“American,” perhaps. “Scientific,” I don’t know.
Long ago, in an economy far far away, I had a job at Holtzbrinck Electronic Publishing. Holtzbrinck, a German company with many American-publishing holdings, also owned Scientific American, at least at that time; also at that time, CD-ROMs were considered the next big wave on Personal Computing Beach (…I know, right? That’s 1995 for you, I guess), so my boss frequently sent me into the SA archives to see if I could find anything worth slapping onto a disc and selling.
I couldn’t, really, but my time in the musty archive room is still my fondest memory of that job, and not just because nobody else in the entire organization ever went in there, leaving me free to nap if the urge struck. I actually liked leafing through the ancient folios; I think SA is a monthly now, but at various times in its history it was a weekly, and reading back through the issues from the turn of the last century, all the breathlessly reported updates on the progress of the tunnels from New York to New Jersey, I could look through a window into a different time and see what we as a culture cared about then.
But the magazine also breathlessly reported on just about anything that had even a casual relationship with science — or engineering, or nature, or the acquisition of patents, which from what I could tell had become a nation-wide craze. I swear to God, every adult male with access to a forge and a first-class stamp had gotten a patent on some variation of the pennyfarthing, and Scientific American dutifully published each one, along with a little drawing. “Wilberforce’s Pennyfarthing,” “Tripworth’s Pennyfarthing,” a gigantic mutation called the nickelfarthing which permitted the rider to lie prone while pedaling with his hands (the gentleman in the illustration had on goggles and a scarf, like a barnstormer)…why, all the pennyfarthinging scarcely left room for the profile of the potato battery spotted at the World’s Fair!
I’m exaggerating…but not much.
Anyway, Scientific American could get pretty hilarious, and after a while I began keeping a list of the most ridiculous SA headlines in my little notebook. I’m sure I don’t know how the list survived five moves, but I came across it today while file-diving for another item entirely, in a folder marked, fittingly, “random.” I’ve reproduced it for you below, in alphabetical order, and I assure you, it is authentic.
Career of a Billiard Ball
A Caution to Hard Drinkers
Coffee as an Antiseptic
Dying Usually a Painless Experience
Electricity in Insects
How Deer Act in a Snowstorm
An Imprisoned Fish
The Inhabitants of Cheese
Kerosene and Spiders
The Kite as Life-Saving Apparatus
The Little Red Ant
The Little Toe
Loss in Keeping Manure
A Mysterious Olive Disease
Pineapple Fiber
Relief of the Idiot
Spontaneous Combustion of Hay
Taking Care of Rope
The Weight of Earth Worms
The Worst Smelling Substance Known
Tags: publishing
Dying Usually a Painless Experience
I’d love to know how they conducted research on this one….
Well, really. What did they base that conclusion on — the fact that, post-mortem, the dead weren’t generally complaining of/reporting any pain? THEY’RE DEAD, dude.
Also, before anyone asks: I don’t remember what the smelly substance was. But my colon would not have the chance to interact with chickpeas for another 80 years, so, it wasn’t that.
Well I’m down with the Inhabitants of Cheese. I like Cheese. And I like Inhabiting. So together they must be good, no?
Free the fish! With the crappy month that I have been having the articles for idiot relief and life-saving kites would come in awfully handy.
That’s a shame, because now I really wanna know, what IS the worst smelling substance known?
But since I can’t know that- how on earth is a kite a life-saving apparatus?
“The Inhabitants of Cheese” is totally the name of my next band.
Well, geez, if Billiard Balls keep bouncing off green felt walls like that, what the hell kind of career can they expect?! There’s no future in felt!
Or maybe that’s the point, and Mr. Billiard Ball will be a featured speaker at the next Job Expo in the Teaneck Marriott.
“Relief of the Idiot”? If only! Clearly this discovery was not widespread enough as I see Paris Hilton is still very much with us.
I worked for Das HB empire! And even at the next iteration of where you were – HB Online Publishing, which was changed to Macmillan Online Publishing….and then briefly worked on launching SciAm online! So very very briefly… They’re changing their name in the US this spring, y’know.
How did you know I was going to ask what the worst smelling substance was? Am I so transparent?
Waaah. Nostalgia! I had a subscription to Scientific American back in the early ’70s, when I was in high school. Mostly, it was so I could read Martin Gardner’s column, the guy who’d been responsible for The Annotated Alice which was my bible from the age 12 on. Although I was a budding humanities major to the core, there was always something in every issue that could pique my interest, because science was cool back then.
It doesn’t seem nearly as cool now, although there’s stuff like this guy that gives me hope:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2007/02/19/070219_orlean
Speaking as one who used to work for “Industrial Safety & Hygiene News,” these are outstanding. They all sort of sound like names chosen by post-ironic bands, in the vein of “My Morning Jacket.”
“The inhabitants of cheese”: teeeeeny little cheese monsters.
I have a little section in my latest diss. chapter on this 15 page essay from The United States Magazine and Democratic Review titled “The Moral Character of Mustachios,” which associates facial hair with an expression of moral turpitude. For 15 pages. Next time anyone tries to make a claim about how contentless American culture has “become” needs to take a trip to the archive. Old timey!
“Kerosene and Spiders”
This sounds like a situation that ends up with someone saying “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Aw, and I was just about to ask what the worst-smelling substance was.
Have you considered submitting this list to McSweeney’s?
Hey, great band names!
“A Mysterious Olive Disease” sounds like the title of a Miss Marple mystery and “Pineapple Fiber” is, as Dave Barry would say, a really good name for a rock band.
The Inhabitants of Cheese? It sounds like the title of one of those children’s book where they go through a door and they’re in another world. I probably would have read it too, since I read everything including the ingredients list on the shampoo bottle while taking a shower.
Your perusal of Scientific American sounds like me in college, hiding in the bound magazine section in the library reading old copies of LIFE magazine. It was a great way to occasionally skip a class.
My dad subscribed to Popular Mechanic when I was a kid and I loved it, especially the little ads in the back pages. Those were the greatest.
Spontaneous Combustion of Hay
That actually happens, as my boyfriend learned first hand. Apparently if you leave hay out in the elements for too long and it gets wet and then dries and does this over and over again something strange happens to it. Then if say your girlfriend yells at you for not cleaning up the 3 bales in her back yard that were put there to practice shooting a bow and arrow (?WHY??) and you go out and kick the hay and let oxygen in, WOOSH Big FIRE in the back yard… which makes your girlfriend feel a little bit bad about yelling at you. Anyway that’s how barn fires start according to my crazy step-father.
I am an archivist as well as a librarian, and I also know the joys of sifting through some dusty pages in search of treasure. Your SA job sounds like a dream come true!
And anytime archives are mentioned in movies, on TV or in print, a little part of me goes “Woot woot!” Yes I am just that geeky.
This one made me giggle: “The Inhabitants of Cheese”
The Weight of Earth Worms — did they mean ALL of the earthworms, or just representative samples?
“The Inhabitants of Cheese”? That frightens me, because cheese is a bright spot in my life and I do not want to chomp down on a grilled mozzerella sandwhich or relish a Triscuit (perferably rosemary and olive oil flavor) loaded with cream cheese while images of tiny people screaming in terror run through my head.
And yes I do know that chese is a kind of mold. Don’t care, when I’m eating it, it is simply the second best reason to never be a vegan (the first is milkshakes).
“Dying Usually a Painless Experience
I’d love to know how they conducted research on this one…”
The first thing I thought of is that perhaps you could monitor the pain centres of the brain for activity, which would let you know exactly what was going on right up until the moment of brain death (when, obviously, any pain signals to the body would cease to be generated.) I’m not claiming in the slightest that they ever did something like this, in fact the article is very likely to be nonsense or some variation on “you always lose consciousness before you die so there’s no way you could feel any pain!”, but I still think it would be cool to try.
I like to imagine that the entire headline was actually “Kerosene and Spiders = Happy Sarah,” but they didn’t have room for the last part.
If I recall my chemical trivia correctly, (I used to be a chemist), I believe the worst smelling substance is methyl mercaptan (or some other thiol). It is a volatile, sulfur-containing chemical. It is present in rotting and decaying things, skunk spray, and in some foods like garlic, onions and the like (at lower concentrations).
And, if you’re next question is, “How do they determine what’s the smelliest?” I think they measure smelliest by comparing chemicals, and for each chemical, figuring out the lowest concentration that still smells bad.
Umm, why do people think chemists are nerds again?
My twentysomething self would have loved the trifecta of:
A Caution to Hard Drinkers
Coffee as an Antiseptic
Dying Usually a Painless Experience
They seem terrifically linked, or they would have on some hungover Friday morning.
I’m kind of intrigued by a lot of these titles. Like “The Little Toe” — why do we have it? What’s it good for? Are we in the process of evolving into 4-toed creatures?
Clearly I need to break into this office so that I can read all these articles. I shall also be forming a nonprofit defense group to free “the Imprisoned Fish,” on the basis that said fish is a victim of malicious prosecution.
Dayna, you beat me to it. I was going to comment that a surprising number of these titles–especially “The Inhabitants of Cheese”–sound like great children’s books titles. And not just great titles, but books that I would have actually wanted to read as a child.
Dayna said: “…I probably would have read it too, since I read everything including the ingredients list on the shampoo bottle while taking a shower.”
You mean… there are people who DON’T read the bottles in the shower? But- but what do they DO?
“How Deer Act in a Snowstorm” begs the question: Why are the Deer acting during a snowstorm? Are they performing a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”? Who taught the deer to act? Too many questions.
I remember all the horse fangirl magazines warning about the hay combustion. If hay isn’t allowed time to fully dry out before it’s stored, it starts its own little greenhouse effect. Hay is highly flammable, so as the hay heats up, a fire could start in the middle of a big pile of hay bales. Not a pretty sight, I hear.
A very scary sight indeed, Leonie. The feed place near our farm had a tractor-trailer load of hay explode one July night oh, about 15-20 years ago, & you could see the flames for several miles. People in the area STILL talk about it.
I suspect that if coffee is an antiseptic, I can plan to live forever & always be germ-free! Maybe we should use the coffee to ward off the Inhabitants of Cheese.
I wonder how long “Taking Care of Rope” was. I mean, what is there to take care of?
“Coil; hang on hook in dry location.”
My favorite is “The Inhabitants of Cheese.” Definitely a cool band name.
Liz, I don’t know who those people are who don’t read stuff, everywhere, all the time.
I have a book called “Bizarre Books” which is a list of some very strange books published. I’m pretty sure it gives this list a run for its money.
But then again… “The Inhabitants of Cheese”. Rock on.
“Kerosene and Spiders”
…I must know more.
Thank you, Dayna and Liz! Good to know that I’m not the only one reading shampoo bottles et al.! This is especially intriguing back home in Switzerland, where everything is labelled in the three official languages German, French and Italian, so you can practice your Italian pronounciation of shampoo ingredients. Never a dull moment in the shower! Apparently as a child I actually learned this stuff by heart during the duration of a bath and then proceeded to quote it to my mother.
And I also must know more about Kerosene and Spiders.
I am all about Relief Of The Idiot.
But I wanna know: Relief from what??
Obviously not idiocy… what are the side-effects of idiocy? Numerous, as any page three will tell you… and what is it exactly thaat provides relief for that idiot? Death? which (we have learnt above) is usually a painless experience… hmm…morning musings over coffee…
Sars, care to extrapolate?
Ummm… I believe I know the answer to “Kites as a lifesaving device”. You see, kites used to be a hobby of mine…
In WWII, airplane crews used to carry survival kits with them. They contained food, matches, and hand-cranked radio with which to call for help. But, how to get up a long aerial for a weak radio? The kit contained an aluminum box kite with wire for string. The “string” was the aerial.
The radio was hourglass-shaped, and therefore the kit was called the “Gibson Girl”.
Of course they could be talking about any number of strategies for using kites to carry ropes to stranded people, but the Gibson Girl is the kite most valued by collectors.
….my colon would not have the chance to interact with chickpeas for another 80 years, so, it wasn’t that.
And I thought it was just me with the chickpeas.
How, HOW, could you leave us this list of headlines but not give us the columns? I need to know how much earthworms weigh…
Ha! When I was at Big National Magazine I worked on a 75th anniversary project that sent me to the archives for months, and I had a similarly awesome time. I had two favorite articles, both from the 30s. One was all about how “The Model Woman” has a new shape for a new decade, and details the trouble garment manufacturers were going to in acquiring curvy mannequins to replace the flat ones from the 20s. It talks about “that designer’s bugaboo, the fat woman.” Bugaboo!
The other one was a one-page article about a volcano in Japan where people went to kill themselves and other people went to watch. It had photos of a transvestite and her two girlfriends (they had tried to kill themselves together), with a footnote defining “transvestite.” Also photos.
(BTW, the headline of the Japanese Suicide Mountain/Transvestites story was “Profits in Suicide;” it was about the steamship company that took the tourists and the suicidal people to the island with the volcano.)
I work for a medical communications company and in my work I come across some crazy research articles. At some point my science geekdom lead to me subscribing to the Annals of Improbable Research, published by the people who do the Ig Nobel awards each year. It is insane, the things people research, and in modern times. Like why woodpeckers don’t get headaches (that was one Ig Nobel award winner last year).
“Taking Care Of Rope” is my favorite. Love. It.
Now I want to read all these. (I mean… what are the inhabitants of cheese?)
Re: Taking Care of Rope and Cassie’s beautifully concise “Coil; hang on hook in dry location.”
My friend’s grandma has the most impeccably organized garage in the western US. Three lovingly labeled boxes read:
Short Rope
Long Rope
Very Long Rope
Cracks me up every time.
Reading shampoo labels! My people! I knew you were out there.
I also read the dictionary. What? Nobody told me you don’t read the dictionary and it had all those words in there. Some even had tiny illustrations.
I might be reading TN too much…I swear I saw the article title as “The Little Joe.”