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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know
The largest known bicep is the right bicep of American Denis Sester, which measures 30 inches when cold. He built up his amazing muscles by performing arm curls with a 150-lb. bucket of sand. As a youngster he wrestled hogs weighing 400 lbs. on his parents' farm to get fit.
Under the proper conditions of moisture and heat, the flesh of the buried body will turn to soap. Known as adipocere, this strange substance is a chemical much like baking soda mixed with fat (and thus almost identical in composition to soap) and is called "grave wax" by undertakers. For years the corpse of William von Ellenbogen, a soldier whose body turned to adipocere after he was killed in the Revolutionary War, was on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
Among many native tribes in South Africa, termites are roasted to a nutlike consistency and eaten by the handful, like party snacks. It might also be noted that at certain specialty food shops in the United States and Europe, the connoisseur of exotic delicacies can purchase such treats as chocolate-covered ants, candied bees, and pickled bull's scrotum.
The character known as the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the phrase "mad as a hatter" are both based on a tragic episode in manufacturing history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hat makers used various chemicals in their work, among them mercury for curing felt. Mercury is a deadly poison, and the thousands of workers who handled this noxious substance developed pathological symptoms-including kidney damage, anemia, inflammation of the gums, as well as insanity ÷ known today as "hatter's syndrome." It is estimated that at one time more than 10 percent of all the workers in hat factories ended their lives insane.
In Elizabethan slang the term "to die" meant to have an orgasm. This double entendre was often used by John Donne (The Prohibition, The Canonization), and by Shakespeare in King Lear.
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