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]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

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]