Month: September 2016

It was hard to get a word out of “Silent Cal,” the president Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter once said was so sour-looking he appeared to have been weaned on a pickle. But while Coolidge was reserved in public, he apparently had plenty of fun in private.

When an admirer—either a friend or an anonymous donor—sent an electric horse to the White House in 1925, Coolidge reportedly laughed so hard at the sight of William Starling, the head of the Secret Service, atop the contraption that he had to sit down. Then, he decided to try it himself—and a weird-but-true White House legend was born.

Coolidge was no stranger to equines, of course. He was an outdoorsman and a horse lover. Though he fell from a horse as a child, breaking his arm, he loved horseback riding for exercise. But his increasing political duties—he was a mayor, senator, and then governor of Massachusetts before being elected as vice president and eventually becoming president in 1923—didn’t leave much leisure time.

By the time he made it to the White House, Coolidge had apparently put on eight pounds. But how was an executive to exercise in the days before Shake Weights and ellipticals?

Enter the electric horse. It was the brainchild of John Harvey Kellogg, the utopian doctor best known for inventing corn flakes in an attempt to cure people of their masturbation habits. Kellogg was a proponent of better living through electricity, crafting scores of inventions that promised to vibrate, shake, and shock patients back to health. He claimed that one of his apparatuses for “automatic exercise,” which he called “the riding horse,” perfectly imitated the single-foot and English trot gaits of a real horse.

Coolidge apparently thought so, too. Though The New York Times mocked the device as “a hobby horse” in 1923, it cited friends who thought that the president’s strength and stamina as a leader were due “in large part to the attention he has given his electric horse.” From a canter to a gallop, Coolidge rode it three times a day.

The president’s personal physician told The Chicago Tribune that while “the horse is not much for looks,” it had some medical benefits. “It is great for the liver and fine for reducing flesh,” he declared. The story was apparently kept secret until Coolidge had to send for an electrician to repair his steed after it went berserk and bucked him from the saddle.

Today, the president’s trusty horse stands in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, a testament to the quiet president’s thrice-daily dose of whimsy—and fitness.

Even die-hard bacon lovers hate scrubbing grease off their stoves. Enter the Frywall, a silicone splatter guard sold by quirky e-commerce website The Grommet. As reported by Gizmodo, the Frywall is shaped like an angled cone (kind of like the one the vet puts on your dog after he or she gets stitches), and is designed to sit inside a frying pan to shield your kitchen from fat and oil splash. When you’re done using it, simply rinse the shield with soap and water, or toss it in the dishwasher.

Pricing for the Frywall begins at $22, and it comes in two models—10-inch and 12-inch. Visit The Grommet for more information, or watch the video below for a demonstration.

[h/t Gizmodo]

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In the years immediately after his death in 1616, Shakespeare was merely remembered as a good, though not necessarily brilliant, writer. But as literary styles and tastes changed, Shakespeare’s work began to be appreciated more and more, so that by the mid-19th century, appetite and acclaim for his writing had reached near fanatical levels. By the late Victorian era, Shakespeare was being hailed as a literary genius, the author of perhaps the greatest works of English literature that had ever been written—but the sheer quality of his work soon began to stir up discontent.

We know relatively little of Shakespeare’s life, and only the barest bones about his background and upbringing. But what little we do know paints a fairly humble picture—and it’s precisely that that some Victorian scholars and writers just couldn’t square up with the quality of Shakespeare’s writing.

In 1848, the American author Joseph C. Hart wrote an essay in his travel memoir The Romance of Yachting in which he expressly questioned, for the first time, the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work. Hart was traveling in Europe when he began to ponder an apparent error in the plot to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: Act 3, scene 3 of the play opens in “Bohemia, a desert country near the sea,” despite the fact that Bohemia—a region of central Europe roughly equivalent to the modern-day Czech Republic—is entirely landlocked. To Hart, such a basic geographical error didn’t sit well with the impossibly high standard of Shakespeare’s writing, which led him to suggest that Shakespeare—dismissed as a “mere factotum of a theatre,” “a copyist for the prompter,” and a “vulgar and unlettered man”—was not the author of the works attributed to him. Shakespeare’s contribution, he suggested, was probably limited to providing the plays’ dirty jokes.

Following the publication of Hart’s memoir, other 19th century writers soon started to break cover and began to question the authorship of Shakespeare’s work themselves. In 1857, writer Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a work—more than a decade in the making—now credited with providing the earliest fully-formed theory that Shakespeare was not the author of his work. Bacon theorized that the works were the result of a collaboration between a number of high-society Elizabethan writers and figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and, most notably of all, Sir Francis Bacon. They, she believed, had left encrypted messages and descriptions of an entirely new philosophical system hidden deep in the wording of Shakespeare’s plays, which they could not be seen to advocate publicly.

Although they didn’t agree with her theory, Bacon’s friendships with several high-profile literary figures of the day (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson) helped her notion of a secret cabal of writers gain ground in 19th-century literary circles. By the turn of the century, dozens of books and essays had been written on the subject, societies had been established to promote the so-called “anti-Stratfordian” theory, and several high profile figures—such as Walt Whitman and, later, Sigmund Freud—had signed on to the idea.

For every advocate of the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint, however, there was a pro-Stratfordian only too happy to point out the holes in their arguments. (Even Joseph Hart’s original quibble over Bohemia being landlocked was easily explained by the fact that Shakespeare had based The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, an earlier work by Robert Greene that made the same mistake.) Still, the authorship question rumbled on—until finally, in the late 1880s, it attracted the attention of Dr. Orville Ward Owen.

THE DOUBTING DOCTOR

Owen was a hugely successful physician based in Detroit who had a habit of reading and memorizing passages of Shakespeare as a way of clearing his mind between patients. Eventually he became so well-versed in Shakespeare’s works that he found he had committed the entire 1623 First Folio to memory, and as a party trick could pinpoint the exact play, act, and scene from which any line given to him was taken. The only lines he struggled with were those that cropped up with almost identical wording in more than one play, and it was precisely these curious repetitions—combined with all the other anachronisms, geographical missteps, and erroneous details that had fueled the authorship debate so far—that led Owen to believe certain passages in Shakespeare’s works must have been implanted deliberately. He concluded that they were the coded passages that would reveal Bacon’s secret message, and he dedicated his life to deciphering them.

Having followed a series of clues littered throughout Shakespeare’s work (“Beginning in the middle, starting thence away …”), Owen worked out a word-based cipher that he then applied to other works outside of the Shakespeare canon—including Arcadia, a 16th-century prose piece by the English poet Sir Philip Sidney (which, he later claimed, Sir Francis Bacon must also have written). All that work left him with the following decrypted passage:

The easiest way to carry on the work is to
Take your knife and cut all our books asunder,
And set the leaves on a great firm wheel
Which rolls and rolls…

It may be a decoded message explaining the best method to decode the code in which it was originally encoded, but Owen nevertheless took his cue from this passage and began construction of an extraordinary contraption to help expedite his research: the cipher wheel.

Around two huge cylindrical spools, each 3-foot by 4-foot, Owen wound an enormous length of canvas fabric, onto which he pasted pages of Shakespeare’s Complete Works plus extracts from his contemporaries’ works. By aligning the pages in a specific order and then turning the spool, vast swathes of text could be analyzed at once. Owen would sit between the two spools, calling out passages of interest to an assistant, who would then collate the extracts for later analysis. Eventually, he managed to decipher a now well-known conspiracy theory: Bacon was not only the true William Shakespeare, but the forgotten son of Queen Elizabeth I and her secret lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Shunned from his rightful claim to the throne, Bacon had laid out his scandalous life story into numerous encoded works of literature, the majority of which he attributed to other writers of the day. Owen published his extraordinary theory—and his equally extraordinary methodology—in a vast five-volume treatise, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (1893-1895). But he did not stop there.

Continuing his analysis of the jumbled text on his cipher wheel, Owen concluded that Bacon had also written two more long-lost plays—namely The Tragical Historie of Our Late Brother Robert, Earl of Essex and The Historical Tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots—which Owen claimed to have successfully extracted. But the real prize would be finding the manuscripts and personal belongings that would prove Bacon’s birthright and authorship, which Owen believed were somewhere close to the river Wye on the border of England and Wales. His quest for the truth was about to take him across the Atlantic.

A FRUITLESS SEARCH

Owen arrived in Britain in 1909. A preliminary search in caves behind Chepstow Castle on the banks of the Wye in southwest Wales was turned up nothing, but he returned a year later to carry out an even more extensive examination. Based on further decoded lines from Bacon’s text (“boxes like eels in the mud,” “make a triangle of 123 feet due north and 33 paces,” “I filled up the shallow water …”), Owen financed an excavation of the riverbed of the Wye itself, believing there was a secret vault containing 66 lead-lined boxes somewhere beneath the mud along its course. Two dozen men were employed, several hundredweight of material was excavated, and Owen’s research caused a media frenzy.

A previously unknown Roman bridge was discovered, as was a medieval cistern. But as for proof of Bacon’s royal bloodline and his authorship of Shakespeare’s work? After great expense, Owen unearthed nothing.

In the years that followed, he continued his research with the cipher wheel, but his confidence began to falter and his health began to fail rapidly. Although he continued to provide new textual evidence for other Baconian advocates—who carried out their own explorations around Chepstow in the late 1910s and early 1920s—none found anything ironclad to support their theory. Finally, Owen was quoted as saying:

“When I discovered the word cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit. I could have been the greatest surgeon there … but I thought that the world would be eager to hear what I had found. Instead, what did they give me? I have had my name dragged in the mud, had more calumny heaped upon my character than many people can imagine, lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden, almost penniless, invalid.”

He died shortly after, on March 31, 1924, at the age 70. The Baconian and anti-Stratfordian viewpoint has continued to be argued over ever since—although not quite as inventively as with Owen’s cipher wheel.

Vegan restaurants may soon be serving up “macaroni and Gary” and “grilled Gary sandwiches.” That’s because, as Mashable reports, a group of vegans has started an online petition to rename vegan cheese “Gary.”

It all started when one cheese-loving Facebook user posted a message against what she saw as the mislabeling of vegan cheese. “If you’re going to be a vegan don’t call your vegan cheese BECAUSE IT’S NOT CHEESE!” she wrote. “[Some} ‘Vegan Cheese’ [is] made with COCONUTS. CHEESE IS NOT MADE WITH COCONUTS. Call it Gary or something don’t call it Cheese because IT’S NOT CHEESE!”

Instead of being offended by the absurd rant, vegans across the internet have embraced it, launching a tongue-in-cheek Facebook group called “It’s not Vegan Cheese, it’s Gary,” and starting an official Change.org petition to rename all commercially sold vegan cheese “Gary.”

Currently, the group has more than 5000 members and the petition has received nearly 140 signatures out of a total goal of 200. For the most part, vegans seem to be gently poking fun at the original poster, embracing the idea of “Gary” as a fun and silly new name for non-dairy cheeses. The poster, meanwhile, has since apologized for the tone of her original rant (“I just really like cheese,” she explained), and expressed appreciation for all the Gary memes she inadvertently inspired.

Check out the Facebook rant that started it all, and some of our favorite “Gary” memes below.

im yelling pic.twitter.com/akDW8QIFnM

— Kate Louise Powell Ⓥ (@KatePow3ll) September 29, 2016

[h/t Mashable]

Even if you religiously pay your bill on time, there are plenty of other credit card gaffes you might be making without realizing it. And any card mistake, no matter how small, can have steep consequences, thanks to high interest rates that can pile on debt in the blink of an eye. Make sure you avoid these common pitfalls and keep your finances under control.

1. YOU USE A CARD FOR BIG MEDICAL BILLS—OR TO GET OUT OF JAIL.

Most expenses can go on a credit card, says Liz Weston, author of Your Credit Score and a NerdWallet columnist. But there are a few no-gos, including any charge that may be coded as a cash advance, such as a money order or a bail bond, that will trigger a higher interest rate. You shouldn’t swipe if the vendor is going to pass along the several-percentage-point card fee, either—scenarios that include federal and state taxes and school tuition. Weston also cautions against charging that scary-huge medical bill, as doing so will disqualify you from income-based discounts or interest-free payment plans offered by many medical providers.

2. YOU OPEN STORE CREDIT CARDS FOR THE DISCOUNTS.

These cards often have sky-high interest rates (a J. Crew card, for example, carries a whopping 25.24 percent APR—12 percentage points higher than the best rate available for a Citi Simplicity Mastercard). Pay only the minimum each month, and you’ll soon find yourself staring at a balance that far exceeds the cost of that perfectly chic pencil skirt.

There are other problems: A store card doesn’t feel as “real” as a Capital One or Citi card, so some shoppers forget or ignore their payments altogether. And while these cards often offer rewards, they come as incentives to shop more—which can trigger overspending.

3. YOU DON’T HAVE ONE.

Lots of Millennials are wary of credit cards in the first place—and for good reason, says Matt Schulz, a senior analyst at CreditCards.com, a site dedicated to helping consumers make smart credit decisions. “If you have a credit card and handle it poorly, it can cause major problems,” he says. But that doesn’t mean you should just stick with your debit card. A credit card is the easiest way to build your credit history, according to Schulz. Lacking such a history will contribute to a low score, because lenders like to see that you have an established track record of paying loans back. Bad credit translates to higher interest rates, “which can cost you thousands of dollars over the years,” Schulz says.

4. YOU’VE NEVER SET UP AUTO-PAY.

Forget a payment, even for a day or two, and you’ll be hit with a $25 to $35 fee and an interest payment on the balance. And it quickly gets worse: If your payment becomes 30 days late, card issuers will report you to the credit bureaus. “A skipped payment can knock 100 points or more off good credit scores,” says Weston. There’s no excuse for not setting up an automatic payment from your checking account, preferably for the full balance every month.

5. YOU “SET AND FORGET” YOUR ACCOUNT ENTIRELY.

While auto-pay can be a godsend, it can also tempt you to not check your statement carefully. Tracking your purchases carefully is not only a fundamental part of budgeting, it’s also critical in this era of identity theft. Federal law requires you to dispute a fraudulent charge within 60 days of receiving the first statement that contained the mistake. If you ignore your account for months on end, you could be missing problems and losing money.

6. YOU’RE A LITTLE FUZZY ON YOUR CARD’S TERMS AND REWARDS.

We know, we know—reading the fine print sucks. But if, for example, you open a card with a zero-percent A.P.R and then don’t transfer a balance over for a few months, you likely just lost out. “There’s often a deadline, generally 60 or 90 days, under which you have to make the transfer,” says Schulz. You also have to commit to doing the math when it comes to rewards to make sure the card’s annual fee is justified. If you pay $450 for a Chase Sapphire Reserve card but don’t travel much, you’re not recouping the cost.

7. YOU CARRY A BALANCE.

Weston and Schulz agree: Your number-one job as a credit card user is to pay the balance in full every month. Contrary to popular belief, carrying a balance does not improve your credit score. In fact, the three major credit reporting agencies like to see a utilization rate of less than 30 percent of your available credit. To boost your score into “excellent” territory, you need to push that utilization percentage down into the single digits or teens, max, says Schulz.

8. YOU BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND.

What happens if you do screw up? As much as you might want to pretend the card doesn’t exist, you have to ask for help—immediately, says Weston. “The worst thing the credit card company could say is no, and there may be options you don’t know about, such as a payment plan if you can’t handle your debt or a fee that can be offset,” she says.

ONCE BITTEN

Edward Grant of Middletown, New Jersey, caught a fish Sunday in Raritan Bay. It’s a fluke, in more ways than one. It appears that something, possibly a bluefish or shark, had taken a bite out of the fish. The injury was completely healed.

“We were very shocked,” Grant said, adding, “We used a few other words, too.”

Grant tossed the 18.5 inch fluke back into the bay, deciding it had been through enough already and deserved to live.

“I felt bad for it,” he said.

Was this fish lucky for both surviving such a bite and being tossed back in by a fisherman? Or is it unlucky for being bitten and being hooked?  

MAN ARRESTED AFTER CLAIMING BRIEFCASE FULL OF COCAINE

An abandoned briefcase was turned over to a police officer in Seattle on Sunday. The person turning it in thought it was a simple lost-and-found case. When the police officer opened the briefcase, he found bags containing a total of 154 grams of cocaine. The briefcase also contained marijuana, a set of scales, a cell phone, some pills, and an identification card belonging to a 19-year-old man. A short time later, a 19-year-old man approached nearby police officers and asked if they’d found a briefcase. The unnamed man matched the ID found in the briefcase, and was promptly arrested for possession with intent to distribute.

MAN’S PENIS BITTEN BY SPIDER …AGAIN

A man named Jordan encountered a venomous redneck spider in a portable toilet at a construction site in Sydney, Australia, in April. The spider bit him on the penis and he was taken to a hospital for treatment. On Tuesday, the same man checked underneath the seats of a portable construction site toilet before sitting down—and was bitten by a spider again!

Jordan, who preferred not to reveal his surname, said he was bitten on “pretty much the same spot” by the spider.

“I’m the most unlucky guy in the country at the moment,” he told the BBC.

“I was sitting on the toilet doing my business and just felt the sting that I felt the first time.

“I was like ‘I can’t believe it’s happened again.’ I looked down and I’ve seen a few little legs come from around the rim.”

Jordan said his colleagues were worried about him the first time, but this time he got laughs as his co-workers took him to the hospital. The second spider has not been identified. Jordan says he will not be using worksite toilets in the future.

MAN SHOOTS OUT OWN TIRES DURING POLICE CHASE

When police in Des Moines, Iowa, attempted to pull over Taylor Parker for a traffic violation, he took off and sparked a police chase. Taylor attempted to get rid of a shotgun in the car by throwing it out the window. The gun hit the ground, which triggered it to fire off a round—into the vehicle’s tire. The 24-year-old Parker left the disabled car and fled on foot, but was soon captured by police. A “significant quantity” of meth was found in the car, and Taylor was charged with possession of both the drugs and the weapon.  

NOT ASSAULT, JUST ZOMBIES

Witnesses called the North West Motorway Police to report an assault on the M62 highway near Warrington, England, on Saturday. One of the callers said a man was “biting a lady.” Police scrambled to find the vehicle. They pulled the car over, and saw both the driver and passenger covered in blood. Fake blood. The two were actors on their way to a job as extras playing zombies. The couple were happy to pose for a picture to accompany the police report. 

There may be a new Batman in town. Bloomberg reports that a fan of the caped crusader, who presumably possesses Bruce Wayne levels of wealth, just purchased Christian Bale’s Batsuit from The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). The anonymous private collector paid a whopping $250,000 (£192,000) for the iconic costume at an auction held by a UK memorabilia company called The Prop Store.

The auction also included several other Batman props, as well as iconic memorabilia from The Goonies (1985), Star Wars: Episode IV (1977), and Jaws (1975). Batman’s souped-up motorcycle, also from The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, sold for $404,706 (£312,000), while Bane’s costume sold for a slightly less impressive $124,512 (£96,000).

Altogether, the auction included 500 pieces of movie memorabilia and attracted close to 400 bidders from 27 countries. In addition to private individuals, investment firms and archivists working for both private collectors and museums participated, purchasing everything from movie props to behind-the-scenes memorabilia like scripts and directors’ chairs.

As for the Batsuit’s new owner, Prop Store chief executive Stephen Lane says it’s unlikely the collector will actually end up using it to play superhero. “These don’t get worn by anybody,” Lane tells Bloomberg. “They really end up in glass display cases.”

[h/t Bloomberg]

Whether you’re into fantasy books or videogames, there’s a novelty chess set out there for every type of nerd. This set, currently for sale from M.S. Rau Antiques in New Orleans, is perfect for history geeks. The price tag? A whopping $1.65 million, Forbes reports.

The item, titled “Battle of Issus” after Alexander the Great’s second battle with the Persian army in 333 BCE, is a board game that doubles as a precious piece of art. Crafted in the late 20th century, each 14-karat gold piece stands in for a character or structure from the battle.

A jewel-encrusted King Darius III and Alexander the Great represent the kings on opposite sides of the board, while the Persian god of war and the Greek goddess of war and wisdom (Athena) assume the roles of their respective queens. When the base of each piece is twisted, a special mechanism is triggered, like the swinging of a sword or the rowing of a ship’s oars.

The board itself is also an example of master craftsmanship. The surface is checkered with pink rhodonite and green malachite, and the base’s perimeter depicts action scenes from the battle. It took a jeweler over 14,000 hours over the course of a decade to craft each detail by hand.

The final product contains nearly 9 pounds of 14-karat gold, 5 pounds of 24-karat gold, 11 pounds of silver, 320 grams of garnets, and accents of pearls, rose quartz, and turquoise. If you don’t have a space in your home worthy of such a game, M.S. Rau Antiques has got you covered: The purchase includes a mahogany table and two 19th-century leather upholstered chairs.

[h/t Forbes]

All images: M.S. Rau Antiques

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One of the biggest art crimes in recent memory has been solved. According to CNN, two of artist Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings stolen from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2002 have been recovered. Their estimated value? $30 million.

Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen and Seascape at Scheveningen, both completed in the 1880s, were found missing after thieves used a ladder to enter the museum through the roof. Federal investigators reported in 2005 that two Dutch men had been convicted of the crime but that authorities had been unable to locate the artwork.  

The trail was apparently cold until Italian authorities reached a key point in their investigation of alleged drug kingpin Raffaele Imperiale. The two paintings were discovered in the basement of one of Imperiale’s apartments.

Museum curators said only minor damage to the edges of the paintings was observed; they were otherwise in good condition and expected to be returned once a criminal trial has been completed in Italy. Imperiale is believed to be on the run in the United Arab Emirates.  

[h/t CNN]