Forbidden Knowledge Part 17

How about a nice cup of herbal tea? Better check which herbs you're talking about.

_01:: Blue Lily of the Nile Remember your fourth grade history textbook, with all those pictures and drawings of life in ancient Egypt? If you can jog your memory enough, you might just recall a blue lotus or lily symbol that tended to be a fixture in those drawings. For centuries historians thought the blue lily to be a symbolic flower commonly placed in the sarcophagi of royalty such as King Tutankhamen. However, more recent findings suggest that the blue lily played a more hedonistic role in Egyptian society as a hallucinogen, creating states of ecstasy among the users. The flowers were prepared as a golden liquid tea with a sweet taste. After drinking, the individual entered into a euphoric state. The dried leaves were also smoked, but the favored way of ingesting the herb was mixed with wine. Maybe there is more to the Blue Nile than we thought.

_02:: A b.u.t.ton for Your Thoughts If you're wondering where peyote comes from, look no further. Take one small Lophophora williamsii cactus and sc.r.a.pe off some of the b.u.t.tons. Let the b.u.t.tons dry until they are brown and ugly-looking. Serve in their natural form or grind them into a powder for tea or to mix with other drinks. For maximum effect, vomit early to get over the nausea. You are now ready for your peyote trip. Long a part of Native American culture, peyote was used by the Aztecs as a way to communicate with their G.o.ds. By the late 1800s, numerous North American tribes had integrated peyote into their religious ceremonies. In the early 1900s, a number of tribes formed the Native American Church, which still exists today. The basis of their communion is peyote.

_03:: Absinthe, or It's Not Easy Being Green One of the most popular drinks of 19th-century Europe, especially in France, was absinthe, made from the herbs wormwood, green anise, fennel, and hyssop. The licorice-tasting drink contained more alcohol than wine and soon gained a reputation for causing addiction, excitability, hallucinations, and epileptic seizures. Questionable scientific research (usually funded by the French wine industry) found that the drink caused individuals to be come criminally insane and that it brought on other illnesses, such as tuberculosis. In fact, one study found absinthe to be 246 times more likely to cause insanity than wine. By the 1890s, it became the leading target of temperance movements, a cause that reached its zenith in 1905, when Jean Lanfray, a Swiss peasant, murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters after having drunk two gla.s.ses of absinthe earlier in the day. What the press failed to mention was that in between the absinthe and the murders Lanfray had also had cognac, several gla.s.ses of wine at lunch, a gla.s.s of wine before leaving work, coffee with brandy, and a liter of wine after coming home. Absinthe was eventually banned in Switzerland (1910), the United States (1912), France (1915), and other countries.

_04:: Mold and Ma.s.s Hysteria: The Salem Witchcraft Trials Was it sorcery or just a case of mold-induced food poisoning? In February 1692, young Betty Paris became ill and began manifesting hysterical behavior such as contorting in pain, appearing to be in a trance, complaining of fever, running around aimlessly, and diving under furniture. Things only got worse when Betty's playmates started showing similar symptoms. For the small Puritan village of Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, this was too strange and, therefore, must be the work of the devil. With this the witch-hunt began. By the time the ma.s.s hysteria had subsided over 100 individuals had been arrested and imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Nineteen were executed, four died while in jail, and one 80-year-old man was pressed to death under large rocks. But was it the devil? The winter of 1692 was extremely cold and wet. The main food source was the harvested rye wheat, which is now believed to have been infected with mold. Rye mold contains a chemical called ergot whose effects are similar to those of LSD, including hallucinations and seizures. It seems the devil was one "rye" character.

_05:: Designer Herbs: The Agony of the Ecstasy The 1990s was a decade of designer drugs. What was a rave without ecstasy, or "X," as it is commonly called? But ecstasy is an illegal hallucinatory amphetamine. Leave it to American ingenuity to come up with a natural herbal alternative, called herbal ecstasy, and sell it as a "designer nutritional supplement." The main ingredients were a natural form of the stimulant ephedrine and the kola nut, a natural source of caffeine. What made the product appear to be more "in" was its slick packaging with pyramids, b.u.t.terflies, mushrooms, and endors.e.m.e.nts from (unknown) publications giving it a psychedelic mystique. Users said that it allowed them to party for hours with no side effects, while hard-core X users found it to be a weak version of the real thing. However, herbal ecstasy had a major problem. Many of its ingredients have been found to cause heart attacks, strokes, and seizures.

Are You Going to Finish That? World's

5 Oddest Cuisines

There's no telling what someone's willing to put in their mouth if the right price is involved. Or the right condiments.

_01:: Eskimo Cuisine: Seal Oil Forget ketchup and salsa, Inuits (often called "Eskimos") consider raw seal oil the king of all condiments. In fact, they're quite happy to slather the excellent sauce on baked salmon, sheefish, whitefish, caribou, moose, and anything else you can catch up north. Inuits also like their seal oil on "frozen-raw" moose or caribou and fish. So what's the secret to this not-so-secret sauce? The oil is produced by cutting up freshly slaughtered seal blubber into chunks and leaving them outside in a bucket for five days, stirring occasionally, until the blubber naturally renders and becomes oil. An adult seal produces about five gallons of usable seal oil. Once ready, just add A-1 or Tabasco to taste (really)!

_02:: Thai Cuisine: Insects I Though most Americans and Europeans are familiar with Thai cuisine standardsthe ubiquitous pad thai and thom yum goong soupmost are unaware of a small epicurean subgroup in Thai cuisine: connoisseurs who appreciate the variety of insect species native to Thailand's tropical jungles. It's true! This lot is quite happy to chow down on cicadas, locusts, mantises, deep-fried crickets, gra.s.shoppers, and bamboo borers (grubs referred to on some menus as "fried little white babies"), steamed giant water bug (which can also be eaten as a paste with chili and sticky rice), weaver ants and their eggs (eaten like the water bug as a paste), bamboo larvae, dung beetles, moth and b.u.t.terfly pupae, wasp and bee larvae, grilled tarantula, and termite soup. A side of Raid will cost you extra.

_03:: j.a.panese Cuisine: Insects II The j.a.panese also have a little-known gustatory affinity for insects. In fact, the practice of eating aquatic insects in particular probably originated in the j.a.panese Alps, where a hostile environment resulted in food scarcities. Now, however, insect larvae are considered a delicacy and are served throughout j.a.pan, including the best restaurants in Tokyo. Well-known dishes include hachi no ko, or boiled wasp larvae; zazamus.h.i.+ or water insect larvae; inago, or field gra.s.shoppers in fried rice; semi, or fried cicada; and sangi, or fried silk moth pupae.

_04:: Nigeria: Insects III Asia isn't the only place you can get someone to rustle you up a couple of bugs. People from Kwara State in Nigeria also have a long-standing appreciation of insects as food. The particular technique used for catching termites is pretty interesting: termites are captured by putting a bowl of water under a bright light, attracting the termites, which then fall into the water and drown. A popular variation is winged termitesfemale queens and male drones that take flight to mate. Large, mature queens are considered a delicacy and are reserved for developed palates. Generally, the inhabitants of Kwara State roast termites over open coals or fry them in a pot before adding salt to taste. Nigerians also enjoy crickets disemboweled and roasted over open coals, except for the Yoruba because Ogun, their iron G.o.d, forbids eating animals that don't have blood. Gra.s.shoppers, however, are the most popular because there's no religious taboo governing them, and field hands can eat them raw.

_05:: Guangxi, China: Live Monkey Brains Disbelieving Westerners and Chinese have long a.s.serted that the alleged practice of eating the brains of a live monkey directly from its skull in south China is a rumor, but in fact it isn't. Gourmets at Pingxiang, on the border with Vietnam, buy monkeys themselves at market and have them prepared by cooks at local inns. The cooks force the monkeys to drink large amounts of rice wine, and when they are pa.s.sed out they bind their limbs, chop open their skull, and scoop out the brains into a bowl. Diners can tell the monkey has been prepared well when they can see the blood vessels still pulsing. The brains are eaten with condiments including pickled ginger, chili pepper, fried peanuts, and cilantro, and apparently taste like tofu. In less enlightened times monkeys were bound and gagged and then strapped under a special table with a hole in the center, and the tops of their skulls were sawed off while they were still sober. Thank G.o.d the TV show Fear Factor didn't exist back then.

They'd Steal Candy from a Baby:

4 Dictators with Infamous Sweet Tooths

After a busy day of oppressing your own people, murdering your enemies, and conquering foreign lands, sometimes a workaholic dictator just needs to treat himself to a little pick-me-up. These were four guys happy to do just that.

_01:: Napoleon: Keeping It Short and Sweet Though he was originally from Corsica, Napoleon seemed to share the French obsession with pastries. In fact, his cook, Antonin Careme, who would eventually become a globe-trotting celebrity famous for his sugary confections, first made his reputation with an enormous wedding cake for Napoleon, celebrating his marriage to the empress Josephine. Of course, cakes were just the tip of the icing for the squirrelly French commander. Napoleon's favorite dessert was supposedly a pastry that resembled profiterole, made with chocolate and cream, and he was also said to favor a pastry called Turkish delight with pistachio filling. Later, when he was in exile on Elba, the sweet-toothed sovereign consoled himself with copious amounts of a sweet dessert wine from Klein Constantia in South Africa.

_02:: Hitler: Getting His Cake, and Definitely Eating It Too Old Adolf probably had the most famous sweet tooth on record. And though he was a vegetarian who also abstained from hard alcohol, Hitler's weakness for candy and pastries was well known, and admirers always made sure to bring a box of chocolates or cake or pastries when they came to see the Fuhrer. So, just how sweet were his teeth? Hitler was reputed to put seven teaspoons of sugar in each cup of tea, supposedly added sugar to wine because he found it too bitter otherwise, and plied all his guests with ice cream and candy. In fact, Hitler's favorite dessert chef, Gerhardt Shtammer, claims that Hitler asked him to make delectable desserts right up to the very end, when they were trapped in Hitler's bunker with hard-core n.a.z.i holdouts. According to Shtammer, Hitler's favorite desserts were eclairs decorated with little swastikas and strudel.

_03:: Saddam Hussein and His Spider-Hole Snack Attacks The bizarre contents of Saddam Hussein's residencesvelvet paintings of Elvis and allhave provided endless fodder for c.o.c.ktail conversations. Amid the revelations of Saddam's incredibly bad taste, it was also revealed that Saddam was a bit of a sugar fiend. In his last rather ign.o.ble residencethe "spider hole" where he was finally apprehended in Ad Dawr in December 2003American soldiers found a refrigerator filled with Mars and Bounty candy bars and 7-Up. Thank G.o.d! No longer relegated to the realm of middle school sleepovers, and Little League pizza parties, these snack foods have finally broken through to a new demographic: dictators evading prosecution for crimes against humanity.

_04:: Fidel Castro: Near-Death by Chocolate In a country known for its sugar production, the Cuban strongman's well-known fondness for a particular type of chocolate milkshake might very well have led to his demise had the CIA been a little more on top of its game. Among the approximately 600 a.s.sa.s.sination attempts the CIA is believed to have set in motion against Castro, one infamous failure called for covert agents to sneak poisoned aspirin into El Presidente's daily chocolate shake. And while they succeeded in getting the poison into the beverage, an overeager servant inadvertently foiled the plan by putting the shake in a freezer to keep it cold. Unfortunately, it froze and Cuba's temperamental dictator dictated a new one.

Hideki Tojo's Horrible-Terrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day (and Dentures) General Hideki Tojo, who led j.a.pan to disastrous defeat with his decision to attack Pearl Harbor, apparently enjoyed a lifetime of sweets. In fact, the condition of his teeth was even more abysmal than the condition of his army, because when he was captured he required a full set of dentures! Oddly enough, this led to one of the more bizarre stories of the Second World War: George Foster and Jack Mallory, Navy dentists on loan to the Army, were given responsibility for making Tojo's dentures and, realizing the ident.i.ty of their famous patient, decided to play a youthful prank on him. Mallory made dentures that were an exact fit, causing no discomfort, but engraved a message"Remember Pearl Harbor"in Morse code on his false teeth.

Touch of Evil In the Soviet Union, the role of Santa Claus was usurped by candy fan Joseph Stalin. Uncle Joe loved sweets so much that they were distributed to schoolchildren all across the country on his birthday (celebrated on December 21).

6 Servings of Swine: The Worst Pork Barrel Politics Revealed Sure, when it's served up as a McRib, or on a platter of chops at Grandma's, pork can be downright tasty. But as soon as a politician gets his grubby hands on the stuff, it becomes a little harder to stomach. The following are six of the worst cases of pork barrel politics, served high with a couple dollops of contempt!

_01:: The Pig Book and Oinker Awards Every year, a pork barrel watchdog group called Citizens Against Government Waste produces the Pig Book, detailing the year's worst pork in Congress. CAGW picks the most outrageous examples from each year to bestow upon them the facetious Oinker Awards. The 2003 Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut Award went to the National Peanut Festival Fairgrounds in Dothan, Alabama, for the $202,500 allocated to them. The 2004 Soaking the Taxpayers Award was given to an Iowa senator for the $50 million he procured for an indoor rainforest in Coralville, Iowa. Montana's senator Conrad Burns took home the 2002 Shear Waste Award, as well as $400,000 for the Montana Sheep Inst.i.tute. And 2001 had two notable winners: the Taxpayers Get Tanked Award, for $648,000 for ornamental fish research; and the Pillager from Pascagoula Award, bestowed upon Trent Lott for the $460 million he got for his state to develop an amphibious a.s.sault s.h.i.+p that the Department of Defense didn't ask for or want. Keep up the good work, CAGW.

_02:: Old Pork: Bonus Bill of 1817 The very first example of pork in American politics comes to us from the legendary and cantankerous South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun. In 1817, Johnny C. proposed the Bonus Bill in Congress, by means of which he planned on using the profits from the Second National Bank of the United States to finance the construction of roads and ca.n.a.ls. While his stated objectives were to connect the country and aid all regions, critics said that Calhoun intended most of the money to go to the South, thereby strengthening its economic ties to the North and West and opening new markets for its goods (and considering his future cries for nullification of federal laws and secession from the Union, this argument had some pretty strong legs). After all, the North had already built its own good roads and ca.n.a.ls, which was one of the main reasons why it was so far ahead of the South economically. But the whole thing is moot anyway: President James Madison vetoed it as unconst.i.tutional.

_03:: Permanent Pork: The War Finance Corporation In 1918, as the United States harnessed its economy for World War I, businesses in crucial war-related industries were having trouble borrowing money through bond sales. So Congress authorized the War Finance Corporation, setting aside $500 million to be made available for finance production. But when the war ended, the WFC didn't. Oddly enough, it lived on in various guises: first to finance the postwar European economy, then to help struggling farmers during the Depression. But money this big attracts plenty of opportunists, and through the 1930s and '40s chairman Jesse H. Jones from Texas doled out dough to his cronies in countless industries, including railroads, munic.i.p.alities, insurance companies, and exporters. During World War II, the WFC payouts ballooned to over $50 billion. In some nifty political sleight-of-hand, the WFC was abolished in 1953 and replaced by the Small Business Administration, which is still with us and does basically the same thing. Same pork, different acronym.

_04:: Porkers-Come-Lately Seems the two most recent additions to the U.S. community of states are making up for lost time at the pork trough. Alaska and Hawaii have traded the number one and two positions for several years in terms of pork spending per capita. In 2001, Alaska received 30 times the national average of pork spending per person; Hawaii got 15 times. And where did all this money go? It funded vital projects such as the pilot training simulator at the University of Alaska ($2,500,000); repairs on an Aleutian Pribilof church in Hawaii ($1,250,000); a parking lot and pedestrian safety access for the whopping 300 residents of Talkeetna, Alaska ($400,000); marijuana eradication in Hawaii ($2,500,000); and the Native Hawaiian culture and arts program ($742,000). Not bad for two states with combined populations of under two million people.

Touch of Evil The Armour brand actually evolved from real pork barrel politics. Taking advantage of artificially high food prices, P. D. Armour sold futures to pork barrels he didn't own, gambling that the Civil War would end in a year, in which case prices would drop dramatically. The gamble paid off and he netted more than $2,000,000, leaving a bunch of disgruntled traders and government officials in the wake.

_05:: Out of This World Pork: NASA With a humongous annual budget of around $14 billion, the National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration has turned into one fantastic place for pork. In 2000 alone, pork projects connected to NASA included $3 million for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center's Modern Genetics Project "to permit studies that simulate specialized weather conditions, pathogen attacks, and development and characterization on genetically modified plants in controlled-environment chambers"; $15 million for upgrades to the Life Sciences Building at the University of MissouriColumbia; and $3 million to enhance the University of South Mississippi's research of remotely sensed data for coastal zone management. The total amount of pork that went to NASA-related projects that year: $140.2 million. Three...two...one...rip-off!

_06:: The Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act: Coming Soon to a Trough Near You In a strange way, it's almost comforting to know that war, economic uncertainty, and ma.s.sive budget deficits have not stopped our government from dysfunctioning normally. Almost. In 2004, a pork-packed piece of legislation called the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act made its way up the Hill. According to CAGW, the bill was a mother lode of windfall tax breaks for all kinds of corporations: $519 million for makers of small aircraft, including Learjet; $310 million for makers of s.h.i.+ps; $189 million for Oldsmobile dealers.h.i.+ps (umm...why?); $92 million for NASCAR (the number-one spectator sport in the country gets a tax cut?); and, most vital of all in time of war, $8 million in tax breaks for makers of bows and arrows.

Let There Be Lunch:

8 Myths from Other Cultures about

G.o.ds' Strange Eating Habits

Eve gets a lot of bad press for the whole forbidden fruit incident. After all, who among us hasn't been tempted by a nice, s.h.i.+ny apple? But Eve's garden party foul doesn't even compare with these mythological munchers and their appet.i.tes for destruction.

_01:: Kronos and the Kids If you thought your family was dysfunctional, you oughta meet the early Greek G.o.ds. Kronos, a t.i.tan, overthrew his father, Ura.n.u.s, and had him castrated. But Ura.n.u.s warned Kronos that one of his children would kill him. So, among Ura.n.u.s' first batch of offspring, he had the one-eyed Cyclopes and the hundred-handed Hecatonchires all imprisoned in the underworld. Fine. But then Kronos' sister and wife, Rhea, gave birth to a bunch of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. Panicky, Kronos ate them whole, one by one: Hestia, Hades, Poseidon, Demeter, and Hera. Chomp! But by the sixth, little Zeus, Rhea got wise. She hid the baby and presented Kronos with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. He ate the stone, and all was forgotten. That is, until years later when Zeus tricked Pops into upchucking the rest of the family (G.o.ds apparently don't digest so well). The new crew then joined forces with the other Olympians to overthrow Daddy and the t.i.tans.

_02:: Zeus and Metis Zeus had a lotan awful lotof s.e.xual conquests. After all, it's good to be the kingespecially of the G.o.ds. But his first was Metis, G.o.ddess of wisdom and knowledge (who says guys don't like girls with brains?). After much pursuit he finally consummated the relations.h.i.+p, resulting in her pregnancy. But leave it to an oracle to spoil the afterglow. A prophecy said that one of Metis's children would overthrow Zeus (surprising that this didn't sound familiar to big Z, isn't it?). So, naturally, he ate Metis. For a while it worked out: Metis gave Zeus wise advice from his belly. But pretty soon, he started to get wicked headaches. So bad, in fact, that he ordered Hephaestus to split his head open with a hammer and wedge (Excedrin wasn't around yet). Out of his split skull emerged Athena, fully grown and armed.

_03:: Demeter The Greek G.o.ddess of grain and the harvest (the Romans called her Ceres, from whence we get "cereal") also bore quite a temper. When a mortal named Erysichthon foolishly tried to cut down her favorite oak tree, she appeared in the form of a priestess asking him to stop. What did our clever mortal do? Threaten her with his ax, of course. Oh, no you didn't! Demeter was, in a word, miffed. Because Erysichthon had wanted the wood to build himself a dining hall, Demeter cursed the man with an endless hunger (G.o.ddesses are nothing if not ironic). The more he ate, the hungrier he got. He ate his parents, their house, the dirt in the street, and, finally, himself. Yep. Ate himself, just like that.

_04:: Demeter, the Second Course We've all heard the ironic punishment tale of Tantalus, the guy with the burning thirst and ravenous hunger who's stuck in a pool of cool water with grapes hanging just out of reach for all eternity. So how'd he get there? Turns out he was a son of Zeus, so he felt like he could have the G.o.ds over for dinner. To please them, he chopped up his son Pelops, boiled him to a nice al dente, and served him to the G.o.ds. They were less than thrilled, and no one touched the Pelops platter except poor Demeter. Seems she was depressed and distracted because her daughter Persephone had just been whisked off to be the bride of Hades (and we all remember the pomegranate seeds and how that turned out). So, the distracted deity ate Pelops's shoulder. The G.o.ds, covering for her, restored the boy to life and gave him an ivory shoulder. Not so good for Dad, pretty good for the son. Apparently, Greek chicks dig ivory prostheses.

_05:: Finn and the Magic Salmon The Greeks aren't the only ones who can come up with gustatory gems. Straight from the Celtic mythology of third-century Ireland comes the Fenian Cycle, tales of a brave group of warriors called the Fianna. The leader, Finn MacCunaill, was known for his wisdom and intelligence. So how'd he get so smart? Simple. He burned himself while cooking fish. OK, let's back up. Finn's mentor, a Druid, told him of the Salmon of Knowledge that swam in the River Boyne. Eat the salmon, know it all. So, the Druid caught the fish, and Finn dutifully set about cooking it. But salmon, as we all know, are fatty, and some of that fat sputtered from the fire and burned Finn's thumb. He licked the grease, and suddenly he was clairvoyant. The story goes that Finn used this knowledge to warn Ireland of the eventual coming of the Vikings. Lotta good it did 'em.

_06:: Set and the s.e.m.e.n Every mythology needs a real bad guy, and the Egyptians had Set, the G.o.d of evil and darkness, nemesis and occasional h.o.m.os.e.xual lover of Horus, and slayer of Osiris, Horus's papa. Ever seen that Egyptian G.o.d with the head of a jackal? Yep, that's Set. To get revenge on Set, Horus and Isis, Horus's mother, hatched a strange plot: Isis made Horus e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e into a jar. She then spread the s.e.m.e.n onto a piece of lettuce (a popular aphrodisiac for the ancient Egyptians). Set, suspecting nothing, ate the lettuce. In Egyptian belief, this meant that Set was symbolically "pregnant" by Horus, and thereby subservient to him. When the s.e.m.e.n eventually "came forth" from Set, he was humiliated before all the G.o.ds. The obvious moral: When having lunch with an Egyptian G.o.d, skip the salad.

_07:: Karpakeli This is an obscure one. Karpakeli is the ancestral G.o.d of the Pun Magar tribe of Nepal. One story tells of his nine wicked sons' plot to kill him. While gathering honey on a high cliff, Karpakeli was warned by a honey bird of his sons' scheme, so Karpakeli stored most of the honey in a cave, sending only empty combs down to his sons. They soon cut the rope, stranding him on the cliff, to kill him. But the clever Karpakeli was prepared, and he spent many months living off the honey he'd stored. Eventually, though, it ran out, so he started eating the only other food available: himself. Starting with his arms, then his thighs, then most of his own body. Luckily, the G.o.ds sent a series of animals to rescue him: a white monkey, a crow, even ants. Finally, the good G.o.d was rescued by a pair of vultures named Khakapati.

_08:: Amaterasu, Sword Swallower As far as food goes, the j.a.panese mythmakers were pretty happy to get into the act as well. The chief deity in j.a.panese mythology was Amaterasu, the sun G.o.ddess from whom j.a.pan's emperors were purportedly descended (Emperor Hirohito was forced to renounce this claim to divinity after World War II). She had a bit of trouble with her hot-tempered brother Susanowo, the kami (G.o.d or spirit) of the sea and storms. So, when she heard he was coming to visit her, she prepared for a battle (don't any G.o.ds get along with their families?). But they reached an understanding, and he offered her his sword. What's a gal to do? Well, Amaterasu promptly broke it into three pieces and ate them. When she exhaled (some sources say she spit them out), she created several more kami out of the pieces. After that, raw fish doesn't sound so bad.

Feeding Frenzies:

4 Pioneers of All-You-Can-Eat

Despite what you may have heard, the concept of all-you-can-eat wasn't invented by the owner of a Chinese restaurant (they just seem to have perfected it).

_01:: Death by...Hetvagg?

By the time Adolf Frederick came to occupy the throne of Sweden in 1751, a long period of monarchy-weakening reforms called the Age of Freedom left him with very little power. But his appet.i.te didn't seem to suffer. In fact, the old Swede died in 1771 at the age of 61 from digestive problems caused by a giant meal (the dinner table being the only place left to him to indulge his power). His final feast? Smoked herring, lobster, caviar, sour cabbage soup, and a heapin' helpin' of a dessert called Hetvagg, a bun filled with marzipan served in a bowl of milk. It's no wonder the hapless monarch went down in history with an unfortunate (but accurate) epithet: "the King Who Ate Himself to Death." Maybe it's not always that good to be the king.

_02:: Mardi Gras' Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddad Just as the pagan Saturnalia was co-opted by Christmas and the Celtic Samhain got translated into All Hallow's Eve/Halloween, the pre-Lent binge of Mardi Gras has its origins in a pagan festival. On March 15, the ancient Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, a festival commemorating the founding of Rome and the suckling of the infants Romulus and Remus in a cave (the Lupercal) on the Palatine Hill. While the festival had a solemn religious aspect to ityou know, the standard blood and animal sacrificethe celebration was marked by much drinking, revelry, and general buffoonery. Boys clad in loincloths and smeared with blood would run through the city, as boys tend to do, las.h.i.+ng bystanders with strips of skin from sacrificed goats. After all, the las.h.i.+ngs were said to promote fertility and easy childbirth, so young wives were particularly eager to meet the lash. When Rome became Christianized, the Lupercalia was replaced by Carnivale (literally "Good-bye to the Flesh"), the day before the beginning of the solemn season of Lent. In fact, the day before Ash Wednesday saw so much drinking and feasting that the medieval French dubbed it Mardi gras, or "Fat Tuesday."

_03:: The Sumo Diet Like nearly every aspect of sumo life, the famed j.a.panese wrestlers' diet is based in centuries of tradition. So, what exactly makes up this traditional food? Sumo wrestlers put on their enormous weight700 pounds and moremostly by consuming a simple diet of chankonabe, a thick boiled stew containing tofu, carrots, cabbages, leeks, potatoes, lotus roots, daikon radishes, s.h.i.+take mushrooms, and giant burdock in chicken broth. Some recipes call for shrimp, noodles, raw eggs, or beer (interesting note: since falling to all fours in a match means a loss, many sumo wrestlers superst.i.tiously avoid eating any four-legged animals. So there's no beef or pork in their chankonabe). Doesn't sound particularly fattening, does it? By itself, it isn't, even with the side of rice. In fact, chankonabe is actually quite healthy, high in both protein and vitamins. But three factors play into the whole weight-gaining aspect of it for sumo wrestlers: (1) They eat a lot of itan awful lot of it; (2) they traditionally skip breakfast, consuming most of their calories at an enormous midday meal, after which (3) they immediately take a three- or four-hour nap. As most nutritionists will tell you, skipping breakfast and then sleeping immediately after a meal is a guaranteed way to pack on the pounds.

Scandalicious FATTY ARBUCKLE CRUSHES LOVER TO DEATH!.

Media circuses around celebrity scandals long predate Michael Jackson and Robert Blake. One of the first involved Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, a major star of silent films. Set around a three-day party hosted by Arbuckle at San Francisco's Saint Francis Hotel in 1921, the case involved a young woman named Virginia Rappe who died of peritonitis during the festivities. While Arbuckle claimed that her death was caused by too much alcohol (other sources say she'd recently had one of several abortions, which may have caused the illness), the papers went wild for the scandal. Based largely on the words of serial celebrity blackmailer "Bambina" Maude Delmont, the papers accused Arbuckle of raping Rappe, crus.h.i.+ng her with his nearly 300 pounds, and violating her with various foreign objects. Arbuckle became the public's scapegoat for the amorality of Hollywood, and movie houses stopped showing his films. Even though he was eventually acquitted (he was already back in Los Angeles when Rappe died), Arbuckle was blacklisted by the Hays Office, a Hollywood monitoring organization established in the wake of the scandal. Fatty would eventually have to change his name to get work, directing several films under the pseudonym William B. Goodrich. He died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1933, at the age of 46. It was his one-year wedding anniversary.

_04:: The Babe's Bad Day at the Plate Home wasn't the only plate at which George Herman "Babe" Ruth was a dominator. This guy had a big appet.i.te for everythingfood, drink, women, you name it. In fact, "the Sultan of Swat's" favorite breakfast was said to include a porterhouse steak, six fried eggs, and potatoes, all washed down with a quart mixture of bourbon whiskey and ginger ale. The Babe also had a certain fondness for hot dogs, downing between 12 and 18 one day in April 1925. Shortly thereafter, he blacked out on a train and was hospitalized for an intestinal abscess (recent historians have attributed his hospital stay to gonorrhea, not a tummy ache). Disgustingly enough, one of the Babe's partially eaten hot dogs (now black and shriveled and nasty) is still on display at the Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California. And although Ruth became pretty hefty in the last few years of his career, the rumor that the Yankees adopted their famous pinstripes to make him look slimmer is false. The pinstripes first appeared in 1912, when the Yanks were still the New York Highlanders.

Touch of Evil Realizing that all-you-can-eat buffets would attract customers (who would then pay to be entertained in other ways), the El Rancho casino in Las Vegas began to offer a smorgasbord with lobster, shrimp, roast beef, turkey, and more in 1946.

3 Crazy Diets from Crazy Times Whether it's avoiding carbs, trans fats, or solid foods, diets generally ask a lot from you in the restraint department. Of course, when we heard about the following three diets, that meant restraining ourselves from laughing.

_01:: Gustave Jaeger: Don't Eat Animals, Wear Them By 1885, the British critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw had already been practicing vegetarianism for a few years when he came under the influence of Dr. Gustave Jaeger's "sanatory [sic] system." The regimen was as much about what to wear as what to eat, and Jaeger rejected plant fibers such as "unhealthful" cotton and linen in favor of animal fibers such as wool. As a result, Shaw gave up using sheets in bed and took to wearing woolen clothing exclusively. In fact, his knitted "stockinette" suit became a personal trademark. Jaeger also allowed clothing made of hair and featherspreferably unbleached, unprocessed, and free of dyes. Most of his followers came from Victorian reform movements such as the Fellows.h.i.+p of the New Life, whichlike Shawpreached a strict vegetarianism.

_02:: The Reverend Sylvester Graham: Stay Away from the Ketchup!

Graham crackers today are made from bleached white flour, which means, strictly speaking, that they are not graham crackers. Named for the Reverend Sylvester Graham (who coincidentally was a cracker), the sweet cupboard staple was part of a 19th-century diet meant to advocate temperance and vegetarianism in order to fend off excessive carnal desires and thus prevent disease. Graham preached that unsifted, coa.r.s.ely ground wheat flour was healthier than the white stuff. He was right about that, but most people figured Graham for cuckoo. His regimen, aimed at reining in the s.e.x drive, included sleeping on hard mattresses, taking cold showers, exercising, sleeping with the windows open (no matter the weather), and eating whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Graham also warned that the use of ketchup and mustard led to insanity. Followers of his doctrine lived in special Grahamist boardinghouses and in an experimental commune near Boston.

_03:: Horace Fletcher: The Great Masticator Also called "the Chew-Chew Man," Horace Fletcher was an American importer and art dealer who in 1890 donned a white jacket and began lecturing and writing about nutrition. His theme: chew. Fletcher advised that nothing should be swallowed unless it could be reduced to liquid first by chewing. Supported by studies that found chewing every morsel 32 times could be beneficial for weight loss (it slowed down the rate of eating, at the very least), Fletcher claimed such adherents as novelist Henry James and industrialist John D. Rockefeller. Health reformer Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was also a devotee of "Fletcherizing" for a while, and even made up a "chewing song" for patients. Many Fletcherizers spit out anything they could not chew to liquid, which eliminated a lot of dietary fiber and led to constipation.

Hail to the Chef: