mulomedic
adj. relating to the medical care of mules
SPCSCPG
The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George” was a lighthearted association with a useful, if incidental, cause. Most railway porters were black, and many passengers called them all George, following the racist custom of naming slaves after their masters. (George Pullman ran the company that made the cars, so the porters were regarded as his servants.)
Strangely, the prevention society was founded not by the black porters, but by white railway employees who were actually named George. Apparently they were either annoyed by the tradition or thought that such a society would be a good joke.
People did think it was funny, or at least inoffensive. At its peak, the society had 31,000 members, including King George V of the United Kingdom, Babe Ruth (whose given name was George), and French politician Georges Clemenceau.
Red Alert
Next time you visit the circus, if the band starts playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” — run. The hymn is known as the “disaster march”; it’s played during a life-threatening emergency to organize aid and evacuate the audience without panic.
Circus bands never play it under any other circumstances.
Unquote
“Working with Julie Andrews is like being hit over the head with a valentine card.” — Christopher Plummer
Drake’s Plate of Brass
Drake’s Plate of Brass is a museum curator’s nightmare: A priceless artifact revealed as historians’ in-joke gone terribly awry.
The story surrounds a golden plate that Francis Drake reportedly left as a monument when he visited Northern California in 1579. Hoping to fool one of their number, a group of local historians hammered out a fake version in 1936 and planted it near Drake’s landing point.
Sure enough, it made its way to the victim, historian George Bolton of Berkeley. Before they could reveal the joke, though, Bolton vouched for the plate’s authenticity, engaging the University of California and paying $2,500 for it.
Now that the hoax was so painfully public the conspirators had to move carefully. They tried discreetly to reveal their joke, but then to their horror Columbia University confirmed the plate as genuine. It was added to textbooks; likenesses were sold as souvenirs; copies were presented to Queen Elizabeth II herself on several occasions.
Only 40 years later, after exhaustive testing at Oxford, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and MIT, was the plate confirmed as a fake, and it was several years before the whole story was pieced together. The plate is still on display at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, an embarrassing testament to the gullibility of an excited historian.
Luddite by Degrees
Douglas Adams’ “rules that describe our reactions to technologies”:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.
Left Turn at Albuquerque
Late last year, somewhere in the lonely New Mexico desert, someone began broadcasting a strange shortwave radio signal.
At regular intervals, on several frequencies, Yosemite Sam says, “Varmint, I’m a-gonna blow you to smithereens!”
The FCC thinks the signal is originating in the desert near Albuquerque, but no one knows who’s broadcasting it, or why.
One, Two, Three …
It’s ironic that hopscotch has come to be known as a little girl’s game, because it couldn’t have a more masculine pedigree. The first hopscotch courts were used in military training exercises in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire. Footsoldiers wearing field packs and full body armor ran through courts 100 feet long, much as football players run through truck tires today.
Imitating the soldiers, Roman children drew their own smaller courts and added a scoring system, which has been preserved remarkably well for more than a thousand years as the game has spread to France (where it’s called “Marelles”), Germany (“Templehupfen”), the Netherlands (“Hinkelbaan”), India (“Ekaria Dukaria”), and even Vietnam (“Pico”) and Argentina (“Rayuela”).
Today’s children still draw their hopscotch courts with the word “London” at the top, without knowing that they’re representing the Great North Road, a 400-mile Roman road from Glasgow to London that was frequently used by the Roman military.
Rimshot
After years of work, some programmers unveil a new supercomputer. They say it knows everything.
A skeptical man asks the computer, “Where is my father?”
The computer thinks, then says, “Your father is fishing in Michigan.”
The man laughs. “See? I knew this was nonsense. My father has been dead for 20 years.”
“No,” the computer says. “Your mother’s husband has been dead for 20 years. Your father just landed a three-pound trout.”
Commuting Times
Average travel time to work:
- New York: 39.0 minutes
- Los Angeles: 28.1 minutes
- Chicago: 33.1 minutes
- Houston: 25.9 minutes
- Philadelphia: 29.2 minutes
- Phoenix: 24.7 minutes
- San Diego: 22.6 minutes
- Dallas: 25.2 minutes
- San Antonio: 21.5 minutes
- Detroit: 24.2 minutes
The average U.S. commute is 24.3 minutes.