Paws, Claws and Landing Gear: Serendipitous Factoids 2

It's interesting how quickly these factoids can pile up now that I've started keeping track. Anyway, here's my second installment!

Last week, the Rome (as in the capital of Italy) city council showed a modicum of humanity and rescinded punishment previously doled out to one of its citizens. Yes, they thought that one of their predecessor’s exiling of Publius Ovidius Naso was a bit harsh. I haven’t read why they rescinded the ban, but that’s fitting because nobody knows why he was banned in the first place. It’s all very curious. Publius Ovidius Naso is better known to the English-speaking world as the poet Ovid, who along with Virgil and Horace, are considered the canonical poets of ancient Rome. Yep, ancient Rome. Ovid was exiled to what is now a Romanian port city on the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus. In the year 8 (it’s 8 AD, but I think at this distance the 17-year spread between 8 BC and 8 AD is kind of inconsequential). Nobody knows why and Ovid himself wouldn’t say anything beyond it was due to “a poem and a mistake” (except he said it in Latin, carmen et error, which doesn’t clarify anything).

Here’s one that’s a colossal time-suck and a complete waste as none of the sites do anything (hence, the word ‘useless’ in the URL) but I can’t stop clicking the “Please” button!

For a time-suck that you might learn something from, try one of the Wikipedia Wiki-Link Games:

Here’s a site that was created in 1995 (for some perspective, HTML, the language used to create webpages, was created in 1993). This site is all about Anabaptists. It turns out that the Amish are a breakaway sect of the Mennonites. I don't know why but I always thought it was the other way around.

I saw an EMS journal article titled, “EMS agency responds to call about frozen woman, finds statue.” I thought it was unusual but wasn’t really surprising for the line of work – public safety service life is filled with WTF? moments – but unusual nonetheless…until I read the inset “Related Article” titled, “‘Homeless Jesus’ statue prompts 911 calls.”

Acute radiation exposure is measured in rads (radiation absorbed dose). A chest x-ray will expose you to 0.01 rads. People with acute exposure of 350 rads (roughly 35,000 chest x-rays in very short order) or less may get sick but will recover without medical intervention. 100 rad exposures generally won’t even cause any illness. Almost all people with exposures over 600 rads will die within a few weeks. This is according to ‘Chapter 13 - Surviving Without Doctors’ in “Nuclear War Survival Skills: Lifesaving Nuclear Facts and Self-Help Instructions” by Cresson H. Kearny (ISBN 978-09-4248-7015 and free online at http://oism.org/nwss/nwss.pdf). While this may sound like a 50s Red Scare / Cold War book, it was actually published in 1986, during the Reagan Administration, when FEMA was focused on minimizing civilian casualties when the nukes started flying. Or, as Major TJ “King” Kong said in Dr. Strangelove, “Nuclear combat, toe-to-toe with the Rooskis!” It should be noted that the units of measure used in this book have since been replaced with an international scale (System Internationale) and rads have been replaced by units called gray (Gy).

Our brush with international peace. In November 1995, the Ohio Chapter of the 8^th Air Force Historical Society, of which my Dad was the President and I was on the Board of Directors, was slated to hold its fall meeting at the Hope Hotel on the grounds of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. Fate had other plans for us, however. Another meeting was scheduled at the last minute at the Hope Hotel (named for Bob Hope, famous entertainer of deployed troops) that was considered by the Powers-That-Be to be a little more important than ours: a few bigwigs were going to get together to negotiate an end to the 3½ year war then going on in Bosnia. For security reasons, we, along with everybody else, were booted. The staff of the Hope were fantastic, finding us another meeting place that met our needs in the immediate Dayton area, ensuring that hotel reservations were transferred to the new meeting place with no change in cost, and even mailing out notices to our membership of the new venue and accommodations. The only thing we had to do was produce a set of membership mailing labels for them to use for the notices. I like to think that (despite the clear lack of say in the matter) our generosity in stepping aside without a fuss helped ease the way to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.

A good army trains the way it’s going to fight. For the US Army this includes teaching the troops that when invading another country they are going to have to deal with foreign languages and cultures and all the complicated dynamics that go along with them. To do this, the Army creates entire countries with their own languages, cultures, money and international relations. These countries include the People’s Republic of Pineland, the Island of Aragon, Attica, the People’s Democratic Republic of Krasnovia, and Atropia.

The inch was originally considered as approximately the width of a man's thumb until the 14th century when King Edward II ruled that 1 inch equaled the length of 3 grains of barley lined up, end to end.