FEEL SMART AGAIN

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SEPTEMBER 2014
VOLUME 13, ISSUE 6
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 WorldMags.net SEPTEMBER 2014 • VOL. 13 ISSUE 6 CONTENTS

FEATURES

35 OF YOUR BIGGEST QUESTIONS: ANSWERED!

36 42 44 45 46
Why don’t Is my doctor’s What does How do Where does
giraffes handwriting a mail-order butterflies language
get dizzy? dangerous? bride cost? navigate? come from?

PLUS: How a real-life James Bond changed World War II P. 48 •

Secrets of a duck-stamp dynasty P. 54
The greatest composer you’ve never heard of P. 44

IN EVERY ISSUE

S C AT T E R B R A I N RIGHT BRAIN/LEFT BRAIN

13 SNACKS: The Senate’s secret candy stash, 27 H.P. Lovecraft’s literary monsterpiece
why cavemen give you the munchies, and 30 Lou Hoover: First Lady extraordinaire
ILLUSTRATION BY BYRON EGGENSCHWILER

history’s craziest vending machines 32 Inside a blind theater company

BE AMAZING G O M E N TA L
21 An anti-aging miracle drug 59 Diving with dogs
22 Coffee talk with novelist Rainbow Rowell 60 Insects: Exposed!
23 Our inside guide to Copenhagen 61 The coolest museums in America Cover by Linzie Hunter
24 A.J. Jacobs invades history’s privacy 62 Mazes made amazing
25 From zero to Nero: Sicilian wine 64 The mental_floss quiz

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CONTENTS
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THE INDEX

A L
Accents 37 Labyrinth, versus maze 62
Amusement parks, world’s oldest 23 Left-handed scissors 62
Arachnids, as ED cure 47 Lithium, as refreshment 18

B N
Banana suitcase 60 Nazi spies 19, 51 A splash of
What Buffy Bear trainers 23 Nero d’Avola 25 Sicily
owes H.P.
Lovecraft Beer Nutella 13
p. 25
p. 29 ancient 23
O
slugs, attraction to 41
Orange juice, and toothbrushing 37
C
Meet America’s
No. 1 bird
P
Candy Desk, congressional 14
artists. Peanut butter, as shaving cream 16
p. 54 Cars, stolen 47
Perfume
Chinese food 43
dispensed by vending machines 15
Chocolate, exploding 19
in outer space 40
Churchill, Winston 19, 50 The imaginary
Piranhas, Europe’s largest school of 23 army that saved
Copenhagen 23 the Allies
Pizza, price in 1974 65
Cthulhu, tentacles of influence 29
Puppies
p. 48
D prescription for 21

ALAMY (GELLAR, WINE, ROOSEVELT). PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARY NORTON. STYLING BY JILLIAN WOODRUFF (PEZ). PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Davis, Miles 61 underwater 59

DAVID BOWMAN (HUMMINGBIRD). ILLUSTRATION BY PETE GAMLEN (DOG). © SUKITA/THE DAVID BOWIE ARCHIVE 2012 (BOWIE)
D-day 50
R
DNA 16
Rowell, Rainbow 22
Doe, Jane and John 43
Duck paintings, lucrative 54 S
Schwarzenegger, Arnold 14
E S’mores, justification to eat 18
Éclairs, deep-fried 15
Spider bites, crazy 47
Espionage 19, 50 Cute cures all.
Eyebrows, as Swiss Army Knife 37 T p. 21
Four sweet Terrarium, cat-proof 63
reasons to take F Toilet, 20-seat 24
your medicine
Fig Newtons, medical benefits of 18 Twitter, literary origins of 37
p. 18
G U
Giraffes, bodily functions of 36 Umami 17
Eleanor
Roosevelt who? H Uranus 66

p. 30 Holy water 15 W
I Warhol, Andy 61, 64

Identity, secret 43, 48 Whales, exploding 43

Imaginary Whiskey dispensers 15

armies 53 Y
co-workers 51 #YOLO, meaning of 38
Why MC Ham-
J Z mer has nothing
on David Bowie
Jell-O, shocking ingredients of 16 Zebra stripes, as insect repellent 38
p. 61

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EDITOR’S NOTE
WorldMags.net
THIS
MONTH
IN MATH

How and Why?

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF BIG QUESTIONS. There’s the
24
Tastykakes
consumed
really big kind, the ones Plato was always fretting
over: What is knowledge? What is experience?

11
What is existence? And so on. And then there are
the other ones: the smaller but somehow more
insatiable curiosities—the stuff we’re driven to
Google to find out.
I know this sounds crazy, but we keep track of flossers who
the questions that keep you up at night—we look watched the Mets
carefully at the queries that lead you to mentalfloss beat the Braves at
.com. Your concerns are not so much about the Citi Field
nature of existence as in its details. You’re trying to
figure out how to calculate wind chill, how to “catch
witches,” how to conquer Ms. Pac-Man, and how Jillian Woodruff styles
to control your libido with cornflakes. You want to some snacks once consid-
know why German words are so long, how camels’ ered medicinal (Scatter-
brain, page 18) .
legs work, why bananas are slippery, why Y is only
sometimes a vowel, and who named them “flea”
markets. “Fancy ketchup, why?” you ask.

1
This is the stuff we really can’t live without
knowing, and it’s to these kinds of inquiries that this SPECIAL THANKS TO
issue is dedicated. Although I don’t personally have
much light to shed on the mysteries of fancy ketchup, COOKIE
we’re about to present you with answers to many MONSTER
who accidentally
other important things you’ve always wondered—and got stranded at
Coney Island later
to questions you hadn’t even thought to ask. that night

ALAMY (GARNER). DIGITAL IMAGE COURTESY GETTY’S OPEN CONTENT PROGRAM (POE). FOLLOWING IMAGES COURTESY
It had never occurred to me, for instance, that
space might have a fragrance. Certainly, I never

65
imagined that you can still smell the hydrocarbons
left over from the formation of the stars up there. It’s

CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG: LANCE CPL. MARTIN R. EGNASH (COOKIE MONSTER); CITI FIELD (DELAYWAVES)
this type of small question that tends to remind me
that the universe is huge. What are yours? EDGAR
E
ALLAN PO
Big Questions
caught and tossed
back for not
meeting the size
requirements

SYDNEY
@jessanne BRISTOW

THINGS YOU’LL why people in old movies talk so funny

11 LEARN IN THIS ISSUE the secret ingredients of deep space
THE CHECKLIST

Beatrix Potter’s real name

peanut butter’s contribution to personal hygiene how many people are eating pizza right now
why we have “eel soup” to thank for Disney World secrets of a prize-winning duck portrait
which First Lady fought in the Boxer Rebellion which philosopher most influenced boxing
how to pronounce Cthulhu how to properly consume a hot dog in Denmark

8 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net CONT RI B UTO R S

London-based artist
LINZIE HUNTER told
us she had to fight off
VO LU M E 13, I S S U E 6 | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 14 the urge to Google the
answers to the questions
FOUNDERS we asked her to illustrate
Mangesh Hattikudur Will Pearson for our cover. Hunter’s
WHAT BIG EDITORIAL
whimsical work has appeared in The Wall
QUESTION EDITOR IN CHIEF Jessanne Collins
Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian.
KEEPS She’s also designed a cookie tin for a
YOU UP AT MANAGING EDITOR Joe Mejía
department store and is currently at work
NIGHT? EDITOR AT LARGE Maccabee Montandon
FEATURES EDITOR Brett Forrest on a series of scratch-and-sniff stickers.
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Jen Doll
HER BIGGEST QUESTION: Is there an
ASSISTANT EDITOR Lucas Reilly
COPY EDITOR Brian Carroll FACT CHECKER Riki Markowitz
evolutionary advantage to having cankles?
CONTRIBUTORS Stacy Conradt, A.J. Jacobs,
Glynnis MacNicol, Will McGough, Arika Okrent,
Jeff Rubin, Matt Soniak, Jamie Spatola, Caity Weaver, Jeff Wilser BRITT PETERSON, who
HOW MUCH SCOTCH writes regularly for The
TAPE DO I HAVE TO ART
LICK TO GET DRUNK? Boston Globe and has
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Winslow Taft
contributed to The New
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Lucy Quintanilla
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Aliya Best
Republic and Slate was
WHO INVENTED fascinated to learn more
STRING CHEESE? MENTALFLOSS.COM about H.P. Lovecraft’s
EDITOR IN CHIEF Jason English
wife, Sonia, while researching her story
MANAGING EDITOR Erin McCarthy
(“Myths and Monsters,” page 27). “It was
DEPUTY EDITOR Nick Greene
STAFF WRITER Hannah Keyser
an extremely unlikely match—he, a shy
WEB PRODUCER Rebecca O’Connell anti-Semite; she, a lively self-made Jewish
RESEARCH EDITORS Kara Kovalchik, Sandy Wood IF I WAKE UP TOMORROW milliner.”
CAN YOU SMELL ALL AND EVERYONE HAS
PUBLISHING HER BIGGEST QUESTION: “I’m still trying to
THE SMELL OUT OF STARTED SPELLING “CLAM”
EVP, SALES Tim Koorbusch “CLAMN,” WOULD I JUST get to the bottom of why so many people
SOMETHING?
VP, SALES Molly Bechert PLAY ALONG, OR WOULD I have paid tribute to a writer who died
DIRECTOR, DIGITAL SALES John Guehl ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING anonymous and poor.”
SALES DIRECTOR Allison Hudson ABOUT IT?
NORTHEAST ACCOUNT DIRECTOR Jim Alfieri
ACCOUNT DIRECTOR Molly Hollister
JESSICA HULLINGER,
ACCOUNT MANAGER Albert Neudeck
who explored the smell
NORTHWEST ACCOUNT DIRECTORS William Murray, Steve Thompson
MIDWEST DIRECTOR Erin Sesto
of outer space (“Big
SOUTHWEST DIRECTOR Matt Estrada Questions,” page 40)
SOUTHEAST DIRECTOR Ed Kobylus and other topics for this
DETROIT DIRECTOR Don Schulz issue has written for
Fast Company and The
INTEGRATING MARKETING DIRECTOR Yasir Salem
RESEARCH & INSIGHTS DIRECTOR Monika Bondy
New York Post. Based in Brooklyn, she is
ART DIRECTOR, MARKETING Joshua Moore currently researching the science of love
INTEGRATED MARKETING MANAGER Adam Clement and potential drugs for dealing with it.
PROMOTIONS MANAGER Jennifer Castellano
WHO IS CHIEFLY HER BIGGEST QUESTION: Does nature need
MARKETING COORDINATOR Jessica Estremera
GROUP DIR, CONSUMER MARKETING Sara O’Connor RESPONSIBLE FOR mosquitoes?
PERPETUATING “I
COULD CARE LESS”
CONSUMER MARKETING DIRECTOR Leslie Guarnieri
IN OUR LEXICON?
DIGITAL & PRINT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Sean Fenlon While illustrating
PRODUCTION MANAGER Kyle Christine Smith the “Big Questions”
HR/OPERATIONS MANAGER Joy Hart package BYRON
EGGENSCHWILER
MENTAL FLOSS, INC. discovered that giraffes
PRESIDENT Will Pearson
are tricky to draw—
CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER Mangesh Hattikudur
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Ethan Trex
especially their strange
CONTROLLER Arielle Starkman mouths! His art has appeared in The
SENIOR ACCOUNTANT Darcine Denny New York Times and BusinessWeek.
STAFF ACCOUNTANT Steve Begonja He is currently illustrating a book about
ACCOUNTS PAYABLE CLERK Bilal Lowe the goofy behavior of a favorite
GROUP CFO Kevin Morgan subject: cats.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE Steven Kotok
CHIEF INQUISITOR Ian Leggett HIS BIGGEST QUESTION: How does a
CHAIRMAN Felix Dennis jellyfish live without a brain or a heart?

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CH ATTE R
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Old-Fashioned Letter of the Month FROM THE WEB

Got the new issue of mental_floss and it FEEL SMART AGAIN AT

featured an interview with an editor of MENTALFLOSS.COM/BQ

romance novels and made the comment

that no one writes cavemen romances 20 things you might
not know about giraffes
[“Happily Ever After,” August 2014]. So I’m
just wondering, what would anyone even
How do
name their cave people? And for that astronauts
matter, would the dialogue be written in scratch their
Hulk-speak or would it be more like the noses on
Flintstones? I have so many questions. space walks?
@SACHE
6 early theories about
the origin of language

HEART OF STONE knowledge eventually, I was In the latest 8 things you may not
While I rarely read “romance” able to use it in less than 10 issue, I learned
novels, I feel I have read one minutes—a new record! know about Nutella
that Calvin
with cavemen. I am referring to —Drew Mehta
Coolidge
Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the slept for 11 11 tips H.P. Lovecraft
Cave Bear series. I am sure it fits SITTING PRETTY
hours. I knew had for novice writers
many genres, but there is lots of You are probably the only
steamy stuff! magazine in the history of the I admired him
—Vicki Watson universe to put into type: “Doll- for a reason. How do zebras
ing up is your decision” [“The @411cd
get their
Ugly Past,” August 2014]. Thank
you, thank you, thank you! I
stripes?
I would like
cannot put into words the value mental_floss
this has for women like me. to know that,
—Katie King yes, I do feel
WE ARE FAMILY
smart again
when I read
Why don’t
Before reading “A Family Affair,”
[August 2014], I had never
your fantastic
magazine.
the drinks
QUICK THINKING
Shortly after reading the
section on how the dog days of
wanted to make a family tree.
But now I’m curious about @Kayla_Nikol in outdoor
summer got their name [“Vocab
Rehab,” August 2014], my
what’s out there. In Jacobs’s
words, “By revealing how the
cliché of ‘We’re all one big I knew there
vending
wife said to me, “Dog days of
summer—I have no idea why it
family’ is true, we hope to pro-
vide bad news to bigots.” What a
was a reason to
keep all my old
machines
is called that.” While I usu-
ally get to use my mental_floss
fantastic idea!
—Tiffany LoSasso
Air Jordans!
@tati_rod
freeze?
Forget the parka. Hop in-
side a vending machine!
For the full answer, go to
MENTAL FLAWS mentalfloss.com/vend.
Send feedback to
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The 1980 German Game of
tweet it @mental_floss. If we the Year award was won by
print your comment, we’ll Rummikub, not the Rubik’s
ISTOCK (DOG, ZEBRA, VENDING, GALAXY)

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Debut Stand-up Album

out June 10 on iTunes
and wherever
fine comedy records
are sold.
@maxsilvestri
www.maxsilvestri.com
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 WorldMags.net CONGRESS’S SWEET DEAL
A PROFESSIONAL TASTER TELLS ALL
MARSHMALLOWS’ MEDICINAL MAGIC
THE SANDWICH-SMUGGLING ASTRONAUT

THIS MONTH’S THEME

SNACKS

Who Invented Nutella?

officially concocted the addicting
PA ST RY C H E F P I E T R O F E R R E R O
hazelnut gloop in 1946, but the story spreads back further than that. In
1806, Napoleon tried to paralyze Great Britain by declaring a continental
blockade, freezing trade goods bound for the islands. Britain retaliated by
declaring a counter-blockade, refusing to export anything to France or its
Mediterranean allies. The gridlock caused the cost of chocolate to skyrocket.
Italian chocolatiers in Turin negotiated the sticky situation by stretching their
supplies with chopped hazelnuts—the resulting paste was dubbed gianduia.
The treat resurged during World War II when confectioners were again
forced to ration their sweets and the tasty paste was marketed as the world-
conquering Nutella we know today.
ISTOCK

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 13

 SNACKS WorldMags.net

Senator
Sweet Tooth
How one politician proved
that candy is the great uniter
LONG BEFORE Ronald Reagan and Arnold
Schwarzenegger took office, California
already had a knack for turning Hollywood
actors into politicians. In 1965, George
Murphy, a song-and-dance man on
Broadway and the silver screen, was elected
to represent the Golden State in the U.S.
Senate. When the Republican candy fiend
arrived in Washington D.C., he had one
major priority—to stuff his Senate desk with
as many sweets as possible.
At first, the freshman senator hoarded all
the goodies to himself. But when Murphy
moved to an aisle desk in the back of the
Senate Chamber—next to the room’s most
heavily used door—he began inviting
other lawmakers to rummage through his
stockpile. Desk No. 95 quickly became a
daily detour for senators on both sides of the
chamber looking to satisfy their sweet tooth.
And when Murphy lost his seat in 1970,
politicos from both parties proved they
could agree on something—they united to
keep the “Candy Desk” going.
The desk remained a Senate secret for
another 20 years, and it has since hosted a
bevy of notable alumni. John McCain was
in charge of stocking the goods when he
was a newbie in the late 1980s. During Rick
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER

Santorum’s tenure, Hershey’s and other

Pennsylvania confectioners donated nearly
300 pounds of sweets a year to quell the
government’s candy crush. Today, Mark
Kirk of Illinois keeps the desk full of Jelly
Bellies, Snickers, and other treats from his
home state. Now that’s a reason to reach
across the aisle! —LUCAS REILLY

THE BOTTOM LINE: DURING THE 19TH CEN TURY, PEA NUTS WERE SO POPUL AR WITH THE ROWDY CROWDS AT

14 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
A BRIEF HISTORY
OF VENDING MACHINES
Before snacks swept the scene,
there were other reasons to keep
spare change on hand.
219 BCE
With Egyptian temples short
on money, Hero Ctesibius in-
vents a contraption that vends
holy water for a few coins a
pop—possibly the world’s first
vending machine.

1822
English bookseller Richard
Carlile gets tossed in the
slammer for selling Thomas
Paine’s The Age of Reason. To
avoid the censors and police,
he starts selling books by
machine and argues that the
device is responsible for any
blasphemous sales, not him.
(The judge didn’t buy it.)

1889
Machines start taking pictures
S C I E N C E S O LV E S
of people while they wait for
their machine purchases (not
creepy at all). Meanwhile,
Scientific American describes
machines that “dole out a drop
or two of liquid which passes
for perfumery, and which, in
Caveman Cravings
many cases serves as a thin
mask for bodily uncleanliness.” FOR A TIME, scientists theorized that random, overwhelming, late-night han-
kerings for deep-fried éclairs were the body’s way of saying, “Hey! You’re miss-
1890 ing some nutrients!” The evidence for that idea, however, is weak—mainly
In New York, penny machines
start singing. Badly. Crude because deep-fried éclairs rarely contain actual nutrients. Instead, evolution-
phonographic cylinders play ary biology is probably to blame. For early humans, fatty, high-calorie foods
bits of operas and popular were both rare and helpful for survival, especially in high-stress, do-or-die
tunes after a customer inserts
a coin. situations. Although we no longer have to prepare for surprise saber-toothed-
tiger attacks, we’re still programmed to crave extra calories when we’re
1891 anxious. In fact, research shows that anxiety may cause the hunger-inducing
The French come up with the
(rather French) idea for an
hormone ghrelin to surge. Stress also activates receptors on the tongue called
“automatic fountain” that spits glucocorticoids, which dial up our appetite for sweets. (That’s why you never
out a glass of wine and a larger crave carrot sticks.) To make matters of the waistline worse, fatty, high-carb
helping of beer. foods boost serotonin, which actually may help us calm down—at least for a
1954 while. Sugary, high-fat treats also release feel-good opioids into the blood-
Paranoid travelers can buy stream, resulting in a feeling of delight that makes a tub of ice cream more
life insurance at machines in appealing. So is there any way to override the urges? Although easier said
the airport. By 1960, they can
soothe their nerves as whiskey than done: de-stress. Staying calm may stop serotonin from sinking and ghre-
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DOWNEY (CRAVINGS)

lands in vending machines lin from growing. Exercise, a good night’s sleep, and a helping of B-vitamins
(still available in Japan!). never hurts either—although one deep-fried éclair probably won’t kill you.

Frito-Lay uses a $40,000 robotic chewing

simulator to test chip crunchiness. The ideal snap?
Four pounds of pressure per square inch.

VAUDEVILLE SHOWS THAT THE R A MBUNCTIOUS

S B
BALCON Y SECTIONS WERE CALLED THE PEA NUT GALLERY.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 15

 SNACKS WorldMags.net
Are You Going to Eat That?
When it comes to household chores, these foods pull double duty.

PEANUT BUTTER TOMATO SOUP CHEERIOS CHEEZ WHIZ POWDERED LEMONADE

A.K.A.: Shaving Cream
Next time you run out of
shaving gel, just reach
into the pantry. Peanut
butter works just as well as
anything at the barbershop,
plus the oils are good for
your skin! Unless you’re
allergic. In that case, it’s
really, really bad for your
skin. (Chunky peanut butter
is never recommended.)
A.K.A.: Hair Treatment
Did the local pool turn your
blonde hair a bright neon
green? Just rub your locks
with condensed tomato
soup. Acids in any tomato
product will break up
oxidized metals, like copper,
that cling to your mop
post-swim.
A.K.A.: Itch Reliever
Don’t scratch that chicken
pox, poison ivy, or poison
oak! Instead, pour two cups
of Cheerios into a blender,
grind into a fine powder,
and then pour into a warm
bath. The oats may contain
avenanthramides and
phenols, which can reduce
inflammation.
A.K.A.: Grease-Stain A.K.A.: Toilet Bowl
Destroyer Cleanser
A dollop of Cheez Whiz The citric acid in your
can remove oily stains favorite lemonade mix
from your jeans. Just rub can remove stains from
in some Whiz and throw porcelain and leave it
your greasy clothes into lemony fresh. While you’re
the washer with regular at it, the powder can also
detergent. Enzymes in the clean soap scum from your
wonder food will loosen up shower and dishwasher.
the stain.

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE ROGALSKI (PEANUT BUTTER). ISTOCK (JELL-O)

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Excuse me, garçon. There’s DNA in my Jell-O!
Gelatin—a basic ingredient in gummy bears, marshmallows, and candy corn—is a pain to
make. Since it’s derived from animal collagen, the results of each batch can be inconsis-
tent. (Not to mention, there’s a very small risk that animal by-products can spread infec-
tious diseases.) But there’s a secret ingredient that can make Jell-O better: human DNA.
In 2011, scientists in Beijing confirmed that inserting fragments of human DNA into
strains of yeast made gelatin more consistent and controllable. The method wasn’t new.
It’s been used to make vaccines, gel drug capsules, and insulin for years. And don’t worry:
Downing copious Jell-O shots doesn’t make you a cannibal. As writer Ed Grabianowski
succinctly points out, “[It’s] not made of human tissues in any way. It’s pure chemistry.”

IN PARTS OF EUROPE, COOL R A NCH DORITOS ARE CALLED “COOL A MERICA N.” THE IN VEN TOR OF THE PRINGLES CA N

16 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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Taste Tested
How a Japanese researcher discovered the culinary
world’s favorite new flavor—100 years too early
K I KU N A E I K E DA , a chemistry professor
at the Imperial University of Tokyo, was
slurping a seaweed soup called dashi when
he had a startling realization: He couldn’t
describe how it tasted. It wasn’t exactly
salty. Or sour. It certainly wasn’t bitter.
Sweet wasn’t even on the radar. In fact,
none of the four basic tastes described the
sensation. It had to be something else.
But according to common wisdom, that
was impossible. For centuries, philoso-
phers, scientists, and chefs had agreed there
were only four basic tastes. The idea dated
all the way back to the fourth century BCE,
when the Greek philosopher Democri-
tus theorized that the shape of a snack’s
atoms determined its taste1. But Ikeda was
convinced a fifth taste was out there, one
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DOWNEY (SARDINE).
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN LAM (STUCKEY)
1. He thought that triangular atoms made food salty, smooth atoms made it bitter,
angular atoms turned everything sour, and large round atoms were sweeteners.
Fidel Castro hated New Coke so
much, he allegedly called it “a sign
of American capitalist decadence.”
WAS BURIED INSIDE ONE. NACHOS GOT THEIR NA ME FROM THEIR
that balanced every other flavor. In 1909, he
published a paper arguing that glutamate,
an amino acid, creates a distinct mouth-
watering brothy taste that leaves a faint
furry feeling on the roof of your mouth that
isn’t sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. He called
the taste umami—“yummy”—and even
patented his own glutamate seasoning.
Everyone dismissed the idea.
A century later, scientists changed their
tune. In 2008, they discovered that the
tongue has special glutamate receptors and
determined that Ikeda was right! The fifth
taste explains the savory rush of ancho-
vies, shellfish, mushrooms, asparagus, veal
stock, and gravy. Umami is also the secret
behind certain favorite food pairings, like
Parmesan cheese and tomato sauce.
CREATOR, IGNACIO “NACHO” A NAYA.
WorldMags.net
SECRETS OF A
PRO SNACKER
Barb Stuckey’s job1 is to
try food—and find ways
to make it tastier.
We have a brainstorming process
called the food studio where
we bring prototypes—called
food avatars—to life. We bring in
food technologists and chefs to
represent what [a hypothetical
new] food would look like. We might
say, “Wouldn’t it be really cool to
enrobe peanuts with cheese?”
And someone will start panning
cheese onto the outside of peanuts.
Sometimes we need to use clay, or
to cut and paste things together.
When I’m tasting, I take one or two
bites and make a decision based on
that, but I’ll take foods home and
eat them for breakfast. The sip test
is how New Coke got into trouble.
Just a sip gives you one experience,
but that changes as you continue.
Flavors build, they accumulate in
your mouth or sinus cavity and can
become overwhelming.
People always look at me and say, “I
would expect a professional taster
to weigh 400 pounds!” I have to
explain: I don’t eat, I taste. Those are
two different things.
I once put a cherry tomato that
had just come out of 350-degree
bubbling oil in my mouth. I had
third-degree burns and I thought
I’d ruined my tasting instrument!
It turns out that it’s really hard to
damage your sense of taste, since
your taste buds regenerate every
two weeks. If you want to preserve
your palate, the best thing you can
do is not smoke—that will ruin your
sense of smell. There’s not a whole
lot more you can do to muck it up.
—JEN DOLL
1. At Mattson, an independent food
and beverage developer
September 2014 mentalfloss.com 17
 SNACKS WorldMags.net
7UP

Edible Like Coca-Cola (a treatment for morphine

addicts) and Dr Pepper (a “brain tonic”), 7Up
was first marketed as a health drink. Charles
Leiper Grigg came up with the drink’s formula in

Meds
Doctors may
1929 and gave it the appetizing name Bib-Label
Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, which must have
made writing jingles difficult. The fizz contained
lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug, until 1950!

advise against
these treats today,
but there was a
time when they
prescribed them.

PEZ
Originally a peppermint sweet,
Pez candies in the 1920s weren’t
spat out by a plastic Donald Duck.
Instead, the first dispensers were
shaped like cigarette lighters
because the candy was supposed
to be an alternative to smoking.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARY NORTON. STYLING BY JILLIAN WOODRUFF

FIG NEWTONS
MARSHMALLOWS Until the late 19th century, many
Real marshmallows are made from the physicians believed that most
root and leaves of Althaea officinalis, a illnesses started in the stomach.
flowery herb that grows around marshes. With indigestion public enemy
Ancient Egyptians learned how to make No. 1, doctors recommended a
candies from the plant four millennia ago, daily helping of biscuits. “Digestive”
and during the Renaissance, folks used it cookies popped up in the U.K., while
to treat sore throats. Thank them for the fig rolls took the States by storm.
medical proof that it’s always OK to have Charles Roser rode the fad’s wave
that extra s’more. by helping invent the Newton.

TR AVELERS CA N MEASURE THE COST OF VISITING A CIT Y BY THE PRICE OF ITS CLUB SA NDWICHES. IT’S CALLED THE

18 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
OUT OF THIS WORLD
There’s more to space
food than freeze-dried
ice cream.

CHOCOLATE IN A TUBE
In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
became the first man to snack in
space after squirting three tubes of
pureed meat and chocolate sauce
into his mouth. By the Mercury mis-
sions, astronauts were munching
on cubes of compressed Franken-
food rehydrated by saliva.

SUPER SOAKED SNACKS
In the mid-1960s, NASA coated bite-
size treats with gelatin to prevent
crumbling. Later, astronauts used
the shuttle’s hydrogen-oxygen fuel
cell to rehydrate their food. (By
Apollo, they were soaking it with a
sophisticated hot water gun.)
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DOWNEY (CHOCOLATE).
Death by Chocolate
The time Germany tried to assassinate Winston Churchill
with a killer candy-gram
W I N STO N C H U R C H I L L loved to eat. A lot.
His meals were lavish one-way tickets to
heartburn, and he favored snacks that were
decadent and boozy. So in 1943, when the
Nazis concocted a plan to kill the prime
minister, it was no surprise they aimed
straight for his stomach.
The plot centered on an exploding
chocolate bar. Hitler’s henchmen drizzled
a slim steel explosive with a thin layer of
dark chocolate and packaged it in a fancy
black-and-gold wrapper labeled peter’s.
Breaking (or biting into) the chocolate
was to send German secret agents into the
dining room used by Churchill’s war cabi-
net and plant the treat on a tray alongside
the British Bulldog’s other luxury goodies.
Fortunately, British spies uncovered the
plot, and intelligence chief Lord Victor
Rothschild created a series of posters
warning the public about a possible
chocolate attack. It wasn’t the first time a
plan like this had been foiled. The Germans
had flubbed a similar plot three years earlier
when they sent a trio of saboteurs into
Ireland carrying four cans of exploding peas

would trigger a timer, and seven seconds intended for Buckingham Palace. Evidently,
later the snack would detonate. The plan King George VI had a healthier diet. —L.R.
ILLUSTRATION BY HYESU LEE (SPACE)

CONTRABAND CORNED BEEF

When Gemini III launched in 1965,
John Young bought a corned beef
sandwich at a Cocoa Beach deli. To
Avocados are technically
the glee of Reuben-loving fellow
astronaut Gus Grissom, he snuck it berries and contain more
with him into space. The non-NASA-
approved stowaway snack led to a
congressional hearing!
potassium than bananas.

CLUB SA NDWICH INDEX. CONFECTIONERS’ GL A ZE CONTAINS SHELL AC MADE OF BEETLE EXCRETIONS.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 19

 WorldMags.net

to the Magazine
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 WorldMags.net ON DEADLINE WITH RAINBOW ROWELL
WHO INVENTED THE AMUSEMENT PARK?
PRIVACY 'S SHAMEFUL SECRET
SICILIAN WINE'S SECOND COMING

BE
AMAZING

Is Love
the Drug?
Oxytocin, better known as
the love hormone, is what
makes your heart melt in the
face of kittens, puppies, and
those addicting YouTube
videos of laughing babies.
But a new study from UC
Berkeley shows that a kick
of oxytocin does more than
make you feel good—it
slows down aging. Evidently,
oxytocin can repair injured
and aging muscles in mice,
and, unlike other molecules
that can do the same job, it
isn’t shown to increase the
ILLUSTRATION BY PETE GAMLEN

risk of cancer. Researchers

believe a daily helping could
someday combat age-related
diseases like Alzheimer’s and
type 2 diabetes. Until then,
a daily dose of cuteness is
prescribed.
WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 21
BE AMA ZIN G !
WorldMags.net
WORK STUDY
Rock by Rock
How Rainbow Rowell went from newspaper reporter to superstar novelist1
For 10 or 11 years, I was a
metro columnist at the Omaha
World-Herald. It was a great
job, but I started young, and it
involved doing the same thing
over and over. I started writing
Attachments at the end of my
time there.
A friend asked me, “What
are you writing for yourself?”
I realized I’d never written
anything just for myself—it
had either been an assignment
or a very ill-advised love letter.
Leaving the newspaper
was incredibly important.
A newspaper is very busy—
22 mentalfloss.com September 2014
you’re always focused on
the next edition and you
can’t really try something
different. I left and got a
job in advertising. Starting
over showed I had it in me
to do something completely
different.
I remember finishing
Attachments and thinking
that was the accomplishment.
My husband said, “No, you
need to do something with
this!” It got published in 2011.
Last year, my literary workload
became so big that I'm now
spending 100 percent of my
time writing books.
WorldMags.net
3 BOOKS
I L OV E :
1
S aga by B ri an
K. Vaughan
2 weeks and recently finished
Then We
C ame to the
End by
Jos hua Ferri s
3 on deadline constantly. You
The Brides of
Rollrock Island
by Margo
L anagan
Things have changed so
quickly, I’ve struggled a
little bit to find my balance.
For so long, I had a full-time
job and was writing on top
of that. I have kids, so I was
writing mostly at coffee shops.
I wrote my first three books
at the same Starbucks. Then
they renovated and changed
the seating. It became much
louder and more chaotic. I
freaked out—I couldn’t write!
So now I have a home office.
I wrote my first four
books before I sold them,
which was so freeing. I’d be
writing, and I’d say, “I don’t
with J EN DOL L
have a deadline because
nobody wants this.” If I
tried to think about what
readers expect from me, I’d
be writing for the past. By
the time it comes out, it’s two
years from now.
My foreign agent told me
Stephen King gets up and
writes a certain number of
words every day and doesn’t
deal with anything else
until he finishes. You know
the metaphor “You put the
big rocks in the jar first?” I
thought, “I am filling the jar
with pebbles.” I decided to
write first thing every day. I
wrote 20,000 words in two
my first draft.
A good thing about working
at a newspaper is you’re
turn in one thing and start
working on the next. There’s
no room for writer’s block.
Having done that for 10 years,
I’d trained my brain. I’ve felt
stuck and scared with this
latest book, but I still finished
a first draft.
Twitter makes me feel
I’m part of a community
in a way I’m not in Omaha.
I don’t see Twitter as a
threat to my productivity. I
see people there as my co-
workers. I sit in a room by
myself. When you think about
working in an office, you get
up, you get coffee. Talking to
your co-workers can increase
your productivity; sometimes
just talking to people on
Twitter helps with a problem.
I’m going on tour with
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
Landline, and then I’m going
to take a vacation with my
family. The next project is
to write a first draft of the
Eleanor & Park screenplay
and then a graphic novel. I’ve
never done any of that
before—it’s all new.
1
Rowell is the author of the novels
Attachments, Fangirl, Eleanor &
Park, and this summer's Landline
(St. Martin’s Press).
 WorldMags.net
w ith AT L A S O B SCURA 1
Copenhagen Calling
Once a viking village, this Scandinavian seaside city is full of history—and piranhas!
1. Dyrehavsbakken
In the 16th century,
Copenhagen’s drinking
water was so bad it
was known as “eel
soup,” so crowds flocked
to a spring outside the
city. Seeing a business
opportunity, entertain-
ers followed, and the
world's first amusement
park was born. By the
1700s troubadours,
bear trainers, and ec-
centrics from all over
Europe were arriving
ILLUSTRATION BY LUKE BOTT
in droves. The spring is
dried up today, but the
fun keeps flowing.
VISIT Dyrehavevej 62,
2930 Klampenborg
1
atlasobscura.com is the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places.
NERDCATION
3 chocolate milk
5
2. Blue Planet
Aquarium
World War II was a
terrible time to get
into the aquarium
business. The Danes’
first attempt was a
disaster: Its ventilation
system was so bad
visitors passed out.
And because the war
stifled imports, it had
an anemic collection
of fish. In 2012, the
old aquarium closed to
make way for a modern
one, which now houses
Europe’s largest
school of piranhas.
VISIT Jacob
Fortlingsvej 1, 2770
Kastrup
WorldMags.net
B E A MA ZING !
S TAY
in true
S ca n d i n av i a n
style at the
friendly
b out iq ue hotel
SP34 in the
L at i n Quarte r.
E AT
a hot dog
washed
down wit h
4 (seriously!).
Danes swear
by it .
DRINK
Skands
B rewery beer,
inspired by an
ancient brew
found with
Egtved Girl.
3. Throne of 4. The Rundetårn 5. Egtved Girl
Denmark Instead of stairs, the In 1921, a farmer in
Denmark’s monarchy 114-foot tall “round the town of Egtved
sat on a chair straight tower”—originally uncovered an old
out of a fantasy an astronomical coffin. It looked like a
television show that observatory—has a tree trunk, and when
shall remain smooth spiraling ramp archaeologists pried it
unmentioned. that winds to the top. open, they discovered a
Constructed in the (This made hauling Bronze Age fashionista.
1600s, and adorned equipment up easier.) All that was left of the
with three life-size When light pollution 3,300-year-old corpse—
silver lions, the regal put the observatory out named Egtved girl—was
white wooden throne of commission in the some skin and nails. But
has an intricate canopy, mid–19th century, the her knee-length string
extravagant spiraling ramp took on new life— skirt, tunic, and bronze
legs, and spokes made as a bicycle race course. belt plate (and some
of what for years was The current record bark beer) were neatly
rumored to be “unicorn was set by Ole Ritter, preserved and are now
horn.” (Fact-check: who made it to the top on display.
They’re narwhal tusks.) in 55.3 seconds in 1971. VISIT National Museum
VISITRosenborg Castle, VISIT Købmagergade of Denmark, Ny
Øster Voldgade 4A 52 Vestergade 10
September 2014 mentalfloss.com 23
BE AMA ZIN G !
WorldMags.net
MODERN PROBLEMS with A . J. JAC OBS

Open Secrets
surgeons and priests. No noses in your business. Men were
pressure there. forbidden to live alone. And many towns
DEAR A.J., And then there’s the set up a system of local snitches called
TECHNOLOGY HAS MADE MY medieval ritual of charivari. tithing men, who were in charge of
LIFE AN OPEN BOOK. EVEN IF I If men couldn't control their keeping tabs on 10 neighbors.
DON’T POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA MY obstreperous wives, they If you’re worried about the National
were publicly humiliated. Security Agency, you should remember
FRIENDS PROBABLY WILL. WHAT As Stephanie Coontz writes that mail and phone lines have
EVER HAPPENED TO THE QUAINT in Marriage, a History, “A rarely been confidential. The French
NOTION OF PRIVACY? henpecked man might be systematized their mail-reading
strapped to a cart or ridden techniques in a secret chamber called
—MAX IN LOS ANGELES
around backward on a mule, the cabinet noir, the black room. In
to be booed and ridiculed for 1950, a majority of Americans used
his inversion of the accepted party lines, meaning you shared lines
marital hierarchy.” with eavesdropping neighbors. Even
Now, to the bathroom. politicians weren’t immune from the
I HEAR YOU, MAX. (FYI: That paisley Voiding was not the solitary nuisance. During the 1960 presidential
shirt you wore last night was hideous. act we know today. It was a communal race, candidate Hubert Humphrey
Get it together, man.) But if it makes activity. Hampton Court in England hosted a TV call-in show in West
you feel better, here’s some perspective. had the Great House of Easement, a Virginia—only to be interrupted by
In the past, privacy was often nonex- toilet for 28, and ancient Romans often an impatient neighbor demanding
istent. And life had no “unfriend” or built 20-seaters. When you weren’t Humphrey hang up and free the line.
“block” features. performing bodily functions, life was The ever-polite Humphrey obeyed.
Let’s start with the bedroom. For even more in the open. Puritans were
much of history, even the most intimate particularly fond of sticking their blue Send your woes to letters@mentalfloss.com.
act was afforded little
privacy. As recently as the
1800s, most non-aristocratic
families in Europe slept in
the same room, so you got to
enjoy the sights and sounds
of your parents creating
your brothers and sisters.
If you were wealthy enough
to have servants, they slept
at the foot of your bed. And
if you were a royal couple,
your wedding night was
considered the best show in
town: Witnesses and servants
were escorted to the bedroom
the day after and the woman
and mattress would be
examined for evidence of
consummation.
If you were having
problems in your marriage,
things got worse. Consider
the notorious impotence
trials in England of the 16th
through 18th centuries. If a
woman wanted to divorce
her husband because of his
inability to perform, she
took him to court, where he
had to prove his virility by
DID YOU HEAR?
CORBIS

having sex with her in front

of select jurors, including

24 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
w ith GLYNNIS MACNICOL B E A MA ZING !

Emperor Nero
Once considered a mere mixer, Sicily’s
y’s native
grape Nero d’Avola is standing on its own.

JUST THE FACTS PAIR IT

OLD HABITS
According to
archaeologists,
Sicilians have been
making wine as far
back as the
17th century BCE. T RY
N E RO D'AVO L A
WITH:
ROCKY STARTS
Sicily’s stony soil is Past a alla
Norma
bad for most crops Fried eggplant,
but great for grapes. tomato, ricotta,
The rocks absorb heat and pasta
during the day and Caponata
release it at night, A stew y mix
helping the vines of eggplant,
maintain a consistent onion, olive,
and tomato
temperature.
Arancine
Fried rice balls
stu ffed with
HEAT WAVES chee s e or meat
The island’s heat also
means the grapes
easily over-ripen,
which results in a
sweeter, syrupier,
boozier vino—not
preferred qualities for
fine wine.
2 TO TRY
Y TALKING POINT

MIXED FEELINGS
For years, wine made
with the island’s native
varietal, the dark Nero
d’Avola grape, was
harsh—thought to be
better for blending
than drinking alone.
Sicily is home to more
SECOND LIFE vineyards than any
New technology other region in Italy—
and fermentation it produces 213 million
methods have helped Stemmari Cantodoro gallons of wine a year.
It’s the Bill Murray of Like a ton of feathers,
ALAMY (WINE GLASS)

vintners harness That’s enough

wines: rich and pleasantly it feels light and dense at
the grape’s best
properties to give the
acidic, but extremely the same time. Delivers to fill nearly 320
approachable. Fruity—not a cozy, full-bodied blast
wine a makeover. snooty—it pairs well of blueberry, plum, and
Olympic-size
with everything. bourbony oak. swimming pools!

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 25

WorldMags.net

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net THE FIRST MODERN FIRST LADY
A THEATER FOR THE BLIND!

How do you pronounce

a name like Cthulhu?
According to Lovecraft,
a good approximation
is “khlûl’-hloo, with the
first syllable pronounced
gutterally and very
thickly.”

101 MASTERPIECES #
58 “THE CALL OF CTHULHU”

OWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT was having a

Myths and Monsters

ILLUSTRATION BY RAFAL BADAN FOR PARDES PUBLISHING HOUSE

H bad summer. Like many newcomers to New

York City, the aspiring writer from Rhode
Island felt overwhelmed and out of place. He
H . P. L O V E C R A F T K E E P S G E T T I N G N A M E - was unemployed, living in a mouse-infested one-room
C H E C K E D I N P O P C U LT U R E . H E R E ’ S W H Y apartment in Brooklyn, and steadily losing weight on a
paltry diet of cold canned beans and spaghetti. To make
H E M AT T E R S . matters worse, his wife, for whom he’d moved to New
BY BRITT PETERSON York in the first place, had taken a job in another city and
left him to fend for himself.
It was the first time Lovecraft had ever lived alone—
and he was spectacularly homesick. Born in Providence
in 1890, he viewed his hometown—with its scholarly
atmosphere and dilapidated 18th-century mansions—as
an essential piece of his identity. “Providence is me—I am
Providence,” he wrote his aunt from his New York exile,
inspiring the title of S. T. Joshi’s authoritative biography,
WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 27
 WorldMags.net
LITERATURE

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft.

The city suited Lovecraft—a self-taught antiquarian
obsessed with the contrasts of New England—in ways
that New York could not.
Lovecraft grew up with a neurotic and stifling mother,
Susie, and two aunts. (His father had died, probably of
syphilis, after a stint in a mental institution.) The family
had little of the capital but all the prejudices associated
with old New England pedigree, and Lovecraft was never
trained for any gainful employment. Nervous illnesses
kept him isolated at home for long stretches, during
which he joined up with “amateur journalist” groups:
organizations of unpaid pamphleteers who—with their
in-fighting, trolling, and political ranting that no one
would ever hear—would likely feel at home in online
forums today.
It was at a convention for such writers in Boston in
1921 that Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene, an energetic
and attractive Eastern European Jewish widow from
New York City, seven years his senior. Lovecraft, still
reeling from the death of his mother six weeks prior,
was not exactly a catch. He had no income besides a
dwindling family inheritance and occasional
checks from editorial temp work. He had
the frame of a scarecrow, a protruding lower INSPIRED BY
jaw, and a squeaky voice. He was also averse
to sex, which he blamed on having read a
POE, LOVECRAFT
scientific book as a child. “The whole matter STRUGGLED TO
was reduced to prosaic mechanism,” he wrote
later, “a mechanism which I rather despised.”
FIND HIS OWN
Not to mention, he was a virulent racial VOICE. struggled to find his own voice. He loaded his stories with
purist, outwardly disgusted by immigrants, thesaurus words (ichor, foetor, eldritch, daemon) and
tending to become “livid with anger” when he engorged sentences: “Shrieking, slithering, torrential
encountered foreign workers. shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another
“I admired his personality but, frankly through endless, ensanguined corridors of purpled
at first, not his person,” Sonia later admitted. And yet, fulgurous sky.” He was fervently absorbed by the theories of human
for some reason, she pursued him for three years. The futility and cosmic indifference. “By my thirteenth birthday I was
couple married in Manhattan in March 1924. Their thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance,”
first connubial night was spent typing up Lovecraft’s he wrote in A Confession of Unfaith. One wishes that other views—like
notes for a new story, after which, Sonia wrote in her his anti-Semitism and belief that African-Americans are biologically
memoirs, “we were too tired and exhausted for honey- inferior—had evolved more after puberty.
mooning or anything else.” Things went downhill from Lovecraft didn’t think he’d gained much from his time in New
there. Lovecraft relocated to New York because Sonia York. In a short story set in Greenwich Village, he wrote: “For
had a lucrative job at a department store, but she lost whereas I had looked for poignant wonder … I had found instead
it right before the wedding. He applied for work in the only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master,
publishing industry, at a bill-collecting firm, and as a paralyse, and annihilate me.” But then, early one morning at the end
lamp-tester in an electrical laboratory, but his efforts of that dreadful summer, he drafted a new story: a rambling epic
proved fruitless. Eventually, Sonia had to look farther alien fantasy that would take him in a new direction.
afield to support them both and moved to Cincinnati for
another department-store job. “THE CALL OF CTHULHU”—which would take another year to
The relationship had never been that intimate. “One complete—begins with a mystery. The narrator finds a strange
way [he expressed] his sentiment was to wrap his ‘pinkey’ bas-relief sculpture among his late great-uncle’s effects, in which
finger around mine and say ‘Umph!’ ” Sonia wrote. “a pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body
But without her around to prepare cheese soufflé for with rudimentary wings.” There’s also a file marked cthulhu cult,
breakfast and take him to Chinese restaurants, Lovecraft, containing two manuscripts. The first describes an uncanny meeting
who had ballooned to “porpoise” size in their early days, between the great-uncle and “a thin, dark young man of neurotic and
shriveled to a sardine. Spiraling into depression, he spent excited aspect” who brings him the sculpture, which he had created
most of his time hanging out with friends and little of based on a fever dream. The second tells the story of a New Orleans
it writing. When he did write, his stories were mostly police officer who raids a Louisiana swamp cult and discovers a fetish
overwrought tales about dark happenings among the object with “an octopus-like head … and long, narrow wings behind.”
city’s immigrant populations. The narrator becomes obsessed and sets out on a worldwide quest
Lovecraft’s early work was often racist, occasionally looking for answers. Soon, he learns that both sculptures depict an
ALAMY

brilliant, and frequently bad. He was inspired by Edgar ancient cephalopod priest-god, a “Great Old One” called Cthulhu,
Allan Poe and the British writer Lord Dunsany, but he who’s locked in an underwater city known as R’lyeh. For a long time,

28 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
LITERATURE

Cthulhu slumbered there rather peaceably. But recently, he’d been lack of hustle. Rejection or criticism would send him
disturbed by an earthquake and unloosed from his rocky confines by into a funk, convinced, as he wrote in 1932, that “my
an unlucky band of shipwrecked sailors. fictional days are probably over.” By the end of his life,
The narrator learns all this secondhand, through news reports, he had largely given up on finding an audience outside
personal narratives, and scholarly records. “Cthulhu” is really a story of his friends.
about reading: about tales that grip and possess you and pull you Luckily, he had some loyal friends. He counted among
on quests into the depths of hell, from which you won’t return the them Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard,
same. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, you are doomed to echo who along with others, started dropping Lovecraftian
“The Call of Cthulhu”: to retell the tale, despite the risk to yourself references into his work as a tribute. After Lovecraft’s
and your listeners. For Lovecraft, the terror of knowledge is a basic death, friend and fellow horror writer August Derleth
human fact. As he writes in the story’s opening lines: “We live on a made the practice official. He set up a press called
placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it Arkham House, named for the fictional Massachusetts
was not meant that we should voyage far.” Indeed, Lovecraft would town where Lovecraft set many stories, and started
need to return to placid Providence to finish the story. He started publishing Lovecraft’s work. He also began composing
lobbying his family for help that fall, and the following year his aunt new stories based on the author’s motifs—an early
funded a return to a rented room near Brown University. Sonia was form of fan fiction. Derleth was the first to describe
an afterthought—and soon, barely a thought at all. The couple filed these stories as “the Cthulhu mythos.” They amounted
for divorce in 1929. to a much more structured pantheon than Lovecraft
“Cthulhu,” published in Weird Tales in 1928, marked the beginning himself had left (and, some argue, a worldview that
of a tremendous burst of productivity. As much as Lovecraft distorts his original intent). But all include Lovecraft’s
complained about New York, the town seemed to have worked like original characters and place names, as well as his moral
a corrosive acid, removing the worst flaws that stained his early landscape: a mocking universe where the gods duke it
writing. New friends, long hours spent discussing craft, and even out while humanity remains helpless.
the poverty and alienation he experienced there all contributed to The theme of retelling from “Cthulhu” has become
a more mature, less effect-driven style. Until he died a decade later essential to how fans experience Lovecraft. Of course,
of cancer, Lovecraft continued revisiting and expanding the themes there are other reasons to enjoy his fiction: the bizarre
of “Cthulhu” in stories like “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” “The plotlines, the echoed names and ideas that weave
Colour Out of Space,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and “At the together into a tightly knit universe, the chance to
Mountains of Madness.” peek into Lovecraft’s poorly ventilated brain, with its
Despite his output, Lovecraft never found success during his particular fixations. But more than anything, Lovecraft’s
lifetime. Some of this was due to literary fashion—only a few stories lend themselves to being rewritten. There are
magazines published horror stories—and some was Lovecraft’s only a few settings—Providence, Boston, Arkham, and
a fictional college called Miskatonic University. There
are even fewer setups: Research scientist uncovers dark
secret. Dark secret takes hold of small New England
Big Reach town. Effete learned man must uncover the truth.
Ancient gods are invoked. Then there’s an epiphany
about the horror of all things, and everyone dies or goes
crazy at the end. Combine all these elements, and you’ve
LOVECRAFT’S got a Lovecraft story.
tentacles of inspiration As more famous authors penned tributes (Jorge Luis
stretch far and wide. You Borges, Michael Chabon, Stephen King), the formula
can find references to his
works in literature, TV,
gained steam. Lovecraft grew from a cult figure to a
music, and film. powerful influence on pop culture. But he remains a
writer many people experience secondhand, mostly
through other mythos-inspired writers and pop nihilistic
horrors like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Detective.
TR
RU
TRUE
ETE
ECTI
DETECTIVE You may not have read Lovecraft, but you’ve probably
encou
encountered his work’s offspring.
MIICHAEL
MICHAEL It’s fitting that it’s online that Lovecraft has found
CH
HABON
CHABON
his most enthusiastic following. With his fevered
BUFFY
BUF FY THE
FFY THE JORGE
JORGE LUIS
JOR LUISS NE EIL
NEIL L correspondence to his amateur journalist buddies,
VAMPIRE
VA
AMP
AM RE SLAYER
PIR SLA YER
LAY
AY ER BORGES
BORRGE
RG
GE S GAIIM
MA
GAIMAN Lovecraft was an Internet junkie long before the
METALLICA
MET
M ETALL
ALLICA
ICA
A medium existed. His plots and characters lend
TH
SOUTHH JOYCE
JOY
JOYC CAROLL themselves to role-playing games, Internet memes, and
TWI
T WILIG
IG
GHT
TWILIGHT H PAR
PARK
PARK OATES
OATES
OAT ES
ZO
Z O
ZONE
LACK
LACK
BLACK EVIL
EVI
VILL fan fiction. The Cthulhu mythos features prominently
ABBA
SAB
SA BAT
ABBAATH
AT
SABBATH IRON
IRO
RO DEAD
ADD on forums with short, spooky horror stories, like the
MAIIDE
MAIDEN one that came to light in June when two young girls
THE
T REAL
TH
GHOSTBUSTERS
HO
OST
S STEPHEN
EN in Wisconsin stabbed a friend in order to “impress” a
KING
KIN
ING meme character called Slenderman. Lovecraft would
UE Ö
BLUE Y
ÖYSTER
C
CULT have been fascinated by the attack and how it hints
GWAR
AR at the sometimes brutal power of storytelling. In this
case, as in his stories, the real and the unreal mingle
uncomfortably close.
WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 29
 WorldMags.net
HISTORY

A Lady of Firsts
TH E WIFE O F TH E PRE SID EN T WA S
J U S T T H AT— U N T I L A G U N -T O T I N G
G EO LO G I S T N A M E D LO U H O OV E R
M OVED INTO TH E E A S T WIN G .
B Y S A R A H L A S KO W

N THE SPRING OF 1929, the White House

I was busy preparing for a tea party. This

wasn’t some run-of-the-mill White House
tea party: It was a top secret shindig, with
staffers and the Secret Service under strict orders not
to speak of it.
All the fuss was because one of the 15 invitees on
the guest list, Jessie DePriest, the wife of Illinois
representative Oscar DePriest, was African-American.
Not since Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T.
Washington over for dinner three decades prior had a
black person paid a social visit to the White House. But
now, in the height of the Jim Crow era, Lou Hoover,
wife of Herbert, was undeterred. She wanted DePriest
to come, and her office had drafted and redrafted the
guest list to include people who would accept her at
the table.
Despite efforts to keep the party under wraps, the
press found out, and, sure enough, a furor ensued.
Newspapers lambasted the first lady for “defiling” the
White House; the state legislatures of Texas, Georgia,
and Florida passed resolutions rebuking her. Lou
didn’t apologize. Although the reaction bothered her,
she refused to acknowledge the controversy publicly.
After all, this was nothing compared to the stress she
had coolly handled while living in China, where she
laughed off death threats during the Boxer Rebellion.
In many ways, Lou Hoover was the first truly modern
first lady. She was one of the first first ladies to drive
her own car (to the chagrin of the Secret Service), give
radio addresses, and create a separate policy agenda
for the East Wing. Usually, it’s Eleanor Roosevelt
who comes to mind when people think of first ladies
who made their own mark. But it was Lou who set an
undeniable precedent for Eleanor herself, as well as
future first ladies.
Lou was independent from the start. She enrolled at
Stanford in 1894 and was the first female to graduate
with a degree in geology, becoming one of only a
handful of female geologists in the country. It was at Stanford that
she met Herbert—at a dinner party where geology professor John
Casper Branner (a mentor to both Herbert and Lou) and his wife
had played matchmaker and seated the two together. They bonded
immediately over a mutual interest—rocks.
An intensely private person, Lou waited until her graduation,
three years after Bert’s, to tell anyone she planned to marry him.
Even the Branners didn’t know how successful their matchmaking
had been: “I thought they were just pals,” Mrs. Branner is quoted
as saying in Nancy Beck Young’s Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First
Lady. Bert’s proposal arrived via telegram: “Going to China via San
Francisco. Will you go with me?” Three months later, he showed up
in California. Within two weeks, they were married. Twenty-four
hours after that, they were on the S.S. Coptic, headed to the Pacific.
It was nearly impossible for a woman, no matter how qualified, to
land a geology job at the time. So while Bert worked as a consulting
engineer to the Chinese government for a lucrative $20,000 salary,
Lou busied herself learning Chinese. She did, however, sometimes
follow Bert underground to inspect the mines, often to the shock
of the miners.
By the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion—a grassroots
movement aimed at quashing foreign influences—had consumed
the country. That June, the Empress Dowager Cixi declared war on
all foreigners. But that didn’t bother Lou. She patrolled her garden
with a .38 caliber pistol, rode her bike around town until a bullet

30 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
PAPERS
LAMBASTED HER
FOR “DEFILING”
THE WHITE
blew out one of her tires, and calmly played solitaire as HOUSE.
shells fell at her front door. As the danger grew, Bert
tried to convince Lou to leave. She refused to go until
he did too.
That August, the couple left China. A year later they
landed in London, where Bert’s company was based, and after
a couple of years they began raising two boys. Kids in tow, Lou
accompanied Bert to Burma, Egypt, India, Russia, and Australia.
Though neither of them had grown up rich, mining was lucrative,
and the Hoovers were on their way to becoming millionaires by
the end of their twenties. Wealth liberated Lou from housework,
allowing her to take advantage of the freedoms available to women
of her class: traveling, domestic help, and the luxury of time‚ which
she spent collecting rock samples and sending them to Branner.
It was during this period that Lou, who would eventually become
fluent in five languages, published an award-winning Latin-to-
English translation of a 1565 guide to mining and metallurgy.
After World War I began, Lou moved her sons to California and
then returned to Europe to help Bert coordinate food and financial
aid in neutral Belgium. (She was decorated by King Albert I for
her work there.) When the U.S. entered the war, she moved to
Washington, D.C. and started a couple of boardinghouses, including
one for female employees of the Food Administration, which Bert
ALAMY
was now heading. After the war, her husband’s political prospects
blossomed—in 1920, his name was floated as a possible presidential
WorldMags.net
candidate, and in 1921, he became Commerce Secretary.
When he ran for president seven years later, he snagged
444 electoral votes.
Before moving into the White House, Lou knew she
could reinvent the role of first lady. Instead of setting
fashion trends like her predecessor, Grace Coolidge,
Lou used her husband’s professional standing to do
work for the causes she considered most important.
She continued to teach women to respond to crises and
disasters as she had during World War I and advocated
for their right to participate in sporting events such as
the Olympics.
Soon Lou was helping address another crisis. Just
eight months after Hoover took office, the market
crashed. People in need flooded the first lady with a
stream of letters. Usually, they pleaded for money or
clothes, though one old man simply asked that she
send a plant to his wife. (Lou sent two: an ivy and
a begonia.)
As the mailbox overflowed, Lou began to
organize. She hired a staff to handle the letters and
implemented a system. When the problem could
be handled by a government agency, Lou’s office
forwarded it. Cases dear to her heart were sent to the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs, while others
were delivered to the offices of the Girl Scouts. (As
national president from 1922 to 1925, she helped
grow the small club into a thriving organization.)
Her office coordinated with more than 40 federal,
state, local, and private groups to provide relief. In
situations where Lou knew none of the organizations
could help, she would forward a letter to
a personal friend of hers, asking for help
on this one case—and then quietly send
whatever money was needed too.
The quasi-governmental organization
Lou created was unlike anything a first
lady had done before. It acted as an
informal clearinghouse, coordinating
aid, independent of the president’s office.
It helped, but not nearly enough—and
neither did the Hoover administration’s
policies. After one disastrous term in the
White House, Lou and Bert left D.C.—and
the Roosevelts moved in. Eleanor Roosevelt
picked up where Lou left off. Her early relief efforts
mirrored the system Lou had set up.
Before the Hoovers moved out, Eleanor came by the
White House for a tour. Lou took her from room to
room, pointing out which pieces of furniture would
stay. In one of the oval-shaped parlors, Eleanor
mentioned she liked the curtains. Lou offered to leave
them behind. That’s the kind of woman she was—
quietly generous.
America wasn’t as generous with the Hoovers: With
the country still in dire financial straits, Americans
rushed to disown anything having to do with them.
The couple did little to argue their own defense. Lou
remained characteristically tight-lipped about her
work, even keeping secrets about her charities from
her husband. When she died of a heart attack in
1944, Bert found, to his surprise, a stash of checks in
her desk—hundreds of them. They were from cash-
strapped people she had helped over the years, looking
to repay her. Lou had refused to cash them.
September 2014 mentalfloss.com 31
 WorldMags.net
THEATER

Sighted director Lindsay

Nyman directs blind
actress Sheila Walker in
the original play Sit.

Stage Directions
AT A L O S A N G E L E S T H E AT E R
C O M P A N Y L I N D S AY N Y M A N H E L P S
B L I N D A C T O R S F I N D T H E I R W AY.
JEFF RUBIN1: First things first. Had you ever heard of a blind
theater company before you started working at one?
LINDSAY NYMAN: No. I had heard of a deaf theater. But no.
Theatre by the Blind is the only one in the country.
So what does the theater do?
We do theater arts therapy with under-served communities in
L.A. We produce original plays that are sometimes based on the
artists’ lives. We also work with at-risk youth. The actors help to
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LYSSA SAMUEL

create the plays, so everything we do is original. Through theater,

we work through a lot of issues.

How did you end up doing this?

I was a child actress. I did plays at little theaters in New York.
Then I went to UCLA and studied theater. And then my
sophomore year, I was getting sushi, and this guy next to me
asked, “Do you like theater?” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I run
a blind theater company. Do you want to come check it out?”

32 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
I went to a rehearsal and started volunteering. Eventually, I
started working for them, writing and directing.
What was the first performance you did with them?
Some of the people in our company were born blind, but
most became blind later in life, and many have had traumatic
experiences that caused their blindness. One woman was in an
abusive relationship, and she lost her sight from the abuse. So
I thought it would be helpful for them to tell me their stories. I
interviewed them, and we did a collection of monologues and
spoken word and some music too.
Did they act before, or is it the therapy angle that draws
them to it?
It’s not really the therapy angle. That’s a beautiful thing that
comes from it, but I think for them it’s just fun.
Physically, how does it work?
We do what I call floor Braille. We put mats on the
floor, which allows the actors to move onstage without “WHEN I’M ACTING helped me become a better yoga teacher
a cane or dog. They’re interlocking mats, like puzzle
pieces. One of the mats will lead to center stage; one
AND PLAYING
mat will lead to a prop. We use that in rehearsal, and A CHARACTER,
they’ll memorize the stage. They can feel with their feet
where the hard floor is and where the mat is, and they
I’M NOT BLIND.
use that to navigate. I’M ANYTHING I
Are there any advantages to being a blind actor?
WANT TO BE.”
I think so. Acting is all about listening, and our actors
have honed their listening skills acutely. But there are
also a lot of physical challenges. Some blind people
can feel a little restricted and afraid to move their
bodies around.
How do you navigate that challenge?
I’m a yoga instructor also, so I always lead them through a
warm-up and encourage them to take up space, and that’s
something I like to touch on for the empowerment aspect. To
take up space onstage and stand and speak and be loud. That
can be a challenge for blind people because sometimes when you
can’t see, you feel unseen.
Has it been difficult to direct in terms of the physical space?
I had a scene where people were knitting. We’ve done scenes
where we’ve had a dinner table set up, so there’s the drink, the
food, the fork, and that can take a lot of time. There are also
entrances and exits, which are tough for any director, but in this
case you can’t say, “Just get offstage.”
So how do you do it?
Everything is a cue. The music is huge. The music will line up
with an onstage blackout. I’m a fan of sound cues in general even
for getting around in rehearsal. It can be invasive to manipulate
a person’s body and tell them, “Sit here.” So I tap on a chair, and
the actors find their way with the sound.
Are they generally playing characters who are also blind?
No. They play sighted characters.
So much of acting is observing. Do they have another
way of observing?
I try not to worry too much about making them look not blind.
I don’t want it to become about that. I don’t give directions like
“Turn your head to the right; you’re not really looking at them
WorldMags.net
enough; blink now; put your hands on your hips”—
because that’s not going to be fun self-expression.
It’s just going to be them trying to look sighted. My
dream for it is to look like something different. At
its core, theater is about people getting onstage and
telling a story.
Are you involved in the community beyond theater?
A little, but I’m interested in doing other things. I’ll
probably start to teach yoga to blind people.
How would you teach yoga to a blind person?
The biggest thing I’ve learned about working with
blind people is to ask questions like “Do you need
help? Is this OK? Do you want me to do this or
that?” I’ll put my body in the shape, and then the
actors will touch my arm to know that it was up.
But I try to use verbal cues as much as
possible. Working with blind people has
for sighted people because you have to be
so specific.
How can you tell the theater is helping the
actors?
Here’s an example. This woman, Sheila
Walker—she’s who I based the last play on.
When she started, she was so soft-spoken
and closed off. In these last few years, she
has become the most outspoken, most
colorful woman onstage and in life. She’s
told me she is standing up to people. She’s
engaged and has found her voice through this. One of
the actors told me once, “I like acting because when
I’m acting and I’m playing a character, I’m not blind.
I’m anything I want to be.”
Has it changed how you view the world?
It’s nice to be around people who care so much about
energy and what that means. And I was thinking
about how sight is a beautiful thing, but it can create
a lot of conflict. What you look like and the color of
your skin and all these things—for them that does
not exist at all. They don’t know what I look like.
We don’t talk about that or how old I am. It doesn’t
matter—none of it matters. One of the women in
the company is 65 years old. We would maybe have
nothing in common in the sighted world—we may
have never even come in contact. Now, she’s one of
my best friends.
I can’t think of another art form where the artist is
possibly getting more out of it than the audience.
Well, that’s what’s interesting about it: Who is it for?
Are we doing the play to entertain the audience, or if
no one came, would it still be beneficial? I think both.
The point is, I think, that seeing them onstage and
what they’ve accomplished to get there, that’s what
you get out of it. It’s this mutually beneficial thing.
They’ve become inspired and watching them onstage
is an inspirational thing to witness.
1
Host of The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show (jeffrubinjeffrubinshow
.com); saw Wicked 11 times.
September 2014 mentalfloss.com 33
WorldMags.net



 


WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net mental _ f lo s s pre s e nt s

35 things you
didn’t know you
needed to know
STORY BY STACY
C Y CON
CO
CONRADT,
O NRAD
R T, NICK GREENE, JESSICA HULLINGER,
RAD
SEAN HUTCHINSON
HUTCHINSON,
ONN , HANNAH
HA
ANN
NNAH KEYSER, MARK MANCINI,
ARIKA OKRENT, LUCAS REILLY, AND MATT SONIAK

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BYRON
BYR O EGGENSCHWILER
Y ON EGGENS
S CHWILER

So where’s Waldo, really? P. 38 | Why do we have middle names? P.

P 41 | Where does my
y money
money go when I buy a movie
m ie ticket?
mo
mov ticket
tick ? P.
P 45
5
WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 35
BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net

1.

Do giraffes get
head rushes?
The short answer
is no, and that’s
thanks to their
very special cardiovascular
system. A giraffe’s heart is
two feet long and can
weigh up to 25 pounds. It
pumps blood so effectively
that giraffes have the
highest known blood
pressure of any
mammal—280/180 mm
Hg. But when a giraffe
bends down to drink, a
series of adaptations
prevent blood from rushing
to its head: Absorbent,
elastic artery walls swell to
hold excess fluid while
valves in the jugular
prevent blood from flowing
back. When the animal lifts
its head, the blood vessels
become pulmonary traffic
cops, directing most of the
blood straight to the brain.
The jugular is even
outfitted with a special
muscle to give blood an
extra boost upward, and all
this prevents wooziness
CUSANDAM QUE NAM, NES MAXIMAX IMOLUPITA

from setting in. —H.K.

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net It’s not because mint is a bad
mixer. The same chemical that
makes toothpaste delightfully foamy
2. is the one interfering with your taste
Why does toothpaste buds. Sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS, is
not a cleanser. It’s merely a foaming
make orange juice agent that helps create the tingly
taste awful? “clean feeling” we’ve come to expect
from our toothpaste. The trade-off is
that SLS temporarily blocks the
sweetness receptors on your tongue
and destroys the mouth’s
phospholipids, which help make
bitter tastes bearable. So while your
mouth is basking in its bath, your
taste for sweets is hampered and your
sensitivity to bitter foods and liquids
skyrockets. —J.H.

5.
4. Who
3.
Is there
such a invented the
When did
Americans
thing as
not having
word twitter?
lose their an accent? The Oxford English Dictionary credits
Geoffrey Chaucer, the Papa of English poetry,
English with introducing the verb—which means to
“chirp continuously”—more than 600 years
accent? ago. Along with twitter, Chaucer coined (or
first recorded) 2,000 other words, such as
Martian, scissors, delicacy, and every toddler’s
go-to: poop. —L.R.

Even the staunchest

dictionary-thumping
pronunciation stickler has
a regional inflection. Still,
accents that are more
Why do we have
6.

When English colonists

arrived in America in the
1600s, they sounded like their
countrymen at home. (Of
course, Britain is home to a
smorgasbord of accents, but
you know what we mean!) By
the mid–18th century, their
descendants sounded more,
well, American. It’s not that
the Yanks simply decided to
talk differently one day—the
accent evolved in Britain too!
Unlike their counterparts
today, 17th-century
Englishmen pronounced their
Rs. But by the 19th century,
it became fashionable in
southern England to drop
certain Rs, turning words like
perfect into puhfect. The fad
spread, but it didn’t reach
America, except along the East
Coast where ties to the old
country were stronger.
(That’s why Bostonians
“pahk the cah.”) —A.O.
common can sound neutral.
In the U.S., that title belongs
to the General American
accent, which you probably
know from the nightly news.
There’s nothing neutral
about it: General American
resembles the accent spoken
in a small swath of the
Midwest, stretching from
eastern Nebraska through
Iowa and parts of western
Illinois. It doesn’t sound funny
to many of us simply because
we’re so exposed to it. But if
the standards change, it may
sound weird one day. And
standards do change: Just
watch a classic movie. The
old silver screen accent, the
Transatlantic accent, sounds
outrageous today. But at that
time, it was considered neutral.
In a decade or two, our current
standard could also go out of
style, revealing that it was an
accent all along. —A.O.
eyebrows?
Eyebrows are the Swiss Army Knife of the
human body—they do everything! First and
foremost, they protect your eyes. The shape
of the brow ridge and the brows themselves
channel sweat, rain, and moisture away from
the eyeballs so your vision stays clear. Second,
they’re essential for nonverbal communication.
Scientists who study facial expressions say
eyebrows are key to expressing happiness,
surprise, and anger. They’re especially useful
to speakers of sign language, who contort
their eyebrows to complement hand signs.
Additionally, they act as an ID card. Eyebrows
stand out against the forehead, can be clearly
seen from a distance, and don’t change very
much over time—making them perfect for
identifying people. In a 2003 study at MIT,
people were shown a picture of Richard Nixon
with his eyes Photoshopped out and then a
picture with his eyebrows erased. They had
significantly more trouble identifying Tricky
Dick and other celebrities when the brow was
bald. The takeaway? If you’re going undercover,
forget the sunglasses. Shave your eyebrows
instead. —M.S.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 37

 BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net rising sun (that’s why we orient ourselves).
And early American settlers sometimes used
8. maps with West on top, because that was the

7. Why is North
always up on maps?
direction they were often heading. If anyone
deserves the blame for today’s northward
bias, it’s Claudius Ptolemy. In the second
century, he wrote the influential Geographia,

Why do There’s nothing inherently upward

which featured a “global” map with North on
top. No one’s positive why he positioned it
that way, but it may be that the Library of
Alexandria—where he did his research—

zebras about North. Some early Egyptian

maps put South on top, while in medieval
Europe, Christian cartographers tended to
simply didn’t have much information on the
Southern Hemisphere. During the
Renaissance, Ptolemy’s work was revived. By

have
give that distinction to the East, since you then, magnetic north had been discovered,
had to turn that way to face Jerusalem. making his layout even more appealing to
Others placed East on top because of the mapmakers. —M.M.

stripes?
Scientists have debated 9.
this question for centuries,
and explanations have What’s the best college-entrance
been as unique as,
well, a zebra’s stripes. question? (It’s an 11-way tie.)
Theories include predator
confusion, camouflage,
temperature regulation, What invention
and identification. Earlier would the world So
this year, biologists from What is college for? be better off
—HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE
without and why? where is
the University of California
compared the competing
—KALAMAZOO
COLLEGE
Waldo,
hypotheses, and the results really?
are in: none of the above. —UNIVERSITY
Studying zebras and OF CHICAGO
their equid cousins, the IF YOU COULD CHOOSE
Kermit the
TO BE RAISED BY ROBOTS,
team investigated how Frog famously
DINOSAURS, OR ALIENS, WHO
lamented, “It’s not
stripes, or lack thereof, WOULD YOU PICK? WHY?
easy being green.”
overlapped with factors Do you agree? —BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
like climate, the presence —TUFTS
of large predators, local UNIVERSITY
vegetation, and the
distribution of hungry,
Tell us the
biting flies. The strongest question you
correlation laid with think a selective
the insects. Stripes were college should
ask. How would
more common in areas Most overrated you answer it?
with lots of bloodsucking, superhero? Most —HAAS SCHOOL
disease-carrying bugs, OF BUSINESS
like tsetse flies. The fact HOW ARE underrated superhero? AT UC BERKELEY
APPLES AND Former kindergarten fear?
that tsetse flies rarely feast ORANGES
on zebra blood and that SUPPOSED TO BE Advice for adults? Gadget
zebras suffer less from fly- COMPARED?
that needs inventing?
borne diseases than their —UNIVERSITY What
OF CHICAGO —UNC CHAPEL HILL
unstriped relatives lends
does
support to the idea that
stripes are a built-in bug #YOLO
repellent. Researchers in COULD MY mean to
BRAIN BE
Hungary say some insects To tweet or not to tweet? EVIL? you?
are attracted to dark hair, —UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, —ALL SOULS —TUFTS
and the contrasting white CHARLOTTESVILLE COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY
stripes make a zebra less OXFORD
appealing than a solid-
colored animal. —M.S.

38 mentalfloss.com September 2014

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net It’s oft repeated that the best thing to do if you’re caught out in a thunderstorm is
to lie down flat, but that’s dead wrong. If you think you’re about to be struck by
lightning—and you might be able to tell because the electrical charge will make
your skin tingle and your hair stand on end—you want to get as low as possible while
keeping as little of your body touching the ground. Experts recommend this position: Cover
10. your ears, crouch on the balls of your feet like a baseball catcher, and touch your heels
together. This creates a circuit for the charge to travel, allowing the bolt to ride up one foot,
What should down the other, and back into the ground—rather than coursing through the rest of your
body. —L.R.
I do if I’m
about to get
struck by
lightning?

11.
Where do What’s so continental
12.

about a continental
the Amish go for breakfast?

vacation?
Every year, nearly 5,000 Amish (and some Mennonite)
snowbirds from Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania take charter
buses 1,200 miles south to Pinecraft, Florida, a little beachside
community jokingly called Amish Las Vegas. In some ways,
an Amish beach vacation is a lot like everyone else’s: flip-flops,
food, shuffleboard tournaments, socializing—and electricity.
Some of the teenagers even get away with bikinis and
sunbathing. That’s a pretty stark contrast to the strict dress code
at home, which is probably why some community members like
to say, “What happens in Pinecraft, stays in Pinecraft.” —S.C.
A stale bagel in a Midwest motel is a far cry from a
flaky croissant at a Parisian cafe, but the sentiment is the
same. The American continental breakfast imitates the
traditional light morning meals common in mainland
Europe—you know, “the continent”—where breakfast
isn’t lauded as the most important meal of the day. (By
some eater’s standards, it’s barely a meal at all.) Take
the traditional petit dejeuner in France: coffee, bread,
maybe some fruit and yogurt. For hoteliers, the appeal of
a light morning meal is clear: It’s cheap, easy to provide,
and satisfactory to European tourists. But when the
small meal first popped up in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, American diners were appalled. Harper’s
Weekly demanded it be banished from the “hemisphere
where the Monroe Doctrine and the pie should reign
supreme.” —M.S.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 39

 BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net
13.

What does space

smell like?

Astronauts fresh off space walks often report that a certain

faint, acrid smell tends to cling to their equipment. NASA
astronaut Don Pettit described it as “a rather pleasant sweet
metallic sensation” akin to “welding fumes,” while others have said it
CUSANDAM QUE NAM, NES MAXIMAX IMOLUPITA

reminds them of charred meat. They were probably smelling

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are compounds
produced when stars and planets form. According to Jeff Oishi, a
research scientist at the Museum of Natural History in New York,
PAHs are present on Earth too—they’re produced when you BBQ!
But if you travel 26,000 light years to a dust cloud at the center
of the Milky Way called Sagittarius B2, you might catch a whiff of
raspberries and maybe rum. This cloud is stuffed with ethyl formate,
an ester that gives both treats their flavor. “Space is pretty boozy,”
Oishi says. “There’s no liquid alcohol, but a lot of different kinds
of alcohols have been observed.” The constellation Aquila contains
enough space booze that, if liquefied, it could fill 400 trillion trillion
pints. Interstellar pub crawl, anyone? —J.H.

WorldMags.net
 BIG
14. QUESTIONS
WorldMags.net
Why do we have middle names?
The phrase “middle name” first appeared in an 1835
Harvard University periodical called Harvardiana, but
the practice dates back much further. In ancient Rome,
having multiple names was an honor usually bestowed
upon the most important people—like Gaius Julius
Caesar. The fad died out only to pick back up again in
Western cultures in the 1700s, when aristocrats started
giving their children lavishly long names to indicate their
place in society. Similarly, lengthy Spanish and Arabic
names adopt paternal or maternal names from previous
generations to trace the individual’s family tree. (In
other cultures, like Chinese, there are traditionally no
middle names.)
PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (ROOSEVELT/LC-USZ62-68542; WELLES/LC-USZ62-119765). ALAMY (DRAKE, LEE, POTTER, HIGHSMITH, MCQUEEN, WOOLF, LEWIS)
The three-name structure used today began in the Mid-
dle Ages when Europeans were torn between giving their
child a saint’s name or a common family name. The practice
of giving three names eventually resolved the problem with a
formula: given name first, baptismal name second, surname
third. It branched to America as immigrants arrived: Adopt-
ing a trio of labels became a way of aspiring to a higher social
class. Nonreligious middle names—often maternal maiden
names—gradually became the norm, and by the Civil War, it
was customary to name your child whatever you liked. Middle
names had started to become more or less official by World
War I, when the U.S. enlistment form became the first official
government document to include space for them. —S.H.

DON’T BE FOOLED! THESE CELEBS ADOPTED THEIR MIDDLE NAMES AS THEIR FIRST.

George Orson Adeline Virginia Philip Anthony Geetali Norah Aubrey Robyn Rihanna Charles Robert
Welles Woolf Hopkins Jones Shankar Drake Graham Fenty Redford

Anna Eleanor Frederick Helen Beatrix Terence Steven Mary Patricia Walter Bruce Nelle Harper
Roosevelt Carlton Lewis Potter McQueen Plangman (Highsmith) Willis Lee

16.
Why do slugs
15.
Why do itches itch? like beer?

We’re not talking about itches from blood pressure. Without Nppb, you
ISTOCK (HOPKINS, RIHANNA, REDFORD, SHANKAR, WILLIS)

bug bites or poison ivy, which are
reactions to histamine. We mean
those random itches that leave
you absent-mindedly scratching
your nose. Itch research remains a
relatively new field of study, and,
previously, itches were thought to be
just extremely mild forms of pain.
While both itches and pain (and
heat) are all transmitted through
the body by similar neurons, a
2013 study showed that itches are
special—they’re triggered by Nppb, a
neurotransmitter that also happens
to be responsible for controlling
wouldn’t feel itchy.
Gil Yosipovitch, M.D., director
of the Temple Itch Center, explains
that itches evolved to warn animals
of environmental dangers. Receptors
near the skin’s surface are poised
to react to any external irritant,
no matter how tiny. If you feel
a random itch, something just a
couple microns long—be it dust,
soap residue, dead skin, or a thread
of clothing—is probably disturbing
a few nerve endings, which send
signals to the spinal cord asking for
a much-needed scratch. —H.K.
The sweet smell of yeast attracts slugs
to beer like moths to a flame. (And
often it’s in a Solo cup that they meet their
boozy demise.) “A lot of slug species feed on
decaying plant material,” says Ian Bedford,
head of the John Innes Centre’s
Entomology Facility in the U.K. Beer
resembles overripe fruits, which burst
with naturally fermenting yeasts that
slugs can’t resist. If you need to clear your
garden of pests but can’t bear to waste some
suds, try this substitute: Mix a packet of dry
yeast with two tablespoons of flour, two cups
of warm water, and a spoonful of sugar to
make the slug medicine go down. —J. H.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 41

 BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net19.
How lethal
18. is my
17.
Can animals How does doctor’s
predict the the post office
future? sloppy
decipher bad handwriting?
penmanship?
It’s classic farming
folklore: If the
cows are lying down, it’s
time to batten down the
hatches. So is it true that
they can predict rain? A
recent study at the Each year, automatic post sorters fail to read That joke about physicians’ indecipherable
University of Arizona about 2.4 billion pieces of mail—all because handwriting? It really isn’t a laughing
found that lying cows of messy handwriting. When a machine finds matter. U.S. doctors write about 3.2 billion
conserve heat—since rain an illegible letter, it sends a digital image to prescriptions every year. The Institute of
is often preceded by a a plant in Salt Lake City, where 700 special Medicine reports that, of those, 1.5 million
sudden drop in clerks are based. These folks are the gurus injuries occur because pharmacists or
temperature, they may of chicken scratch—amazingly, most clerks hospital workers misread that handwriting.
assume the position to can crack the code in just three seconds! Worse, sloppily written prescriptions lead
keep warm as a shower Each year, 200 million letters remain baffling to more than 7,000-patient deaths per year.
nears. (They may, and are handed to peek-and-poke clerks, a Fortunately, health-care providers and tech
however, just be relaxing dying breed of postal worker who sorts mail companies have come up with a solution:
over some delicious cud by hand. If they can’t translate the script, the the National ePrescribing Patient Safety
for unrelated reasons.) letters are christened nixies and sent to the Initiative, which encourages doctors to
Plenty of other species last line of penmanship wizards, the nixie write prescriptions electronically. Congress
have reputations for clerks. If they can’t decode it, the mail ends backed the plan in 2008, and since then,
fortune-telling too. This up in Atlanta’s dead letter office, where it medical errors caused by sloppy scribbles
is mainly because they can heads to the big shredder in the sky. —L.R. have dropped by 90 percent. —S.H.
detect infrasound: noise
frequencies so low human
ears can’t perceive them.
Thunder and earthquakes
emit infrasound waves
over long distances, as
happened in 2004, when
a tsunami devastated
Thailand. Before
the wave made land,
herds of elephants—
which use infrasound
to communicate—
spontaneously fled for
higher ground.
Sharks, meanwhile,
can detect changes
in ocean pressure,
which, theoretically,
includes those caused
by impending storms.
They’re known to avoid
hurricanes by making
a beeline for deeper
water. Which answers
an additional pressing
question: No, a sharknado
cannot happen. —M.M.

42 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 20.
WorldMags.net Decomposing corpses bloat with gases like
methane and hydrogen sulfide, which have
to find their way out one way or another. If a
Why do dead whale dies at sea, scavengers such as sharks might
relieve the pressure by munching at the skin, but if
whales explode? a whale washes up on shore, the animal’s weight
can cause any open orifices to seal up. Exacerbated
by the sun’s heat, the gases build and the whale
turns into a blubber balloon ripe for popping. Of
course, humans and other animals bloat too, says
Les Kaufman, a professor of biology at Boston
University. You never hear about that because,
simply put, “when a whale explodes, you tend to
notice.” But not all cetaceans explode equally.
When a 45-foot, eight-ton whale washed up on
the shores of Florence, Oregon, in 1970, officials
took matters into their own hands. They used a
half-ton of dynamite to blow it up, hoping most of
the detritus would blast into the ocean. Instead,
the explosion sent hundreds of pieces of whale
confetti flying as far as a quarter of a mile,
smashing one car to bits. —J.H.

How Chinese is
21.
Who were
22.

Chinese food?
John and
Jane Doe?
Nobodies. The names were born out of a
strange, defunct British legal process called
an “action of ejectment.” Under old English
common law, it was ridiculously difficult for
landowners to take action against squatters
or defaulting tenants in court. The process
was bogged down by so many legal hoops,
it became easier for the courts to just make
things up. A fictitious tenant and landlord
were created, and the imaginary parties were
regularly named John Doo and Richard Roo.
(Other surnames, like Noakes and Stiles,
were used, but they didn’t catch on.) No one
is sure why Doo and Roo, which evolved into
Doe and Roe, were picked, although both do
refer to deer. —M.S.

If you showed one of those iconic white pails to people in China, they
might scratch their heads. The little boxes were patented on
23.
November 13, 1894 in Chicago by the not-so-Chinese inventor
Frederick Weeks Wilcox (who wanted to improve the wooden oyster pails
What is
commonly used to transport raw mollusks from fish markets). They’re
distinctly American—as is the takeout packed inside them. Chinese
the Statue of
23.
restaurants first started popping up in America in the mid-1800s when
immigrants—mostly from present-day Guangzhou—flocked to California
Liberty’s shoe
during the Gold Rush. The eateries spread, and by the 1920s, Chinese
restaurants were featuring two menus: one with traditional fare; the other an
size?
Americanized version. The latter menu, which featured foods doused in 879
(U.S. women’s,
sweet, salty, syrupy sauces, became a cuisine all its own. For example, the of course!)
broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, and yellow onions found at American Chinese
restaurants aren’t part of traditional Chinese cooking. (Tomatoes and
broccoli aren’t even native to China!) That General Tso’s chicken you adore? 25 feet
American. Those fortune cookies? Not just American, but based on Japanese
crackers. Chinese food is so ingrained in American culture that there are (The equivalent of 30 size 9 women’s shoes!)
more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s. —S.H.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 43

 BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net
Who wrote the world’s greatest
25.

one-hit wonder?
24. “Chopsticks” is probably the world’s best- instructions to “Play with both hands
known waltz (yes, it’s a waltz). The ditty turned sideways, the little fingers lowest,
was penned in 1877 by a 16-year-old girl so that the movement of the hands imitates

What named Euphemia Allen, who called it “The

Celebrated Chop Waltz.” Her brother, a
music publisher named Mozart Allen (yes,
the chopping from which this waltz gets
its name.” So no, the title of the piece has
nothing to do with the utensils. Despite the

does
he was named Mozart) helped get the sheet lasting success of “The Celebrated Chop
music on store shelves under the pseudonym Waltz,” neither Miss Allen nor her alter ego
Arthur de Lulli. The music included ever published music again. —S.C.

a mail-
order 26.

bride Why isn’t cat food mouse-flavored?

cost? Cats love to chew on mice, so why

not feed them meals with delicious
Not every “international rodent flavoring? Because the
marriage agency” charges FDA says you can’t. It holds pet food to
the same price, and it the same sanitation and safety standards
depends on how far you as it does human food, approving
travel to meet and court ingredients it deems appropriate, and
potential spouses. One necessary, for an animal’s diet. Rodents
prominent mail-order New aren’t sanctioned to be grown as a food
York couple estimated source in the United States, and the
their experience cost Department of Agriculture doesn’t have an
roughly $20,000. The official inspection procedure for mice. So
first “catalog courting” while fish are a go, mice are a no. —S.H.
appeared in the 1600s
to match colonists with
English girls to populate
the New World. They
.03
were called “Jamestown
brides,” “King’s daughters,”
and “Casket girls.” The
tradition continued into
the mid-1800s, when
prospectors headed west
to dig up gold. Because
women were scarce, men
took out personals ads on
the East Coast and sent
letters to churches, asking
ladies to send pictures. In
1882, Fred Harvey went a
step further and recruited
women to serve in cafés
and entertain potential
mates in “courting parlors”
along the Santa Fe railroad
in exchange for free room
and board. By 1900, more
than 5,000 “Harvey Girls”
had been married off. —S.C.

44 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
27.
Why do we carve
pumpkins? 28.
Are special
pumpkin-carving
tools safer than
When you think about it, scooping the innards out of a large
squash, carving a scary face into it, and jamming a candle inside kitchen knives?
is a bit weird. But so is the story behind the first jack-o’-lantern. As
far back as the 1500s, Irish storytellers regaled about a blacksmith
named Stingy Jack, who invited the Devil to the bar. When their
night of carousing ended, Jack needed cash and the Devil, handily,
transformed himself into a coin so Jack could pay the tab. Ever
the trickster, Jack pocketed the coin and used a cross to prevent
Satan from changing back. He later let the Devil loose under the
condition that his soul would never go to hell.
But there was a problem. When Jack died, God wouldn’t let him
into Heaven, so his soul was stuck on Earth. Feeling bad that his It turns out they are! How do we know? Researchers at SUNY
old buddy would be wandering the world in the dark, the Devil Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, enlisted a few
gave Jack a lump of burning coal that Jack, for reasons untold, helping hands. Literally. In a 2004 study, they placed the donated
placed in a carved-out turnip. Thus: jack-o’-lantern. hands of six cadavers in front of a knife-wielding hydraulic press.
The tale was devised to explain will-o’-the-wisps, the mysterious After calculating how much pressure each carving tool needed
flashes of light created by flaming gas around swamps and bogs, to penetrate pumpkin skin, the researchers gauged how easily
and it became tradition for the Irish to carve turnips, beets, and the utensils could slice the cadaver’s hands. Indeed, they found
potatoes to trick friends into thinking Stingy Jack was lurking that the specialty tools were less likely to lacerate flesh at the
nearby. Immigrants took the custom to the U.S, where the plentiful required pumpkin-penetrating pressure than standard kitchen
pumpkin became the veggie of choice. —S.C. knives. —N.G.

30.
29. How do
Where does my money go butterflies
navigate?
when I buy …
SOURCES: ROGEREBERT.COM (MOVIE TICKET); MONEY MAGAZINE (BOOKS)

… a movie ticket? ($9) … a book?* ($27.95) Monarchs calibrate

their body clock with
13% 10% 7% the sun’s position in the sky to
Publisher Wholesaler Marketingng migrate more than 2,000
($3.55) ($2.80) ($2) miles to their breeding sites in
45% Mexico. But on cloudy days,
Theater
they use a backup GPS
($4.05) 10%
Printing borrowed from geese and sea
($2.83) turtles: an inner magnetic
compass. Earlier this year,
55% Studio ($4.95) 45% researchers at UMass
15% Retailer
($12.58)
confirmed that monarchs use
Authorlties
Ads and marketing: $1.90 ($4.19) proteins called cryptochromes
Production: $1.54 to detect minute changes in
Distribution: $0.90 the Earth’s magnetic field. The
Actors: $0.61 *Figures for
a bestselling proteins are fueled by UVA
author light, which pierces the cloud
cover. —L.R.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 45

BIG QUESTIONSWorldMags.net
This question is for the birds. No, really! In a paper recently
published in Frontiers in Psychology, linguists at MIT and the
University of Tokyo argue that ancient humans crafted language
from two communication systems that already existed in nature—those
used by birds and primates.
Human language has two distinct layers: expressive and lexical. Both
of these have existed in nature for millennia. The melodic, beat-stressed
expressive quality of our language is similar to that used by birds. The
lexical “pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech” resemble the system
used by other primates. About 100,000 years ago, the research suggests,
humans may have fused the two together to form the building blocks of
31.
their own language. In doing so, they achieved something astounding.

Where does
Birdsong and primate language are both finite: They each contain only a
limited number of sounds, which supply a limited number of meanings. But
by combining the two, humans created a language that allows for infinite
possible meaning combinations. This complexity is part of what makes us,

language well, human. —L.R.

come from?

CUSANDAM QUE NAM, NES MAXIMAX IMOLUPITA

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net
33.
32.
Who owns
the Mall of
America?
An Iranian-Canadian
family. Ironic, eh? The
five Ghermezian brothers were
granted full ownership in
2006, putting the Mall of
America firmly in Canadian
hands. Their next venture? A
$3.7 billion New Jersey
megamall called American
Dream Meadowlands. —M.M.
34.
Right now, how many
people are …
… on Facebook?
SOURCES: O’REILLY RESEARCH (FACEBOOK). NICB (CARS). BLS (SLEEP). BARBIE MEDIA (BARBIE). RADICATI (EMAIL).
… stealing cars in the U.S.?
… asleep?
NAPO (PIZZA). HOWMANYPEOPLEAREINSPACERIGHTNOW.COM (SPACE). BITSCAN (BITCOIN)
… buying Barbie dolls?
… sending emails?
… eating pizza in the U.S.
… orbiting the planet?
… Bitcoin owners?
Which spider has the
craziest bite?
Spiders of the genus Phoneutria, known as Brazilian wandering spiders, are some of
the deadliest in the world. Just 0.006 mg of their venom—about the same mass as two
grains of sand—can kill a mouse. A bite will also cause a grown man intense pain, blurred
vision, vomiting, a spike in blood pressure and heart rate, tremors, and … a noticeable
bulge in the pants. You read that right. One of the consequences of a Phoneutria bite
(in men) is an erection. This is not a good thing: It’s painful, prolonged, and can cause
permanent damage to the penis. But there is an upside. The venom ingredient causing
the situation—a peptide called Tx2-6—can be isolated, and researchers have shown it can
improve erectile function in mice. They hope the chemical can eventually be developed
into an erectile dysfunction drug. —M.S.
35.
Were the Wright
Brothers really the
first to fly?
1.6 million
Consult any history book and you’ll learn
that Wilbur and Orville Wright were the
first people to achieve “controlled, powered, and
2 sustained heavier-than-air human flight.” Now
(every
that’s a fancy title! But the first (somewhat)
minute)
successful flights actually occurred about 1,400
years earlier, when the Chinese invented
“man-carrying kites.” These were exactly what
2 billion they sound like. Typically dropped from a
calculated height, some of them reportedly
could transport a brave passenger well over a
mile. Later in 11th-century England, a
20 (per
minute)
Benedictine monk named Eilmer of
Malmesbury built a feathery birdlike apparatus,
jumped off his monastery’s cliff into the wind,
and glided about 200 yards—before crashing
1.3 million
(every and breaking his legs. The next big advance in
minute) flight came in 1783, when French scientist
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier ascended
roughly 500 hundred feet in a manned,
21,000 untethered hot air balloon. Then came inventors
(every
such as England’s Sir George Cayley and
minute)
Germany’s Otto Lilienthal, both of whom
designed and piloted revolutionary gliders in the
18th and 19th centuries. Cayley, who’s credited
6 with designing the world’s first glider, also
discovered major aeronautic concepts like drag
and lift. Lilienthal, considered the “world’s first
true aviator,” made more than 2,000 successful
2.5 gliding flights between 1891 and 1896, some of
million
which covered seven times more ground than
the Wright Brothers’ famous flight at Kitty
Hawk. —M.M.
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48 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
the weeks leading up to D-day, Allied commanders had their best game
faces on. “This operation is not being planned with any alternatives,”
barked General Dwight D. Eisenhower. “This operation is planned
as a victory, and that’s the way it’s going to be!” Indeed, more than
6,000 ships were ready to cruise across the English Channel to plant
the first wave of two million troops on the white beaches of Normandy.
Nearly 20,000 vehicles would crawl ashore as 13,000 planes dropped
thousands of tons of explosives and thousands of paratroopers.
The sheer size of the invasion—it would be the largest in history—
was staggering. But so were the stakes. With the first day’s casualty
rate expected to reach 90 percent and the outcome of World War II
hanging in the balance, the truth was that Eisenhower was riddled
with doubt. He’d transformed into an anxious chimney, puffing four
packs of cigarettes a day. Other Allied leaders felt equally unsure.
“I see the tides running red with their blood,” Winston Churchill
lamented. General George S. Patton privately complained of feeling
“awfully restless.” Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alan Brooke
was more blunt: “It won’t work,” he said. The day before the inva-
sion, Eisenhower quietly penciled a note accepting blame in case he
had to order retreat. When he watched the last of the 101st Airborne
Division take off, the steely general started to cry.
They were worried for good reason. With so many troops
and so much artillery swelling in England, it was impossible
to keep the attack a secret. Hitler knew it was coming, and
he’d been preparing a defense for months. Only one detail
eluded him, and he was confident in a Nazi victory if he
could figure it out—he needed to know where, exactly, the
attack would happen. To make D-day a success, the Allies
needed to keep him in the dark: They’d have to trick the Ger-
mans into thinking the real invasion was just a bluff, while
making it seem like a major attack was imminent elsewhere.
The task seemed impossible, but luckily, the British had a
secret weapon: a short, young balding Spaniard. He was the king
of con men, an amateur spy gone pro, the world’s sneakiest liar. He
was also, of all things, a chicken farmer.
JUAN PUJOL GARCÍA HAD BEEN WORKING at a hotel when he decided
to become a spy. Although he was born to a wealthy Barcelona family
in 1912, Pujol had squandered his privileges. To the disappointment
of his family, he dropped out of boarding school at 15, eventually en-
rolling instead at an academy for poultry farmers. At 21, he served six
months of mandatory military service, but army life wasn’t for him:
The pacifist ditched the cavalry and bought a movie theater. When
that venture failed, he bought a smaller theater, which flopped too.
Success chronically eluded him. By 24, Pujol had resigned himself
to working on a sinking chicken farm and marrying a girl he wasn’t
sure he loved. His life was normal, if not boring.
But life in 1930s Spain was anything but boring. In 1931, King
Alfonso XIII sensed his popularity crumbling and fled the country
without formally abdicating, leaving Spain a political vacuum. Com-
munist and Fascist groups violently fought for power. Bullrings be-
came theaters for public massacres, and the corpses of politicians
littered Madrid’s alleys.
50 mentalfloss.com September 2014
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When Spain plunged into civil war in July 1936, Pujol was
supposed to report for duty, but he fled instead. He was soon caught
and thrown in prison. Then, after unwittingly joining a jailbreak, he
bolted to a safe house in Barcelona. He never saw his fiancée again.
More than a year passed, and in 1938, a depressed and emaciated
Pujol emerged from hiding. The escapee looked so bad, he was able
to forge a document saying he was too old for the army. It would be
the first of a growing snowball of lies.
Desperate for money, Pujol eventually landed a job managing a
dumpy Madrid hotel ironically named the Majestic. The walls were
grubby and the heating was shoddy, but in a certain sense, he had
found a home. He was a passionate small-talker, and a hotel was a
great place to meet people. And those people could be his ticket out
of war-torn Spain.
One day, the Spanish Duke of Torre walked into the hotel and
asked for a room. Pujol struck up a conversation about parties,
which prompted the duke to complain that his aunts—two elderly
pro-Franco princesses—were upset they couldn’t get their hands on
any scotch since the civil war erupted. Pujol’s eyes lit up. He knew
there was hooch across the border in Portugal. He didn’t have a pass-
port—obtaining one was nearly impossible—but if anyone could get
him one, it would be a pair of Franco-loving princesses.
So Pujol wagered the duke a deal: If he could procure Pujol a
passport, then Pujol would procure some scotch. The royal agreed,
and soon the Spaniard had his papers. He chauffeured the aristo-
crats into Portugal, bought six bottles of black market booze, and
moseyed back into Spain with ease. Like that, he had a document
that people killed, and were killed, for. He could escape.
The timing could not have been worse. There was nowhere safe to
escape to. Weeks earlier, in September 1939, England had declared
war on Germany. Hitler was beginning to gobble up Europe, and
word of concentration camps had leaked past Spain’s censors. Pu-
jol was trapped—and outraged. “My humanist convictions would
not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was
being unleashed by this psychopath,” he wrote in Operation Garbo,
a 1985 book co-authored by Nigel West. So instead of plotting his
escape, Pujol began plotting schemes to help the Allies.
In January 1941, he walked into the British embassy and vague-
ly asked for a job as a spy. There was just one problem: He knew
absolutely nothing about espionage. He floated from one embassy
secretary to the next, talking in circles about “his services.” They of-
fered their own services by showing him the door. Undeterred, Pujol
returned home and fine-tuned his spiel. Then, he did the unthink-
able: He called the German embassy and declared he wanted to spy
for the Nazis.
THE VOICE ON THE LINE WAS HEAVY AND GUTTURAL. It told Pujol to
go to the Café Lyon at 16:30 the next day—an agent in a light suit
would be holding a raincoat in the back of the café waiting for him.
 WorldMags.net
Thousands of inflatable
tanks were scattered
across southeastern
Pujol followed orders. He strolled into the café and intro- England to make the fake
army look real.
duced himself to an athletic, blue-eyed blond man sitting
in the back. The agent greeted him with a cold nod. His
code name was Federico, and he was specially trained to
spot frauds. Pujol sat and started professing a devout—but
false—love for Hitler and the New Order. The rant was
cunning and bombastic. Off the top of his head, Pujol spun
a rambling web of lies, rattling off names of nonexistent
diplomats whom he claimed were friends. Impressed, Fed-
erico scheduled a second meeting.
Rendezvousing at a beerhouse, Federico told Pujol that
the Nazi spy ring—the Abwehr—didn’t need more agents
in Spain. Rather, they needed moles who could snoop
abroad. Pujol beamed and told the recruiter about his
passport. Federico nodded. A few days later, he told Pujol
to go to Lisbon and charm the embassy into awarding him
an exit visa. When Pujol got there, the embassy refused.
It looked like a dead end, but again, Pujol’s gift of gab
proved handy. At his hotel in Lisbon, he befriended a portly, affable
Galician man named Jaime Souza. On a night out together, Souza
unveiled a document that made Pujol’s heart leap—a diplomatic visa.
For the next week, Pujol accompanied Souza everywhere: amuse-
ment parks, nightclubs, cabarets, and, eventually, a casino. One af-
ternoon, as the duo played roulette, Pujol pretended to double over
with stomach cramps. He told Souza to keep playing while he ran
back to the hotel. He raced to their room, opened Souza’s suitcase,
pilfered the visa, and snapped a few photographs. Then, he returned
to the casino floor as if nothing had happened.
Within days, Pujol had forged the document. Upon returning to
Spain, he showed it to Federico: Pujol was in. The agent was so im-
pressed, he took Pujol under his wing, stocking him with invisible
ink, ciphers, $3,000 in cash, and a code name: ARABEL—Latin
for “answered prayer.” His first assignment was to move to England,
pose as a BBC radio producer, and crib British intelligence.
Pujol, of course, had no interest in actually spying for the Nazis.
He wanted to be an Allied double agent. So instead of following
orders to go to Britain, he went to Portugal. Confident the Allies
would accept him now that he had access to German secrets, he
dashed to the British embassy and showed them the ink, the ci-
phers, and the cash—he had everything a double agent needed.
But the British reply was clear: “No.” Pujol was crestfallen. “Why,”
he wondered, “was the enemy proving to be so helpful, while those
whom I wanted to be my friends were being so implacable?”
Despite its name, Britain’s intelligence office was anything but.
When the war began, the office was a factory of bad ideas. In 1941, it
tried convincing the Germans that 200 man-eating sharks had been
dumped in the English Channel. A year later, it seriously considered
staging the Second Coming of Christ. (The plan was simple: A Jesus-
like figure would magically appear across the German countryside,
perform miracles, and preach peace.)
The decision to reject Pujol, however, was a matter of politics.
The Allies wanted to keep Spain out of the war, so a Spanish double
agent wasn’t enticing. Plus there was the minor detail that Pujol
didn’t know a thing about England. He had never been there. He
knew nothing about its military. He barely spoke the language. And
now, in order not to blow his cover with the Abwehr, he had to con-
vince the Nazis he was living there.
WITHOUT LEAVING PORTUGAL, Pujol bought a map of England, a
tourist guidebook, and a list of railway timetables—and began lying
through his teeth. The Abwehr had told him to recruit subagents
WorldMags.net
for help. Pujol had a better idea: He’d make them up. If something
went sour, he could blame it on his imaginary employees. When
something went right, he’d take the credit. With that, ARABEL
started fabricating sources, spies, and stories. Using newspapers and
telephone books as inspiration, Pujol wrote sprawling, baroque letters
to the Abwehr that contained practically no useful information at
all—they were just meant to waste the agency’s time. But Pujol knew
he couldn’t keep up the ruse forever. If he wanted the Abwehr’s trust,
he’d need to start sending some legitimate information. He asked for
Britain’s help, but the embassy rejected him a fourth and fifth time.
Then, by chance, some of ARABEL’s reports struck too close to
the truth. In one letter, he told the Germans that a convoy of five
Allied ships had left Liverpool for Malta. Little did Pujol know, but
the made-up report was, in reality, mostly correct. When Britain’s
spy circle—the M15—intercepted the message, agents panicked. A
Nazi spy was loose in England! “The British were going crazy looking
for me,” Pujol later recalled. He pulled a similar stunt weeks later,
reporting that a major armada was departing Wales. This time, the
convoy didn’t exist. But U-boats and Italian fighter planes scrambled
to ambush it anyway, wasting tons of fuel and thousands of man-
hours. Now this grabbed the Allies’ attention. In April 1942, the M15
smuggled Pujol into London and hired him as part of its double-
cross system. The Brits were so impressed with his ability to play a
fervid Nazi, they code-named the amateur spy GARBO because, in
their opinion, he was the best actor in the world.
As a bona fide double agent, GARBO’s network of imaginary spies
ballooned. He enlisted a traveling salesman, a cave-dwelling Gibral-
tarian waiter, a retired Welsh seaman turned Fascist mercenary,
an Indian poet nicknamed RAGS, an obsessive-compulsive code-
named MOONBEAM, and even an employee at Britain’s Ministry
of War. The bogus spies filed expense reports; some earned real sala-
ries, all funded by the Nazis. By war’s end, GARBO had invented 27
personas. Working for the M15 also meant that Pujol finally had real
military information at his fingertips. So to build the Abwehr’s trust,
he began giving away legitimate Allied secrets, peppering the reports
with enough white lies to throw off the Nazis.
For example, during Operation Torch—the campaign to invade
North Africa—three of GARBO’s imaginary agents reported see-
ing troops in Scotland, prepping for an invasion. (There weren’t any
there.) The phantom agents spread rumors that Norway might be
attacked, while others claimed that Dakar, Senegal, was next. The
news confused the Nazis and kept them ill-prepared. To save face,
GARBO wrote the Abwehr a letter one week before the true African
September 2014 mentalfloss.com 51
 WorldMags.net GARBO killed off
Gerbers after realizing the
fake agent’s “presence” in
Liverpool was too suspicious.
To convince the Nazis he was
dead, the M15 ran an obitu-
invasion, detailing exactly when and where the Allies would at- ary in the local newspaper.
tack. The information could have put thousands of troops at risk,
except that the M15 intentionally delayed the letter so it arrived
one day late. The stunt saved lives and made GARBO look like
an oracle.
Other stunts boosted his star power. When the Nazis wanted
to bomb civilian trains in England, they asked GARBO for a train
timetable. He sent an outdated one. When they wanted a book
containing Royal Air Force secrets, GARBO mailed it in a cake
SMITH FRENCH-WRITING
with all the up-to-date pages deviously torn out. When Germans British airline CARVALHO
shot down a civilian plane between Portugal and London, killing steward Portuguese com-
everybody aboard—including Hollywood actor Leslie Howard— mercial traveler
GARBO lambasted the Abwehr. One of his make-believe agents,
a pilot, could have been onboard! Embarrassed, the Germans NO NAME
never attacked another civilian aircraft on that route. KLM pilot and
By June 1943, Pujol had become one of Germany’s most prized courier
spies. The Abwehr sent him new ciphers and vials of invisible
ink—which made it easier for the M15 to crack enemy codes. MCCANN
Meanwhile, the Nazis circulated a memo comparing him to Employee at the
a 45,000-man army. Pujol, who’d failed at school, at mili- Ministry of
Germans encouraged
Information
tary service, and at business, was a virtuoso con man. And GARBO to take this nonex-
now, he had all of the ingredients he needed to cook up istent woman on dates and
to spend as much money on NO NAME
his biggest lie yet. her as possible, hoping she’d Communist censor
leak secrets. They expensed working for the
ENGLAND’S COUNTRY LANES were choked with troops. It every bill. Ministry of
was early 1943, and planes, jeeps, and tents were every- Information
where. Locals joked that the island would sink under all the
weight. To German reconnaissance aircraft, it was obvious that NO NAME
something big was about to happen. GARBO’s job wasn’t to hide Secretary at the
the impending French invasion—it was to convince the Germans Ministry of War,
that it was going to happen in Calais, 200 miles north of Norman- GARBO’S “lover”
dy. If he succeeded, most of the Nazi soldiers would be waiting in
the wrong place when the real invasion happened. But few people
believed the ploy could actually work. Tricking Hitler, intelligence Erwin Rommel was convinced FUSAG was real. Just before D-day,
officer Ralph Ingersoll once said, was the equivalent of “putting a the Allies bombed 19 railroad junctions near Calais—and none in
hooped skirt and ruffled pants on an elephant to make it look like Normandy. Accompanied with GARBO’s reports, the bombings led
a crinoline girl.” most Nazi bigwigs to agree: All signs pointed to Calais.
To pull it off, GARBO had to convince the Nazis that a nonex- At 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, the first Allied troops stormed onto
istent million-man army was assembling in southeastern England. the sands of Omaha Beach, Normandy. D-day had begun. Although
The imaginary army was given a real name: the First United States the first boats met a stiff resistance, the Nazis were relatively clue-
Army Group, or FUSAG. According to Stephan Talty’s book Agent less. The German Seventh Army stationed nearby was snoozing in
Garbo, the British spared no effort or expense to make the hoax look its barracks. General Hans Speidel had told both his armies to re-
legit. Inflatable decoys—mock tanks and boats—dotted harbors and duce their states of readiness because of gloomy weather. General
farms. Fake hospitals were erected. Bulldozers plowed faux airstrips, Friedrich Dollmann was so convinced June 6 would be a slow day
and soldiers built hundreds of phony wooden aircraft. When a bogus that he scheduled war games. Meanwhile, Rommel had taken the
oil plant was constructed near Dover, the Brits requisitioned wind day off to celebrate his wife’s birthday. (The day before, as the Al-
machines from a movie studio to blow dust across the Channel to lies prepared history’s biggest invasion, he was picking wildflowers.)
make the construction site more believable. Newspapers showed When Berlin learned that forces were landing in Normandy, the staff
King George VI inspecting the artificial plant. Carrier pigeons were refused to even wake Hitler. The ploy had worked—almost nobody
released in enemy territory with property of fusag IDs wrapped took the invasion seriously. Nazi brass thought it was a scheme to
around their legs, and special machines stamped tank tracks along distract them from the real invasion—at Calais.
dusty roads. Newspapers published fake letters complaining about Two days went by. Tens of thousands more troops hit the beaches,
the ruckus all the imaginary soldiers were causing. And as the date and German generals still refused to send in serious reinforcements:
of the real invasion neared, General Patton appeared across south- They were still waiting for the fake army to attack. On June 9, a des-
eastern England to rally the make-believe troops. perate General Gerd von Rundstedt begged Hitler to send the Pan-
GARBO “sent” his best agents to southeast England to report zers, the Axis’s fearsome tank squads. Hitler finally caved. This was
on the activity. Meanwhile, other phony agents reported seeing terrible news for the Allies: The Panzers could cripple the invasion.
bombers in Scotland, which made an additional attack on Norway But early that morning, GARBO sent a message about the fake
look imminent. The reports made Hitler so nervous that he kept army that would change history: “I am of the opinion, in view of
250,000 much-needed troops stationed in Scandinavia. By May the strong troop concentrations in southeastern and eastern Eng-
1944, German High Command was utterly confused. Field Marshal land, which are not taking part in the present operations, that these

52 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net
Pujol recruited eight subagents, who, between them,
recruited 19 sub-subagents. None actually existed.

GARBO/ARABEL
Juan Pujol García

WILLIAM BENEDICT, A.K.A. CHAMILLUS, MOONBEAM DICK DAGOBERT

GERBERS CARLOS A.K.A. FRED a.k.a. Benedict’s Violent anti- Welsh seaman,
Colorful Swiss GARBO’s deputy Gibraltarian waiter Venezuelan Communist linguist mercenary, mem-
businessman, killed chief, Venezuelan living in the Chisle- brother, based in from South Africa ber of the Brothers
off in 1942 student in Glasgow hurst Caves Montreal, Canada in the Aryan World
Order (BAWO)

MRS. WILLIAM NO NAME

GERBERS Drunken non- ALMURA CON NO NAME
Financially commissioned RAF Wireless radio Commercial trav- Soldier in Britain’s
strapped widow pilot operator eler in Buffalo, N.Y. 9th armoured
division

NO NAME NO NAME
Lieutenant of Brit- DAVID
Guard at the Chisle- Ex–Welsh national-
ish 49th Infantry hurst caves ist seaman, founder
of BAWO
NO NAME NO NAME Laughably shrewd, this fake
Greek commu- Franco-loving agent once asked the Abwehr
nist seaman and American NCO in to pay someone to shovel his
deserter THERESA
London sidewalk. They did! Secretary at the
BAWO, stationed in
Céylon

operations are a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy RAGS

reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place … it Aryan-loving Indian
may very probably take place in the Pas-de-Calais area.” poet
The message was forwarded immediately to Berlin. Hitler’s But this too was another bril-
personal intelligence officer underlined the word diversionary and liantly executed lie—a rumor spread DRAKE
handed it off to a higher official, who laid it on Hitler’s desk. The to shake off any vengeful Nazi loyal- Welsh traveling
Abwehr chimed in confirming the information. Later that night, ists. Pujol, then 36, was alive and well businessman,
member of the
Hitler read GARBO’s message; shortly after, an order beamed in Venezuela, where his life became BAWO
from High Command: “The move of the 1st SS Panzer Division will boring and normal again. He mar-
therefore be halted.” Suddenly, nine of Germany’s meanest armored ried, had two sons, opened a book-
divisions—all bound for Normandy—stopped dead in their tracks store, and got a job with Shell Oil NO NAME
Fascist from South
and turned around to defend Calais. as a language teacher. He even tried Wales
It was GARBO’s greatest lie, and it arguably turned the tide of the going back into the hotel business,
war. The fake-out saved tens of thousands of Allied lives and secured where, again, he failed miserably. He
a foothold on the continent. A month later, 22 German divisions lived off the radar until 1984, when DORICK
Fascist Welsh
were still waiting in Pas-de-Calais for the fake army. By December, the enterprising journalist Nigel treasurer of the
when Allies had regained France, German commanders still believed West found him after a decade-plus BAWO
FUSAG was real. Berlin was so convinced by GARBO’s reports that search. That year, a 72-year-old Pujol
it awarded him an Iron Cross—an honor usually reserved for troops returned to London for an emotional
on the front line. Months later, the King of England followed suit reunion. His former M15 colleagues
and made Pujol a member of the Most Excellent Order of the Brit- were gobsmacked. “It can’t be you,”
ish Empire—one of the nation’s greatest honors. The self-made spy one of them burst. “You’re dead!”
became the first and only person decorated by both sides. West took Pujol to Omaha Beach for D-day’s 40th anniversary.
D-day was the beginning of the end. Hitler killed himself the When the spy saw the cemetery—with its long, neat rows of white
next spring, and the Abwehr told GARBO to give up—they’d never headstones—he dropped to his knees and burst into tears. He felt
realized they had a double agent on their hands. By then, his net- responsible for each grave. But as the day wore on, word circulated
work of phony agents had stolen £17,554—nearly $1 million to- that Pujol was there. Hordes of gray-haired men flocked to him, beg-
day—from Nazi coffers. Soon, Pujol fled to South America to be, ging to shake his hand. One man, surrounded by family and fellow
as he put it, “forgotten, to pass unnoticed and to be untraceable.” veterans, took Pujol by the arm and beamed. “I have the pleasure
Four years later, the M15 reported that he had died of malaria while of introducing GARBO, the man who saved our lives.” Again, tears
exploring Africa. flooded Pujol’s eyes. This time, though, he smiled.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 53

WorldMags.net

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 WorldMags.net

Is This a
Million-Dollar
Stamp?
For the three Minnesota brothers who dominate the elite world of
competitive wildlife painting, it could be.
BY MARTIN J. SMITH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID BOWMAN

The Federal Duck Stamp Contest licenses to hunt waterfowl. Though

is the most prestigious wildlife art
contest you’ve never heard of. Held
annually since 1949, it’s the only
juried art contest sponsored by the
U.S. government. Each August, more
than 200 painters submit render-
ings of ducks, geese, and other
waterfowl to an elite top secret panel
of judges. In September, over a tense
two days that’s been described as
the World Series for wildlife painters,
one artist will be awarded top prize:
His or her painting will grace the
following year’s Migratory Bird Con-
servation and Hunting Stamp—the
sticker sportsmen must affix to their
there’s no prize money, winners can
earn a fortune through licensing
agreements and collectible limited-
edition prints, garnering the stamp a
reputation as the Million-Dollar Duck.
The most elite players in this game
are Minnesota brothers Bob, Jim, and
Joe Hautman, a dynasty one fellow
competitor has dubbed “the New
York Yankees of competitive duck
painting.” In two decades, they’ve
collectively won 10 times, making
followers wonder whether they’ve
figured out how to crack the code. As
they gear up for this year’s contest,
they let us peek inside their studios.

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 WorldMags.net

Bob, Joe, and Jim in Joe’s stu-

dio. Joe wears a ghillie suit—made
from burlap and twine to look like
foliage—which he uses to photo-
graph wildlife at his pond. “You
crouch down and look like a clump
of stuff,” Bob explains. Raised by
a duck-hunter dad and a painter
mom, the brothers never formally
studied art. Joe has a doctorate
in physics; Bob and Jim used to
paint and roof houses. As kids,
they were enthralled by their dad’s
collection of duck stamps, but
they didn’t hear about the contest
until the mid-1980s, when they
first entered. By 1996, they were
well-known enough in the duck-
stamp circuit to be name-checked
in Fargo—made by their childhood
friends, the Coen brothers. In the
movie, Norm Gunderson finishes
behind a Hautman brother’s paint-
ing in the contest.

Work generally begins with a

sketch, using mounted birds or
feathers as a reference. (The main
bird in this image, a commission
for Pheasants Forever, was inspired
by a specimen mounted at a ranch
in Idaho.) The brothers have no
qualms throwing out opinions on
what looks good and what doesn’t.
“This mess is Joe’s,” says Bob. “I
don’t know how he can work with
that palette. We all have completely
different easel setups. Jim’s is really
organized and perfect. Joe mixes
on top of mixes. It’s a quarter inch
built on his palette. Mine is kind of in
between the two.”

56 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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WorldMags.net
ANATOMY OF A DUCK STAMP
Bob won the 1996 duck-stamp contest with this painting
of a Canada goose. He had entered a similar painting, sans
background, two years earlier and came in second place to
his brother Jim. Knowing that the judges liked the goose, he
painted the same bird a second time on a placid, reedy back-
ground and took home first place. Bob says it’s still exciting to
win, but nothing beats the first time. “They flew us out to the
Department of Engraving, where they make all the money,”
he remembers. “You’d see the guy engraving the stamp and
the guys engraving money. It was our dream when we first
started painting just to win a state contest; the federal was this
faraway dream.”

Official rules state

The government puts
proceeds from the
stamp toward wildlife
preservation. With more
than $800 million dol-
lars raised to date, the
program is one of the
most successful wildlife
conservation programs
ever initiated.
Bob keeps a collection of dead
birds in his freezer: some he shot,
others he’s been given, and a hand-
ful have crashed into the sliding
glass door of his Minnesota studio.
that the birds must be
anatomically correct
and their plumage must
match the season in the
background.
Five species of waterfowl
qualify as subjects each
year. 2014’s are the brant,
the Canada goose, the
northern shoveler, the
red-breasted merganser,
and the ruddy duck.

Hummingbirds don’t qualify for

the contest, but all the brothers
have painted them anyway. “They’re
just really cool birds,” says Bob. “I
have to wear magnifying glasses to
paint the eye—it’s the size of a pea!”

Some people say bird Another Hautman, Pete,

feet are hard to draw.
Bob disagrees. “Thing is,
they look really funny,
like one foot’s on top of
the other. If you don’t
know what they look like,
you can’t believe they
look like that. It’s better
to just put them down in
the weeds.”
who does not paint, says
his brothers’ “approach
the duck stamp more
like they’re doing art for
an ad campaign. They do
multiple versions—dif-
ferent postures, different
poses, different weather
in the background. It’s
very analytical and
scientific.”

To learn more about the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, read Martin J. Smith’s
The Wild Duck Chase (wildduckchase.com).

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 57

 WorldMags.net

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out a casting call for his follow-up, Underwater Puppies, he wasn’t sure how things would go.
“I’d been working with older dogs that loved the water and had a passion for retrieving. The
puppies—they don’t know anything,” he says. He ended up working with some 1,500 puppies,

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MENTAL WorldMags.net
mostly rescue dogs in
training ranging from
6 weeks to 6 months
old. Among them were
11-week-old labs Jack,
Reason, and Grits, who
dove to the bottom of a
five-foot swimming pool
for their close-ups, and
6-week-old Hunter, a
husky-malamute-wolf mix
who became the cover dog
after being photographed
in a pool in Denver during
the area’s severe flooding
in 2013. “Outside, the
storms were coming
down,” says Casteel. “I was
so proud of that little guy.”
Aside from lending
much-needed cuteness
to the world, the project
has a broader purpose:
Spreading awareness
about the importance
of water safety for pets.
“We have to prepare our
puppies to be a part of the
world, and that includes
swimming pools,” says
Casteel, who lives in New
York and L.A. with his own
dogs, Nala and Fred-bop.
“I couldn’t guarantee
anyone a great picture,
but I promised that the
puppies would get a great
lesson in swimming. It
was all about turning
that puppy curiosity into
confidence.” —JEN DOLL
Underwater
Puppies, by
Seth Casteel
(Little,
Brown and
Company)
60 mentalfloss.com September 2014
SPEED READ
If you read just six sentences about the
private lives of bugs this month …
pr
Sex on Six Legs: “The lack of
Lessons on Life, Love & identification
Language From the Insect with insects is
World by Marlene Zuk precisely why
we can look to
(
(H
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)
them to gain
insight into our
own lives—we
simply cannot
“There is nothing like the anthropomor-
“... Hanging flies view of the genitalia of phize them into
insects to convince you cute caricatures
and scorpion
flies go out and that the male equipment of humans.”
catch prey items in human beings is rather
dull and pedestrian
to present to
females, who then in its appearance.”
consume the item
while their hind
ends are occupied
with mating." “[Female damselflies] favor some males’ sperm over
others by ejecting the less-preferred males’ contributions,
long after the male himself has departed.”
“Female black field
crickets in Australia let
[sperm packets] remain “Among insects and spiders at least,
we should see that females control
attached longer for
more attractive males … much of what happens in repro-
than for relatively duction, and that we should stop
wimpy males."” focusing so short sightedly on that
moment when sperm meets egg.”
Patently Absurd: BANANA BAGGAGE
Invention: Banana Suitcase
Patent: US6612440B1
Published: 2003
It’s snack o’clock and your ba-
nana got horribly bruised in
your bag on the way to work.
What now? Stale party mix
from the break-room vend-
ing machine? Thick skins
notwithstanding, bananas
are subject to all manner of
abuse, but the Banana Suit-
case keeps your favorite fruit
safe and fresh as it travels in
a perforated, foam-lined case
that hinges shut. That is, as
long as it fits into this one-
size-only carrying case! No
wonder the invention didn't
exactly peel off.
WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net
Where to Go to: STUDY THE ART OF COOL

“American Cool” “ Orale!: The Kings and “David Bowie Is”

National Portrait Gallery, Washington,
D.C., through September 7
Saxophonist Lester Young is credited
with the first modern usage of the word
cool—in the 1940s, when it mostly
described jazz musicians. Since then,
it’s served as a code for the laid-back
style and pioneering spirit embodied by
the subjects of this exhibit, including
Bessie Smith, Miles Davis, Patti Smith,
and Steve McQueen.
© SUKITA/THE DAVID BOWIE ARCHIVE 2012 (BOWIE). ARAM AVAKIAN COLLECTION © ARAM AVAKIAN (DAVIS).
Queens of Cool”
Harwood Museum of Art, Los Angeles,
September 20–January 5
What’s cooler than sticking it to the
man? This exhibit showcases button-
pushing ’60s artists like R. Crumb,
connecting the dots between their
countercultural sensibility and the
“nuevo lowbrow” Hispanic culture of
low-rider cars, street art, and post-pop
artists like Brandon Maldonado.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
September 23–January 4
David Bowie made androgyny cool in
pop with his painted-face personas
Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust. On
display are costumes by avant-garde
Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto
and Alexander McQueen, rare videos,
photographs, and concert posters. See
for yourself where Lady Gaga got so
much of her style.

THE PAPER TRAIL

Our favorite reads right now BRAIN KALE

BRAIN CANDY
BRANDON MALDONALDO COURTESY HARWOOD MUSEUM OF ART (EL DIABLO).

Benson’s Cuckoos The Who, the The The Elements of Trolls

by Anouk Ricard
(Drawn & Quarterly, $20)
A duck named Richard
takes a job working at
a cuckoo clock factory
only to discover his dog
of a boss is a nutjob and
George, the lion he’s
replacing, disappeared
under mysterious
circumstances in this
illustrated novel that’s as
funny as it is weird.
What, and the
When by Jenny Volvovski,
Julia Rothman, and Matt La-
mothe (Chronicle Books, $23)
Sixty-five illustrators
and as many writers
collaborated for these
surprising, fun bios of
history’s secret side-
kicks, including Mrs.
Warhola, who inspired
her son Andy’s fascina-
tion with groceries.
Unpersuadables
by Will Storr
(Overlook, $28)
Why do people believe
irrational things in the
face of facts? Storr
investigates creation-
ists, UFO sighters, and
people who believe
they are John Lennon
to try to find answers
in this engrossing look
at belief.
Eloquence
by Mark Forsyth
(Berkley Trade Paperback,
$16)
Learn what “polypto-
ton” and “anadiplosis”
are and how writers
from Shakespeare to
Dolly Parton employ
them to create the lines
we can’t get out of our
heads. It’s Rhetoric 101
made breezy (really!).
by John Lindow
(University of Chicago Pres,
$27)
Before the Internet,
there was Usenet,
where in the ’80s the
word troll was first used
to refer to an online
bully. This compelling
book traces the 1,000-
year history of the
troll—from Scandinavia
to fairy tales to the web.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 61

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MENTAL WorldMags.net The Maze Runner opens
THE SIMPLIFIER September 19.

ANCIENT RELIGIONS
Described by
SCHOOL SUPPLIES
RELIGION SUPPLY

Gnosticism Le
Left-handed
scissors
Salvation comes from the
knowledge that they’re impossible
to find. You might as well just give

Pop Culture Syllabus: MAZES

up on material things.

Zoroastrianism Abacus
Invented in the Middle East about
2,700 years ago, they helped
people make sense of the world for
Y.A.-MAZING
The first book in James Dashner’s bestselling sci-fi trilogy for teens, The Maze
Runner, gets a big-screen adaptation this fall. Inspiration for the novel struck
Dashner as he lay in bed in November 2005: “Somehow this idea popped in
my head about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable maze full of
hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world,” he writes. He
started working on it that night.
READ The Maze Runner, by James Dashner (Delacorte Press);
WATCH The Maze Runner, 20th Century Fox, out September 19.
PUZZLE POWER
You call them games; Peter Turchi considers them inspirational, educational

centuries. (They’re still around!)
ISTOCK (ZOROASTRIANISM, GNOSTICISM). MAUNUS (OLMEC). © 2013 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM (MAZES)
pathways for writers. In his new book, he compares stories to mazes and
labyrinths, noting that the history of mazes traces back at least 2,500 years.
As for their differences, “labyrinths” can convey a single (indirect) path that
leads to one destination, while “mazes” branch off with various choices and
directions—the latter being the easier to get lost in, as with a good story.
READ A Muse & a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, by Peter Turchi
(out November 11 from Trinity University Press)

CHILDREN OF THE CORN MAZE

Olmec Rubber cement
Olmec shamans got a little loopy
before invoking the spirits. Third-
graders do the same while invoking
the hand turkey muse.
Today’s increasingly popular corn mazes can be built using GPS technology
and cut to look like anything from the brain and the solar system (a design
that broke the Guinness record for the largest corn maze) to Scooby-Doo,
Johnny Cash, and John Wayne. They can also help supplement the income of
farmers by anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 annually. Experts say if you get
lost in one, keep turning left.
READ “Master the Maize: The Increasingly Big Business of Corn Mazes,” by Andy
Wright, ModernFarmer.com

A 3-D CLASSIC
First released as a 45-minute multi-screen presentation at the 1967 World’s
Fair in Montreal, this movie used 35mm and 70mm film projected simultane-
ously, making it the precursor of today’s IMAX. In 1972, it was made into a
21-minute IMAX film; in 1979, it was rereleased as In the Labyrinth, a single
Babylonian Permanent flat-screen movie. A contemporary adaptation of the Minotaur legend, it is
markers said to have inspired Norman Jewison to use similar techniques for 1968's
The Thomas Crown Affair.
Don’t make any mistakes: WATCH In the Labyrinth, directed by Roman Kroiter, Colin Low, and Hugh
They’re not forgiving.
OConnor, National Film Board of Canada, 1967

62 mentalfloss.com September 2014

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net WISH LIST

Everything we don’t really

y need
but really want anyway.

“This quirky-looking
omnidirectional speaker
is dust-, water-, and
drop-proof, so it’s ideal
for camping, the beach,
and skydiving.”—Joe
Turtle Shell Bluetooth
speaker, $130,
outdoortechnology.com

“It’s perfect for those who want the cachet of team “I can’t have a lot of plants
sports but possess none of the ability.”—Ethan because my cats will eat them—these
Rawlings Heart of the Hide duffel bag, are the perfect solution!”—Erin
$599, rawlings.com Science beaker terrarium set, $59, DoodleBirdie on etsy.com

The Best TAKE-OUT ORDER Ever

In this oddly exciting video from 1974, Donald Sherman, a
man with facial paralysis, orders a pizza over the phone for
the first time in his life. Forty years ago, researchers at Michigan State
University’s Artificial Language Lab combined a Voltrax voice synthesizer
and a computer to create the first-ever speech prosthesis. In the experiment,
Sherman types an order and the machine reads it aloud in a voice that
PRODUCTS COURTESY MANUFACTURERS

makes Microsoft Sam sound like Morgan Freeman. The whole transaction
takes only six minutes, but you’ll feel the tension as Sherman is asked to
repeat some information and told that someone will be calling him back to
confirm. Finally, with the order successfully placed, everyone in the room
breathes easy. At the end, a journalist on the scene reports, “It may not be
very long before we’ll all be able to use computers to communicate.” Imagine
that! Also unbelievable? The large pizza with four toppings was only $6.25.

Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer, Dec. 4, 1974 is

available on YouTube.

WorldMags.net September 2014 mentalfloss.com 63

MENTAL
GO

QUIZ WorldMags.net
BY LUCAS ADAMS 7 What was the name of the 12 Superman’s dog,
first American-built steam Krypto, was a member
NAME: __________________________________________________ AGE: _______ locomotive? of which team?
A Tom Thumb A The League of
FAVORITE COLOR: ___________________________________________________ B Big Red Mega Mutts
C Mister Choo-Choo B The American
D Smokestack Rex Canine Patrol
C The Legion of
8 Which of these was Super-Pets
not an XFL team? D The Cosmic
Start A The New York/ Dog Squad
Here New Jersey Hitmen
B The San Francisco 13 Which of these did
Demons director Akira Kurosawa
C The Seattle Ghouls cite as one of his favorite
D The Orlando Rage movies?

1 What did
Andy Warhol
refer to as
9 The Pitcher Man was
which famous mascot’s
A The Wizard of Oz
B Citizen Kane
C Godzilla
predecessor? D Easy Rider
“timepieces”? A Mr. Met
A Wigs B The Kool-Aid Man 14 Which fictional character
B Stained-glass C Mr. Clean did the Dalai Lama give the
windows D The Coca-Cola polar bears Light of Truth Award to in
C Cookie jars 2006?
D Crayons 10 Which was a two- A Tintin
wheeled forerunner to B Spider-Man
the bicycle? C Jughead
2 Which author had 5 What tragedy befell A The Dandy Horse D Cathy
a job as a cruise ship Vice President Nelson B The Dapper Divan
entertainment director? Rockefeller’s son? C The Zipster 15 A sculpture of what
A Dashiell Hammett A He was ostracized for D The Steel Stallion was plastered on the
B Harper Lee practicing sorcery. front of Mussolini’s
C J.K. Rowling B He was eaten 11 Which boxer called Fascist headquarters
D J.D. Salinger by cannibals. Nietzsche his favorite in Rome?
C He was kidnapped philosopher? A The Fascist Italian flag
3 Which was one of by the Amish. A Muhammad Ali B A Futurist race car
Dwight Eisenhower’s D He produced the B Mike Tyson C His face
hobbies while president? movie Ishtar. C Sugar Ray Leonard D An angry shaking fist
A Bird-watching D George Foreman
B Paint by numbers
C Needlepoint
D Ceramics

4 What’s seafoam salad?

A A Jell-O dessert
6 The U.S.
military
airdropped
B Beach debris which
C A combination of snack into
food foams A B C D
D A Mediterranean
Afghanistan Peeps Peanut Butter Pop-Tarts Popcorn-flavored
fish dinner in 2001? Cap’n Crunch jelly beans

ANSWERS 4. A (Ingredients western New many close calls

Your
1. C (He collected usually include Guinea in 1961.) with pedestrians.)
Hey, overachiever! Score!
If you scored an Also
175 of them.) green Jell-O, 6. C 11. B Pretty Good on this
2. D pears, cherries, 7. A 12. C quiz, enter the coupon
3. B (He exhibited cream cheese, and 8. C 13. C code HONORSYSTEM at
some of his whipped cream.) 9. B 14. A store.mentalfloss.com
0–4 Pretty Good
ALAMY (WARHOL)

paintings in the 5. B (Michael 10. A (By the 15. C and save an extra
White House.) Rockefeller 1820s, it was 15% on your order. 5–7 The Best
disappeared in banned after too Excludes clearance, package 8–9 The Worst
deals, and subscriptions.
10–15 Also Pretty Good

64 mentalfloss.com September 2014

WorldMags.net
 WorldMags.net
Writing Creative
Nonfiction
Taught by Professor Tilar J. Mazzeo
COLBY COLLEGE
TIME O
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of Your Characters
15. Using Narrative Perspective
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17. Writing the Gutter—How to Not Tell a Story
18. Dialogue Strategies in Creative Nonfiction
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1, 0 0 6 W O R D S
WorldMags.net

SUMMER ON
URANUS LASTS
21 YEARS.
ALAMY

66 mentalfloss.com September 2014

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 WorldMags.net

The all-new 2015 Legacy. Well-equipped at $21,695 **

Subaru and Legacy are registered trademarks. *EPA-estimated hwy fuel economy for 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i models. Actual mileage may vary.
**MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and registration fees. Retailer sets actual price. 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Limited pictured has an MSRP of $28,690.
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WorldMags.net

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