The last meal of Ötzi the Iceman, the Copper-Age mummy discovered frozen in Alpine ice along the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, was a dry-cured meat similar to speck, prosciutto, or bacon, according to Gizmodo and The Local.
Ötzi, who was probably around 45 years old when he was murdered in 3300 BCE, is housed at the European Academy of Bolzano’s EURAC-Institute for Mummies and the Iceman. Researchers have thawed his body and have been studying his stomach contents for insights into his life. The latest research from Albert Zink, who heads up the Institute for Mummies, shows that his stomach contained the remains of raw, dry-cured goat meat. The nanostructure of the meat fibers showed that the goat was not cooked or grilled at all.
“It seems probable that his last meal was very fatty, dried meat—perhaps a type of Stone Age speck or bacon,” Zink told The Local. He was pretty likely to have had a stomachache, too, since previous research findings showed that his stomach contained a bacteria that can result in ulcers or inflammation of the stomach lining in modern-day humans.
And like modern-day hikers carrying beef jerky, Ötzi probably brought his snack from elsewhere, since he wasn’t carrying a hunting bow (though he did have a quiver) that would have allowed him to take down animals for a fresh dinner.
Now we know: The allure of dry-cured meats is timeless. If you’re interested in delving into the Iceman further, EURAC has a high-definition collection of photos of his entire body (including his tattoos) at IcemanPhotoscan.eu.
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, John Clem decided to enlist in the Union Army. There was just one problem: The Ohio resident was just 9 years old. Undeterred by his youth, Clem forced his way into the conflict. By the time he was discharged near the end of the war, he had not only seen active combat but had become a national folk hero as well—and he wasn’t even 13.
Yet with folk heroes come folktales. Once a real person’s deeds achieve near-mythic status in public perception, hearsay tends to bury fact. While much of Clem’s story is 100 percent verifiable, he did make a few claims that some historians question. Here’s what we know for sure.
“I’D LIKE MIGHTY WELL TO BE A DRUMMER BOY”
The son of French-German immigrants, Clem was born in Newark, Ohio on August 13, 1851. Though his parents christened him John Joseph Klem, he later changed the spelling of his last name to “Clem” because he felt it sounded more American. (Clem would later adopt Lincoln as a replacement middle name.) Vegetable farming was the family business, and growing up, John pitched in by selling their freshly-grown produce door-to-door, with his younger siblings Lewis and Elizabeth usually tagging along. Sadly, the children lost their mother, Magdalene, when she was hit by a train when crossing railroad tracks in 1861. John’s father, Roman, quickly remarried, and although their stepmother was kind to the children, John would soon disappear.
John’s interest in military service had begun shortly after Confederate rebels fired on Fort Sumter, officially starting the U.S. Civil War. At one point, he approached the Third Ohio Regiment of Volunteers, which happened to be passing through Newark, and asked the commanding officer to take him on as their drummer boy. “He looked me over, laughed, and said he wasn’t enlisting infants,” Clem later wrote. But he wasn’t willing to let the matter drop. His sister Elizabeth later recalled that as the family sat eating dinner one night in May 1861, “Johnnie said … ‘Father, I’d like mighty well to be a drummer boy. Can’t I go into the Union army?’ ‘Tut, what nonsense boy!’ replied father, ‘You are not yet 10 years old!’”
After the Klems finished eating, John announced that he was going out for a swim. Instead, he ran away from home.
In his 1914 autobiographical essay “From Nursery to Battlefield,” Clem claimed that he took a train to Cincinnati, where he approached the Twenty-Second Michigan Regiment. Supposedly, this unit also rejected him at first, but he followed it around anyway until the men gradually accepted him as their drummer boy. Since he couldn’t legally be put on the payroll, the adults dug into their own pockets and pooled together a $13 monthly allowance. They also supplied Clem with, as he put it, “a soldier’s uniform, cut down by the regimental tailor from a man’s size.”
The historical record shows that at just 11, John Clem was made a private within that regiment on May 1, 1863. Little did he know that he was about to dive into a clash of historic and devastating proportions.
FROM CHICKAMAUGA TO ICON
After Gettysburg, the Battle of Chickamauga had the second-highest body count of any battle in the Civil War. For three days beginning on September 18, 1863, Union and Confederate forces tore into each other around the Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia. The rebels’ goal there was to thwart a southward Union march. They succeeded, but it was a costly victory: By the time the battle ended, it had claimed the lives of 34,000 men—including 18,000 Confederates.
John Clem and the Twenty-Second Michigan Infantry were a part of that repelled northern advance. “At Chickamauga, I carried a musket, the barrel of which had been sawed off to a length suitable to my size,” Clem wrote in “From Nursery to Battlefield.” On the final day of the battle, Clem said he found himself behind enemy lines, where he shot and wounded a charging Confederate Colonel. Clem describes the incident in his essay, writing that the man “rode up and yelled at me ‘Surrender, you damned little Yankee!’” Rather than drop his gun, Clem pulled the trigger, and knocked the officer from his horse.
Up north, word quickly got around that a 12-year-old had shot a rebel officer. For unionists who’d grown desperate for some sliver of good news from the Georgian front, the story was a welcome rallying cry. The press nicknamed Clem “The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga” and, as news of his heroics spread across the Union, Clem quickly became a celebrity. Soon, his wardrobe got a free makeover thanks to some Chicago women who had obtained the boy’s measurements from his comrades and sent him a new handmade uniform.
Meanwhile, the war raged on. Just a few weeks after the battle that made him famous came to an end, Clem was captured in Georgia by Confederate forces. He was brought before Joseph Wheeler, then a Major General, who allegedly said, “See to what sore straits the Yankees are driven, when they have to send their babies to fight us!”
Two months later, Clem was set free as part of a prisoner exchange. The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga spent the remainder of the war serving under General George H. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. He was wounded twice and participated in such major battles as those of Kennesaw and Atlanta before being discharged in September 1864.
With the war nearing its end, Clem returned to civilian life, graduating from high school in 1870. His next move was applying to the U.S. Military Academy. Despite his decorated battlefield experience, the young man failed his entrance exam several times over—but by then, his celebrity was so well established that President Ulysses S. Grant felt compelled to intervene and make Clem a Second Lieutenant in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment on December 18, 1871.
Clem went on to graduate from Fort Monroe’s artillery school, took part in the Spanish-American War, and rose to the rank of Colonel. In 1915, when he retired, he became a Brigadier General (a tradition for retiring Civil War veterans). It was a truly historic departure: Before Clem left the military, he was the last Civil War veteran to serve the U.S. Army.
In 1916, Congress honored Clem by promoting him to Major General. He died on May 13, 1937, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
A LEGACY ON TRIAL
Did Clem really do everything he claimed to have done? In his lifetime, his supposed exploits in the Civil War were broadly accepted as fact. But today, some are skeptical of these anecdotes.
Consider this: In his autobiographical essay “From Nursery to Battlefield,” Clem states that he accompanied the Twenty-Second Michigan to the Battle of Shiloh, where a “fragment of a shell” totaled his drum. According to Clem, his comrades then gave him the nickname “Johnny Shiloh,” which Disney went on to use as the title of a 1963 movie about his life. There’s just one problem: The Battle of Shiloh was fought on April 6 and 7, 1862—and the Twenty-Second Michigan wasn’t established until the following summer. In fact, the new regiment didn’t even start recruiting troops until July 15.
Historians have their theories about this discrepancy. Some believe Clem wasn’t at the battle at all, while others suspect that he did participate—just with some other regiment. In a conversation with author and history popularizer Henry Howe, Elizabeth seemed to support the latter position. During their exchange, she said that her brother enlisted as the drummer boy of the Twenty-Fourth Ohio Regiment—which saw action at Shiloh—before leaving them to join the Twenty-Second Michigan.
And then there’s the matter of that wounded Confederate tale. In the late 1980s, Greg Pavelka—a park ranger and amateur historian—effectively called Clem a liar. His arguments were published in the January 1989 issue of Civil War Times Illustrated. Pavelka pointed out that Clem couldn’t have fought in the Battle of Shiloh as a member of the Twenty-Second Michigan Infantry. The ranger also dismissed the story about Clem shooting a southern officer at Chickamauga. Pavelka maintained that there was simply no record of a Confederate Colonel being wounded during this particular battle. So, as far as he was concerned, Clem must have falsified his war stories.
In Newark, Ohio, the article caused quite a stir. For over 120 years, Clem’s hometown had embraced him as one of its greatest heroes, even naming the local elementary school after him. To settle the debate over Clem’s legacy once and for all, the citizens of Newark invited Pavelka to defend his allegations in a mock “trial.”
The whole community took part. Linda Leffel, a now-retired teacher who worked at John Clem Elementary, has fond memories of the event. “I was thrilled to get the students, teachers, and parents involved in activities taking place the week leading up to the trial,” Leffel told the Newark Advocate in 2015. The school also organized an essay contest for its fifth graders. The winners—James Galbraith and Hila Hayes—were recruited to portray John and Elizabeth Clem at the trial. Clem’s defense was to be presented by Dr. Dean Jauchius, an ex-Marine and Franklin University professor who had collaborated with future Ohio governor James A. Rhodes to co-author a 1959 historical novel about Clem’s life.
On October 14, 1989, the trial began at Newark’s courthouse. Around 350 people showed up to witness the spectacle firsthand, including a number of curious bystanders in full Civil War regalia; a jury (made up of local politicians and public figures) was also in attendance. By far, the most esteemed visitor was General Dwight E. Beach, Clem’s great-grandson.
Once things kicked off, the mock “attorneys” were given 20 minutes each to state their cases. Pavelka reiterated the points he’d made in Civil War Times Illustrated; Jauchius countered by reminding the jury that Clem was only nine years old when his involvement with the Union army began. Clem’s age meant that his enlistment technically wasn’t legal. Hence, the professor argued, the regiment(s) he was involved with probably did not list him in their official rosters, lest they incriminate themselves by doing so. That, in turn, might explain why there’s no record of Clem at Shiloh.
As for the Chickamauga incident, Jauchius maintained that Clem really did shoot a Colonel who went on to become an attorney in Texas. He added that the two met face-to-face many years later, at which point the former Confederate told Clem, “So you’re the little [expletive] who shot me.”
Swayed by Jauchius’s evidence, the jury unanimously found Clem innocent of misrepresenting his war record in any way. “He’s become a legend,” Pavelka said, “and you can’t fight a legend.”
Since then, the city’s love affair with Clem has only grown. Ten years after the trial, sculptor Mike Major unveiled a bronze statue on Main Street. Dedicated to local veterans, it depicts a youthful John Clem tapping away on his war drum. In 2007, the Cincinnati-based film company Historical Productions, Inc. released Johnny, a biopic about the patriot. Naturally, its world premiere was held in Newark.
Traveling in and out of airports in Australia could get a little easier by the end of the decade, thanks to new developments in biometric technology. As The Telegraph reports, Australia plans to replace physical passports with face recognition and fingerprint scanning by 2020.
The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection recently announced the new project, which would also make in-person immigration officers obsolete. Instead of having their passports scanned by an employee at an immigration desk, travelers would pass through electronic stations that would use face and fingerprint readings to verify their identities. By 2020, the Australian government expects to process 90 percent of travelers using this kind of biometric technology.
Nations around the world are starting to give their passports a high-tech upgrade. A long list of countries, including Australia, currently use biometric passports with embedded computer chips that contain facial, fingerprint, iris, or other identifying information. Now Australia is looking to progress things even further by doing away with paper passports altogether. The details on how exactly the system will function are still hazy, but will be made clear soon enough: Officials plan to test a pilot version at Canberra Airport this July before coming to the Sydney and Melbourne airports in November. The government hopes to have the technology in place in airports around the country by March 2019.
McDonald’s famous Big Mac sandwich has a brand-new look—and to commemorate the occasion, USA Today reports that the burger giant is giving away 10,000 bottles of its “Special Sauce” this Thursday, at select locations.
McDonald’s recently debuted the Mac Jr. and the Grand Mac, two limited-edition sandwiches that are essentially larger- and smaller-sized versions of their namesake. The Mac Jr. has a single patty with cheese (no middle bun layer) and Special Sauce, and the Grand Mac has thicker patties and extra cheese.
“We listened to our customers, who told us they wanted different ways to enjoy the one-of-a-kind Big Mac taste,” McDonald’s chef Mike Haracz explained in a press release.
The Special Sauce giveaway locations won’t be officially announced until Wednesday, January 25, but WTOP News reports that bottles will be handed out to customers on a first-come-first-served basis, if they say the phrase, “There’s a Big Mac for that.”
Contrary to its name, McDonald’s Special Sauce really isn’t that special. In 2012, McDonald’s executive chef Dan Coudreaut revealed that the tangy Big Mac condiment is simply a variation of Thousand Island dressing, and demonstrated how to make it at home in a YouTube video tutorial. Still, this public knowledge hasn’t prevented fast food lovers from continuing to enjoy the sauce in-store—or for that matter, from spending $96,000 on a vintage bottle of the condiment.
It may not be the cutest, cuddliest, or the most exotic animal to have in your home, but there’s something about the goldfish that appeals to pet owners around the world. These descendants of the Prussian carp were first domesticated in China 2000 years ago. Mutations produced fish with brilliantly colored scales, and after years of breeding, the pet store staple we know today was born. Here are some facts about the iconic pet worth knowing.
Goldfish come in many shades, but it’s the orange variety that’s most closely associated with the species. This may not have been the case if it wasn’t for a rule enforced during the Song Dynasty. By 1162 CE, goldfish ponds were en vogue, and the empress at the time had her own built and filled with the colorful creatures. She also forbade all non-royals from keeping fish that were yellow, the color of the royal family.
2. THE GOVERNMENT HELPED MAKE THEM POPULAR IN AMERICA.
Goldfish became the go-to fish for American pet owners in the late 19th century, and that’s partly thanks to Washington. According to The Atlantic, the U.S. Commission on Fisheries received an import of Japanese goldfish in 1878 and decided to give them away as a publicity stunt. D.C. residents could submit requests for glass bowls of goldfish, and at the program’s peak, 20,000 pets were handed out a year. The campaign lasted through the 19th century, and at one point, a third of all households in the city owned a government-provided goldfish.
3. THEY’VE OCCUPIED THE WHITE HOUSE.
One notable D.C. resident to hop aboard the goldfish craze of the late 1800s was President Grover Cleveland. Among the hundreds of fish he had imported to Washington were Japanese goldfish. And he’s not the only president to keep a pet goldfish. After Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, a 10-year-old from New York sent him a goldfish named Ronald Reagan the Second with the note, “I hope you get better and to help you get better, here is a companion … Just feed him daily and he’ll be fine.” (White House staffers put the goldfish in a former jelly bean bowl.) President Nixon’s dog Vicky became famous for chasing the goldfish in a White House pond.
It may be the most recognizable one, but the common goldfish isn’t the only member of the species worth noting. Goldfish come in dozens of breeds that vary in color, shape, and size. Some varieties are known for the lumpy growths on their heads, while others are prized for their mottled scales. A few spectacular varieties include lionheads, pompoms, veiltails, bubble-eyes, and shubunkins.
5. YOU CAN TEACH THEM TRICKS.
Having trouble teaching your dog to fetch? Maybe you’ll have better luck with a goldfish. The species can be trained to perform tasks like recognizing colors, retrieving items, and swimming through mazes. The R2 Fish School offers a whole training kit, complete with a miniature sports field designed to transform your fish into a star athlete. One of their graduates currently holds the world record for knowing the most tricks of any fish.
6. THEY HAVE AN EAR FOR MUSIC.
Partly because they’re easily trained, goldfish make for popular test study subjects. In one such study conducted by Keio University, goldfish were taught to distinguish between the music of two classical composers. One group was trained to nibble on a ball of food when they heard pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. A second group was taught to do the same but with Igor Stravinsky. When scientists swapped the composers the fish no longer showed interest in eating, suggesting they could tell the difference between the two styles.
7. GIANT GOLDFISH ARE A HUGE PROBLEM.
Murdoch University
Your goldfish may look cute and tiny in the tank, but in the wild, they can grow to monstrous proportions. Specimens living in Australia’s Vasse River have the fastest growth rate of any goldfish species, reaching up to four pounds. Their growth spurts might be impressive if they weren’t so disastrous for the environment: Goldfish are an invasive species and they’re sometimes responsible for harming local animal populations and spreading disease. So if you have a sick fish at home, make sure it’s really dead before you flush it. Or better yet, bury it in your garden (it’s more dignified anyway).
8. THE OLDEST GOLDFISH LIVED TO BE 43.
Buying a goldfish isn’t supposed to be a lifelong commitment. You may hope for it to last a few years at the most, but with proper care and good genes, a goldfish can live to be much older. The world’s oldest goldfish, a carnival prize named Tish, died in 1999 at the age of 43. According to his owner, the secret to his longevity was occasional sunlight and being fed in moderation.
9. FISHBOWLS ARE BANNED IN PARTS OF ITALY.
iStock
It’s hard to think of goldfish without picturing the classic, glass fishbowl, but animal welfare groups say we should rethink the vessel as a pet habitat. According to the Humane Society, first-time fish owners should buy a tank of 20 gallons or more to give their aquatic companion suitable swimming space. In 2004, the northern Italian city of Monza banned pet owners from keeping fish in round bowls and Rome passed a similar law a year later.
In 2004, a NYU student spent 8 months living in the college library due to being unable to afford tuition and room & board despite a $15000/yr scholarship and working 30 hours a week. Upon learning about this, the university gave him free accommodation through the summer. 00
It’s hard to come up with a really good password for every single website you use, but some commonly used passwords are basically just invitations for nefarious actors to waltz in and steal your information. And yet, as Time reports, people still use “password” to protect access to their personal information. SplashData, a password manager, puts together a list of the worst passwords each year from lists of passwords that have been leaked by hackers. Unsurprisingly, people who use super obvious passwords tend to have their accounts compromised.
So just what are the passwords you should feel ashamed of using in the modern age? Once again, “123456” appears in the top spot on the list, followed by that old standby, “password.” Get a little creative, people! No, replacing the “o” in “password” with a “0” doesn’t make it any safer. Just don’t use any password that even vaguely includes the word “password,” please. Surprisingly, a lot of people use sports like “football” (No. 5 on the list) as passwords, too. Just go ahead and avoid any singular nouns, please.
According to Politifact, the fact-checking website, Google doesn’t even allow you to use “password” as the key to your Gmail account. Those annoying password requirements that dictate that you use a certain number of letters, numbers, and symbols really are trying to protect you (and by extension, their own reputation) from having your account compromised.
The smartest way to protect your information is to use a password manager. Like, for instance, SplashData. There are a number of free password generators out there, though, including LastPass, Dashlane, and StickyPassword. Many of these services also have premium subscriptions that give you more advanced features. These apps don’t just keep all your passwords in one place—they create new, stronger passwords to replace those terrible old ones you always forget anyway.
Regardless of how you decide to deal with your passwords, please enable two-factor authentication.
To the delight of kids (and adults who have a major sweet tooth), Fruit Roll-Ups have been around since the early 1980s. Part of General Mills’ Betty Crocker brand, Fruit Roll-Ups are one of the brand’s several fruit snack products, but, as you may have suspected, they don’t count toward your four to five servings of fruit per day. Read on for nine fun, fruity facts about Fruit Roll-Ups.
1. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FOR FRUIT ROLL-UPS STARTED IN 1975.
In 1975, General Mills began researching ways to make a fun, sweet fruit treat. The research and development team based the new product on fruit leather, and when Fruit Roll-Ups hit grocery store shelves in 1983, customers could choose between strawberry, apple, cherry, and apricot varieties.
2. A PROLIFIC GENERAL MILLS INVENTOR CREATED FRUIT ROLL-UPS’ NONSTICK BACKING.
The main fruit component for Fruit Roll-Ups might get the most notice, but another company inventor contributed the essential non-edible packaging of the snack. Bob Zoss, an inventor at General Mills, created Fruit Roll-Ups’ nonstick backing, which allows kids to easily pull apart the flat sheet of fruit snack from its cellophane backing. During his nearly 40 years at General Mills, Zoss filed five patents, set 58 invention records, and worked on everything from sodium reduction research to quality control in food packaging.
3. PEOPLE SOMETIMES CONFUSE FRUIT ROLL-UPS WITH FRUIT BY THE FOOT.
Because Fruit Roll-Ups are inherently similar to Fruit by the Foot, another Betty Crocker fruit snack, confusion between the two has abounded. Both snacks are sugary, come in bright colors, appeal to kids, and come rolled. Although people debate in online forums and comment sections about the merits of Fruit Roll-Ups versus Fruit by the Foot, many commenters state that they mistakenly always thought the two snacks were the same.
4. THEIR TEMPORARY TONGUE TATTOOS WERE A BIT HIT WITH KIDS.
Kids’ food have a long history of including toys or games to pique interest, and Fruit Roll-Ups are no different. Besides offering a variety of flavors and pre-cut shapes to punch out of the roll, in the early 2000s, some Fruit Roll-Ups added edible dye that could be pressed onto the tongue, giving kids cool temporary tongue tattoos. The marketing trick worked. As one 6th grader in Oregon said, “The greatest snack ever invented is Fruit Roll-Ups because there are tongue tattoos that are out of this world.”
5. A LAWSUIT POINTED OUT THAT STRAWBERRY FRUIT ROLL-UPS DON’T ACTUALLY CONTAIN STRAWBERRIES.
A consumer watchdog nonprofit, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, recently sued General Mills, claiming that Fruit Roll-Ups’ packaging intentionally misled customers into believing that the snack was healthy and made of fruit. In particular, the strawberry flavor of Fruit Roll-Ups contains no actual strawberries—it’s flavored with pear juice concentrate instead—but the box showed an image of a strawberry. In 2012, General Mills agreed to remove images of fruit from Fruit Roll-Ups boxes that didn’t contain the actual fruit.
6. ALTHOUGH KIDS MAY LOVE THEM, DENTISTS DON’T.
Dentists specifically call out Fruit Roll-Ups as being particularly bad for teeth. Because many people think dried fruits and various fruit-flavored snacks are healthier than candy, they don’t realize just how much sugar the fruit products contain. Besides the possibility of eroding enamel from being stuck on the teeth for too long, the chewiness and stickiness of Fruit Roll-Ups can also potentially pull out fillings.
7. YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN VERSION OF FRUIT ROLL-UPS.
If you run out of Fruit Roll-Ups or love them so much that you want to try your hand at making your own homemade version, you’re in luck. Chop up your favorite fruit (it can be fresh, frozen, or out of a can), add a sweetener such as sugar or honey, and puree it in a food processor. Spread the puree on a baking sheet and dry the fruit mixture by cooking it in your oven for 6 to 8 hours at 150°F. Slice into strips or blocks with a pizza cutter, and if you wrap it in plastic or parchment paper, you’ll have your own homemade fruit roll-ups.
8. FRUIT ROLL-UPS GOT A SHOUT-OUT ON FRIENDS.
On a 2000 episode of Friends, Chandler tried to avoid a relationship conversation with Monica by asking for a Fruit Roll-Up. Guess even manchildren need afternoon snacks.
9. JEREMY LIN HAS A BASKETBALL JERSEY MADE OF FRUIT ROLL-UPS.
thanks fruit snacks for the best gift ever: a life-size jersey made of fruit roll up. I would eat it if it wasnt framed pic.twitter.com/UIJH6cTs
In 2012, General Mills gave Jeremy Lin, a former member of the New York Knicks, a special jersey made entirely of Fruit Roll-Ups. Full “Linsanity” had broken out after Lin, a point guard, led the Knicks to a number of wins. When the newly crowned superstar tweeted about loving fruit snacks, Fruit Roll-Ups responded in kind by making the colorful jersey as well as sending along a gift basket of fruit snacks.
