Uncle John’s Briefs (28 page)

THE EARTH IS HOLLOW
Who Said So:
Captain John Cleves Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812
What He Believed:
Earth has four layers, like a big onion. Each is a “warm and rich land, stocked with vegetables and animals, if not men.” What we perceive as the surface of the Earth is actually the fifth and outer layer. And the North and South poles aren’t just poles, they’re also
holes
leading to the four interior worlds.

John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair was auctioned off for $453,500.

History:
In 1823 Symmes managed to get a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress to finance a steamship voyage to the “North Hole” and to the inner worlds beyond. When the bill received only 25 votes, Johnson talked President Adams’s secretaries of the Navy and the Treasury into outfitting three ships for a voyage to the middle of the earth. But before it got underway, Andrew Jackson became president and scuttled the trip. Symmes died in 1829, unfulfilled, but his theory remained popular with unconventional thinkers until 1909, when Robert Peary set foot on the North Pole (or at least came close)…and found no hole.

Even after 1909, the hollow-Earth theory had its admirers—including Adolf Hitler. Today, a few diehard hollow-Earthers believe that Hitler survived World War II, escaped to an interior world under the South Pole, and may still be hiding there, mingling with “a race of advanced hollow-Earth beings who are responsible for the UFO sightings throughout history.”

THE EARTH IS SHAPED LIKE THE INSIDE OF AN EGG
Who Said So:
Cyrus Reed Teed, in the late 1860s
What He Believed:
Instead of living on the outside of a solid round ball, we’re on the inside surface of a hollow one. The rest of the universe—sun, stars, etc.—is where the yolk would be.

Background:
For years, Teed grappled with the notion of an infinite universe…but just couldn’t accept it. Then one night in 1869, he had a dream in which a beautiful woman explained everything:

The entire cosmos is like an egg. We live on the inner surface of the shell, and inside the hollow are the sun, moon, stars, planets, and comets. What is outside? Absolutely nothing! The inside is all there is. You can’t see across it because the atmosphere is too dense. The shell is 100 miles thick.

The woman in Teed’s dream also said he would be the new Messiah, and he took it to heart. In the 1890s, he bought land outside Fort Meyers, Florida, and founded a community called The New Jerusalem that he preached would one day be the capital of the world. He expected 8 million residents, but only got 200. In 1908 Teed died from injuries suffered during a run-in with the local marshal; his dwindling community held on until the late 1940s, when the last of his followers disbanded following a property dispute.

Favorite candy of the Netherlands:
drop
. What is it? Salty licorice.

FOOD A MILLENNIUM AGO

What could the average medieval peasant expect to find on the dinner table after a hard day’s work? Here’s the grueling tale
.

I
’M STARVING! WHAT’S FOR LUNCH?
For most people in the year A.D. 1000, finding enough food to eat was a constant problem. There were long periods, particularly in winter, when no fresh food was available. During the 10th century alone, Europe suffered 20 famines. As a result, people tended to gorge themselves whenever food was abundant because they never knew what the next season would bring. The staple of Joe Peasant’s diet was gruel—what we’d call oatmeal—which nutritionists say was probably healthier than our modern meat-heavy diet. When vegetables were in season, people ate cabbage, carrots, peas, and various garden greens. They picked apples, pears, and nuts right off the trees.

FUNGAL FEVER
Another medieval staple was bread made from whole-grain wheat, rye, or barley flour. That may sound healthy, but unsanitary kitchens and ovens introduced other ingredients that weren’t so wholesome, including insects and mold. The mold brought another problem: outbreaks of
ergotism
, a fatal illness caused by a substance called ergotamine found in a fungus that often infected rye grain. When baked into bread, the ergotamine chemically transformed into a deadly hallucinogen. Victims experienced tingling, dizziness, hallucinations, psychosis and, eventually, death. The symptoms of ergotism, according to some theories, may have caused some sufferers to be accused of witchcraft.

WOULD YOU LIKE HORSE WITH THAT?
A millennium ago, horses were just beginning to replace oxen as the quintessential farm animal. But they were still a valuable food source and were eaten with gusto. Meat was prepared with salt, pepper, cloves, and other spices, which not only preserved the food but also masked the rotten taste after it had spoiled. In addition to horses and the odd rabbit or pig, birds were eaten with regularity. People ate cranes, storks, swans,
crows, herons, loons, and blackbirds, sometimes served in a pastries like the “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” from the well-known English nursery rhyme.

Feeding dyes to hens will change the color of their eggs’ yolks.

MINIMALISM, MEDIEVAL-STYLE
Setting the medieval table was fairly simple—because there were no plates. Even nobles, who generally spread out tablecloths for their meals, went without plates. Instead, meals were served on round, flat slabs of bread. Bread plates had the dual advantages of soaking up drippings and being edible. When plates eventually came into vogue, it was customary to share your plate with the person sitting next to you.

Guests were invited to bring their own knives; spoons and forks weren’t widely used in Europe until much later. In the eastern Mediterranean, two-pronged forks had been in use for centuries, but they didn’t come to Europe until 1071, when a Greek princess brought the custom to Venice. Rich Venetians took it up as the fashion, but forks stayed in Venice for centuries before the rest of Europe caught on.

GROG: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
A thousand years ago, alcoholic beverages were a diversion and comfort to households among all classes. Wine was the favorite drink of the nobility and wealthier middle class. But everyone drank beer, even for breakfast, and the alcoholic content was three to four times higher than today’s brews. Mead, a kind of beer made from fermented honey, was popular in northern Europe and packed an even stronger wallop—it could have an alcohol content of up to 18 percent. Beer was such a prized commodity that one Swedish king chose, among several prospective brides, the one who could brew the best beer.

FREE RANGE

Leonardo da Vinci, an avowed vegetarian, was so opposed to people eating animals that he often purchased live poultry and then set the birds free. He wrote, “I have, from an early age, abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”

An Atlanta, Georgia, law forbids “smelly people” from riding on public streetcars.

THE MISSING MOM

Here’s a nightmare: You set off on a simple trip, only to end up more than 1,000 miles away from everyone you’ve ever known, with no way to get home. It happened to a woman who became known as “Auntie Mon.”

L
ANGUAGE BARRIER
In 1982 Jaeyaena Beuraheng left her home in the Narathiwat Province of southern Thailand to take one of her regular shopping trips across the border in Malaysia. After she was done at the markets, Beuraheng, 51 years old and a mother of seven, accidentally boarded the wrong bus. She fell asleep. When she woke up, she found herself in Bangkok…700 miles north of her home. Unfortunately for Beuraheng, she couldn’t speak Thai, and her Malay dialect, Yawi, is spoken by very few people in Bangkok. In fact, to the people in Bangkok whom she asked for directions, it sounded like the woman was speaking gibberish. Without the ability to read signs or ask directions, Beuraheng boarded another bus—one that she thought was headed south. Instead, it took her another 430 miles north and she ended up in the city of Chiang Mai. Beuraheng was now more than 1,100 miles from home, she didn’t know where she was, and she’d run out of money.

Meanwhile, back in her hometown, Beuraheng’s family told the authorities that their mother was missing and were informed that a woman matching her description had been hit by a train and killed. Beuraheng’s son went to identify the body—which was difficult—but he said that it could have been her. So, believing their mother was dead, they stopped searching for her. Beuraheng was on her own. With no other options, she resorted to begging in the street to survive.

A SHELTERED LIFE
Five years later, Beuraheng, now 56, was arrested in a section of the city where begging was not allowed. The police couldn’t understand the woman’s words, so they took her to a homeless shelter in nearby Phitsanulok. The staff at the shelter deduced that the woman was insane. Still, she seemed nice, so there she stayed. Mostly, Beuraheng sat in a chair and
sang a song that no one could understand. They called her “Auntie Mon” because the song reminded them of the language spoken by the ethnic Mon people, who live on the Burma-Thailand border. They even brought in someone who could speak Mon to try and discern if that’s what it was, but it wasn’t. Everyone who tried to understand Auntie Mon only heard gibberish.

Twenty years passed.

How about you? 85% of Americans have Rh positive blood.

THE POWER OF SONG
In 2007 three university students from Narathiwat were studying the homeless problem in Phitsanulok. As they were touring the shelter, one of the students asked about the old woman singing the song. “That’s Auntie Mon. We can’t understand her words, but we like the song,” said one of the staff workers. The student replied that he could—it was Yawi, a dialect spoken near his hometown. He approached her, smiled, and asked her for her name. It was the first time Beuraheng had understood anything that anyone had said in 25 years. Overjoyed, she told the students about her ordeal—how she took the wrong bus, how she ended up at the shelter, how much she missed being able to speak to anyone, and how much she missed her family.

HOME AT LAST
Beuraheng’s family was shocked to receive the news that their mother was alive. Her youngest son and eldest daughter traveled to the shelter to bring her home. She recognized her daughter, but not her son, who was just a small child when she last saw him. They flew back to Narathiwat…and took the
correct
bus home to their village. A two-day celebration ensued, during which Beuraheng—often crying tears of joy—told her amazing story to the press. “I didn’t tell anybody where I was going on that day, because I went there quite often. I thought I would die in Phitsanulok. I thought about running away many times, but then I worried I would not be able to make it home. I really missed my children.”

Beuraheng, now 79 years old, has a much larger family than when she left (there are many grandchildren). As in the shelter, she still spends much of her time sitting in her chair and singing her song. Only now, those around her can understand the words.

“If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” —proverb

SUPPOSEDLY SAID

Because quoting what other people say is often like playing a game of “telephone,” what ends up in our collective memory often isn’t exactly what the speaker said
.

T
ARZAN
He supposedly said:
“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
…But actually:
This line was never uttered in any Tarzan film, nor in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. The quote stems from an interview in which Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller made up the line as a comment on the films’ simplistic dialogue.

KARL MARX
He supposedly said:
“Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
…But actually:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” is what Marx really said. The misquote implies that Marx believed religion “drugs” people. The full quote suggests that Marx had a better understanding of why many people flock to religion.

JOHN KERRY
He supposedly said:
“Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?”
…But actually:
This quote was well circulated during the 2004 presidential election, often characterizing Senator Kerry as awkward, out of touch, and pandering to blue-collar voters. Turns out that when
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd mocked Kerry for the quote in a March 2004 column, it was the first time the quote had ever appeared. Dowd had just made it up.