Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (54 page)

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When Ernest Digweed of Portsmouth, England, died in 1976, he left his entire estate, £26,000 (about $47,000)—to Jesus Christ, in the case that he arrived for his second coming. “If during the next 80 years,” reads his will, “the Lord Jesus Christ shall come to reign on Earth, then the Public Trustee, upon obtaining proof which shall satisfy Him of His identity, shall pay to the Lord Jesus Christ all the property He holds on His behalf.” (No takers so far.)

Vermont’s Panache restaurant offers hippo, lion, and giraffe dishes on its menu.

BRI stalwart Jeff Cheek—a proud Texan with a love of forgotten history—uncovered this fascinating nugget of Americana
.

T
HE PLOT

In the spring of 1861, while politicians from the North and South were in Washington, D.C., debating about whether a state had the right to secede from the Union, clandestine meetings of a far less diplomatic nature were taking place in Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate government was plotting to conquer the Union-held territory of New Mexico—which included the future states of New Mexico and Arizona—then push on to southern California, all the way to the Pacific. Not only would they be creating an ocean-to-ocean slave empire, the Confederate State Department was certain that this bold gesture would also insure recognition of the Confederacy by France and England.

Although grandiose, the plan wasn’t far-fetched. The Union had weakened their frontier garrisons by transferring troops east to guard Washington. The outposts were further weakened by the defection of Southern-born officers who resigned their commissions and joined the Confederate Army. And southern California, they reported, was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers. The rebel army would be welcomed.

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

Though supposedly waiting for a political solution, the southern government quickly put their plan in motion. Colonel John Baylor was ordered to deploy his 300-man cavalry unit to El Paso, on the extreme western edge of Confederate Texas. Three days after the first shots were fired at the Battle of Bull Run (the first major battle of the Civil War) in July 1861, Baylor and his 300 Texans invaded New Mexico, crossing the border near El Paso. They continued to advance north until they were blocked by a larger Yankee detachment commanded by Major Isaac Lynde. But being outnumbered didn’t stop Baylor—he attacked. Lynde’s troops tried to retreat to nearby Fort Stanton, but heat and exhaustion did them in before they made it, and they surrendered. Baylor marched on.

The man who invented Jell-O was originally looking for a way to make a palatable laxative.

GAINING GROUND

Baylor now held only a tiny slice of southern New Mexico, but he claimed the entire territory as part of the Confederate States of America. When word of the victory got back to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, he promoted Baylor to military governor and gave Brigadier General Henry Sibley command of the Confederate Army of New Mexico. In late December, Sibley led his troops north from El Paso. His objective: take Fort Craig, a Union bastion in south-central New Mexico and headquarters of Colonel Edward Canby, the ranking Union officer in the territory.

On arriving at Fort Craig, Sibley changed his plan, deciding not to attack—the position was too well fortified. Instead he retreated south to Valverde, New Mexico, taking up a defensive position along the banks of the Rio Grande River. Canby left a token force to guard the fort and set out in pursuit with 3,700 men, outnumbering Sibley’s troops by more than a thousand.

The two armies clashed on February 21, l862, in what proved to be the bloodiest battle in the west. And despite being outnumbered, the rebels fought the better battle. After losing more than 200 men, Colonel Canby was forced to make a strategic retreat while waiting for reinforcements. A few weeks later, the Confederates took Albuquerque and then Santa Fe, the high-water mark of the Confederate Army of New Mexico.

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

By this time the Union army had been reinforced by several New Mexican militia units and 600 volunteers from Colorado, under the command of Major John Chivington, known as the “Fighting Parson.” (He was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church, and fighting slavery, he preached to his troops, was “doing God’s work.”)

The two armies met at Glorieta Pass, 50 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Canby engaged the main rebel force, while Chivington outflanked them. When they located the rebel supply dump eight miles in the rear, the Fighting Parson launched an attack, killing or capturing the guards. The Confederates’ supplies were destroyed, every wagon burned, and all the mules driven off.

Alexander the Great enjoyed leading parades dressed as the goddess Artemis.

Casualties were relatively light (Confederates 189, Union 142), but the loss of the supplies guaranteed a Union victory. With no cannonballs for their artillery, no cartridges for their rifles, and no food other than what they could forage from the countryside, the Army of New Mexico disintegrated, and was forced to retreat to San Antonio. Of the original 2,700 rebel soldiers, only 1,500 made it back to Texas. The Confederate dream of a coast-to-coast empire was over.

HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE: THE DONKEY BOMB

The night before the Confederate victory at Valverde, a sneak attack that might have given the Yankees a victory failed. Captain “Paddy” Graydon, commanding a company of Union volunteers, came up with a novel idea. He asked for two old mules and a few boxes of howitzer shells and then rigged them up with fuses, turning them into “donkey bombs.” The two armies were encamped on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and the idea was that Graydon and a few volunteers would swim the river, infiltrate the enemy camp, and set the bomb-carrying mules free near the rebel corral. The Union mules would mix in with the Confederate mules, and the shells would explode, inflicting casualties, and destroying the enemy’s supplies. Graydon’s request was approved.

That night the raiders swam the river. They came within 150 yards of the enemy corral. They could smell the rebel mules. They lit the fuses on the howitzer shells, slapped the mules on the rump, and began their retreat. But they had forgotten one important detail: they hadn’t briefed the mules on their part of the operation. Seeing their masters leaving, the mules turned and trotted toward them.

Paddy and his men took off, running barefoot through cactus and catclaw bushes. Naturally, the mules also sped up. The men were running, the fuses were burning, and the mules were gaining (one of nature’s laws is that a four-legged mule can run faster than a two-legged man) when KABOOM!, a dozen 24-pound shells exploded, scattering mule parts over a large chunk of New Mexico and scaring the hell out of the soldiers in both camps. Paddy and his footsore Commandos limped back to camp at daybreak.

Salmon comes from the Latin word
salmo
, for “leaper.”

Just in case you’re not inundated with enough numbers in your life
.

•
Times, on average, a person swallows during a meal:
295

•
Countries that joined the United Nations when it was formed in 1945:
51

•
Points scored by basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar over his entire career:
38,387

•
Bones in the human wrist:
8

•
Bones in a chimpanzee’s wrist:
8

•
Yards a healthy slug can travel in a day:
50

•
Banana slugs that were eaten in a California slug-eating contest in 2002:
50

•
Chromosomes the average human has:
46
(the average cabbage has
18
)

•
Pounds of fish a pelican can hold in its beak:
25

•
Pumpkins grown in Floydada, Texas, every year:
1,000,000

•
People booked for “offensive gestures” in Germany in 2003:
164,848

•
Steps to the top of the Empire State Building:
1,860

•
Industrial robots in Japan:
350,000

•
Islands in the Indonesian archipelago:
17,508

•
Species of penguin:
17

•
Pages the average bathroom reader reads at a “sitting”:
2.7

•
Calories consumed during one hour of typing:
110

•
Calories consumed during one hour on the phone:
71

•
Pieces of paper the IRS sends to taxpayers every year:
8,000,000,000

•
Pounds that 8 billion pieces of paper weigh:
32,000,000

•
People in airplanes at any given time:
366,144

•
Students who streaked naked in Boulder, Colorado, on March 16, 1974:
1,200

•
People who die every minute: About
100
. (People who are born:
200
)

Mississippi’s largest industry: catfish. 150,000 tons are produced each year.

Here’s the second installment of our story about the little jumbo jet that could. (Part I starts on
page 125
.)

L
ITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT

To understand what happened aboard Flight 143, we need to revisit the math. It turns out that Captain Pearson made a slight error in his calculations. When you multiply liters by 1.77, you convert them into
pounds
, not kilograms (to convert a liter to a kilogram, you multiply by 0.8). Flight 143 had 20,302
pounds
of fuel in its tanks when it left Montreal, not 20,302 kilograms. And since 1 pound weighs less than half of 1 kilogram, Flight 143 had less than half the fuel it needed to get where it was going.

Normally Captain Pearson and First Officer Quintal would have known long in advance that they were running low on fuel—the gauges would have triggered a little red warning light. But not in this case. Since Pearson and Quintal’s original estimate was so far off, the low-fuel light never came on. The estimated fuel gauge showed plenty of fuel left...even as the last drops were being sucked from the tanks.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The first hint of trouble came just minutes before the engines quit, about two hours into the flight. Four quick audible beeps sounded in the cockpit and a warning light came on, indicating that one of the two fuel pumps in the left wing was reporting low pressure. That’s not unheard of, and at first Captain Pearson assumed that there was something wrong with the fuel pump. But moments later four more beeps sounded and the
second
fuel pump in the left wing reported low pressure. What are the odds that two pumps would fail at the same time? Captain Pearson concluded it couldn’t be the pumps. It had to be the fuel.

He decided to divert Flight 143 to Winnipeg, the nearest major airport. Whatever the problem was with the left fuel tank, he wanted it fixed before they flew any farther. He took the plane down from 41,000 feet to 28,000 feet, and made plans to land with only one engine, if it came to that.

More people on the West Coast prefer chunky peanut butter; East Coasters, creamy.

TANKS FOR NOTHING

About five minutes after the first alarm sounded, four
more
beeps sounded and two
more
lights came on. Then
another
four beeps and
another
four lights. Now the two fuel pumps in the right wing tank, as well as the two fuel pumps in the center tank, were reporting low pressure. (The pumps themselves were fine—they were reporting low pressure because the fuel tanks were empty and pumping nothing but air.)

Nine minutes after the first beeps, a loud
bong!
sounded in the cockpit. The left engine, completely starved of gas, sputtered out. Pearson and Quintal, still trying to figure out what was going on, prepared to land the 767 at Winnipeg with only one engine. It was an emergency situation, but it was something the plane was designed to do and something they had been trained to handle.

Then, three minutes later, the right engine ran out of fuel and quit. Pearson and Quintal hadn’t been trained to land a 767 with both engines out. Nobody had—jumbo jets aren’t supposed to run out of gas.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

In a normal aircraft with conventional mechanical instruments, the instruments keep working even if all the engines quit. But as Captain Pearson quickly realized, glass cockpits are different. They get their power from electrical generators powered by the jet engines. When both engines fail, the generators quit producing electricity...and all the computer screens go dark.