Tidbits January 24 Issue

Of Grand fOrks • East Grand fOrks

January 24, 2013 Issue # 803The Little Paper Ever Read®NeatestPublished by: Wick Publications • P.O. Box 12861, Grand Forks, ND 58208 • For Advertising Call: 701-772-8239 • [email protected]

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When Roosevelt and Churchill were sched-uled to meet in 1943, they knew the Germans were desperate to find out where the meeting would be. News was leaked that it would be at the place identified in code as Casablanca. The Germans figured that since “casablanca” was Spanish for white house, the meeting would take place at the White House. They sent all their spies to monitor the White House while Roosevelt and Churchill had an uneventful meeting in Casablanca, Morocco.• On December 6, 1941, President Roosevelt

sent a message to Emperor Hirohito in Japan pleading for peace. He sent the message by telegraph in a simple code used for every-day transmissions. In Japan, the telegram sat for ten hours unread due to a backlog of messages. Had he sent the message in a top security code, it would have reached the Emperor immediately. But it did not— and the next day, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

• Actress Lucille Ball reported that every time she walked near a certain area, she heard Japanese radio broadcasts coming across some lead fillings in her teeth. An investiga-tion revealed a Japanese radio station hidden underground.

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• On December 6, 1941, Japan was preparing to mount an attack on Pearl Harbor. A Japa-nese spy in Pearl Harbor walked right up to the telegraph office in town and sent a dispatch to his confederates describing where the war-ships were located. The telegram cost $6.82 and apparently nobody in the telegraph office thought it was suspicious.

• On Dec. 6, 1941, a new employee at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Mrs. Dorothy Edgers (who had been employed there only a month), decoded an intercepted Japanese message that indicated Honolulu was to be the target of a Japanese attack. She showed it to her superi-or officer, who said it needed more work and could wait until Monday.

• In May of 1942, the Japanese were prepar-ing to mount a major attack somewhere in the Central Pacific. The U.S. had broken the Japa-nese code and were aware of the impending attack. However, they didn’t know what the target would be. The Japanese called the target “AF” and the Americans could not figure out what place that denoted. Then they came up with a scheme: they had Midway send an un-coded message saying their water distillation plant had broken down and they were short on drinking water. Then they monitored the Japa-nese transmissions. Two days later, they inter-cepted a coded message from Japan reporting that “AF” was short of drinking water. When the Japanese descended on Midway, the Amer-ican forces were ready and waiting.

• When agents stormed the Japanese embassy in Portugal, they seized a Japanese code book, thinking it would be helpful to the Allies. What they didn’t know was that the Allies had already broken the code. Now that Japan knew the code book had been stolen, they changed the code. It took a year before the U.S. could break the new code.

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How many Silly Putty eggs are sold each day—5,000, 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000?The Falkland Islands lie off the coast of which continent?As far as hobbies go, what does a spelunker do?Name the 1970 song in this lyric: “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend.”

1.

2.

3.

4.

Which three comedians starred in the film comedy “¡Three Amigos!”?What kind of gases are neon and helium?What is the official nickname of the state of Illinois?Who was the first pop group memorialized in London’s Ma-dame Tussauds Wax Museum? How were they posed?

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T or F: In 2011 it was the first time ever that a pair of A.L. teammates (Boston’s Adrian Gonzalez (213) and Jacoby Ellsbury (212)) each had more than 210 hits in the same season. In 2012, Serena Williams be-came the 2nd woman to have won all 4 of tennis’ Grand Slam titles along with Olympic singles gold. Who was the first?

Four players who started their major-league careers in the 1970s played in four decades. Name two of them. Four players 6 feet 3 inches or shorter have won an NBA Most Valuable Player Award? Name them.Name the NHL team that allowed the fewest goals in an 82-game season?Of the nine NASCAR Chase for the Cup playoffs through 2012, how many drivers have made at least eight of them?

3.

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• When American decoding experts intercepted and deciphered a message from Germany to Mexico, they found that Germany was offer-ing Mexico a large chunk of the United States if only Mexico would join with them in the war. This message was pivotal in pushing the U.S. into World War I.

• Zeppelin L-49 was returning to Germany during World War I after having bombed London. It was over France when it ran out of fuel. There was no way the aircraft was going to make it back to Germany. The captain, knowing they were doomed to be captured, knew it was essential to get rid of the code books. But he couldn’t burn the books because the zeppelin was filled with flammable gas. So he ordered his men to shred the books and toss the pieces of paper over the side. When they were captured, Colonel Rich-ard Williams of the U.S. Army Intelligence was frustrated when he found that the code books had been destroyed. So he sent the troops out to search the ground following the path the air-ship had taken. By nightfall they had collected 22 sacks full of tiny scraps of paper. Williams set his men to the task of reconstructing the book. By midnight they had put together a complete map of the North Sea showing the call sign posi-tions for a U-boat rendezvous.

• William and Elizabeth Friedman were a married team of cryptanalysts who were instrumental in cracking many codes. Once the British sent them some sample messages from a new encoding de-vice they were considering using throughout the British Army. Within three hours of receiving the five messages, the Friedmans had deciphered them. The first message, ironically enough, said, “This cipher is absolutely indecipherable.”

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• A captured slave was brought to General Ly-sander, leader of the Spartan forces around 400 B.C. A message the slave was carrying was handed to the General. There were many hostilities going on, so Lysander suspected the message would bear important information. However, it did not. Then he noticed the slave’s belt was decorated with a series of letters that made no sense. He took the belt and wrapped it around a thin rod. There, down the side of the rod, was a perfectly legible message. It said that the Persians— who were supposed to be allies of the Spartans— were planning to take over. Thus forewarned, Lysander rushed his forces back to Sparta and ruined the plot.

• Around 300 B.C. Histiaeos was the gover-nor of the ancient Greek city Miletus. He was being held under guard and couldn’t get any messages out— but it was imperative that he inform his people behind enemy lines that he planned to overthrow Darius, the king of Per-sia. He shaved the head of his servant and tat-tooed the message on his scalp. After the hair grew back, he sent the servant out on an er-rand. The message was delivered.

• During the Revolutionary War, messages were sent via Anna Strong’s clothesline. She sig-naled an American spy whenever a boatman was ready to carry secret messages across Long Island Sound. A black petticoat hung out to dry meant that the boatman was wait-ing. The number of hankies next to it indicated which cove he was hiding in.

• Paul Bernard was a French spy in World War I who sent his secret messages home by writing the essential information in the top right-hand corner of postcards, and then putting postage stamps over the writing.

• Thomas Jefferson invented a coding instru-ment called the wheel cipher that is still used by the U.S. Navy today.

SECRET WARS (continued):

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Finally, having a woman and a baby along on the expe-dition convinced other tribes that the group of men was a peaceful party, and not a war party.

• There was one other reason why her presence was im-portant. Lewis and Clark knew that they would need to abandon their boats in order to cross the mountain range that separates what is now Montana and Idaho. In order to do that, they would need to procure horses from the Indians. They hoped Sacajawea could help them negotiate a trade when the time came.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson hired Lewis and Clark to explore the area. Lewis and Clark and their men left St. Louis on their journey in 1804, and stopped to spend their first winter with an In-dian tribe in what is now North Dakota. There, they met a trapper from Quebec named Charbonneau, and his young Indian wife, Sacajawea. • Sacajawea was born in what is now Idaho around

1790. When she was 12, she was kidnapped and carried hundreds of miles away, to where Lewis and Clark met her. It is thought that Charbonneau won her hand in marriage in a card game. When Lewis and Clark met her, she was pregnant, and soon gave birth to a baby boy named Jean Baptist.

• Lewis and Clark needed someone who was famil-iar with the territory to help guide them to the Pa-cific coast, and Charbonneau was a good match. Having his wife along was very advantageous for several reasons. First, she spoke Shoshone and served as an interpreter. Second, she was familiar with the country and helped make crucial deci-sions regarding which route they should take.

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SACAjAWEA (continued):• After months of grueling travel, the explorers

reached the head of the Missouri river in August of 1805, and began looking for Indians who could provide them with horses. Sacajawea rec-ognized the area they were in, as it was very close to the place where she had been born. In an incredible stroke of luck, the first Indian scouting party they met was led by none oth-er than Sacajawea’s own brother, who had not seen her since she had been kidnapped years before. It was an emotional reunion, which was made much harder when her brother was forced to tell her that their parents had died while she was away. Of course, Lewis and Clark and all their men were treated like family, loaded with provisions, and sold all the horses they needed to make the difficult crossing.

• Sacajawea, Charbonneau, and Jean Baptist re-mained with Lewis and Clark for the duration of their two-year journey, and eventually even moved to St. Louis at the request of Clark. Clark even adopted Jean Baptist as his own son, making sure the boy received the best possible education and ensuring he was given many op-portunities to travel the world. Jean Baptist died at the age of 61.

• What became of Sacajawea is uncertain. It’s known that she gave birth to a baby daughter while she lived in St. Louis, who died as a child. Some claim Sacajawea died of a fever at the age of 25; others say she died an old woman in 1884.

• It is sad to reflect that if Sacajawea died in 1884, she would have lived long enough to see the genocide and subjugation of the Indian nation by the very nation of people she had assisted by leading them across the wilderness as a young woman.

MoMents in tiMe the History Channel


• On Jan. 29, 1922, in the middle of a film, the Knickerbocker The-atre in Washington, D.C., collaps-es, killing 108 people and sending another 133 to the hospital. Accu-mulated snowfall from a blizzard collapsed the theater’s roof, which fell down on top of theatergoers.

• On Jan. 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg names Ad-olf Hitler -- fuhrer (leader) of the National Socialist German Work-ers Party (or Nazi Party) -- as chancellor of Germany. Hitler’s meteoric rise to prominence in Germany was spurred largely by the German people’s frustration with dismal economic conditions.

• On Feb. 3, 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped developed the atomic bomb, is arrested in Great Britain for pass-ing top-secret information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. The ar-rest of Fuchs led authorities to sev-eral other individuals, including Ju-lius and Ethel Rosenberg in the U.S.

• On Jan. 31, 1606, in London, Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parlia-ment building, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason. He had been found lurk-ing in a cellar of the Parliament building with 2 tons of gunpowder.

• On Feb. 1, 1884, the first portion of the Oxford English Dictionary is published. In 1857, members of London’s Philological Society de-cided to produce a dictionary that would cover all vocabulary from 1150 A.D. to the present. It took more than 40 years to complete.

• On Jan. 28, 1915, the captain of a German cruiser orders the destruction of the William P. Frye, an American merchant ship off the Brazilian coast. He had ordered the Frye to jettison its cargo as contraband, but the ship’s crew refused. It was the first American merchant vessel lost to Germany’s aggression during World War I.

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u

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SILLY PUTTYDuring World War II, Japanese invasions of rubber-producing countries in the Far East vast-ly reduced availability of rubber in the U.S. In the 1940s, the U.S. War Production Board asked General Electric for help in developing a cheap substitute for rubber so that production of things such as boots and tires could continue. G.E. hired James Wright, who created a compound after accidentally dropping some boric acid into silicone oil in 1943. • It stretched further than rubber; rebounded

higher than rubber; was impervious to mold and decay; and could withstand all tempera-tures. The only problem was that scientists could find no real use for the stuff. In 1945, G.E. mailed samples to scientists all over the world, asking them to find a purpose for it.

• Paul Hodgson happened to attend a party where some of the stuff was brought out. It entertained the party-goers for hours. He teamed up with the owner of a toy store and Silly Putty outsold everything else in the com-pany catalog with the exception of a 50 cent box of crayons. Still, the store owner wasn’t interested in pursuing Silly Putty, so Hodgson split off on his own. In 1950 Hodgson bought a huge glob of the stuff for $147 and hired a Yale student to separate it into one ounce balls and put it into plastic eggs, perhaps because Easter was coming up. Several months later when Silly Putty was mentioned in the “Talk of the Town” section of the New Yorker maga-zine, Hodgson’s phone rang off the hook and he collected a quarter million orders in only four days. A few years later, he was racking up sales of over six million dollars annually. Hodgson was soon a millionaire.

by Samantha Weaver


• In 2010, a new species of slug was discovered in the mountains of Borneo. It is distinguished from other species of slug by its novel method of mat-ing: It shoots its mate with a so-called love dart made of calcium carbonate and containing hormones. The researchers nicknamed the gastropods “ninja slugs.”• If you’re traveling to Kan-sas anytime soon, be sure to remember that it is against the law in that state to catch fish with your bare hands. • During the original run of the classic 1960s TV series “Gilligan’s Island,” some viewers took the show rather too seriously. Sev-eral telegrams were sent to the U.S. Coast Guard ask-ing why the poor people hadn’t yet been rescued. * * *Thought for the Day: “I want a man who is kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a mil-lionaire?” -- Zsa Zsa Gabor

• It was Martin Luther King Jr. who made the following sage observation: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstand-ing from people of ill will.”• Are you a dromomaniac? If you travel compulsively, you are. • The famed statue Venus de Milo was lost to history for nearly 2,000 years. No one knew of its existence until 1820, when a Greek peasant tilling a field on the island of Milos hit stone -- several carved blocks of stone, to be specific. Within a few weeks, archaeologists arrived and took the statue of Aphrodite to France. King Louis XVIII dubbed it the Venus de Milo and donated it to the Lou-vre, where it remains today. • You might be surprised to learn that Humphrey Bo-gart wasn’t the producers’ first choice for the role of Rick in “Casablanca.” An ac-tor named George Raft was originally offered the part, but he turned it down be-cause he didn’t like the script.

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SILLY PUTTY (continued):• Today, Binney & Smith, owners of Crayola,

own the rights to Silly Putty. It comes in 16 dif-ferent colors including glow-in-the-dark, glitter, metallic gold, and hot flourescent colors. There’s also Silly Putty that changes color depending on the temperature of your hands. You can even buy a five-pound block of Silly Putty for only $79.

• In 2001 Silly Putty was inducted into the Na-tional Toy Hall of Fame located in Salem, Oregon. In addition, one of the original Silly Putty eggs is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

• Binny & Smith sponsored a contest asking peo-ple to submit their silliest uses for Silly Putty. The winner suggested using it to replace your stockbroker by throwing a ball of it at the stock page in the newspaper and investing in what-ever stock it lifts from the newsprint. Second place went to the woman who said it could be used to form a fake swollen gland to get out of an unwanted date.

• What exactly is Silly Putty made of? Mostly it’s dimethyl siloxane, hydroxy-terminated plymers with boric acid. Add in a little thixotrol ST, a dash of polydimethylsiloxane, a pinch of decamethyl cyclopentasiloxane, and top it off with titanium dioxide, and that’s about all there is to it.

• You can make your own sort-of silly putty at home by mixing two tablespoons of Borax and adding it to one cup of water, mixing well. Seperately add half a cup of water to half a cup of white glue. Next add half a cup of your Bo-rax solution to the glue and water mixture. Mix well and store in a plastic bag.

• It’s flammable and burns slowly with a bright white light. Microwaved for a few minutes, it be-comes excessively sticky but reverts to its original form when it cools. It smells horrible when baked.

Thanks for Reading Tidbits!

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1Q2009 :: Wk 13 :: Mar 22 - Mar 28 :: Pg. 6

DEERE. JOHN DEERE. (continued): • It was while living in Illinois that John no-

ticed the problems that farmers faced when attempting to till soil. Because the area had formerly been woodland, the soil was rich with hummus, which clumped and clung to the blades of the plows farmers were accus-tomed to using. While repairing a broken cir-cular saw, Deere stumbled upon an idea. He employed his smith skills to fashion the steel blade into the shape of a plow. He affixed two wooden spokes, then hitched the device to a horse. It plowed the heavy Illinois soil like a charm. In fact, a farmer who happened to be observing the test run immediately put in an order for his own John Deere plow.

• In short order, Deere gave up his blacksmith shop and focused on making plows. The company grew steadily and added many em-ployees. In the late 1840s, John relocated the entire operation to Moline, Illinois. Ashamed of his own lack of education, John sent his children to the state’s finest schools. One of his proudest days occurred when son Charles earned the equivalent of an MBA from Bell’s Commercial College in Chicago.

• With his son Charles managing the company, John found time to pursue philanthropic in-terests. He co-founded both the First Nation-al Bank and the First Congregational Church. He was elected the mayor of Moline in 1873, where one of his first actions – the replace-ment of the city’s open drains with a sewer pipe system – saved countless lives by reduc-ing the spread of disease.

• The original John Deere logo, registered in 1876, depicted a deer that was native to Afri-ca. Thirty-six years later, in 1912, it was re-placed with the image of a North American white-tailed deer. In the decades that fol-lowed, the now-familiar “outline” logo took over as the symbol of the John Deere brand.

III?

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Tidbits January 24 Issue