
  • Volkswagen: The “people’s car.”
  • Volvo: Latin for “I roll.”
| Trivia

Latin Proverbs

Latin proverbs:

  • Audi alteram partem – “Hear the other side.”
  • Credo quia absurdum – “I believe it because it is absurd.”
  • Errare humanum est; perseverare diabolicum – “To err is human; to repeat error is of the devil.”
  • Ex nihilo nihil fit – “Nothing comes from nothing.”
  • Festina lente – “Make haste slowly.”
  • Gutta cavat lapidem – “Constant dropping wears the stone.”
  • Mundus vult decipi – “The world wants to be deceived.”
  • Natura non contristur – “Nature isn’t sentimental.”
  • Quem di diligunt, adulescens moritur – “Whom the gods love dies young.”
  • Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor – “I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way.”

The motto of the Addams Family is Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc — “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.”

| Language

More Bad Poetry

More bad poetry, from J.B. Smiley’s A Basket of Chips (1888):

The north winds are still and the blizzards at rest,
All in the beautiful spring.
The dear little robins are building their nests,
All in the beautiful spring.
The tramp appears and for lodging begs,
The old hen setteth on turkey eggs,
And the horse has scratches in all four legs,
All in the beautiful spring.
Kalamazoo
On the outskirts are celery marshes
Which only a few years ago
Were as wet as a drugstore in Kansas
And as worthless as marshes could grow,
Well some genius bethought him to drain them
And to add in a short year or two
About eighty-five thousand dollars
To the income of Kalamazoo.
The Michigan Insane Asylum
Is up on the top of the hill,
And some irresponsible crazies
Meander around there at will,
And they frequently talk to a stranger,
And they sometimes escape, it is true,
But the folks are not all of them crazy
Who hail from Kalamazoo.

| Poems

Bacon’s Universe

An actor’s “Bacon number” is the number of successive co-stars through whom he can be linked to actor Kevin Bacon (hence the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”). For example, Elvis Presley has a Bacon number of 2: He appeared in Change of Heart (1969) with Edward Asner, who appeared in JFK with Bacon.

Surprisingly, most actors have a Bacon number of only 2 or 3. So far, of all the actors listed in the Internet Movie Database, only one can’t be linked at all: Fred Ott, who appeared by himself in two features released in the late 1800s.

Mathematically, Bacon isn’t even the most linkable actor — that honor belongs to Rod Steiger. The average Bacon number is 2.955; the average Steiger number is 2.679.

| Entertainment