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The Mettle to Melt Medals

It’s a pretty well-known fact that that the Nazis financed their portion of World War II in part by seizing the gold reserves of the nations they conquered. It’s hard to know exactly how much gold was stolen by the Nazis: contemporary accounts are a confusing hodgepodge of metric, Imperial and troy units, and books on the subject don’t always make it clear whether they’re using historical or inflation-adjusted currencies. But it’s certain that the Nazis seized tons of gold throughout Europe and sent it back to Germany, where it was melted down and recast with the Nazi stamp.

What is less known, however, is that the Nazis also banned the export of gold from Germany in the 1930s. At the time, the German government faced the dual problem making reparation payments to the Allies while simultaneously (illegally) rebuilding their armed forces. What’s worse, any Jews, academics, intellectuals and leftists who could afford to leave Germany did, taking their gold with them. Germany’s gold reserves fell to unsustainably low levels, hence the law forbidding anyone to take gold out of the country.

Which made the actions of two German scientists – Max von Laue and James Franck – a crime. Both men had sent their Nobel Prizes to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. The Institute’s founder and leader – Niels Bohr – promised to keep the medals safe for the men.

nobel_prize

The only problem was the Germans launched the invasion of Denmark and Norway – Operation Weserübung – on April 9, 1940. The Danes held out for a whopping six hours before giving up, but there was method to their madness: in return for their quick surrender, the Nazis allowed the Danes a fair amount of autonomy, and Denmark was arguably the safest place to be in Nazi-occupied Europe.

But the Nazis did go door to door throughout Copenhagen, looking for gold, Jews or anything of interest to the Reich. Bohr knew the Nobel Prizes would be a death sentence for von Laue and Franck. After all, they were not only made of 23 karat gold – which was illegal to export – they also had the recipient’s names inconveniently inscribed on them. And von Laue was a vocal opponent of the Nazis and Franck was Jewish. If the Gestapo found the medals… it would be bad.

A Hungarian chemist named Georgy de Hevesy was working in Bohr’s lab that day. He suggested to Bohr that they bury the medals. Bohr rejected the idea, as it was only a matter of hours before the Nazis arrived, and they certainly would notice any recently disturbed dirt on campus grounds. So de Hevesy had another idea: there was a chemical in the lab, a mixture of three parts hydrochloric acid and one part nitric acid known as aqua regia. It has several uses in the lab and it’s one of the few chemicals that will dissolve gold. Perhaps they could just… dissolve the medals?

Bohr agreed, so the men put the Nobel Prizes in the aqua regia. The thing is, though, aqua regia breaks down gold slowly. Dissolving the medals might have taken days or even weeks! And so the two men spent several very nervous hours watching the medals ever so slowly dissolve. I imagine it was like a scene in a movie where the Good Guy copies a bunch of files to a flash drive while being hunted by the Bad Guys, and we all watch as the agonizingly slow progress bar tracks the copy: 20% complete… 30% complete… 40% complete. Only in real life this chemical process went on for hours and hours!

Continue reading “The Mettle to Melt Medals”

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Spam as Poetry

So one of my clients had an employee leave a couple months ago, and last week I finally got permission to delete the user’s Exchange mailbox. My standard operating procedure in this situation is to export the mailbox to a PST (archive) file (in case the data is needed later), then delete the mailbox. But since this user had been gone for a couple months, the mailbox had several hundred unread messages. So I decided to go through it first, deleting anything that was obviously spam.

I deleted dozens of “CHEAP Vi@gr@!” and “PRESIDENT APPROVES MORTGAGE RATE SLASH!” emails before I noticed a few little poetic emails. There were no links in the emails, no mention of satisfying your woman or your credit score changing or new careers in interior design or the latest secret discovery by Dr. Oz. Just little bits of – what I assume are – test emails to see how spam filters work. I was struck by how these little emails sounded like something Ezra Pound would have written:

He was awful surprised

And away he went, Next day was auction day.
She was beautiful.

So gather around the drum circle, stroke your beard if you’ve got one, and enjoy the beatnik poetry of the spammers:

He looked surprised

I cleaned out the place, CHAPTER XXVIII.
Good! says the old gentleman.

Nice. Short, solid, and to the point.

I tried it

Thems the very words, CHAPTER XXV.
All right.

A southern twang, almost like Flannery O’Connor!

It was dreadful lonesome

So she hollered, But the king was cam.
You git it.

No wait… that’s Flannery O’Connor.

We are highwaymen

And Ive et worse pies, Hungry, too, I reckon.
Well, guess.

Alan Ginsberg, for reals.

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2013 Music at the Half

Thanks to the good folks at Last.fm, here are my Top 10 songs for the first half of 2013:

1) Marsheaux – “So Far”
2) Owl Eyes – “Nightswim”
3) Marsheaux – “Secret Place”
4) The Raveonettes – “She Owns The Streets”
5) Anya Marina – “Whatever You Like”
6) Marsheaux – “To the End”
7) The Raveonettes – “You Hit Me (I’m Down)”
8) Marsheaux – “Alone”
9) Marsheaux – “Summer”
10) The Raveonettes – “The Beat Dies”

And here are my artist playcounts for the first six months of 2013:

1) Marsheaux (392)
2) Saint Etienne (297)
3) The Raveonettes (145)
4) Owl Eyes (73)
5) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (69)
6) Nightlife (39)
7) Françoise Hardy (36)
8) Stumbleine (28)
9) Anya Marina (28)
10) Carla Bruni (27)

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The Saddest Thing Ever

Dollar Tree is a chain of variety stores in the US where most everything sells for $1, much like Poundland in the UK.

Most of the products sold at Dollar Tree are private label items; walk down the hardware, kitchen gadget or toy aisles and you’ll find that almost everything is “imported by Greenbrier International”, the Dollar Tree subsidiary that purchases and distributes those items. Dollar Tree also sells a lot of “faded brands” like Fabuloso and Bon Ami cleaners, Aim and Ultrabrite toothpaste, Lavoris mouthwash, Sunbeam batteries, and so on. They also sell a variety of off-brand grocery items, mostly stuff like canned chili or dried pasta that wouldn’t sell for much more than a dollar at a regular grocery store. And when dollar stores started really taking off in the mid 1990s, high profile manufacturers like Procter & Gamble and Johnson Wax started making goods especially for them. So where a local grocery store might sell a box of 30 Ziploc brand bags for $2.79, Dollar Tree might sell a box of 10 for $1.

But there are some goods which just don’t belong in a dollar store. I was at my local Dollar Tree today, checking out the new freezer case, when I spotted a “Ribeye Steak” for only a buck. I knew there HAD to be a catch, so I opened up the freezer to check it out:

steak_01
(click to enlarge)

Yeah… let’s turn this thing over:

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(click to enlarge)

Wow. That’s… one teeny tiny steak ya got there. Look how thin it is compared to my finger:

steak_03
(click to enlarge)

Good Lord, it’s barely enough for a single cheesesteak sandwich, and that’s not even counting the “up to thirty percent solution” of salt water added to the meat to bulk it out.

Jesus… I almost feel sorry for the cow, ya know? The poor thing ended up as a Dollar Tree steak… and you know no cow ever dreams of that. I bet when most cows are young they hope to one day become steaks at Ruth’s Chris or Morton’s or Peter Luger. But maybe some cows hit middle age and become resigned to the fact that they’re going to end up at Outback or LongHorn, and they’re OK with that. Cows that don’t give a damn and smoke and drink too much (Bukowski cows, they’re called) end up at Denny’s and Waffle House. Sickly cows end up in dog food. But what kind of sad cow ends up as a Dollar Tree steak?

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2013 TV at the Half

2013 has been an interesting year in TV so far. American network TV has been a huge disappointment… but there’s plenty of great stuff out there if you know where to look. And this year’s “best of” list contains a few surprises: two shows from New Zealand, and the first ever non-English language show!

So… let’s get it on! As always, you’ll find the list of my favorite new shows, in rough ascending order of preference (keep in mind that the list is only for new shows, so Breaking Bad and Mad Men aren’t on the list). Then there’s a list of shows that tried but failed, a section about miniseries, a tribute to shows that have left the air, and various odds and ends.

THE BEST NEW SHOWS ON TV

The Americans (FX) – This show has the potential to be great: Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell play Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, an all-American couple raising two kids in northern Virginia. However, their real names are Mischa and Nadezhda, and they’re a pair of KGB spies trained to pass as Americans. The “spy stuff” on the show is great, although it doesn’t hold up to close examination: you’ll find yourself asking “Why would they… ” or “How come they don’t…” early and often. In spite of that, it really does keep you on the edge of your seat. But where the show fails is “any time they aren’t doing spy stuff”. Philip and Elizabeth have domestic troubles like any other couple: intimacy and trust issues, trouble with the kids, etc. Others, such as neighbor (and FBI spy hunter) Stan Beeman have similar (boring) problems, too, and it drags the whole show down. Still, the supporting cast is great: Margo Martindale plays “Claudia”, Phil and Elizabeth’s KGB handler, and Richard “John Boy” Thomas plays Stan’s boss at the FBI. One odd thing about the show is the lack of historical detail. The sets and costumes look more like “generic Americana” than the early 1980s specifically. And sometimes the camera seems to focus on one particular object – like an old rotary phone – as if to make up for the lack of a time-specific feel. It’s like the show doesn’t have the budget to do the nice touches Mad Men is known for, and to make up for it they have the camera linger on a Space Invaders arcade game or Kim Carnes cassette as if to scream “SEE! IT REALLY IS 1981!!!”. Most of the suits the FBI agents wear would be perfectly acceptable in 2013 corporate America: not a single polyester jacket, wide lapel or obnoxious tie is seen. In early episodes, rotary pay phones and old cars are really the only hints that it’s 1981 and not 2013. Perhaps it’s a minor quibble, but Mad Men has really raised the bar for details like this.

the_americans

Way to Go (BBC Three) – For years I’ve believed in something I call the “French Film Fallacy”: a certain type of film buff will only watch French films because they’re “so much better than American films”. Of course, in a good year only the six best French films make it to the US, so the pretentious hipster never sees the 200 crappy French films made that year. The point is, I don’t know if I’m losing my taste for British comedy, or if the easy downloadability of TV shows has “diluted the talent pool” such that I’m seeing a lot more crap comedies these days. This makes Way to Go especially interesting. Although made in the UK with British actors, it’s written by Bob Kushell, an American who has written for The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and 3rd Rock from the Sun, among others. Blake Harrison stars as Scott, a nice guy who has taken a dead-end job as a receptionist at a veterinarian’s office because he can no longer afford medical school. When his gambling addicted half-brother Joey (Ben Heathcote) gets in trouble with the Wrong People, Scott reluctantly agrees to help pay back the bookies by assisting a terminally-ill neighbor’s suicide. Scott steals euthanasia drugs from his vet’s office and asks his friend, Cozzo, who repairs machines at fast food restaurants, to build him a “suicide machine”. When the suicide is successful, Scott, Joey and Cozzo decide to go in to the assisted suicide business… and people are just dying to become customers! (Sorry, that was truly terrible). Although morbid (and more than a little controversial), the show was one of the funniest things I’ve seen on UK TV in a long time. The characters remind me a bit of a more daring Reaper. Blake Harrison (Scott) plays a similar “nice guy” character to Bret Harrison’s Reaper character (they have the same last name, too!), and Marc Wootton (Cozzo) is not only a dead ringer for Tyler Labine, he plays a similar “good friend who is a slacker, and constantly screws up” just as Lebine did in Reaper.

way_to_go

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Quote of the Day

“Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you’re stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee. But they’re gone too fast and the taste is… fleeting. So, you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. And if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers.”

 – William B. Davis as “The Cigarette Smoking Man”
The X-Files, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”

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RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Kitty Genovese

On March 13, 1964, a woman was brutally murdered outside her apartment in Queens, New York. While the murder was tragic – as all murders are – it wasn’t especially noteworthy. It wasn’t until two weeks after the murder, when the New York Times published an article about the incident, that the whole world lost its mind.

*     *     *

Kitty Genovese was born in New York City on July 7, 1935. The eldest of five children, Kitty grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In what has to be one of the saddest ironies of all time, Kitty’s mother witnessed a murder on a street in 1954 and demanded that the family move to a safer place. And so, later that year, the family moved to Connecticut. But Kitty was 19 by then, and decided to remain in the city. By 1964, Kitty was managing Ev’s Eleventh Hour, a sports bar in Hollis, Queens and living in Kew Gardens with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.

At around 3:15 AM on the morning of March 13, Kitty drove home from the bar and parked her car at the Long Island Rail Road parking lot. The lot was on Austin Street across from an apartment building called The Mowbray, and approximately 100 feet from the entrance to her apartment, which was above some shops. Kitty had no idea that a man named Winston Moseley had woken up at 2:00 AM and quietly left his house. He had driven around Queens looking for a woman to murder, and Kitty was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Moseley approached Genovese in the parking lot. Genovese, frightened, ran across the lot towards towards her apartment, but changed her mind and turned to run up Austin Street towards Lefferts Boulevard, a street that was usually busy, even at 3:15 AM. Moseley caught up to her and stabbed her in the back twice. Genovese cried out “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!”. A neighbor named Robert Mozer leaned out his window and shouted for Moseley to “let that girl alone”.

Mozer’s shout frightened Moseley. He ran back to his car, a white Corvair, and drove around for several minutes. He came back, parked in a different location, and put on a wide-brimmed hat, which he pulled down low to hide his face. He scanned the LIRR lot, the street, and the area around the shops. Genovese had slowly walked towards the rear of the shops, where her apartment was, and Moseley found her there in an exterior hallway. He stabbed her several more times, raped her, and took $49 from her wallet (around $360 in 2012 dollars). He then walked back to his car and drove away.

*     *     *

At the time, most crime reporters simply took the NYPD’s word on most cases. Sure, there was the occasional high-profile case in which reporters would interview neighbors or witnesses. But most of the time, the NYPD would simply hand out sheets with crime summaries on them, and the reporters would rewrite them and submit them to their papers.

On March 27, 1964, the New York Times ran an article by Martin Gansberg with the headline “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police”. The article begins thusly:

“For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

That was two weeks ago today.”

The only problem is, almost everything in Gansberg’s article is wrong. In fact, there’s a huge factual error in the story’s very first sentence: there were only two attacks, not three. And the alleged “38 witnesses”? The District Attorney’s office searched high and low for witnesses prior to Moseley’s subsequent trial, and according to ADA Charles Skoller, only six credible witness were found. And, due to the layout of the crime, none of those people actually saw Moselely murder Genovese.

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Mad Men: Symmetry

Last night, Pete Campbell’s transition into Don Draper came full circle. The symbolism was blindingly obvious… after all, does this shot:

mad_men_s6e13_shot

Remind you of anything? How about this shot from “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”:

mad_men_s1e1_shot

More beautiful symmetry from Matt Weiner and Co.

 

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Taking Measure

Several historians have described the American Revolution as the “American Secession”. This is because the American Revolution was pretty tame compared to later revolutions in France and Russia. Most Americans weren’t even in favor of the Revolution, and the majority of those that were didn’t want to change their entire world… they just wanted the British to leave them alone. So after the British left, life continued for most Americans more or less as it had for decades.

Contrast this with the French Revolution, where revolutionaries railed against a millennia of rule by a theocratic monarchy. Most of France belonged to the monarchy or aristocracy, and much of the rest belonged to the church. From a revolutionary point of view, it wasn’t enough to just change their form of government. Society had to be recreated from the ground up, and certain people needed to be gotten rid of or “re-educated”. So aristocrats, bishops and priests were executed by the thousands, and their wealth and property redistributed to the working class.

But even that wasn’t enough. French revolutionaries created a new calendar to eliminate religious and monarchical days. The calendar would start not from the birth of Jesus, but from the founding of the Republic. Revolutionaries even invented a new decimal clock, partly because of its perceived ease of use, but also as another way to eliminate all traces of the Ancien Régime.

Many reforms weren’t very popular. Decimal time became the “official time” of a handful of towns, and was readily embraced by a few scientists and revolutionaries… but almost no one else. The Republican calendar was more successful, being used by the French government for 12 years. There was, however, a significant error in the calendar related to the calculation of leap years which made it mathematically inaccurate. And while many Frenchmen were at least initially more enthusiastic about the calendar than the clock, so many people had to use the Gregorian calendar so often – in business dealings with other countries, or working with dates from before the Revolution – that most just gave up and went back to the old calendar. For some reason, I’m picturing an 18th century French version of Lewis Black, complete with liberty cap: “we already had one perfectly good calendar, but invented a new one… SO WHY THE HELL DO WE KEEP GOING BACK TO THE OLD ONE? IF EVERYONE’S GONNA KEEP USING THE OLD ONE, WHY DON’T WE JUST DITCH THE NEW ONE? AM I THE ONLY SANE PERSON IN THIS REPUBLIC??”  In any case, the French government agreed and went back to the Gregorian calendar in 1805.

But there was one reform that was insanely popular. It was so popular, in fact, that almost the entire world now uses it. And people in France at the time were happy to see it.

It’s the metric system.

metric

The first unified system of measurement used in France was established by Charlemagne in AD 790. His system was remarkably similar to Britain’s “Imperial System”. For instance, the pouce was the French equivalent of the inch, and was exactly 1.066 inches. And the pied du roi (“the king’s foot”, usually just shortened to pied) was equal to 12 pounce (12.86 inches, or 1.066 feet). Thus, the pied carré (square foot) was equal to 1.136 sq ft. The toise, the French equivalent of the fathom, was 6.394 feet, compared to 6 feet in England (the English only used fathoms at sea; the French used it on both land and sea). Liquid measurements varied a bit: the chopine was equal to .84 Imperial pints (but almost exactly 1 US pint, which was the system in use in England until 1824), the pinte was 1.86 Imperial pints (or 2.01 US pints). The quade was equal to a US half-gallon (or .42 Imperial gallons) and the velte was equal to 2.01 US gallons (or 1.68 Imperial gallons).

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The Record That (Apparently) Doesn’t Exist

Billboard magazine is an American publication that compiles the official music charts for the United States. It was founded way back in 1894 as a magazine about outdoor advertising… hence the name. After a few years it started reporting on “outdoor amusements” – like fairs and carnivals – as these were a big thing in the days before television and movies. They were also one of the biggest billboard customers of the time. Billboard soon became the unofficial “newspaper of record” for amusement parks, circuses, carnivals and fairs.

When jukeboxes became popular in the 1930s, Billboard began publishing charts of the most popular songs in the country. On August 4, 1958, the magazine started publishing its famous “Billboard 100”, the list of the top 100 songs for each of three categories: Pop, Country & Western, and Rhythm & Blues.

Nowadays, of course, Billboard publishes a ridiculous number of charts every week: over 100 different charts at the time of this writing. “Pop” has now been subdivided into “Pop”, “Rock”, “Adult Contemporary”. “Adult Pop”, “Alternative”, “Hard Rock”, “Folk”, “Dance”, “World”, “New Age” and more. There’s the “Top Digital Songs” chart for downloads and “Top Streaming Songs” chart for sites like Spotify and Last.fm. There’s a chart for the week’s “Top Ringtones” (who knew that was still a thing?), “Top MySpace Songs” (ditto), “Top Catalogue Albums” (older albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which are almost pure profit for record labels), as well as “Top Tastemaker” and “Top Heatseekers”, whatever they are.

One of Billboard’s first tweaks to their music charts came in the June 1, 1959 issue, in which it debuted the “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” chart. Usually just called the “Bubbling Under” chart, it featured the 15 songs that would have been numbers 101-115 on the Hot 100 chart. This way DJs and others in the record industry could keep up with new artists. Over the years, Billboard has changed the Bubbling Under chart to include 35, 10 or 25 songs (which is what it remains today).

The Bubbling Under chart of Billboard‘s June 16, 1979 issue of included a song called “Ready ‘N Steady” by a band called D.A.. And the funny thing about it is… no one has ever seen or heard a copy of the record!

Music historian Joel Whitburn – who has a massive underground vault containing a copy of almost every single 78, 45, LP and CD to make the Billboard charts since the 30s, and whose company, Whitburn’s Record Research, is the longest-running licensee of Billboard’s chart information – has looked into the matter with some depth. And, as a former record collector myself, I can see why: Whitburn owns a copy of every single that has ever appeared on the “Bubbling Under” chart… except “Ready ‘N Steady”.

In 1995, Whitburn said that he thought the band might actually be a girl-punk band from Chicago named DA! that was active in the late 70s and early 80s. He has since recanted this, presumably because DA! released a few records on a label called Autumn Records in 1981.

Whitburn has proof that Rascal, the label that released “Ready N’ Steady”, actually existed. He found a small ad for the label in the back of a punk rock “zine” (a type of self-published amateur magazine popular with sci-fi writers from the 1930s, but closely associated with punk culture in the 70s). Whitburn even hired a detective to go to the address listed in the ad – incidentally, a residential address – but the building was abandoned. I don’t know if Whitburn tried to do a title search on the property, or if he did and found that the home was a rental at the time or what. All I know is that it was a dead-end.

But perhaps the most titillating thing of all is that Billboard listed the catalog number of “Ready N’ Steady” as “RASCAL 102”. Presumably, there’s a completely unknown record out there with the catalog number “RASCAL 101”.

It amazes me that mysteries like these persist in the Internet age. You’d think that someone involved with the record – the band, the label, or a fan – would have come forward by now. After all, Ken Snyder’s By Request Only was thought to be a hoax for years… until it wasn’t. But it’s also possible that “Ready N’ Steady” was, in fact, some kind of hoax pulled on Billboard. But if so… why? Having a record appear on the “Bubbling Under” chart isn’t exactly the prank of the century. I mean, come on… the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion? Now THAT’S a prank, my friend. Getting “Ready N’ Steady” on a minor Billboard chart? Not so much.