Data remain safe, most of the time. The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked. If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can’t get in.
Workers at the Westland-Hallmark beef factory poked very sick cows, prodding them into the abattoirs with with the prongs of forklifts. What makes a cow non-ambulatory? Mad cow disease, for one thing. The dreaded kuru relative attacks the central nervous system and leads to immobility and a terrible demise.
GOOD magazine, issue 009 (“All You Can Eat”)
An unfortunate side effect of hanging or poisoning a man is that his organs go sour before they can be transplanted. Death-row inmates have repeatedly asked to donate their organs, but their requests are always denied. The simple reason is that execution generally ruins organs before they can be harvested. By the time you cut someone down from the gallows or pronounce the injection lethal, the heart and lungs will have thumped and puffed for the last time. Soon after, the kidneys start rotting, and before long nothing is useful but the corneas. Even with beheading— still practiced in Saudi Arabia—the heart and lungs probably wouldn’t make it, says Douglas Hanto, chief transplant surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Mental Floss, February 2008
Forget Apple and Pilot Inspektor. If you really want to give your kid a hard time growing up, just pick from the following list.
1. BATMAN.
Venezuelans are among the world’s most creative namers. In fact, according to their own government, they’re too creative. In September 2007, after hearing about babies named Superman and Batman, state authorities urged parents to pick their names from an approved list of 100 common Spanish monikers. Those conventional names (such as Juanita and Miguel) quickly acquired a patrician ring, ironically giving rise to more novel names, like Hochiminh (after the Vietnamese guerilla) and Eisenhower (after the president). There are also at least 60 Venezuelans with the first name Hitler.
2. ECLIPSE GLASSES.
In June 2001, a total solar eclipse was about to cross southern Africa. To prepare, the Zimbabwean and Zambian media began a massive astronomy education campaign focused on warning people not to stare at the Sun. Apparently, the campaign worked. The locals took a real liking to the vocabulary, and today, the birth registries are filled with names like Eclipse Glasses Banda, Totality Zhou, and Annular Mchombo.
3. NAAKTGEBOREN.
When Napoleon seized the Netherlands in 1810, he demanded that all Dutchmen take last names, just as the French had done decades prior. Problem was, the Dutch had lived full and happy lives with single names, so they took absurd surnames in a show of spirited defiance. These included Naaktgeboren (born naked), Spring int Veld (jump in the field), and Piest (pisses). Sadly for their descendants, Napoleon’s last-name trend stuck, and all of these remain perfectly normal Dutch names today.
4. VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY.
a.va.jpg The people of Iceland take their names very seriously. The country permits no one—not even immigrants—to take or keep foreign surnames. So what happened when esteemed Russian maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy asked to become an Icelandic citizen? Well, the government finally decided to make an exception. Vladimir Ashkenazy is now on the short list of approved Icelandic names.
5. YAZID.
Imam Husayn ibn Ali is one of the holiest figures in the Shi’ite Muslim faith. In the 7th century CE, he lost his head on the orders of the Sunni caliph, Yazid, and the decapitation initiated the biggest schism in Islamic history. While the name Yazid remains common among Sunnis, it is disdained throughout the Shi’a world. The stigma attached to it is equivalent to naming one’s son Stalin or Hitler. Speaking of which…
6. ADOLF.
Memories of death camps and fascism have kept parents from christening their kids Adolf for quite some time. But one unlucky youngster acquired the name in 1949. He was the son of William Patrick Hitler—the dictator’s nephew, who moved to America in the 1930s to fight against his uncle. It isn’t clear why William preserved the name, but his four sons (including Alexander Adolf Hitler, now 57) made a pact to never have children in an effort to stunt der Fuehrer’s family tree at its branches.
Today Jendayi Frazer, the top US diplomat for African affairs, rendered a grim assessment of the post-election bloodbath in Kenya, saying it amounted to “ethnic cleansing,” but not “genocide.” This distinction is so fine as to be described as “Talmudic,” except that it contains no ancient Hebraic wisdom or indeed any other system of thought.
Letter to the London Review of Books
Nicholas Guyatt, in his piece on the US Christian right, mentions that at the funeral of the notorious religious huckster Jerry Falwell, one lamb from Pastor Falwell’s flock was caught with homemade bombs in his car, claiming that he’d brought them in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège. In the event, the protesters weren’t ‘liberal’: they were members of an even more extreme religious sect, the Westboro Baptist Church, which denounced Falwell as a ‘corpulent false prophet’. The WBC, whose members believe the Iraq war is God’s way of punishing America for its permissive attitudes towards homosexuality, have weathered years of denunciation by more moderate clerics, such as Falwell. Yet when I interviewed them at one of their demonstrations, WBC members said they regard the US Constitution, including its provision guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion, as one of God’s greatest blessings. It’s a melancholy fact that many US Christians appreciate their Constitution only when their own beliefs are the ones ridiculed and suppressed.
Graeme Wood
Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
The American (online)
Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System
By Roberto Saviano (translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $25
On his Vespa outside Naples, Robert Saviano once blew a tire by riding over a splintered human thighbone. The setting of Gomorrah, his gripping new account of the city’s vast criminal business empire, is so unrelentingly brutal that this grisly inconvenience takes up just a couple sentences. And by comparison with the ends of other players in Naples’s mob drama during the last decade, the lonely roadside killing of the thighbone’s owner seems hardly grisly at all. If slow deaths by shooting, stabbing, gouging, poisoning, burning, strangling, garroting, choking, kneecapping, and slicing happen with anything like the frequency suggested in Saviano’s book, then every Neapolitan gangster should carry a suicide-pill hidden in a false tooth. There are fates worse than death, and many of their colleagues seem to have met them.
The Atlantic (online)
The first rule of foreign policy, says the adage, is never to invade a country where they use q’s without u’s. Besides saving the Republic from overseas boondoggles, I like to think this chestnut exists to rescue American copy editors from endless niggling over Arabic names. If war is, as Paul Rodriguez quipped, God’s way of teaching Americans about geography, it is also a way of teaching his humble servants at the Atlantic copy desk how to cram foreign words and phrases into an alphabet that manifestly doesn’t suit them.
Since terrorism and Iraq began to dominate our coverage, The Atlantic has crammed many Arabic names and phrases into our text, and some have not gone gently. The simplest cases demand fussiness and attention: We spell Iraq’s second-largest city Basra. But why not Basrah, as writers in English called it for hundreds of years before? And why no dot under the s, as scholars seem now to prefer?
Graeme Wood