Forbidden Knowledge Part 20

_03:: Edgar Cayce (18771945) Known as "the Sleeping Prophet," Edgar Cayce must have been a real bore at social gatherings. Considered to be one of America's greatest psychics, Cayce would close his eyes and appear to go into a trance before making his prophecies. A story has it that an angel appeared to Cayce at the age of 13 asking him what his greatest desire was, to which he allegedly replied that it was to help people. Another story has Cayce placing books under his pillow and absorbing the contents while he slept. Not bad for someone who was illiterate. However, Cayce was best known for his medical prognostications, performing thousands of medical readings for his legion of followers. While there was little or no scientific proof that anyone was actually cured by Cayce's clairvoyance, his followers were quick to spread the word. However, there was an interesting catch: Cayce's followers claimed that if one doubted the mystic his diagnosis wouldn't work. If only Miss Cleo had had such foresight.

_04:: Ezekiel Talk about a genuine fire-and-brimstone preacher; today's ragam.u.f.fin evangelists would run a distant second to the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. Consider how the guy gave solace to the exiled Israelites. When the bunch found themselves exiled in Babylon, far from their holy city of Jerusalem, Ezekiel didn't hold a pity party. Instead, the sweetheart prophet told the captives that they were directly responsible for their own exile and needed to change their ways if they ever hoped to return home. Probably not the comforting words the people wanted to hear. He also did something entirely revolutionary: he put G.o.d in a chariot throne, thus giving Him the mobility to get out of the temple and visit His people in Babylon. The idea of the chariot came to old Zeke in a vision that looks like something straight out of Independence Day. As described by the prophet, the glowing chariot emerged from a large storm cloud with fire flas.h.i.+ng all around it, and couched in the middle of all the action was a fiery humanlike figure. To religious scholars this was obviously Yahweh coming in loud and clear on a mobile throne (can you see Him now?), though one still wonders if Ezekiel hadn't just had the fiery dream as the result of late-night indigestion.

_05:: The Reverend Jim Jones (19311978) Hanging around with the Reverend Jim Jones was certainly detrimental to more than a few people's health. As an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination, Jones created a large congregation of followers among the poor in the San Francis...o...b..y area. Proclaiming himself a prophet and one who could raise the dead, Jones quickly became a local religious celebrity and his congregation numbered over 8,000. But by the early 1970s, a number of local newspapers published articles accusing Jones of using church money to buy political influence. Then, in 1976, another article was published accusing Jones of performing fake healings and coercing church members to sell their possessions and give the money to the church (clearly he was better at raising funds than the deceased). With the pressure on, Jones and a group of his followers moved to Guyana and set up a compound modestly named Jonestown. Things came to a nasty halt in November 1978 when, feeling trapped (especially after killing U.S. congressman Leo Ryan), Jones ordered his followers to down a grape drink laced with cyanide. Over 914 people died in the ma.s.s suicide, including Jones. Contrary to popular belief, though, the drink was not Kool-Aid, but one of its compet.i.tors.

You Say "Potato," I Say "Nuclear Annihilation":

7 Close Calls in the Nuclear Age

There's a formula for fun: Arm two superpowers to the teeth with thousands of nuclear warheads. Make sure they are deeply hostile and suspicious of each other. Now, cut off diplomatic communication, stir in about 50 smaller countries with their own agendas on each side, andvoila!cold war in a jiffy!

_01:: Suez Crisis On November 5, 1956, during the Suez crisis, the North American Aeros.p.a.ce Defense Command (NORAD) received warnings that seemed to indicate that a large-scale Soviet attack was under way: a Soviet fleet was moving from the Black Sea to a more aggressive posture in the Aegean, 100 Soviet MiGs were detected flying over Syria, a British bomber had just been shot down in Syria, and unidentified aircraft were in flight over Turkey, causing the Turkish air force to go on high alert. All signs pointed to the ominous, except that, not long after, each of the four warnings was found to have a completely innocent explanation. The Soviet fleet was conducting routine exercises, the MiGs were part of a normal escortwhose size had been exaggeratedfor the president of Syria, the British bomber had made an emergency landing after mechanical problems, and, last but not least, the unidentified planes over Turkey? Well, they turned out to be a large flock of swans.

_02:: SAC-NORAD Communication Failure On November 24, 1961, all communication links between the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) and NORAD suddenly went dead, cutting off the SAC from three early warning radar stations in England, Greenland, and Alaska. The communication breakdown made no sense, though. After all, a widespread, total failure of all communication circuits was considered impossible, because the network included so many redundant systems that it should have been failsafe. The only alternative explanation was that a full-scale Soviet nuclear first strike had occurred. As a result, all SAC bases were put on alert, and B-52 bomber crews warmed up their engines and moved their planes onto runways, awaiting orders to counterattack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. Luckily, those orders were never given. It was discovered that the circuits were not in fact redundant because they all ran through one relay station in Colorado, where a single motor had overheated and caused the entire system to fail.

_03:: U2 Spy Plane Accidentally Violates Soviet Airs.p.a.ce U2 spy planes were high-alt.i.tude aircraft that took pictures of the Soviet Union with extremely powerful long-distance telephoto lenses. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, U2 pilots were ordered not to fly within 100 miles of the Soviet Union to avoid antagonizing the Soviets. However, on October 26, 1962, a U2 pilot flying over the North Pole made a series of navigational errors because the s.h.i.+fting lights of the aurora borealis prevented him from taking accurate readings with his s.e.xtant. As a result, he ended up flying over the Chukotski Peninsula in northern Siberia, causing the Soviets to order a number of MiG interceptors to shoot his plane down immediately. Instead of letting him be shot down, however, the United States responded quickly by sending out F-102A fighters armed with nuclear missiles to escort the U2 back to American airs.p.a.ce and prevent the MiGs from following it. Unbelievably, the tactic worked. Even more amazing: the decision whether to use their nuclear missiles was left to the American pilots, and could have easily resulted in a nuclear conflict.

_04:: When Camping, Make Sure to Hide Your Food and Your Nuclear Weapons On October 25, 1962, again during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a security guard at an air base in Duluth, Minnesota, saw a shadowy figure scaling one of the fences enclosing the base. He shot at the intruder and activated an intruder alarm, automatically setting off intruder alarms at neighboring bases. However, at the Volk Field air base in Wisconsin, the Klaxon loudspeaker had been wired incorrectly, and instead sounded an alarm ordering F-106A interceptors armed with nuclear missiles to take off. The pilots a.s.sumed that a full-scale nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union had begun, and the planes were about to take off when a car from the air traffic control tower raced down the tarmac and signaled the planes to stop. The intruder in Duluth had finally been identified: it was a bear.

_05:: A Terrifying Crash On January 21, 1968, fire broke out on a B-52 carrying a nuclear payload near Greenland, forcing the crew to bail out. The unmanned plane then crashed about seven miles from the early warning radar station in Greenland. The damage done could have been remarkable. The plane exploded, as did the explosives surrounding the radioactive core of the nuclear weapons (which require conventional explosives to detonate). Given the state of nuclear weapons technology at the time, this type of unintentional detonation of conventional first-stage explosives could have theoretically triggered the second-stage fission reaction, resulting in a nuclear explosion. Luckily for the world, it didn't. The resulting explosion would have not only severed regular communications between the early warning station and NORAD, it would have also triggered an emergency alarm based on radiation readings taken by sensors near the station. The only conclusion at NORAD headquarters, in this grisly hypothetical but very plausible scenario, would have been that the Soviets were launching a preemptive nuclear strike, and the United States would have responded in kind.

_06:: Comp Fear On November 9, 1979, four command centers for the U.S. nuclear a.r.s.enal received data on their radar screens indicating that the Soviet Union had launched a full-scale nuclear first strike on the United States. Over the next six minutes, planes were launched and nuclear missiles initialized for an immediate retaliatory strike. The president's National Emergency Airborne Command Postan armored jumbo jet with radiation s.h.i.+elding and advanced communications capabilities, meant to allow the president to remain in contact with the government and armed forces during a nuclear warwas also launched, though curiously without the president aboard. However, the alarm was canceled because no sensors or satellites detected an actual Soviet missile launch. The alarm had been caused by computer software used for training exercises depicting a nightmare scenario Soviet first strike. Senator Charles Percy, who happened to be at NORAD headquarters during this event, said the reaction was one of overwhelming panic and terror. Justifiably so.

_07:: Comp Fear, Part 2 Electronic displays at NORAD, the SAC, and the Pentagon included prominent, highly visible numeric counters showing the number of enemy nuclear missiles detected. They normally displayed four zeros"0000"indicating that no nuclear missiles had been launched. However, on June 3, 1980, at 2:25 in the morning, the counters started randomly subst.i.tuting the number "2" for "0." As a result, crews manning bombers carrying nuclear weapons were ordered to begin to warm up their engines, Minuteman missiles were initialized for launch, and airborne command posts were also launched. It was determined that this first event was a false alarm, but three days later it happened a second timecausing the entire emergency response procedure to start rolling once again. The problem was eventually traced back to a single faulty computer chip combined with faulty wiring.

Touch of Evil Western intelligence a.n.a.lysts believe that by the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Unionshortly before it went brokewas spending approximately $350 billion, or a third of its gross national product (GNP), on military spending. The United States, by comparison, was spending only 6 to 7% of its GNP at that time.

An Eye for an Eye:

5 Charming Episodes of Violence from

Medieval Iceland

The sagas of early medieval Iceland (written down between 1100 and 1300) are some of the great works of Western literature. Heck, they've got it all: l.u.s.t, envy, large-scale violence, widespread failures. Plus, these charming tales are all set in a time when a man just had to do what a man (generally with anger-management issues and a club) had to do.

_01:: Hallgerd the Petty (Njal's Saga) One of the bloodiest feuds in Icelandic history arose from the seating chart at a wedding, when Bergthora asked Hallgerd Hoskuldsdattir to move over at a banquet to a less prestigious seat. It only makes sense that the slighted Hallgerd took the instruction as a deadly insult. Unfortunately for Bergthora, though, Hallgerd knew how to hold a grudge. After all, this was the same woman whose husband, Gunnar, once slapped her for stealing from one of his enemies. Then, years later, when besieged in his home by his enemies, Gunnar begged Hallgerd to give him a lock of her hair to repair his bowstring, and she refused, reminding him of the slap he'd given her. Gunnar was killed, and Hallgerd was finally happy. Bergthora wasn't any luckier. Despite the attempts of Njal, Bergthora's husband, to make peace, things quickly got out of hand. Eventually, a gang attacked Njal's family on their farm and set fire to the farmhouse, killing everyone inside except for a brother-in-law, a Viking who didn't take kindly to his in-laws being barbecued. In response, he cobbled together a small army and successfully wiped out most of the conspirators before finally ending the b.l.o.o.d.y feud as all good feuds end...with a strategic marriage.

_02:: Hrafnkel's Comeback (Hrafnkel's Saga) Hrafnkel was the perfect villain: a callous chieftain who murdered without paying compensation (this being rather bad manners at the time). Overthrown but spared by the kinsmen of a man he had killed, Hrafnkel was banished to the life of a penniless vagrant. But he managed to learn from past mistakes, gaining wisdom, kindness, and followers while his enemies grew weak and complacent. And while the wisdom and followers would definitely help him in his greater plan, we're not quite so sure we buy the kindness. Hrafnkel waited seven years for the opportunity to serve his revenge ice cold. And when it finally came, he killed the most dangerous of his enemies, then chased the rest out of his former holdings.

_03:: Thorstein Replaces the Men He Kills (The Tale of Thorstein the Staff-Struck) What's a poor farmer to do when his honor is insulted by three servants of a wealthy landowner? If you're Thorstein Thorarinsson, you kill 'em, announcing your actions after the fact in accordance with Icelandic custom. Luckily for Thorstein, the three he killed were so worthless that their own boss didn't particularly want to avenge them. Thorstein and the chieftain, Bjarni, fought a rather halfhearted duel, punctuated by frequent water breaks, pauses to examine one another's weapons, and even stops to tie their shoes in midbattle. Finally, they reached a settlement: Thorstein, who was strong enough to do the work of three men, became the perfect replacement for the three he had killed. Downsizing, Icelandic style.

_04:: Egil Rewrites a Poem in His Head (Egil's Saga) Egil was a raider, a pirate, a murderer, and, oh so predictably, an accomplished poet to boot. On his way to deliver a poem to King Athelstan of England, he fell into the clutches of Eirik, the Viking king of York. This was most unfortunate, as Egil had made a career of being quite a pain in Eirik's royal rear. Given one night's reprieve while the king decided the method of execution, Egil stunned everyone by delivering, in perfect meter, a poem in praise of Eirik. He was released well before anyone realized that he had just replaced "Athelstan" with "Eirik" (the Old Norse form), maintaining the rhythm of the poem and saving his own neck. Long after he died of old age, Egil's grave was excavated and his abnormally bulky skull was discovered, proving that you can have a thick head and still do some quick thinking.

Lies Your Mother Told You REMEMBER THE MAINE.

In full, the U.S. battle cry during the Spanish-American War of 1898 was "Remember the Maine, to h.e.l.l with Spain!" It referred to the sinking of the U.S. battles.h.i.+p Maine in Havana Harbor in February of that year. But it's never been shown that Spainthen fending off a Cuban independence movementattacked the s.h.i.+p. Sent to protect U.S. interests, the Maine was preparing to leave when it exploded. In reality, though, Spain had nothing to gain by provoking the United States, and much to lose. Many think the onboard explosion was accidental. Or maybe Havana rebels planted a bomb, hoping to bring America into their fight. If so, the tactic worked. U.S. newspapersespecially those owned by mogul William Randolph Hearsttook up the "Remember the Maine!" cry and agitated for war. It worked out well for the U.S. government, though...the United States came out of the fight with the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, while Cuba was happy to win its independence.

_05:: Gudmund Negotiates a Deal (Gudmund the Worthy's Saga) When a chump named Skaering had his hand cut off by Norwegian merchants, he turned to his kinsman Gudmund to get him justice. Ever helpful, Gudmund arranged a monetary settlement, but as soon as he left the scene the Norwegians refused to pay. Summoned back, a rather annoyed Gudmund made the following proposal: "I will pay Skaering the amount that you were judged to pay, but I shall choose one man from among you who seems to me of equivalent standing with Skaering and chop off his hand. You may then compensate that fellow's hand as cheaply as you wish." Not surprisingly, the Norwegians quickly coughed up the money, no doubt to the sound of Skaering's one hand clapping.

Quit Your Day Job:

5 Dictators Who Worked Their Way to the Top

In the dreary monotony of daily life, the best most of us can hope for is a promotion and 3% raise. But a small subset of the human population dreams bigof b.l.o.o.d.y coups and secret torture chambers, personality cults and absolute power. Frankly, it's enough to turn us off ambition entirely. Just imagine if Idi Amin had remained an a.s.sistant cook in the British colonial army. Or if these folks hadn't thought to quit their day jobs.

_01:: Pol Pot, the Frustrated Teacher Before he became a world-famous war criminal, Pol Pot was named Saloth Sar. As a young man, Sar studied carpentry and radio engineering, but proved a poor student so he becamewhat else?a teacher. (And you thought your cla.s.srooms were scary.) From 1954 to 1963, Sar taught at a private school in Phnom Penh before being forced out because of ties to communism. Ever fond of alliteration, Saloth Sar became Pol Pot and devoted himself full-time to Cambodia's Communist Party, eventually becoming the party's leader, and by 1975, his Khmer Rouge guerrilla army had overthrown the same government that once fired him. In his four years of rule, Pot killed more than a million Cambodians. When the Vietnamese came to the rescue and invaded Cambodia in 1979, Pot retreated to the jungle, though he continued to orchestrate guerrilla attacks until his arrest in 1997.

_02:: Hitler, the Frustrated Painter As a child, Adolf Hitler attended a monastery school and harbored dreams of becoming a priest, but he dropped out after his father's death in 1903. By then, Hitler had a new career in mind: professional artist. And though the Fuhrer's precise but emotionless landscapes showed moderate promise, he was rejected twice from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. Bitter, poor, and lonely, young Adolf moved between boardinghouses and hostels, earning a meager living painting postcards. Oddly enough, he might have been just another failed artist had it not been for World War I. Turning in his paintbrush for a pistol, Hitler volunteered as a runner for the German army. Turns out he enjoyed that world war so much that, a few decades later, he decided to start another one.

_03:: Mussolini, the Frustrated Author Many dictators were also authors. Stalin wrote scintillating screeds like Building Collective Farms; Mao's Little Red Book is considered to be the second-best-selling book of all time; and Hitler's Mein Kampf made him a millionaire. Even Saddam Hussein found a little time to pen two horrible bodice-rippers while performing his duties as president of Iraq. But the most famous dictatorial romance is The Cardinal's Mistress, written by Benito Mussolini. Before becoming the world's first fascist dictator, Mussolini worked for a socialist paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, for which he wrote a serial later published as a novel. The Cardinal's Mistress tells the tragic story of, you guessed it, a 17th-century cardinal and his mistress. And boy is it bad. It's the sort of book where "terrible groan[s] burst forth from" characters' b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and characters ask one another to "cast a ray of your light into my darkened soul." No wonder Il Duce gave up his day job.

_04:: Papa Doc, the Frustrated Doctor Unlike Doc Holliday (brilliant gunfighter and amateur dentist) and Elmer Fudd (inept gunfighter known to Bugs Bunny as Doc), Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier was, in fact, a doctoralthough we can only imagine his bedside manner. Favoring hypocrisy to the Hippocratic oath, the dangerous dictator was first a physician in Port-au-Prince for nearly a decade before immersing himself in politics full-time in 1943. Even more surprising, he actually rose to power in a legitimately democratic election. And though he was voted in as president in 1957, Duvalier promptly showed his grat.i.tude to the Haitian nation by killing anyone who expressed the slightest opposition to his government. By the mid-1960s, Duvalier had established himself not only as President for Life but also as a quasi-divine manifestation of Haiti's greatness (he claimed to have supernatural powers; Papa Doc even said he placed a curse on John F. Kennedy that resulted in Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination). Incidentally, his son, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who ruled from Papa Doc's death in 1971 until 1986, was not a doctor. Just a dictator.

_05:: Castro, the Angry Ballplayer?

Persistent rumors would have you believe that old Fidel was a talented baseball player who once tried out for a major-league team in America...which is completely untrue. The fact is, Castro did play a little ball back in school: he seems to have been the losing pitcher in a 1946 intramural game between the University of Havana's business and law schools. But the point here is that he was in law school not so much to win ball games as to study law. Castro graduated and practiced in Havana between 1950 and 1952, when he failed miserably in his first attempted coup d'etat. After a brief stint in prison and a few years exiled in Mexico and the United States, Castro and his army finally took control of Cuba in 1959. Just goes to show you, there's more to life than sports!

War, What Is It Good For? Well,

3 Things, Actually

War gets a bad rap. Sure, it's often fatal and frequently unnecessary. But if war is so terrible, why do we keep on trying it? Hoping to shed some rosy light on the fog of war, we've collected a few possible, if minor, benefits to starting one.

_01:: Medicine It seems like nothing brings about a good medical breakthrough like a solid war. Antibiotics, anesthesia, and countless advances in surgery were all discovered or perfected during wartime. In fact, one of the most interesting war-related medical breakthroughs came from Dr. Charles W. Drew, an African American doctor in World War II, who helped pioneer technology allowing the preservation and transfusion of blood plasma. Drew worked from 1940 through the end of the war, and his efforts saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who otherwise would have bled to death. Drew himself, however, was not so fortunate. After falling asleep at the wheel in North Carolina years after the war, Drew sustained ma.s.sive trauma and bled to death. A persistent rumor claims that Drew was given poor treatment at the hospital because of his race, but friends with him that fateful night vehemently deny it.

_02:: Engineering War can also bring technological advances. Believe it or not, the phrase "civil engineering" wasn't coined until the 19th century because before that "engineering" had been exclusively a military endeavor. It's common knowledge that math and science have both civilian and military implications, but one prominent example of the type is cybernetics, the mathematical field pioneered by the unfortunately named Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics is the study of control within complex systems, and our boy wonder (Wiener actually got a Ph.D. in math from Harvard when he was just 18) began by applying it as a World War II tool. Amazingly, he used the science to figure out how best to aim artillery fire at speeding airplanes. But he didn't stop there. Wiener went on to write about the nonmilitary political and social uses of cybernetics in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). Today cybernetics helps thermostats antic.i.p.ate rising and falling temperatures. Do better artillery fire, finely tuned air-conditioning, and one good book make a war worthwhile? Well, that brings us to...

_03:: Literature Peace just doesn't have the same ring as War and Peace. And quite frankly, it couldn't get All Quiet on the Western Front until after things had gotten awfully loud. From The Iliad to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, good yarns have often used war as their setting. It's good for visual art, too. Pica.s.so's Guernica and Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People would have been impossible without the Spanish Civil War and the French Revolution, respectively. Sometimes, in fact, good art is all that emerges from a battle. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the best-selling Slaughterhouse-Five about the firebombing of Dresden, an utterly superfluous attack that Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war in 1945. Of the bombing, Vonnegut once wrote: "Only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed."

4 Angry Authors and Even Angrier Critics Nothing sours a literary friends.h.i.+p quite like a bad review. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan once said, "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." Whether warring writers keep their feud on paper or let things escalate to physical violence, a great literary feud is always entertaining.

_01:: Amis v. Amis You'd think that the father-and-son dynamic duo of contemporary Brit lit would stand by one another, but Kingsley Amis (19221995) was awfully hard on his son, Martin (1949). Kingsley, most famous for Lucky Jim, once told The Guardian, "If I was reviewing Martin under a pseudonym, I would say he works too hard and it shows." (Kingsley received his own bad reviewsthe novelist Robertson Davies called his work "an awful bore.") But Kingsley's critique was nothing compared with attacks on Martin since. In one of the snarkiest reviews of all time, author Tibor Fischer wrote that reading Martin Amis's Yellow Dog (2003) was akin to "your favourite uncle being caught in the school playground, masturbating." Martin responded by calling Fischer "a wretch." So much for British politeness.

_02:: Keats v. Quarterly Review Before he became a central figure in British Romantic poetry, John Keats apprenticed with a surgeon. When he published the now-cla.s.sic Endymion at the age of 23, one critic wrote that Keats ought to go back to medicine, arguing that it's better to be "a starved apothecary than a starved poet." The widely respected Quarterly Review was even harsher, using adjectives like "absurd" and "unintelligible." Keats seemed largely unaffected by the criticismthe following year, he wrote his most famous poems, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn." But fellow Romantic Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley later claimed that the bad reviews hadn't just angered Keats; they'd killed him. That led Lord Byron to write in Don Juan that Keats had been "snuffed out by an Article." Nice rhetoric, but in reality, Keats was snuffed out by tuberculosis. Immune to the critics, he remained a poet to the last. His entire last will and testament, in fact, was a single line of perfect iambic pentameter: "My chest of books divide amongst my friends."

Profiles in Carnage PRINCESS OLGA OF KIEV.

Olga the Widow: In 945, Prince Igor of Kiev took an army to the land of the Derevlian tribe. The Derevlians weren't exactly amused by Igor's demands for tribute so they defeated his forces and murdered him. In a great display of chutzpah, they then suggested that his widow, Olga, marry their ruler.

Olga the Agreeable: Surprisingly, Olga consented and invited the Derevlian leaders to Kiev to discuss the arrangements.

Olga the Hostess: Arranging a ceremonial steam bath for her guests, Olga had them burned alive inside. She then led an army against the Derevlian capital. When the Derevlians offered her tribute to leave, Olga showed her magnanimity by only asking for three doves per household.

Olga the PETA Nightmare: Their relief turned to horror when she had the birds set on fire (PETA not being around at the time); the doves returned home and set the town ablaze. The survivors were enslaved.

Olga the Saint: As for the Kievan princess, she had a fairly happy ending. She later converted to Christianity and is venerated today as Saint Olga.

_03:: Voltaire v. Freron In spite of his so-called pa.s.sion for rationalism, Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire held ferociously unreasonable grudges. He once published a pamphlet claiming Rousseau had abandoned his children, and he even called Shakespeare "a drunken savage." But Voltaire's greatest literary feud was with elie Freron, founder of the literary journal Annee litteraire. Freron virulently attacked both the underlying philosophies of the Enlightenment and Voltaire's writing. Not one to take it lying down, Voltaire quickly fought back, penning the play L'ecossaise to ridicule Freron. "A serpent bit Freron," Voltaire said. "But it was the serpent that died." (Incidentally, the play is widely regarded to be one of Voltaire's very worst.) The rivalry didn't exactly die down. In fact, the bitterness seemed to last a lifetime: for example, Voltaire kept a painting in one of his dining rooms depicting a bunch of demons horsewhipping elie Freron. How's that for rationalism?

_04:: Gore Vidal v. Norman Mailer While Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were serving as commentators for ABC at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, their private feud became fairly public when Mailer called Vidal a "queer." Of course, he had his reasonsafter all, the openly gay Vidal had just referred to him as a "crypto-n.a.z.i." End of round one. Three years later, Vidal (most famous for his historical novels) compared Mailer's view of women to that of Charles Manson in the New York Review of Books. Mailer, whose gritty The Naked and the Dead established his reputation, was a misogynisthe once remarked, "I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages." Even so, he didn't appreciate the Manson comparison. Just how much didn't he appreciate it? In the d.i.c.k Cavett Show greenroom a few months later, Mailer headb.u.t.ted Vidal, who cleverly responded with a punch to Mailer's gut. The show itself was a disaster, with Mailer insulting both Vidal and Cavett while Vidal stared blankly like, well, like someone who'd just been headb.u.t.ted.

Touch of Evil After e. e. c.u.mmings' poetry collection was rejected 14 times, he borrowed $300 from his mom and printed it himself. t.i.tled No Thanks, the book's dedication listed all the publishers that had turned him down, arranged on the page in the shape of a funeral urn.

When Nature Is a Real Mother:

6 Natural Disasters Explained

There's nothing quite as frightening as when Mother throws one of her temper tantrums. Mother Nature, that is. And while there's some comfort in knowing that at least there's a little science in her madness, the explanations are enough to keep you up at night.

_01:: Krakatoa's Really, Really Big Bang The terrible tsunami that devastated Indonesia in December 2004 wasn't the first time nature had vented its fury on the South Asian nation. At 10:02 a.m. on August 27, 1883, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, erupted. More accurately, it exploded. The detonation threw smoke and ash 17 miles in the air. In fact, the ferocity of the burst echoed so loudly that the sound of the explosion was heard on Rodriguez Island, nearly 3,000 miles away (imagine being in New York and hearing a boom from San Francisco!). The pressure wave caused barometers to twitch as far away as London seven times as the shock bounded and rebounded around the globe. But the eruption itself wasn't the worst of it. The explosion sent tsunami waves over 100 feet high toward Java and Sumatra. s.h.i.+ps were carried a mile and a half inland and dumped in the jungle. The disruption was so great, the tide actually rose several inches in New York. In all, more than 36,000 people were killed by the tsunami, and most of the nearby coasts of both islands were laid waste. As for Krakatoa, the island blew itself out of existence. It reemerged years later, the result of continued volcanic activity in this turbulent part of the Pacific "Ring of Fire."

_02:: "Bring Out Your Dead!" The Black Death Between 1347 and 1351, a plague raged through Europe. Arriving in Messina, Sicily, on a Black Sea merchant s.h.i.+p, the disease was initially thought of as solely an animal sicknesslike bird flu or mad cow disease. But somehow fleas managed to transmit the condition from rats to people. Called the Black Death because of the dark spots that appeared on victims' skin, the pandemic wasn't just the bubonic plague. In fact, the vicious strain was actually a lethal combination of four variations of plague: bubonic (causing buboes, or inflammations of the lymph nodes), enteric (intestinal), septicemic (an infection of the blood), and pneumonic (filling the lungs with fluid). Quadruple yuck. Even worse, the Black Death worked fast. People who were perfectly healthy at midday were dead by sunset. And the staggering death toll reflects it. An estimated 12 million people in Asia and 25 million in Europe (or one-third of Europe's population) were wiped out. An indiscriminate killer, the disease destroyed rich and poor alike, though only one reigning monarch is known to have died: King Alfonse XI of Castile, who refused to abandon his troops when plague struck his army.

_03:: Russia Dodges a Bullet from s.p.a.ce: The Tunguska Blast At 7:17 a.m. on June 30, 1908, a 15-megaton explosion (more than 1,000 times that at Hiros.h.i.+ma) flattened a ma.s.sive part of the Tunguska region of Siberia. The devastated area was 57 miles across, and the explosion shattered windows 400 miles away. A real investigation of the event wasn't undertaken until 1927. But that's not the weird part. The strangest fact about the incident is that there was no impact crater. An entire forest flattened, but there was no hole, meaning the object had exploded in the air. Scientists now believe that the object was an asteroid or extinct stony comet; the pressure of its descent simply blew it apart before it hit the ground. But the mysterious nature of the event has led to a whole literature of ludicrous theories, blaming the blast on everything from a black hole pa.s.sing through the earth to a chunk of antimatter to an exploding UFO towe love this onean energy death ray built by Nikola Tesla and test-fired from the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. Whatever they believe, scientists have shuddered and thanked their lucky stars, contemplating what might have happened had the object decided to explode over, say, Central Park. Due to the remoteness of Tunguska, not a single person was killed by the blast.

_04:: The Day the Little Conemaugh Got Much Bigger Lake Conemaugh lies 14 miles up the Little Conemaugh River from the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. On May 31, 1889, the dam that held back the lake waters burst after two days of torrential rain. The results were devastating. A wall of water 60 feet high, moving at 40 mph, crashed down on the unsuspecting people of Johnstown, and the water and debris it carried all but flattened the entire town. In an utterly tragic twist, the town was downstream from a wire factory that was also flattened by the water. Many townspeople caught in the deluge got so entangled in barbed wire that they couldn't escape. In the end, 2,209 people were killed, including 99 entire families. But Mother Nature was not wholly to blame for the tragedy. The Lake Conemaugh Dam was the property of the South Fork Fis.h.i.+ng and Forestry Club, which had turned the area into a mountain retreat for the wealthy. However, the club had neglected proper maintenance on the dam. Despite its culpability, though, it was never held legally responsible.

_05:: From the People Who Brought You World War I: The Flu Just as the Great War was ending and the world looked like it might finally get back to normal, the influenza pandemic of 19181919 struck. The pandemic most likely originated in China, but its huge and devastating impact on Spain's population earned it the name "Spanish flu," while the French called it "La Grippe." Even such luminaries as President Woodrow Wilson caught the bug, in his case while attending the Versailles Peace Conference. In the end, onefifth of the world's population would become infected, and more people would diesome estimates are as high as 40 millionthan had during four years of fighting in the First World War. Ironically, the war can be held partly responsible not only for spreading the flu, but also for checking it. Populations were weakened, and thereby made more susceptible, by shortages and rationing and the fact that many of the strongest and healthiest members had been killed in some trench or no-man's-land. But the war had also advanced medical learning and germ theory, and steeled people to hards.h.i.+p. They were used to self-sacrifice and putting the nation before the individual. So they were more calm and cooperative with the measures taken by their public health departments, some of which were tremendously restrictive.

_06:: Yellowstone National... Supervolcano?