The U.S. Mint added notches to the sides of dimes and quarters, because people were shaving the edges to collect the silver. Copper and nickel are not valuable, so the sides of pennies and nickels are smooth.
Prithee, Unpin me.
Why do men’s clothes button on the right and women’s on the left? It’s easier for right handers to push buttons from the right into holes on the left. But in the days when ladies were dressed by their maids, the buttons were on the maid’s right.
Reel Bugs: Empire of the Ants
Some of you may know that from time to time I like to review insect-themed horror movies on this blog. (For my previous reviews, you can search “Reel Bugs.”) Not only are these movies a guilty pleasure of mine, but they’re also a good way to help understand the relationship humans have with insects, which is a theme of my upcoming book. Today’s film: Empire of the Ants (1977).
Joan Collins plays a sleazy real estate agent who takes a group of investors on a tour of some bogus property she says she’s going to develop, in what appears to be the Florida Keys. But thanks to nearby dumping of radioactive waste, the local ants have mutated into rampaging, oversized, keening monsters who begin picnicking on the group one by one. We see shrieking people get pincered to death by eight-foot-long rubber ants, but the special effects are so bogus, it isn’t very scary.
The pacing is plodding—it takes over 28 minutes to get to the ants. The special effects are cheesy—mostly shots of actual ants, blurrily enlarged. And the dialogue is just plain painful. At one point Joan Collins says, “I wish I hadn’t seen Charlie die like that!” And later–“Giant ants?” says the local sheriff. “That’s hard to believe.”
The plot does have a semi-interesting twist in the last twenty minutes, when the five survivors of the group stagger into a town, believing they’re safe at last, only to find that the ants have taken over the local sugar refinery, and that the queen ant has converted the locals into slaves by dousing them with pheromones.
Spoiler alert: It ends the way so many of these insect movies seem to end: by blowing up the bugs. There’s a big zoom in to a tanker truck’s “FLAMMABLE” sign, and then one of the main characters manages to use it to blow up the ants—or does he???
Joan Collins doesn’t seem to be having much fun. She has to run around in gaucho pants and a polyester blouse, gets dunked into the bayou, soaked by fake rain, and dipped in green slime, and she ultimately dies at the mandibles of the ant queen.
Robert Lansing, who plays a salty tour-boat captain
What most annoyed me was how incapable of running away the women in the movie seem to be. The good-guy men have to clutch them tightly around the shoulders as they run away from the ants, as though they’re running a three-legged race, and the women keep shrieking and looking over their shoulders and stumbling over stuff.
There is one guy who chooses to run away without stopping to help a woman. So in accordance with B-movie protocol, he deserves to die, and ends up getting eaten by the ants. You could see that one coming a mile away. He wears a puka-shell necklace.
Scratch That
Before the invention of erasers, many writers removed pencil marks with breadcrumbs.
Worth Their Salt
Since ancient times, salt has always been highly valuable. Roman soldiers were paid at certain times with salt—their salarium—from which we get the word “salary.”
Indian Territory
New York City at night ca. 1935, National Archives
Many people are unaware that Native Americans, and specifically the Mohawks, are skilled ironworkers who have built most of the New York City skyscrapers.
Flatiron Building under construction 1902 (National Archives)
The tradition began in 1886 when a Canadian company was building a bridge over the St. Lawrence River, located near a Mohawk reservation close to the city of Montreal. The company hired some Indian day laborers, and discovered the men had an apparent lack of fear of heights. So they trained them as riveters.
Indians employed in construction of the Hoover Dam as high scalers
The Mohawks began building more and more bridges, then branched out into skyscrapers, and have become a fixture of New York City construction building ever since. Mohawk ironworkers played a huge role in building the World Trade Center.
Construction of Empire State Building, 1930, by Lewis Hine (National Archives) I don’t think he’s Indian, but it’s such a cool picture I posted it anyway.
Do Mohawks really have no fear of heights, as many of their employers believe? Possibly, and it may also be true that they have a better general sense of balance than most people. But pursuing this daring profession could also be part of the culture. It’s cool and macho—part of the warrior ethos—to walk along narrow beams 600 feet in the air. Here’s a quote from one Mohawk construction worker, which was part of a Smithsonian exhibit:
A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true. We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better. We also have the experience of the old timers to follow and the responsibility to lead the younger guys. There’s pride in “walking iron.”
—Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais (Mohawk, Kahnawake)
The Dung Also Rises
The ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra, was symbolized as a giant scarab beetle rolling the sun like a ball of dung across the heavens.
There Will Be Blood
Small herds of reindeer living above the Arctic Circle have been found dead from exsanguination (having their blood sucked out), the result of swarms of mosquitoes and black flies.
What Plagued Them
The Plague of Flies, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902)
One of my favorite insect books is called Bugs in the System, by rock-star entomologist May Berenbaum. According to Berenbaum, six of the ten plagues of Egypt may have been caused by insects.
The ten plagues were ten calamities that are described in the book of Exodus. Yahweh, the Israelites’ god, inflicted the plagues upon Egypt to encourage the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery. This is not one of the Bible’s cheerier tales. When the pharaoh finally relented, the Jewish people commenced with their Exodus from Egypt.
So the plagues go as follows:
- blood-red water, which killed all the aquatic life.
- a rain of frogs
- lice
- flies
- livestock got sick
- people developed awful boils on their bodies
- hail and thunder
- locusts
- darkness
- death of the Egyptians’ firstborn
You can see right away that three of the plagues feature insects (lice, flies, and locusts). But Berenbaum’s theory is that the cattle diseases could have been caused by biting flies. The boils might have been buboes (and bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas). Or, she exuberantly continues, they might have been scabies or bot flies. And the darkness (#9) might be a continuation of the locust plague darkening the sky.
Latin Fun
The person who discovers a new species is allowed to name it. There is a beetle called Agra vation, a mollusk called Abra cadabra, and a tiny snail species called Bittium ittibittium.