The Cocoanut Grove Fire

Are you reading this article at work? Via a public Wi-Fi hotspot at a coffee shop or airport? Anywhere in public? If so, look around you. You’ll probably see at least one door with one of those standard illuminated EXIT signs above it. You might notice that the exit door has a brightly colored handle, so as to be easy to see in case of a smoky fire. You might also have noticed that just about every door leading to the outside in a public building – be it an office, a church, a shopping mall or a school – pushes out from the inside, rather than pulls in, so that in case of emergency the people inside can exit the building as quickly as possible. You might have even noticed that buildings that have revolving doors always have at least one “normal” door next to the exit, so that if there’s some emergency people aren’t stuck waiting to walk through the revolving door.

All of these fire\emergency safety precautions might seem like common sense today. But it took one of the greatest tragedies in American history for such changes to become required by law. That tragedy was the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942.

The Cocoanut Grove nightclub was the place to be in early WWII-era Boston. The club had a maximum official occupancy of 460, but the club was so popular that it often had two or three times that amount inside. And it’s not difficult to see why everyone would want in: the club was a virtual paradise inside, a lush, tropical-themed club lined with artificial palm trees and cloth coverings on the walls and ceilings. The club even had a retractable roof that was opened in the summer months so that the club’s patrons – a lot of them soldiers and sailors on their last fling before setting off to fight in Europe – could dance under the stars. The club had a main floor which had your basic bar and dance floor setup, a dining room upstairs, and an intimate lounge downstairs. If a GI played his cards right, he could spend an entire evening there: after a nice dinner upstairs, he could go downstairs for drinks and dancing on the main floor, and then go down to one of the dark corners of the lounge for a make-out session if he’d been lucky.

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The Death of Superman

When I was a child, WTBS (a.k.a. TBS, the “Superstation”) was known as WTCG. At the time, WTCG was a small, unimportant UHF station in Atlanta that was infamous for running old black & white B-movies and reruns of ancient TV shows like Petticoat Junction, Felix The Cat and Mighty Mouse. Even though America had firmly moved in to the color TV era by this point, it sometimes seemed as if the only color you’d ever see on WTCG were the commercials or the occasional color episode of The Beverly Hillbillies!

One of the shows that WTCG ran religiously was the original Superman TV show – the one from the 1950s starring George Reeves. It was one of my favorite shows as a wee child, and I’d beg my mom to rush home from kindergarten so I wouldn’t miss a minute of Reeves dishing out truth, justice and the American Way. It’s ironic (and sad) then, that Reeves would be denied all of those things when it came to his own life.

George Reeves was born in 1914 in Woolstock, Iowa. His first film appearance was 1939’s Ride, Cowboy, Ride. Reeves would go on to become a somewhat successful “bit part” actor; he ended up being one of Vivian Leigh’s first suitors in the opening scene of Gone With The Wind. But by the 1950s, Reeves star had fallen, and he was reduced to taking the occasional part on television.

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The Heart’s Memory

Medical science might be on the verge of a truly amazing discovery. For decades, it’s been thought that the only organ responsible for human memory is the brain. And while it’s true that the lion’s share of memories and preferences are indeed kept in the brain, it turns out that the brain might not be the only organ where such things are kept.

It all began when two American doctors – working separately on either coast – noticed something odd about heart transplant patients. Once the patients had recovered, their personalities started to undergo subtle changes. For example, a woman named Claire Sylvia started drinking beer and eating green peppers and chicken nuggets, even though she’d never enjoyed doing so before. Bill Wohl, a middle aged man from Phoenix, was a dedicated businessman that rarely – if ever – exercised before his heart transplant; as soon as he was healthy enough to do so, he stopped working so much and took up extreme sports. An Englishman named Jim that had barely graduated from school and led the decidedly non-academic life of a truck driver suddenly began writing poetry. An unnamed woman that hated violence so much that she’d even leave the room when her husband watched football started watching football and swearing like a sailor while doing so. Another unnamed person – this time a 47 year-old male – suddenly developed a fascination with classical music, and could even hum obscure classical pieces he’d never heard before.

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Spring Heeled Jack

Just about everyone in the English-speaking world – and probably the entire world – is familiar with the story of Jack The Ripper, the mysterious serial killer that haunted London’s Whitechapel district in the second half of 1888. But many have never heard of another Jack that terrified the entire English nation decades before the Ripper. He was, in a way, much more frightening than Jack The Ripper, even if this Jack didn’t kill anyone. This is because hundreds of people saw him and were terrified by what they saw. Ladies and gentlemen… meet Spring Heeled Jack.

He was called Spring Heeled Jack because of his ability to effortlessly leap over walls that were 8, 10 or even 15 feet high. But that’s not what scared people. It was his appearance – like that of a devil – that put the fear of God into people. He was tall and thin, with claws for hands, pointed ears and eyes that glowed red in the night. Some even said that he could breathe white or blue flames. The few that were unlucky enough to actually be touched by Spring Heeled Jack reported that his skin was ice cold.

Reports of Spring Heeled Jack exist from as early as 1817, but he didn’t become a phenomenon until September of 1837, when reports of bizarre happenings hit the London press. A perfectly upstanding businessman reported that Jack had jumped over the tall wall of a cemetery and landed right in his path. Shortly thereafter, a group claimed that a man with similar features had attacked them, and one of the party even had her coat ripped by the unknown assailant. Another of the party – a barmaid named Polly Adams – wasn’t so lucky. She was found bloodied and unconscious in the same spot hours later with her blouse torn and deep scratches in her belly. A few weeks later, a girl named Mary Stevens was assaulted on Clapham Common by someone (or something) meeting Jack’s description, and in much the same fashion as Polly Adams had been. Jack returned the next day, this time by leaping from a wall to block the path of a moving horse carriage, causing it to crash. A few days later, Jack struck yet again… and this time he left physical evidence: police noted two footprints “around three inches deep” in the immediate area. This implies someone jumping from a great height. Upon further examination, one police officer noted “curious imprints” within the footprints which led him to believe that springs or some other gadget might have been involved. Sadly though, the concept of “forensics” hadn’t developed yet, so casts were never made of the prints.

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The Bacteriaophage

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, millions of dollars were poured in to the study of bacteriophages – viruses that kill bacteria but are otherwise harmless to humans. Back then, diseases like cholera and dysentery were running rampant throughout the planet, and millions died from those two diseases alone. But then Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin in 1928, and Western medicine dropped bacteriophage study almost en masse to move into the new and sexy world of antibiotics.

Looking back on it now, that was a pretty boneheaded move. The overuse and misapplication of antibiotics has helped to hasten the day when bacteria become resistant to many (if not most) types of antibiotics. You see, not every single bacterium is affected equally by an antibiotic. Some antibiotics merely weaken a bacterium until the antibiotic ceases to be administered. Other bacterium might be completely immune to an antibiotic. Regardless, the important thing is that those bacteria most able to survive against antibiotics are the ones that survive and multiply. And given the short life of bacteria in general, natural selection can work its magic in months or even days, instead of the centuries and millennia that humans tend to associate natural selection with. Staphylococcus aureus is not only one of the most common infections in hospitals, it’s one of the hardiest too, having developed resistance to penicillin as early as 1947. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is now considered to be “quite common” in British hospitals. And to show you what a problem its become, MRSA was the cause of 37% of all fatal cases of blood poisoning in the UK in 1999; less than a decade earlier, only 4% of blood poisoning deaths in the UK were caused by MRSA.

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One-Hit Wonders

Like pornography, “one-hit wonders” are hard to define, yet people know them when they see them.

A “one-hit wonder” is technically defined as “a band that has a single hit song in a nation’s official music charts, then fades into obscurity forever”. But, in reality, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

For example, it’s often implied that the “one hit” is huge, like Los del Rio’s “Macarena”, Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?” or Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping”. This is to differentiate it from a long-running, well-respected indie band who just happened to have one song peak at #39 in the mainstream charts. I call this the “Pixies Clause”, because although the Pixies had a long career and several hits on the US Alternative charts, most mainstream music fans only remember them for “Where Is My Mind?” (a song, incidentally, that was never a single).

But even this is open to interpretation. The Swedish band a-ha landed at #8 on VH1’s “100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders” list of 2002, not to mention countless “One-Hit Wonders of the 80s” lists. But the band actually had two Top 20 singles in 1985: “Take On Me” reached #1 while the arguably better “The Sun Always Shines on TV” reached #20. Similarly, Great White are often considered one-hit wonders for their #5 hit “Once Bitten Twice Shy”, even though “The Angel Song” also made it to Billboard’s Top 40.

Geography is integral with one-hit wonders. A band can be hugely successful in one country but still be considered a one-hit wonder in another. Sweden’s The Cardigans had ten Top 40 singles in the UK, yet are thought of as “one-hit wonders” in the US for their hit “Lovefool”, which became popular after being featured in Leonardo DiCaprio’s version of Romeo + Juliet. Other geographically-hindered bands in the US include Nena, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Crash Test Dummies. Flipping it around, Brownsville Station and Alphaville are considered one-hit wonders in the UK, even though both had more than one hit single in the US.

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Industry “Standards”

Anyone familiar with the IT industry is surely aware of the hundreds of “industry standards” that have come and gone over the years: USB, FireWire, PictBridge, 802.11g, Bluetooth, Ethernet, PCI, ISA, RS-232… the list goes on and on. Most of these standards are (were) well thought-out systems created by engineers working with designers and marketing departments. But that’s not always the case. Industry standards are sometimes determined by available components or corporate warfare… or even one man’s random decision! And you can find all three of those reasons in the chequered history of the phonograph record.

As you probably know, the first commercially viable recording and playback system was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. The system used a needle to cut grooves into a spinning wax cylinder. The only problem with the system was the the cylinder was turned by a hand crank. This meant that you could record something at 30 cranks per second (cps), while your neighbor might record something at 50cps, while the guy down the street might use 60cps. It wasn’t long before Edison’s engineers were asking him to create a “cranks per second” standard so that any recording would play back correctly on any machine. Edison found a machine and played with it for a while before setting on 80cps… “because it sounded right”. No scientific testing, no focus groups, no careful study of the results… just Edison playing around with the machine for 15 minutes.

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How A Flea Spawned The Middle Class

There are around 2.8 billion people in Europe, North and South America, Japan and India. A huge chunk of these people are middle class. Neither rich nor poor, the middle classes are able to obtain comfortable shelter, an adequate supply of food, clothing and basic utilities like electricity and sewer service, as well as education for their children and entertainment for themselves. But I wonder how many people in the middle classes know that they owe their existence… to a flea!

Well, not to a flea, exactly. But rather Yersinia pestis, a bacteria that piggybacked on the flea… which in turn piggybacked on rats in the holds of ships. You might have guessed that I’m talking about the Black Death (a.k.a. the bubonic plague) which happened in Europe and the rest of the world between 1347 – 1351. Little is known about the epidemic outside of Europe except that it was also found in the Middle East, India and China and killed around 75 million people worldwide – around 34 million of which were Europeans. Of course, most of us learned about the Black Death in high school, yet we were often never taught about what the disease actually meant at the time and what happened after the disease had run its course…. which is odd, because one of the most important things to come out of the Black Death was the middle class itself!

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The Sad Saga of Diego Garcia

Imagine a scenario where Venezuela wanted a military base somewhere in the Caribbean and offered the United States a nice discount on oil if it would move the residents of Puerto Rico off their island, demolish all existing structures and lease it over to Venezuela in perpetuity… Sounds improbable, doesn’t it? Perhaps Puerto Rico isn’t a good example – with a modern infrastructure, a population of almost four million people and thousands of American businesses on the island, it would be a monumental task (logistically as well as politically) to pull something like that off. But what if the island’s population was much smaller? Could something like that happen?

Well, something like that already did. You might of heard of the island of Diego Garcia on the news. Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia is one of the largest American airbases in the world, and planes regularly take off from the island for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What you probably haven’t heard is how it came to pass that America got an airbase there in the first place. It’s a story of realpolitik, nuclear weapons, a few thousand Creoles and the mysterious powers of the British monarch.

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REVIEW: Illegal Tender

What: An awesome book by author David Tripp
Where: Bookstores everywhere
How Much: $16.38 from Amazon (as little as $2.70 used)

Would you believe me if I told you that one of history’s greatest mysteries was about… a handful of coins? Author David Tripp makes the case with his book Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle, a tale of intrigue at the highest levels of government, back-room deals between shady coin dealers, a madness of pursuit worthy of the search for the Holy Grail… and one corpulent and corrupt king.

Here’s the basics of the story in a nutshell:

Theodore Roosevelt had long been critical of the beauty – or lack thereof – of American coinage. In fact, one of the things he was bound and determined to do while in the White House was to remedy this, and to that end he sent a brutally short and to-the-point memo to Secretary of the Treasury Leslie Mortimer Shaw on December 27, 1904: “I think our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness.” This memo set off a chain of events that eventually resulted in the hiring of famed American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to redesign American coins. Although Saint-Gaudens was in ill health – as it turns out, he would barely live long enough to see his designs to completion – he took to the task with gusto, creating new designs for just about every American coin. Sadly though, most of Saint-Gaudens’ designs were simply too complex for the Mint to implement. Striking a coin four times was perfectly acceptable for medallions, but it just wasn’t cost-effective to do the same for pennies. Of all of Saint-Gaudens’ designs, the only one to be implemented without major alterations would be $20 gold piece, which was nicknamed the “double eagle”. The coin would go down in history as perhaps the most beautiful coin the United States ever minted, and it would enjoy robust circulation for around 25 years.

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