Links for October

Looking for a new cocktail to juice up your fall? Why not try Torpedo Juice–a mixture of pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol used as fuel in Navy torpedo motors. On second thought, this sounds more like a summer beverage. 

During the first year of his presidency, George H.W. Bush’s love of pork rinds drove a 31% increase in sales of this non-kosher snack. 

Lithium’s psychiatric effects were originally “discovered” by taking urine from patients at the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital (near Melbourne, Australia) and injecting it into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs. Early pregnancy tests involved injecting women’s pee into mice, rabbits, or frogs (note: Piss Prophets is an amazing name for a feminist punk rock band if you’re looking to start the next Pussy Riot). Maybe if we want faster biomedical research, we need to try injecting more kinds of pee into more kinds of animals.

The Department of Defense represents 77% of the federal government’s energy consumption. In Fiscal Year 2017, the DoD consumed over 82 times more BTUs than NASA. The federal agency with the second largest energy consumption is the Postal Service. 

Trump is famous for giving his political opponents cheeky nicknames, but his zingers pale in comparison to those of classical Chinese philosophers. Case in point: “Mozi criticized Confucians by saying they ‘behave like beggars; grasp food like hamsters, stare like he-goats, and walk around like castrated pigs. 是若人氣,鼸鼠藏,而羝羊視,賁彘起。(墨子·非儒下)’”

In his eulogy at Graham Chapman’s memorial service, John Cleese said, “I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability and kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now, so suddenly, be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say, Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries!” Amazingly, we have this on video.

Agent Orange was just one of a family of colorful chemicals put to use by the United States Military. During the Vietnam War, Project AGILE deployed 9 types of Rainbow Herbicides (Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent White, and 4 types of Agent Orange) across Southeast Asia between 1961 and 1971. I feel like I should lighten the mood but all of the rainbow jokes I can think of are extremely offensive and/or distasteful.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s