February 18, 1856
Know-Nothings convene in Philadelphia

The Republican Party, also known as the "Known-Nothing Party," convenes in Philadelphia to nominate its first presidential candidate.

February 18, 1885
Twain publishes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

On this day in 1885, Mark Twain publishes his famous-- and famously controversial-- novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, about a wandering blue Scandinavian boy

February 18, 1930
Pluto discovered

On this day Walt Disney comes up with a great idea for a new cartoon character.

February 20, 1725
American colonists practice scalping

In the American colonies, a posse of New Hampshire volunteers comes across a band of Native Americans encamped outside the stadium and sells them tickets to the playoffs for heap plenty wampum.

February 20, 1962
An American orbits earth

From Cape Canaveral, Florida, John Hershel Glenn Jr. is launched into space after receiving the family's Neiman-Marcus charge card statement for December.

February 20, 1986
Chunnel plans announced

On this date France and Britain announce that a "chunnel," or Channel Tunnel would soon become a reality. Trains, cars and buses would be able to speed through the tunnel in less than half an hour. Construction began in December 1987 and the "chunnel" was finally completed in 1994. Other Anglo-Franco hybrid projects include a "fridge"— a combination freeway and bridge, an "underport" connecting the London subway with Charles de Gaulle airport, and a "parkevator" combining the parking garage at Harrods with the elevator in the Eiffel Tower.

Dear Tourist:

Although George was a dedicated seashore type— his Surfboard One inspired an entire industry— in the summer of 1789 Martha persuaded him to try the Catskills as an alternative. So they signed up for two weeks at Grossinger's in the Borscht Belt. Martha loved the place, surrounding herself with other yentas all showing off engravings of their grandchildren, noshing on lox and bagels at every opportunity, napping vigorously to prepare for the dinner theater every night, and laughing uproariously at comics like Jared Lewis, Shecky Greenbaum and Buddy Hackmann. She met old friend Betsy Ross at a quilting bee, bought tacky souvenirs for all of her friends back in Mount Vernon, gained twelve pounds, and loved every minute of it.

George was bored stiff until he discovered where the kitchen and parlor maids went skinny-dipping on hot nights, and realized that the 60 cozy cabins gave him an unparallel opportunity for sleeping around.

Dear Polymeric:

This unique combination of plaster and mastic solved the early colonists' problem of finishing the interiors of their sod huts and log cabins. Lacking such amenities as sheet rock, they would attempt to use plaster on the rough wooden walls. This was a laborious process, involving making wooden frames on the floor, pouring plaster in them to a depth of 5/8ths of an inch or so, waiting for the panels to dry, then carefully removing the brittle sheets from the mold, placing them against a wall, then nailing them in place.

Well, the brittleness of the plaster made the job next to impossible: few homeowners managed to get as far as the third nail before the whole shootin' match split, crumbled and fell. The construction experts at Log Cabin Depot suggested pre-drilling the plaster panels with holes to prevent this, but it was still touch and go, and few logcabinowners or contractors could resist giving the nails a final whack so they could be plastered over to hide the nail heads. Logcabinwives of the day would not tolerate exposed nail heads, which they thought cheapened the place.

Then one of the colonists, discussing the problem with a local Wham!plug Indian while admiring the neatly-finished plaster walls of his teepee, was told the location of the Great Mastic Tree Forest. "Heap plenty stickum" were his exact words. So a party of colonists armed with spiles and buckets went into the forest to recover the wondrous stuff, but they never came out again, as the mastic really was heap plenty stickum, and they remained firmly adhered to the trees until they were eaten by bears.

After a respectable interval another party set off, this time wearing garments of greased paper to avoid the dilemma the first group had encountered. They returned victoriously, bringing back buckets and buckets of mastic, which they added to the wet plaster, calling the mixture "plastic," since the Wham!plug word, "kuinnehtukqutngiaahrakenhaten" required two people to pronounce. With bated breath they removed the first 4' x 8' panel and placed it gingerly against a log wall... and it stuck! Another panel was placed tight against the first and it stuck, too! When the seam was covered with joint compound and sanded, it was invisible, giving the logcabinwives at last a place to hang the family portraits they had brought over from the Old World.

This was only one of the many hurdles our enterprising ancestors had to overcome to bring civilization to the wilderness. Next time we'll discuss how these hardy pioneers dealt with indoor plumbing, central air conditioning and inflatable swimming pools.

Dear Lisa:

Dear Sweet:

Nitroglycerine. The sweet but perky taste was all the rage in ancient times, eventually finding its way into toothpaste, beverages and ice cream. It wasn't until the 19th century that Alfred Nobel made the connection between nitroglycerine sweetener/antiseptic and people's heads, stomachs and injured limbs exploding. For that he was awarded his own prize for chemistry in 1869. He used the prize money to open a dynamite factory and to improve warfare.

Dear Spooked:

Dear Elderly:

Although the macro zamia has attracted the bulk of attention from dendrologists (it is the only species of tree that grows completely underground) the micro zamia has been the focus of one recent study. The only tree native to Antarctica, this tiny (they rarely exceed half-an-inch in height) and even longer-lived subspecies (the only known example is believed to be over 200,000 years old, based on its dental records) grows completely under the ice, according to the Russian scientists who discovered it after consuming the ethanol de-icer in 3 cargo planes.

Dear Accountant:

Most people were offered the usual monthly statement, but some were allowed to use the new-fangled credit cards, while others were forced to pay cash because of their poor credit ratings. Spotting the latter group as a potential source of profits, a rival brand, Coocoo-Cola®, stressed  that people could buy their product. They ran ads saying, "NO Credit? BAD Credit? NO Job? NO income? You can still enjoy delightful Coocoo-Cola with NO down payment, NO credit check, and low, low, interest-only payments when you sign a Coocoo-Cola contract— 'The Clause that Refreshes'"

Well, millions of the poverty-stricken classes immediately signed up, bragging about their good luck, and how Coocoo-Cola was "every bit as good as the real thing." Then, in September, 1889, disaster struck. Investors who had put their money into Coocoo-Cola stock expecting rich returns from the high interest rates that kicked in after the introductory period, were horrified to learn that the customers who bought the beverage so readily under the introductory terms were unable to pay the new rates, and in many cases were choosing to walk away from their beloved cans and bottles rather than make the now-unaffordable payments.

Worse yet, the Federal Beverage Commission, which had authorized the daring new pricing concept to make soft drinks available to the disadvantaged, announced it was on the brink of bankruptcy, having sponsored so many of the new contracts which were now worthless. Panic ensued, and soon drugstores and soda fountains were announcing staggering inventories of unsold Coocoo-Cola, throwing the manufacturing plant workers out on the street as factories closed. Can and bottle manufacturers soon followed, and the entire supply chain dried up. The chaos was unimaginable.

Finally, at the darkest hour, a young black man came forth with a plan which would get the economy back on its feet. He was promptly lynched.

Dear "Pop":

Elisha Gritzby (né Smith) of the Atlanta Anteaters in a 1923 game that is still recalled with awe by the few remaining witnesses of the event. Gritzby, never known as a squeeze power hitter— at least on the field— was expected to turn in his usual routine performance, maybe good for a two-bagger at best. It was a dull day at the ballfield that July, with fans more hot and bored than enthusiastic.

Elijah Foombartz (né Smith) of the Cleveland Elk, Gritzby's twin brother, happened to be playing shortstop that day. Although the brothers were identical twins, they wore different baseball uniforms so as to tell them apart: Gritzby wore a Piston City Wringers uniform that day, and Foombartz a Florida Palmetto Bugs one. They were easy to spot on the field, which added a certain drama to what happened in the seventh inning. Or maybe not.

Gritzby was at the plate, probably preparing to use his crafty "spitbat" technique on the incoming ball. The spitbat technique was not strictly illegal, but was frowned on by the Rules Commission, which encouraged the use of the term "salivabat" to raise the tone of the game.

The first pitch by Hiram Gritzby (no relation) was high, low and inside, but with an option on two acres of the outside. Elisha Gritzby (no relation) swung at it, even though the ball was so inside it passed behind him. Strike one. The pitcher then threw his patented Cleveland Cleaver® pitch, based on the newly discovered Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in which the speed of the ball could be detected, but not the location, and vice-versa. A difficult pitch to hit at any time, but Gritzby (no relation) gave it his best shot. Imagine his surprise, and the crowd's, when the ball reappeared in the peanut vendor's tray after coming to a stop! Strike two.

Girding up his loins, which drew an appreciative titter from the distaff members of the crowd, Gritzby swore a mighty oath that the next one would not get by him. Gritzby threw, Gritzby swung-- and connected with a mighty crack! that sent the ball as fast as fast can be toward his brother the shortstop who was unable to react in time. The ball struck the side of his head with such force that it ricocheted into the bleachers for a home run!

Well, you should have seen the pandemonium in the stands that day! Gritzby the batter was ecstatic, Gritzby (no relation) the pitcher was enraptured to have been part of the momentous event, the crowd was beatific, and the umpire, who had been to college, quoted Nietzsche breathlessly.

Elijah Foombartz, shortstop and brother of the rhapsodic batter, was less enthusiastic, as his temporal lobe had been stove in by the homer, and for the rest of his life he thought it was Tuesday.

Dear High-roller:

It's actually code. The real word is "ecasbma," an Etruscan word meaning "Fling down your cards and head for the door!" It's a way of escaping from a poker game ("emagrekop" in Etruscan) in which you are losing heavily. The etymology of the word reveals that the expression originated in earthquake-prone Etruria as an warning in casinos. Loudspeakers ("srekaepsduol") — slaves with loud, stentorian voices — were stationed at every exit. When the Approaching Earthquake meters they carried indicated an imminent temblor, they would call out "ECASBMA!" as loudly as they could, warning the cardplayers to leave the game instantly and head for the exits. Dice-players were warned by different slaves, trained to shout "SRETOOHSPARCEELF!" to warn of the approaching danger.

Losing poker players today use the reversed form of the original word to throw off the suspicions of any Etruscans who may be hanging around the casino.

Dear Numismatist:

Trick question. The $10 bill, at least until 1937, had no back, due to a once-in-several-lifetimes papermaking, engraving and printing error. It wasn't that the backside of the bill was blank, there was no back side at all! This perplexed the folks at the Treasury Department, but since it reduced the weight of the bill by half, and saved 50% of the engraving and printing cost, they put it in circulation anyway.

The missing back wasn't the only error on the bill. Alexander Hamilton's head was inadvertently exchanged with another image destined for a postage stamp commemorating the extinction of the buffalo.

As for the two portraits that did appear on the obverse— and only verse— of the currency, to this day no one knows who they are, although there's a strong suspicion they represent the two brothers-in-law of the engraver, a notorious drunk who once tried to slip a racy picture of actress Lillian Russell onto the $50 bill on the grounds that she was "a swell dame."

Dear Incarceree:

The first police department was established in New Orleans in 1782 to concentrate the sources of graft and corruption. Having a police department meant it was no longer necessary to hunt around for the correct person to bribe in the city's bureaucracy. A simple trip to a nearby police station would suffice, and those seeking advice on graft and corruption had a "one-stop shop" that covered the whole range of crimes and misdemeanors.

Everything worked smoothly until 1824, when police departments across the city were struck with a plague of probity and forthrightness which ruined the city's business and tourist trade. It wasn't until 1828 that normalcy returned.

Dear Greenhorn:

It's a long story, and one which few 21st-century Americans know about.

You see, when the French gave us the Trojan Horse of Liberty in 1886, an idea they had gotten from the tale of King Arthur and the Wooden Rabbit of Betrayal, they, like Arthur of old, forgot to put their spies and soldiers into it who would leap out at a given signal to spark the Revolution.

This peeved them greatly, for they had used up every centime (penny) in the Bourse (Treasury) to make the copper sheets (feuille de cuivre) that covered the armature of the statue (armature of the statue). So they pretended it was a goodwill gift, although they ground their teeth when they made the presentation.

Now there was a feature of the newly-renamed Statue of Liberty to which only a few were privy. The original statue was animated, to distract attention from the miscreants lurking inside. At the touch of a button Liberty would wave her torch and book and wiggle her hips in a sinuous pattern that was fascinating to watch. The French ambassador mentioned this to only one person, Leonard Swackhammer, the custodian of the statue. The ambassador also passed along a 5-liter bucket of verdi gris (verde grease), the only lubricant that would adequately oil the mechanism of the statue to allow it to perform. Plus the recipe for making more of it.

Now Leonard was a good man, but he could not read French any more than he could read Upper Peninsula High Choctaw. He faithfully lubricated the joints of the giant manikin every night (he worked nights as custodian), and always pushed the button to give the verde grease time to penetrate the joints. This exercising persuaded a number of late-night confirmed drunkards to climb onto the sobriety wagon the next time it was in town. Raving about the belly-dancing Statue of Liberty was also a good way to end up chained to a wall in nearby Blackwell's Island Lunatic Asylum.

Well, all men must depart from this vale of tears at some point, and in January of 1919 it was Leonard Swackhammer's turn. So the verde grease recipe remained locked in Leonard's old roll-top desk in a storage area, where it was soon covered with junk and forgotten. The statue, never again oiled or exercised, fell into a state of permanent immobility.

Then in 2002 the US Department of Headline Security decided to make the building safe from American visitors. In their vigilant quest to seek out any bombs which may have been left behind by careless tourists, they uncovered Leonard's old roll-top desk, and in it the recipe for verde grease. A French-speaking liaison officer from INTERPOL who happened to be on hand was able to furnish a translation, and once again the necessary elixir could be made!

Or could have been, had not the verde gone extinct in 1977, a victim of misguided environmentalists, who had taken every last verde from their secure mountain retreats and reintroduced them to the Louisiana bayous from whence their ancestors had emigrated thousands of years ago. In a matter of weeks the verde, unfamiliar with their new surroundings, were nibbled to death by minnows, down to the very last calf. Conscience-stricken, the Well Meaning but Misguided Environmentalist Action Committee (WMMEAC, pronounced wimmy-ak) put up a nice concrete pylon with a brass plaque commemorating the hapless verde. And so the secret of the animatronic Statue of Liberty was lost again, this time forever.

Dear Earl:

Dear Slow:

Dear Caffeinated:

At least two to meet federal regulations. Coffee producers often complain about the need for them to import the three classes of defective beans to meet the standards, but the government sees it as a way for poor coffee-exporting countries to pull themselves out of poverty. Coffee-bean farmers also dislike the labor involved in spoiling their crops to gain acceptance to the US market, but in the fatalistic tropical manner tourists find so endearing they simply shrug their shoulders and mutter the words que sera, sera ("that which rots, rots") or the equivalent in their native language.

Dear Historian:

Martin Marietta. Although Americans still remember the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1805, the Marietta and Monongahela expedition of 1803-1808? has been long forgotten. Just as Lewis and Clark were commissioned by President Jefferson to explore the new western American territories beyond the Mississippi , the M&M expedition, as it came to be called, was sent to explore the American southlands.

But, where Lewis and Clark both had Boy Scout Explorer badges with ribbons in map-reading and use of the compass and sextant, Marietta and Monongahela had never left the small town in Ohio where they were born and lived until the great event which wouldn't leave a mark in American history books.

Ed Marietta was the son of a seamstress and a costermonger, both born in England long before the American Revolution. Although Mrs Marietta was an expert in her field and established a franchise called "Needle Park®," which spread across America's Midwest, Mr Marietta had no luck persuading people to have their costers monged. He eventually found a part-time job as the town drunk, but lived in obscurity beside his rich and famous wife.

Joe Monongahela was the son of an Italian immigrant mother and an Indian father whose name was never known. His mother was an excellent lasagna roller-outer, and actually invented the curling iron which puts the wavy edges on lasagna noodles. But they were far from wealthy, which is why Joe jumped at the chance to join the federal expedition, which paid more in a month than he could earn in a year carrying baskets of noodles on his head through Irish neighborhoods yelling, "Ottenere il vostro nuovo-laminati lasagne tagliatelle qui a destra!" ("Get your fresh-rolled lasagna noodles right here!"), which of course, Irish housewives found incomprehensible.

So, on April 3, 1804, the M&M party set off, accompanied by 20 bearers and two 14-year-old Indian maidens as translators. However, unbeknownst to the expedition leaders, the two sisters who had answered the "Help Wanted" ad were from Jodhpur, India, and, although they were fluent in Hindi and could manage Punjabi well enough, knew not a word of English, much less any American Indian dialects. Scholars were puzzled for decades as to why the expedition kept them on after discovering this serious handicap. Then in 1921 a long-lost satchel from the expedition was discovered in a motel in Linchpin, Texas, living under an assumed name. In it scholars found engravings of both girls and the mystery vanished. In their report on what was found in the satchel, Prof B J Reynolds and Prof Jack Mulroney used expressions like, "vavoooom!" "hotcha!" and "oh, boy!" to describe the two.

The satchel also contained Martin Marietta's journal, which helped explain how and why the expedition vanished. Thinking they were in Georgia, not Texas, Marietta reported that they had to cross a "big lake," to continue their trek on the other side. The "lake" was the Gulf of Mexico, the time was October, the peak of the Gulf hurricane season in 1804, and the "hastily cobbled together rafts," the explorers and their retainers used were apparently no match for Hurricane Nasty that year.

Search parties were sent out over the years, to no avail. In 1808 president Jefferson declared them to be missing and presumed dead, ordering the flag on the Capitol to be lowered to three-quarters staff and a moment of silence— ten seconds by the clock, actually— observed, as he was busy that day.

In the 1840s the town they had grown up in was renamed in Marietta's honor, as all the good names had been taken.

Dear Beach Bum:

Snowshoes. An odd rule, admittedly, but one with a kernel of good sense behind it. You see, the weather in Atlantic City is quite variable, especially in the summertime. A frigid northern wind meteorologists call the Boreal Express comes sweeping down from the Arctic Circle, pausing only to change trains in Rahway before hitting the beach at Atlantic City with the accuracy of a "300" bowler. This is why women, who were believed to be as delicate as fine porcelain in those days, were advised to dress warmly before venturing out onto the sands. Long woolen bathing dresses, sensible bathing shoes and straw hats for sun protection were suggested, and for the unusually delicate a fur coat, matching hat and muff as well.

The regulation about snowshoes was added after the Tragedy of 1902 when Charles W Donner and his extended family were enjoying their yearly reunion party on the beach with hot dogs, Moxie®, marshmallows for toasting over a fire and all the other summertime accoutrements people used to think they enjoyed before the coming of Second Life and Facebook.

Well, it was a sweltering day, so the family decided to leave the heavier clothing back at the hotel, and some of the women were daring enough to shed their bathing shoes, despite the scandal it might cause. So they were unprepared for the Boreal Express when it hit just after 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The Donner reunion party was trapped.

After the spring thaw the following year, workers clearing the remaining drifts from the sand in the hope of locating the bodies were astonished to discover survivors! Before long the dark secret came out, though: the survivors had only survived only through anthropophagy. (The newspapers used that euphemism so as not to shock the ladies, who would not understand the longer word, of course, being as unlearnéd as fine porcelain).

When the hotels reopened a few weeks later for the early bird vacationers they were greeted with a new rule: No guest could so much as step onto the beach without the protective wear mentioned above, plus snowshoes, which were supplied gratis by the hotel. This precaution paid off, as there has never been another tragedy like that which befell the Donners' party.

Dear Starry:

Almost any contrarian astronomical group which denounces the prostellation concept of the universe. Constellationists hold that, rather than a titanic universe filled with billions of galaxies and quadrillions of stars, the Earth is surrounded by a black velvet curtain at night, and what appear to be "stars" are just pinholes in the velvet allowing the glorious light of Heaven to shine through. They point to the absence of a star in the south like Polaris in the north as evidence of one of their claims, that without a matching south polar star the Earth has no axis to revolve around. They dismiss all evidence to the contrary as "optical aberrations" in the equipment used.

Dear Elegant:

The Ambrose cocktail, consisting of:

2 oz of 151 proof rum
1 oz cherry brandy
1 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice
8 oz blockade whiskey

Combine all ingredients with cracked ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake well. Strain into a chilled old-fashioned glass. Serve with sugar cane garnish. As the general himself used to say, "It'll burn yer sides, boy! Yer insides ah mean." During the war it became an act of patriotism to slam down as many Ambroses as you could hold before slamming down on the floor.

Surprisingly, after the war it became a lady's drink, the Sweet Ambrose, with Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound replacing the blockade whiskey, as it was stronger and included sufficient morphine extract to give young women that glassy-eyed look so attractive to men.

Dear Vexillologist:

The flag of the "Indeependunt Stayt of Texas" was designed by Davey Crockett Bowie Travis-Houston in 1977 to mark the beginning of the Second Texas Revolution which underwhelmed the state until its leaders were safely housed where they were no harm to themselves or the public. Militias were formed of tens to dozens of middle-aged, beer-bellied high-school dropouts who swore they would wrest the sovereignty of the state from its illegal master, the United States of America.

Young Travis-Houston's entry in the contest to pick a flag design for the movement was chosen by the judges as best expressing the ideals of the revolution. It depicted Jim Bowie stabbing his trademark blade into the heart of the "King of the US," black corpses hung from trees along with the Pope, a barbed wire fence and "mine feild" around an outline of the state, and the "US Capital" being blown up underneath the slogans "Texas, not Taxes!" and "God and Guns are Us!" with "Wimmin in There Place!" on a banner across the bottom.

Dear Shot-up:

It's an old military term, dating back to when the howitzer was first introduced to battlefield artillery. This short-barreled weapon was not used to fire directly at a target, but to lob shells high over city walls to dismay the population of a city under siege. Well, it soon became the most popular artillery piece ever, and artillery units discovered that the higher the gun was pointed, the closer the shell fell.

This reached its inevitable finale at the siege of West Lump during the Asparagus Wars of the 17th century. Having reached the outer fortifications with some shells left over, the gun crew decided to lob one over the wall to distract the defenders on the other side. They pointed the howitzer almost straight up, but forgot to account for the rotation of the Earth, critically important with this kind of shot, just as it is in championship billiards matches.

The upshot was the destruction of the howitzer and crew, whose last words were, according to a witness, "What's that thing in the sky getting bigger and big--."

Dear Wannabe:

Plowboy. In its original conception it was aimed at those who worked the soil, and the centerfold would be "Milker of the Month." But in focus groups of young farm types, Hefner discovered that Smut magazine was preferred by nine out of ten in their choice of outhouse reading matter.

Not being a farm type himself, despite his name (which he thought would be a selling point), he didn't know that Smut was a periodical devoted to the fungus disease which affects cereal crops. Knowing only the other definition, he shrugged and said to Janet Pilgrim of his new magazine's subscription department, "If smut's what they want, smut's what we'll give 'em."

It wasn't all that difficult to change the direction of Hefner's magazine. The title required only the replacement of a single letter, and changing the "Milker of the Month" centerfold required only a different species.

Dear Enuretic:

Arnold Gleeb, of the Apollo 18 lunar trip, sometimes known as the "Lost Voyage." By the time mission 18 took place every other lunar Guinness "first" had already been made (first golf shot, first back flip, first Hokey-Pokey, first shaken martini, first water balloon fight, first organic garden, etc). Gleeb, desperate for any sort of permanent fame, took what he thought of as the Last Resort to enter the record books and let his bladder go that fateful morning.

That left Robinson Tooter, navigator on the mission, only one choice to enter the Guinness record book. Sneaking behind a convenient moon rock, Tooter undid the flap at the back of his space suit and prepared to fertilize the barren lunar regolith. Unfortunately his quest for fame trumped years of lunar training, as he momentarily forgot he was squatting down in a near-perfect vacuum.

Well, he accomplished his record all right, and his fatal error later became known as the "[expletive deleted] heard 'round the world," as he evacuated himself clean up to and including his back teeth. When he didn't show up for lunch the two other astronauts went out looking for him. The body was easy enough to find as there was a mile-long trail of exploded organs pointing directly at it. The third astronaut, pilot Edgar Wroblewski, took one look at the corpse and entered the Guinness record book as the first person to upchuck into a space suit. He, too, forgot all his training as he opened his helmet to clean up the mess so he could see and was completely sucked out of his space suit and sent into low lunar orbit.

Record-holding lunar pants-wetter Arnold Gleeb was then faced with a dilemma: with the pilot and navigator turned into space hamburger he had to get the landing module back up to the orbiting mother ship alone. This was difficult as it usually required six hands on the controls to successfully blast off from the lunar surface and carefully navigate to the waiting spacecraft. Without four of those hands he was forced to tie the accelerator lever in the FULL ON position, figuring that if he could get near enough to the ship he could bail out and grab onto a strut or something, allowing him to enter the craft by the airlock, thus saving himself, if not the mission.

Not being the navigator he didn't know that you had to sneak up on the command module from behind and slowly match speeds for such an endeavor to succeed. He found himself moving in an ever-accelerating collision course with the bigger ship, which was traveling toward him at about 17,000 mph. Rapidly calculating the time he would have to catch the spacecraft, he soon learned that the interval would be 0.000000004th of a second, or about the time it would take for a nerve impulse to travel about one two-hundred-and-forty-fifth of an inch along the appropriate ganglions. The calculation was academic in any case, as he missed the command module by a country mile (1.609 country kilometers) and, unable to untie the knot in the cable that was holding the accelerator lever in the wide-open position, he found himself in the perfect position to become the first person to enter the Guinness record book for piloting a lunar landing module into the Sun.

Oh, and the command module itself? Lacking six additional hands on the controls by now, Captain Preston Terwilliger attempted to bring the spacecraft close enough to Earth to enter the atmosphere and trigger the landing parachutes. No matter how valiant his effort, he became the first person to enter the Guinness record book for having a crater named after him. Not a lunar crater, but the modest one he created just outside the town limits of Baxter, Iowa, 50028.

Dear Maytag:

Eggbeaters. 1953 was the "International Year of the Egg," and the media were packed with Egg Facts, Egg Nutrition, New Egg Uses, and, of course, recipes, recipes, recipes. Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I topped the best-seller charts for months, and was made into a 15-minute comedy program that came on just before "One Egg to Give," a popular daytime soap opera centered around one woman's quest for the perfect egg-salad recipe. (The series was later made into a movie by Woody Allen called What's Up, Tiger Lily?)

Now you have to remember that in 1953 the eggbeater was not the slim and accessorized electrical unit we think of today, but the old manual type. With so much use prompted by media attention during the Year of the Egg, cheap and flimsy eggbeaters soon gave up the ghost, causing a run on eggbeater stores, hoarding and soon the tragedy of 'beaterjacking. Share prices for National Eggbeater rose to dizzying heights, and stock splits were as common as banana splits, also popular in the early '50s. Soon newspapers were filled with sordid stories like this one:
 

President Truman announced a "War on Beater Cheaters," with additional penalties for 'beaterjackings near schools, parks and playgrounds. Finally the Egg Council, supreme authority on all things ovoid, realized it was time to step in. Despite the financial pain it would cause its membership, they declared the incredible, edible egg to be so full of cholesterol that should be renamed "stroke in a shell."

Well, the results were nearly instantaneous. The egg soon became an ingredient non grata, was dropped from the Victual-of-the-Month Alternate Selection list, and egging someone on soon became felony endangerment. The CEO of National Eggbeater applied for bankruptcy, and two days later was found hanging from his "Eggman of the Year" sash in the basement of his foreclosed home. Even Desi Arnaz of the wildly popular "I Love Lucy" TV show was forced to drop the beginning of his stock setup phrase, "Eggsplain!" for fear of corrupting American youths' morals. As for the rest of America, President Eisenhower took office and introduced The Decade of Conformity, interrupted only by Wisconsin Senator "Tail-gunner Joe" McCarthy's accusations that the State Department was overrun with Rhode Island Reds, and by Elvis Presley's gyrations, which some McCarthyites saw as a subversive imitation of an eggbeater's movements.

The 1960s became The Eggless Years, so much so that when Paul McCartney sang that he was the eggman, rumors arose that he had inadvertently consumed an Egg Koo-koo-a-choo and died horribly, replaced by a walrus as lead singer of his group.