The Loyalty Of Dogs

If dogs don’t go to Heaven, then when I die I want to be where they are.

–Will Rogers

• Baekgu, a 4-year-old male Korean Jindo, lived alone with owner. After the owner died in June 2000, accompanied his dead owner for three days until other people came to find the body. Followed the owner’s body to his funeral, came back home, not eating anything for four days, until The Korean Jindo Dog Research Institute (진돗개 시험연구소) brought him under its care. The dog would not interact with anyone except for his feeder as of 2005.
• Captain, a German Shepard, ran away from his home after the death of his owner Miguel Guzman in 2006. About a week later, Guzman’s family found Captain standing guard at Guzman’s grave after finding the cemetery on his own. When brought home, Captain again ran away back to the grave of his former owner. As of 2012, he continues to stand vigil over his owner’s grave and receives provisions from the cemetery staff so he does not need to leave.
  
• Fido, a mixed-breed dog, whose master, Carlo Soriani, had died in an air raid over Borgo San Lorenzo (near Florence, in Italy) in 1943, during World War II. Fido waited in vain, for the following 14 years, for Soriani’s return, going daily to the bus stop in Luco del Mugello (a frazione of Borgo) where the man used to get off after coming home from work.
  
• Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye Terrier in Edinburgh, Scotland, was loyal to his master long after his master’s death in 1858. Until Bobby’s death 14 years later, he reportedly spent every night at his master’s grave. A statue in memorial of Greyfriars Bobby was erected near the graveyard.
• Hachikō, an Akita who became a symbol of loyalty in Japan, is now honored by a statue in Tokyo. Hachikō is famous for his loyalty to his long dead master Hidesaburō Ueno, by returning to the train station and waiting for his return, every day for the next nine years during the time the train was scheduled to arrive.
  
• Hawkeye, a Labrador retriever, stayed by the coffin of his owner, Jon Tumilson, a Navy Seal who was killed in Afghanistan in 6 August 2011 when the CH-47 Chinook he was riding on was shot down by a rocket propelled grenade.
  
• Heidi, a Jack Russell Terrier from Scotland, made her way down a 500-foot (150 m) vertical drop to get to the body of her owner (after he fell to his death while hiking) and stood guard over his body for days in 2001.
  
• Leao, a mix breed who stayed by the side of her owner who died on January 2011 during Brazil’s flood. His owner was Cristina Cesário Maria Santana. Her body (along with other 3 bodies of members of the family) was retrieved by the rescuers after looking at the dog digging over some mud.
  
• Shep, a Border Collie, who – after seeing the coffin of his master loaded onto a train in Fort Benton, Montana in 1936 – maintained a vigil at the station for six years.
  
• Spot: In November 2010, five months after his owner, Wayne Giroux of Lone Oak, Texas, was killed by a drunk driver, a local television station reported that Giroux’s Great Dane-mix, Spot, was still traveling daily to wait for Giroux at a spot on a country lane where Giroux used to meet him. The story was quickly picked up and disseminated by international media outlets such as CNN.
  
• Squeak, a Jack Russell Terrier who would not leave the body of his owner, Zimbabwean farmer Terry Ford, after Ford was murdered in 2002 by a violent mob carrying out Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe‘s land seizure programs. The photo of little Squeak guarding Ford’s bloody body raised worldwide awareness of land-related violence in Zimbabwe.
  

Squeak. Guarding the body of his murdered owner.

• Theo, an English Springer Spaniel belonging to Lance Corporal Liam Tasker of the British Army. Theo was used to sniff out roadside bombs in Afghanistan. In 2010, Theo and Tasker were in a firefight with insurgents, killing Tasker. Theo died later at a British army base from a fatal seizure, although many believe he died from a broken heart. Tasker’s body and Theo’s ashes were returned to England where Tasker’s family was presented with Theo’s ashes in a private ceremony. In October 2012, Theo was posthumously honored with the Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest award for bravery by animals.
  
• Waghya, Chhatrapati Shivaji‘s pet dog. Waghya is known as the epitome of loyalty and eternal devotion. After Shivaji’s death, the dog mourned and jumped into his master’s funeral pyre and immolated himself. A statue was put up on a pedestal next to Shivaji’s tomb at Raigad Fort.
  

  

  Statue of Waghya, symbol of pure loyalty and devotion in India

  Sources disagree about whether Waghya was an actual dog or a fictional dog.^[32]

• The yellow dog of Lao Pan. After Lao Pan, a poor 68-year-old Shandong villager who lived alone, died in November 2011, his home was cleared, and his unnamed yellow Spitz-type dog disappeared. Villagers later noticed the dog had found Lao Pan’s grave and tried to bring it back to the village, but the dog refused to leave. They tried luring the hungry dog back to the village with some buns, but he took the food and ran back to the site again. Villagers felt touched by the dog’s behavior, arranged to provision him daily at the grave, and as of a week later when the first reports appeared, had decided to build him a shelter there. The story broke locally, was picked up by national media, and was being run by many international media outlets by mid-December.

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_dogs#Faithful_after_master.E2.80.99s_death

 

A Proposed List of Rock Groups to Ban in Ukraine, Soviet Union

Not sure if they were “banned” per se, but foreign rock music was definitely frowned upon by the Soviet establishment. So, this is a proposed list of why these groups must be banned, I guess.

Original post here.

*******************************************************

Representatives of government periodically compiled lists of forbidden bands and artists who “harmed” Soviet ideology and were “unacceptable” for values of Soviet people. As a result of this, songs of bands mentioned in those lists were not allowed to be played at youth discotheques to make sure people will live as the Soviet government wanted them to live and that they won’t try to seek for freedom. This document was released in 1985 as a banning order for committee of Komsomol (The Communist Union of Youth) of Nikolayev region of Ukraine. What is more, this Cold War document below was kept in secret. It is funny how some bands and performers were called as “neofascist” or as “punk violence” acts with detailed reasons why they must be banned.

(I didn’t even know that the Soviet Union had discotheques 🙂

“The following is an approximate list of foreign music groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions. This information is recommended for the purpose of intensifying control over the activities in discotheques. This information must be also provided to all vocal-instrument ensembles [that’s bands] and youth discotheques in the region”

“Group Name and Type of Propaganda”

1. Sex Pistols – punk, violence

2. B-52s – punk, violence

3. Madness – punk, violence

4. Clash – punk, violence

5. Stranglers – punk, violence

6. Kiss – neofascism, punk, violence

7. Krokus – violence, cult of strong personality

8. Styx – violence, vandalism

9. Iron Maiden – violence, religious obscurantism

10. Judas Priest – anticommunism, racism

11. AC/DC – neofascism, violence

12. Sparks – neofascism, racism

13. Black Sabbath – violence, religious obscurantism

14. Alice Cooper – violence, vandalism

15. Nazareth – violence, religious mysticism

16. Scorpions – violence

17. Genghis Khan – anticommunism, nationalism

18. UFO – violence

19. Pink Floyd – distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet aggression inAfghanistan”)

20. Talking Heads – myth of the Soviet military threat

21. Perron – eroticism

22. Bohannon – eroticism

23. Originals – sex

24. Donna Summer – eroticism

25. Tina Turner – sex

26. Junior English – sex

27. Canned Heat – homosexuality

28. Munich Machine – eroticism

29. Ramones – punk

30. Van Halen – anti-Soviet propaganda

31. Julio Iglesias – neofascism

32. Yazoo – punk, violence

33. Depeche Mode – punk, violence

34. Village People – violence

35. 10cc – neofascism

36. Stooges – violence

37. Boys – punk, violence

38. Blondie – punk, violence

 Further Reading:

The Weird’s Diary. http://my-meaningless-thoughts.blogspot.com/2011/06/forbidden-freedom-rock-music-in-ussr_11.html

 

The Arctic Convoys of World War 2

The Arctic convoys of World War II were oceangoing convoys which sailed from the United Kingdom, Iceland, and North America to northern ports in the Soviet Union – primarily Arkhangelsk (“Archangel”) and Murmansk, both in modern day Russia. There were 78 convoys between August 1941 and May 1945 (although there were two gaps with no sailings between July and September 1942, and March and November 1943), sailing via several seas of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

About 1400 merchant ships delivered vital supplies to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program, escorted by ships of the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, and the U.S. Navy. Eighty-five merchant vessels and 16 Royal Navy warships (two cruisers, six destroyers, eight other escort ships) were lost. The Nazi German Kriegsmarine lost a number of vessels including one battleship, three destroyers and at least 30 U-boats as well as a large number of aircraft.

The convoys ran from Iceland (usually off Hvalfjörður) north of Jan Mayen Island to Arkhangelsk when the ice permitted in the summer months, shifting south as the pack ice increased and terminating at Murmansk.

Summer Route from Iceland

After September 1942 they assembled and sailed from Loch Ewe in Scotland.

Summer and Winter Routes from Scotland

Outbound and homebound convoys were planned to run simultaneously; a close escort accompanied the merchant ships to port, remaining to make the subsequent return trip, whilst a covering force of heavy surface units was also provided to guard against sorties by German surface ships, such as the Tirpitz. These would accompany the outbound convoy to a cross-over point, meeting and then conducting the home-bound convoy back, while the close escort finished the voyage with its charges.

The route was around occupied Norway to the Soviet ports and was particularly dangerous due to the proximity of German air, submarine and surface forces and also because of the likelihood of severe weather, the frequency of fog, the strong currents and the mixing of cold and warm waters which made ASDIC use difficult, drift ice, and the alternation between the difficulties of navigating and maintaining convoy cohesion in constant darkness or being attacked around-the-clock in constant daylight.

For one particular convoy, only 11 of the 35 ships made it to their destination. It was the worst loss of the entire operation.

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_convoys_of_World_War_II

 

Top Nazi Hermann Goering Was Big Into Model Trains

 

 

 

Goring (middle, wearing white) and some officers / soldiers observing Marklin railway in the basement.

Goring at the controls smoking a cigar

Basement layout — possibly later than previous photos as the layout is more developed with elevated tracks and racing system. In the background several models can be seen set up on the tabletop. The two on the left side look like artillery / mortar pieces while the on on the right is perhaps a tank or train-mountain gun piece.

Further Reading:

Marklin at Carinhall: Hermann Goring’s Miniature Railway

The Siege of Paris in 1870: A Starving City Eats Their Two Elephants

This post is not strictly about the Franco-Prussian War. You can read more about that and the Siege of Paris here.

******************************************************************************

Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants, which have been killed. It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton.

—  Henry Labouchère

During one 23-day period, over 500 shells a day were fired into the city. People were starving and the only way out of the city was by the occasional release of the newly invented hot air balloon.

Today we are checking out what the starving citizens of Paris ate as food during this long four month siege. All 70,000 of the city’s horses were slaughtered and consumed. Next came cats and dogs. Then, the zoo animals, except for monkeys (who were too human-like) and lions and tigers (who were deemed too dangerous). The local hippopotamus survived, mainly because nobody could afford to buy him at 80,000 Francs. But it appears that not even the two beloved elephants, Castor and Pollux, from the city zoo were spared. They were killed for their meat in the winter of 1870.

Let’s take a look at the menu of a contemporary restaurant during the siege. Menus began to offer exotic dishes such as Cuissot de Loup, Sauce Chevreuil (Haunch of Wolf with a Deer Sauce), Terrine d’Antilope aux truffes (Terrine of Antelope with truffles), Civet de Kangourou (Kangaroo Stew) and Chameau rôti à l’anglaise (Camel roasted à l’anglaise).

A Latin Quarter menu contemporary with the siege reads in part:

* Consommé de cheval au millet. (horse)

* Brochettes de foie de chien à la maître d’hôtel. (dog)

* Emincé de rable de chat. Sauce mayonnaise. (cat)

* Epaules et filets de chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates. (dog)

* Civet de chat aux champignons. (cat)

* Côtelettes de chien aux petits pois. (dog)

* Salamis de rats. Sauce Robert. (rats)

* Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade. (dog, rats)

* Begonias au jus. (flowers)

* Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval. (horse)

We are going to need some of Frank’s Red Hot sauce

Sources:

Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Paris_(1870%E2%80%931871)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux_(elephants)

133 Days Stranded at Sea – The Story of Poon Lim

When told no one had ever survived longer on a raft at sea, Poon Lim replied, “I hope no one will ever have to break that record.” People have lived longer lost at sea, the current record being 10 months for 3 Mexican sailors in a disabled fishing boat. However, as of 2012, no one has broken Poon Lim’s record on a life raft.

Poon Lim or Lim Poon BEM (March 8, 1918 – January 4, 1991) was a Chinese sailor who survived 133 days alone in the South Atlantic.

Pool Lim when rescued

On November 23, the German U-boat U-172 intercepted and struck the Ben Lomond with two torpedoes in position 00.30°N 38.45°W, some 750 miles east of the Amazon. As the ship was sinking, Poon Lim took a life jacket and jumped overboard before the ship’s boilers exploded. As the ship sunk in two minutes, 53 of the crew were lost including the master, 44 sailors and eight gunners, making Lim the sole survivor.

SS Ben Lomond in 1906

After approximately two hours in the water, he found an 8′ square wooden raft and climbed into it. The raft had several tins of biscuits, a forty litre jug of water, some chocolate, a bag of sugar lumps, some flares, two smoke pots and an electric torch.

Poon Lim initially kept himself alive by drinking the water and eating the food on the raft, but later resorted to catching rainwater in a canvas life jacket covering, and fishing. He could not swim very well and often tied a rope from the boat to his wrist, in case he fell into the ocean. He took a wire from the electric torch and made it into a fishhook, and used hemp rope as a fishing line. He also dug a nail out of the boards on the wooden raft and bent it into a hook for larger fish. When he captured a fish, he would cut it open with a knife he fashioned out of a biscuit tin and dry it on a hemp line over the raft. Once, a large storm hit and spoiled his fish and fouled his water. Poon, barely alive, caught a bird and drank its blood to survive.

When he saw sharks, he did not swim. Instead he set out to catch one. He used the remnants of the next bird he caught as bait. The first shark to pick up the taste was only a few feet long. He gulped the bait and hit the line with full force, but in preparation Poon Lim had braided the line so it would have double thickness. He also had wrapped his hands in canvas to enable him to make the catch. But the shark attacked him after he brought it aboard the raft. He used the water jug half-filled with seawater as a weapon. After his victory, Poon Lim cut open the shark and sucked its blood from its liver. Since it hadn’t rained, he was out of water and this quenched his thirst. He sliced the fins and let them dry in the sun, a Hainan delicacy.

Lim’s voyage

On two occasions other vessels passed nearby: first a freighter, then a squad of United States Navy patrol planes. Poon contended that the freighter saw him but did not pick him up because he was Chinese, although it was common practice at the time for U-boats to use “dummy” survivors as bait and sink any ship that stopped to make the rescue. The Navy planes did see him, and one dropped a marker buoy in the water. Unfortunately for Poon, a large storm hit the area at the same time and he was lost again. He was also once spotted by a German U-boat, which had been doing gunnery drills by targeting seagulls.

At first, he counted the days by tying knots in a rope, but later decided that there was no point in counting the days and simply began counting full moons.

On April 5, 1943, after 133 days in the life raft, Poon Lim neared land and a river inlet. A few days earlier, he had known that he was close to the land because the color of the water had changed; it was no longer the oceanic deep blue. Three Brazilian fishermen rescued him and took him to Belém three days later.

During his ordeal, Poon Lim had lost 9 kg, but was able to walk unaided upon being rescued. He spent four weeks in a Brazilian hospital and the British Consul arranged for him to return to Britain via Miami and New York.

Sources:

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poon_Lim

 

50 to 90% Of All Films Before 1950 Have Been Lost…

Most lost films are from the silent film and early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930. Martin Scorsese‘s Film Foundation estimates that over 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are lost, and of American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, perhaps half have been lost.

Blog Note:

In addition to lost movies, it also makes me sad that many educational and corporate training and safety films are lost. That would include driver’s ed films from school, and stuff that you had to watch as a young adult at your first job at some company. I watched many cheezy but awesomely funny training videos at minimum wage jobs that I have had over the years. I can only assume most are lost to history. Are they not Art as well..? Suffer me no more lost art!

*****************************************************************

Many early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used for nearly all 35 mm negatives and prints made before 1952 is highly flammable. When in very badly deteriorated condition and improperly stored, it can spontaneously combust. Fires have destroyed entire archives of films. For example, a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all of the original negatives of Fox Pictures‘ pre-1935 movies. Nitrate film is chemically unstable and over time can decay into a sticky mass or a powder akin to gunpowder. This process can be very unpredictable: some nitrate film from the 1890s is still in good condition today, while some much later nitrate had to be scrapped as unsalvageable when it was barely twenty years old. Much depends on the environment in which it is stored. Ideal conditions of low temperature, low humidity and adequate ventilation can preserve nitrate film for centuries, but in practice the storage conditions were usually far from ideal. When a film on nitrate base is said to have been “preserved”, this almost always means simply that it has been copied onto safety film or, more recently, digitized; both methods result in some loss of quality.

Eastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in spring 1909. However, the plasticizers used to make the film flexible evaporated too quickly, making the film dry and brittle, causing splices to part and perforations to tear. By 1911 the major American film studios were back to using nitrate stock. “Safety film” was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as 16 mm and 8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s.

The largest cause of silent film loss was intentional destruction, as silent films were perceived as having little or no commercial value after the end of the silent era by 1930. Film preservationist Robert A. Harris has said, “Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house.”

Some pre-1931 sound films made by Warner Bros. and First National have been lost because they used a sound-on-disc system with a separate soundtrack on special phonograph records. If some of a film’s soundtrack discs could not be found when 16 mm sound-on-film reduction prints of early “talkies” were being made for television use in the 1950s, that film’s chances of survival plummeted: many sound-on-disc films have survived only by way of those 16 mm prints.

Before the eras of television and later home video, films were viewed as having little future value when their theatrical runs ended. Thus, again, many were deliberately destroyed to save the space and cost of storage; many were recycled for their silver content. Many Technicolor two-color negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were thrown out when the studios refused to reclaim their films, still being held by Technicolor in its vaults. Some prints were sold either intact or broken into short clips to individuals who bought early novelty home projection machines and wanted scenes from their favorite movies to play for guests or family members.

As a consequence of this widespread lack of care, the work of many early filmmakers and performers has made its way to the present in fragmentary form. In the case of Theda Bara, who was one of the best-known actresses of the early silent era: of the 40 films she made, only three and a half are now known to exist. However, this was still better than the fate of Valeska Suratt, not one of whose films survives. Likewise stage actresses such as Pauline Frederick and Elsie Ferguson who made the jump to silent films and became more popular have large caches of lost films. Frederick has about seven films that survive from the years 1915-1928 and Ferguson has one from 1919 that survives from her entire silent career 1917-1925. More typical is the case of Clara Bow: of her 57 movies, 20 are completely lost and five more are incomplete.

There are occasional exceptions. Almost all of Charlie Chaplin‘s films from his entire career have survived as well as extensive amounts of unused footage dating back to 1916. The exceptions are A Woman of the Sea (which he destroyed himself as a tax writeoff) and one of his early Keystone films, Her Friend the Bandit (see Unknown Chaplin). The filmography of D.W. Griffith is nearly complete as many of his early Biograph films were deposited by the company inpaper print form at the Library of Congress. Much of Griffith’s feature film work, of the 1910s and 1920s, found their way to the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and were preserved under the auspices of curator Iris Barry. Mary Pickford‘s filmography is very much complete being that her early years were spent with Griffith and especially films produced later after she gained control of her own productions in the late 1910s and early 1920s. She also backtracked to as many of her Zukor controlled early Famous Players films that were salvageable. Stars like Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks enjoyed stupendous popularity and their films were reissued over and over throughout the silent era, meaning prints of their films were likely to surface decades later. Pickford, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Cecil B. DeMille were early champions of film preservation. Lloyd lost a good deal of his silent work in a vault fire in the early 1940s.

Another remarkable case was the 1919 German film Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern), starring Conrad Veidt. A striking plea for tolerance forhomosexuality, produced in collaboration with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, it was targeted for destruction by the Nazis, with many prints of the film burned as decadent. However, a 50-minute fragment survived the censorship attempt.

Further Reading…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film

 

People Who Have Performed Surgery… on Themselves

I recently saw a survival show where a guy got his arm stuck in a piece of equipment in his basement, it was either a boiler or a furnace. Knowing that his fiance was out of town for a week, and that his dog was upstairs with no food, he continued to struggle, only getting his arm stuck further down in the grate. As he lost feeling and circulation in his arm a few days later, mentally and physically drained…he decided to amputate his own limb. When he was about halfway through, his coworkers who were worried about his absence from work, came over and called paramedics. However, doctors were not able to save his arm. Due to the restricted blood flow to his arm, and lack of circulation for over two days, he may have lost his arm anyways, even if he had not performed his impromptu surgery.

Be careful out there. Even in your own home.

********************************************************************

Self-surgery is the act of performing a surgical procedure on oneself. It can be a rare manifestation of a psychological disorder, an attempt to avoid embarrassment or legal action, or an act taken in extreme circumstances out of necessity.

On April 30, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov removed his own appendix at a Soviet Research Station in Antarctica.

Abdominal Surgery

Abdominal self-surgery is extremely rare. A few well-publicized cases have found their way into the medical literature.

• On February 15, 1921, Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane carried out his own appendectomy in an attempt to prove the efficacy of local anaesthesia for such operations. He is believed to have been the first surgeon to have done so. In 1932, he performed an even more risky self-operation of repairing his inguinal hernia at the age of 70.
  

• On April 30, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov removed his own infected appendix at the Soviet Novolazarevskaja Research Station in Antarctica, as he was the only physician on staff. The operation lasted one hour and 45 minutes. Rogozov later reported on the surgery in the Information Bulletin of the Soviet Antarctic Expedition.
  

• A male student who had already performed a self-castration was the subject of a 1979 case report by Kalin. The student, some time after his self-castration, also attempted to reduce the activity of his adrenal glands with an injection of bovine serum albumin, luteinizing hormone-releasing hormoneand Freund’s adjuvant. When this produced an abscess at the injection site, he resorted to self-surgery. His psychiatrist reported:

At four o’clock on the morning of his surgery, he disinfected his dormitory room with spray disinfectant and alcohol and draped an area with sheets that he had previously sterilized. For anesthesia, he took oral barbiturates. He also took hydrocortisone and prepared a canister of vaporized adrenalin, readying himself for a possible shock syndrome. He performed the procedure wearing sterile gloves and a surgical mask. Lying supine and looking into strategically placed mirrors to obtain an optimum view, he began by cleansing his abdomen with alcohol. The incision was made with a scalpel, exposure obtained by retractors, and the dissection carried out with surgical instruments. Lidocaine hydrochloride was injected into each successive tissue layer during the opening. He controlled bleeding with locally applied gelatin powder, while sterilized cotton thread ligatures were used for the larger vessels. After eight hours he had had minimal blood loss but was unable to obtain adequate exposure to enter the retroperitoneal space because of the unexpected pain in retracting his liver. Exhausted, he bandaged his wound, cleaned up his room, and called the police for transport to the hospital because of a “rupture”.

• In 2000, a Mexican woman, Inés Ramírez, was forced to resort to self-surgery – a Caesarean section – because of lack of medical assistance during a difficult labour: “She took three small glasses of hard liquor and, using a kitchen knife, sliced her abdomen in 3 attempts … cut the uterus itself longitudinally, and delivered a male infant. Both mother and child reportedly survived and are now well.”

Amputation of Trapped Limbs

• In 1993, Donald Wyman amputated his leg with his pocketknife after it was pinned by a tree.

• In 1993, Bill Jeracki was fishing near St. Mary’s Glacier in Colorado, when a boulder pinned his left leg. Snow was forecast and without a jacket or pack, Jeracki didn’t believe he would survive the night. Fashioning a tourniquet out of his flannel shirt and using his bait knife, he cut his leg off at the knee joint, using hemostats from his fishing kit to clamp the bleeding arteries.

• In 2002, Doug Goodale cut off his own arm at the elbow in order to survive an accident at sea.

• Aron Ralston, a former student at Carnegie Mellon University was on a canyoneering trip in 2003 in Blue John Canyon (near Moab, Utah), when a boulder fell and pinned his right forearm down, crushing it. First he tried to chip away the rock around his hand with his pocket knife, but gave up the attempt after two days. Next he tried to lift and move the boulder with a simple pulley system made with rope and gear, but that failed too. On the sixth day a dehydrated and delirious Ralston had a vision of himself as a one-armed man playing with his future son. He bowed his arm against the chockstone and snapped the radius and ulna bones. Using the dull blade on his multiuse tool, he cut the soft tissue around the break. He then used the tool’s pliers to tear at the tougher tendons. He was careful not to sever the arteries before attaching an improvised tourniquet. After he cut the main bundle of nerves, leading to agonizing pain, he cut through the last piece of skin and was free. In bad physical shape, and having lost more than a litre of blood, he managed to rappel 60 yards down and hike another 8 miles, when he ran into a Dutch family who offered help and guided him to a rescue helicopter which happened to be nearby looking for Ralston and took him to a hospital. His story was dramatized in the film 127 Hours (2010).

• In 2003, an Australian coal miner trapped three kilometres underground by an overturned tractor cut off his own arm with a box-cutting knife. The 44-year-old man, who was not identified by police, was working late at the Hunter Valley mine when the tractor tipped over, crushing his arm and trapping him.

Sources

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery

 

The Man Who Shot John Wilkes Booth Castrated Himself

Boston Corbett was born in London, England. His family emigrated to New York City. He became a hatter in Troy, New York. It has been suggested that the fumes of mercury used in the hatter’s trade caused Corbett’s later mental problems.

Missing a few pages…?

Thomas “Boston” Corbett married, but his wife died in childbirth. Following her death, he moved to Boston, and continued working as a hatter. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and changed his name to Boston, the name of the city where he was converted. In an attempt to imitate Jesus, he began to wear his hair very long. On July 16, 1858, in order to avoid the temptation of prostitutes, Corbett castrated himself with a pair of scissors. He then ate a meal and went to a prayer meeting, before going for medical treatment.

In 1887, because of his fame as Booth’s killer, Corbett was appointed assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives in Topeka. One day he overheard a conversation in which the legislature’s opening prayer was mocked. He jumped to his feet and brandished a revolver. No one was hurt, but Corbett was arrested and sent to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane. On May 26, 1888, he escaped from the asylum. He went to Neodesha, Kansas, and stayed briefly with Richard Thatcher, whom he had met when they were both prisoners of war. When he left, he told Thatcher he was going to Mexico. His “madness” may have been the result of exposure to mercury, an element commonly used in hat manufacturing. It is so well known for this side effect that it has given rise to the expression “mad as a hatter“.

Presumed fate

Rather than going to Mexico, Corbett is believed to have settled in a cabin he built in the forests near Hinckley, Minnesota. He is thought to have died in the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1, 1894. Although there is no proof, the name “Thomas Corbett” does appear on the list of dead and missing.

More on Corbett from the Art of Bleeding web site:

Folded shamefully away in the quilt of American history is a bloody pair of scissors used by union cavalryman. Why? Well, turns out self-castration is unbecoming in an American hero.

Just as Jack Ruby snuffed Lee Harvey Oswald before we had answers, Lincoln’s assassin was prematurely “executed” by a gunman with his own rogue sense of justice.   Though Corbett defied orders from his commanding officer, no disciplinary actions were taken, and he was initially hailed as a hero.

But then he started talking about God whispering in his ear and signing autographs “the agent of His swift retribution on the assassin of our beloved President, Abraham Lincoln.”

His fans began to worry.

When some of his fans turned to sending hate mail, Corbett’s natural paranoia blossomed.  He started reacting to requests for autographs with a drawn pistol.

“Natural” is perhaps the wrong word in this case, as Corbett’s paranoia was likely connected to his earlier work as a hatter, the mercury used in that trade and the madness associated with it and certain Lewis Carroll characters.

Whatever the cause, Corbett’s exposure to religion didn’t help.  The notion of following Christ’s example he took to mean growing his hair in long and stringy imitation of the Savior.  For years he refused to cut it.  With the genitals, it was a different story…

In 1858, upon finding himself inflamed by the sight of prostitutes walking the streets, he took matters in hand, slicing open his scrotum, stretching out the testes, and snipping his cords.  Immediately after, he rewarded himself with a prayer meeting, a long walk, and a hearty meal.  Good things were going to happen.  The assassin assassination was still years in his future.

After his moment in the national spotlight, Corbett was granted the position of doorkeeper at the Kansas State Legislature but ended that by waving around a gun and getting himself thrown in the state insane asylum.   Escaping from there, he become a reclusive farmer, living in a hole in the ground (euphemistically a “dugout”) and only occasionally emerging to wave a pistol at children playing ball on the Sabbath.   After being driven from his burrow by angry neighbors, Corbett’s history becomes fuzzy and he begins to fade into a sort of mythic figure.

It’s speculated that he died in a vast fire that claimed the town of Hinckley, Minnesota in 1894, though this is unconfirmed.  Also unconfirmed are stories this long-haired bogeyman had taken up residence in the nearby woods where he presumably continued to threaten errant children with guns, the Bible, or perhaps… scissors.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Corbett

The Art of Bleeding. http://www.artofbleeding.com/blog/?paged=13

 

Moon Towers – When Cities Were Lit Up Like Sports Stadiums

At the end of the 1800s, many towns and cities were lit up by powerful electrical lamps placed on towers up to 300 feet high.

The arc lamp – the first electric light and the predecessor of Edison’s incandescent light bulb – was extremely bright and much more energy efficient than other lighting technologies from those times.

The lamps were too strong for indoor use, but they were regarded as the future of municipal lighting. Especially in the United States, many cities and towns were illuminated as if they were immense sports stadiums.

The tower system also had the advantage of safety. Witness this report from the New York Times, Arc light kills a smoker (1907):

Joseph Gooden was instantly killed by an electric shock today while he was attempting to light a cigar from an arc lamp in the street. With several companions he was returning from a dance when, in a spirit of bravado, he lowered one of the big electric street lamps and put his cigar against one of the carbons. He received a shock of 2,000 volts.

Further Reading:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/01/moonlight-towers-light-pollution-in-the-1800s.html

Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower