Tawdry Knickers

Time 2020-11-12 07:04:04

Web Name: Tawdry Knickers

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February 10 (1910) is the anniversary of the death of Sir Joseph Lister, unwitting namesake of mouthwash. Rinse, gargle, and celebrate.n. an antiseptic solution Oxford English DictionarySingle women the world over rightfully curse the men who popularized the phrase often a bridesmaid but never a bride, many not realizing that it was part of a wildly successful advertising campaign for Listerine in the 1920s that warned young ladies that their bad breath might leave them old maids before their tragic thirtieth birthdays. Had he still been living, no one would have been cursing louder than eminent British surgeon Baron Joseph Lister who spent the last years of his life desperately trying to disassociate himself from a product that he neither invented nor endorsed.Hospital wards in the mid-nineteenth century were stinking, seeping cesspools of infection. Windows were generally closed (limiting the influx of fresh air), surgeons did not wash their instruments or their hands prior to procedures, and wounds were rarely, if ever, flushed clean, providing literal breeding grounds for deadly microorganisms. When Joseph Lister was a young surgeon in the Male Accident Ward of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the 1860s, more than half of his amputation patients died from sepsis, a bacterial wound infection. Lister became fascinated with Louis Pasteur s emerging theories on rot and fermentation and was convinced that his findings could be applied to medicine. At the time, Britain was more concerned with the cleanliness of its sewers than its hospitals, and carbolic acid had been used for years to improve the odor of its municipal muck. In 1865, Lister decided that what was good enough for British sewage was good enough for British patients, and he began swabbing his surgical tools and his wounds with carbolic acid. His mortality rate instantly dropped by 35 percent. He formalized his sterile operating procedures in 1867 (including forcing surgeons to wear clean gloves and wash their hands before and after surgeries), and they were quickly adopted worldwide.Lister was made a baron in 1883 and enjoyed an extraordinarily successful medical career and respectable retirement until his death at the age of eighty-four in 1912. For his pioneering efforts, he became the namesake of the Royal Society s prestigious Lister Medal and England s Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. He was commemorated on two postal stamps in 1965 and has public monuments in both London and Glasgow. Unfortunately, it is the now-ubiquitous Listerine that provides him with the most name recognition today.In 1879, twelve years after Lister s groundbreaking discoveries, Dr. Joseph Lawrence and Jordan Wheat Lambert used Lister s research to formulate a surgical antiseptic that was eventually recommended for dentists in 1895. Over the shy and unassuming surgeon s objections, the Lambert Pharmacal company marketed the product as Listerine and were selling it as the first over-the-counter mouthwash by 1914. According to company legend, once the general manager first heard that there was a medical term for bad breath (halitosis), his ad men embarked on a spectacular 1920s campaign castigating the social disgrace of foul mouth odor and skyrocketing Lambert Pharmacal s profits into the millions.Thankfully, for his sake, Lister did not live to witness the decades of absurd and misleading Listerine marketing ploys that hawked his namesake as everything from a dandruff suppressant, deodorant, and sore throat remedy to gonorrhea treatment, aftershave, and floor cleaner.January 31 is the anniversary of the death of Ernesto Mirando in 1976. As this is little cause for celebration, you can feel free to invoke your right to withhold condolences.adj. of, relating to, or being the legal rights of an arrested person to have an attorney and to remain silent so as to avoid self-incrimination Merriam-Webster s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh EditionDespite the Constitutional warm fuzzies invoked in the United States by the Amendment-imbued words You have the right to remain silent , the namesake of the pop culturally clichéd Miranda Warning was an extraordinarily sad scumbag.Ernesto Arturo Miranda was born in 1941 in Mesa, Arizona, and was a convicted criminal before finishing the eighth grade. By his eighteenth birthday, he had additionally been convicted of burglary, arrested on suspicion of armed robbery and assorted sex offenses, spent several years in reform school, and deported back to Arizona from California. A brief and dishonorably discharged stint in the Army was followed by arrests and jail time for vagrancy in Texas and driving a stolen car in Tennessee before Miranda finally settled down in Arizona in the early 1960s.In March of 1963, Miranda was arrested in Phoenix and confessed (after interrogation) to the rape of an eighteen-year-old girl, and his voice was positively identified by the victim. He dutifully wrote down his confessions on police stationery with printed certification on the top of each page that all statements were made with full knowledge of my legal rights. During his trial, Miranda s court-appointed lawyer raised the objection that his client had not been informed of his Constitutional rights to remain silent (and avoid self-incrimination) or to have an attorney present during his confession. The judge overruled the objections and sentenced Miranda to twenty to thirty years each for charges of rape and kidnapping.Miranda appealed the decision to the Arizona Supreme Court only to have it uphold the original ruling. In 1966, the United States Supreme Court ultimately overturned his conviction with Chief Justice Earl Warren insisting that the Fifth Amendment s self-incrimination clause and the Sixth Amendment s right to an attorney meant that a confession could be used as admissible evidence only if a suspect had been made aware of his rights and then waived them. Following Miranda v. Arizona, police across the United States were required to issue a Miranda Warning to all criminal suspects in custody, making them aware of their Constitutional rights somewhat erroneously now identified as Miranda rights. Despite the rote treatment it gets on television cop shows, there is remarkably no single wording that has to be used for the warning as long as the gist is conveyed. Miranda still went back to jail. His case was retried using evidence besides his confession, he was convicted again, and he served eleven more years. He was turned down for parole four times before finally being released. He made the most of his ongoing notoriety by selling autographed Miranda Warning cards, getting arrested for moving violations and gun possession, working as a delivery driver, and gambling. Miranda was killed in a knife fight at a Phoenix bar in 1976 at the age of thirty-four.The prime suspect in Miranda s killing had the Miranda warning read to him from a small card, invoked his right to remain silent, and allegedly escaped to Mexico to avoid prosecution.January 30 is the anniversary of the death of Harmen Knickerbocker (1855), New York blueblood and notorious namesake of two things best not discussed in polite company the New York Knicks and underwear.n. pl. a short-legged (orig. knee-length), freq. loose-fitting, pair of pants worn by women and children as an undergarment Oxford English DictionaryThe word knickers comes from the leggings worn by the fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose name was derived from the austere and very real Harmen Knickerbocker. Suffice it to say that many members of the Knickerbocker lineage in New York have had their knickers in a twist over this for the last two hundred years.Harmen Knickerbocker was the clan patriarch of a prominent social and political family in upstate New York in the early 1800s. He was friends with the legendary writer and historian Washington Irving, who used Knickerbocker as a pseudonym for his creation of a crotchety Dutch historian.Irving is most famous for his short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, but it was his 1809 satire A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty that made its fictional author Diedrich Knickerbocker a household name. Irving s mockery of inflated local history and small-minded politics was a huge success, and the name Knickerbocker eventually became a nickname for anyone living in Manhattan (shortened to Knicks for those who merely play basketball there).Eventually, an English edition of the book featured illustrations by the classic Charles Dickens illustrator George Cruikshank, who drew the fictitious and stodgy Knickerbocker family in loose, knee-length Dutch breeches. Over the next few decades, the short and loose ladies undergarments that became popular in England were dubbed knickers. Knickers aside, Washington Irving further lampooned New York s power brokers in a literary magazine called Salmagundi under the pseudonyms William Wizard and Launcelot Langstaff. It was here that he was the first to describe New York City as Gotham, which is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning Goat s Town. He was also the first to coin the phrase almighty dollar, in 1837 s The Creole Village, and it was a dream sequence in an 1812 revision of A History of New York that first featured old St. Nick cruising the Christmas skies in a flying wagon.But to return to pantaloons, while knickers (and their twisting) became standard British slang for delicate unmentionables, baggy trousers for women in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were called bloomers, named for early feminist Amelia Jenks Bloomer. But that is another story.January 27 is the birthday of the original masochist Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch.n. the getting of sexual pleasure from being dominated, mistreated, or hurt physically or otherwise by one's partner Webster s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second EditionOur psychological term for this sexual fetish was coined by an Austrian psychiatrist in 1886 but inspired by author Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, who is destined to be remembered not for his writings on Anti-Semitism or women s suffrage but for his secret penchant for domination by women wearing fur.Von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in a province of the Austrian Empire that is now part of Ukraine. Raised in Roman Catholic household with a police chief as a father, Masoch s early writings as a professor were fairly standard Austrian fare history, folklore, and ethnic short stories. But it was 1870 s Venus in Furs, the only one of his short novels still commonly available in English, that brought him notoriety. It was the first glimpse into his particular fetishes and described in detail his fantasy of dominant fur-clad women.Masoch found a willing partner with an early mistress, Baroness Fanny Pistor herself an emerging writer who approached him for help with her work. Masoch eventually coaxed Pistor into signing a contract that enslaved him to her for a period of six months in 1869 with his only stipulation being that she should wear furs as much as possible. Their experiences served as the fodder for Venus in Furs, in which the main character asks to be degraded by his dominatrix and is eventually further abused by a trio of African women. Unfortunately, he found less willingness to indulge his fantasies from his first wife, Aurora von Römelin, whom he married in 1873 and eventually divorced over obvious irreconcilable differences. He eventually married his assistant. It was around Masoch s fiftieth birthday that Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing introduced the term masochism in his famous series of case studies of sexual perversity Psychopathia Sexualis. The Latin title was a deliberate attempt to discouraging reading by an enthusiastic lay audience with purely prurient interests in such formerly taboo topics as female sexual pleasure and contrary sexual desires. Krafft-Ebing was a strict procreationist and believed that any sexual activity strictly for gratification was perverse (interestingly, while rape was considered deviant, it was not strictly perverse in that pregnancy could still result).To the great dismay of Masoch, Krafft-Ebing co-opted the author s name to describe gratification derived from receiving pain or humiliation. ...I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly Masochism, because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings . During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with the anomaly. In fact, the specific details of Masoch s private life were relatively unknown until his first wife s memoirs were published in 1905.Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Krafft-Ebing, would eventually assert that the impulse for masochism is often accompanied by an impulse for sadism (gratification derived from inflicting pain or humiliation) a term based on the life and writings of Marquis de Sade (see sadism) leading to a completely new term, sadomasochism.Despite founding an association for adult education with his second wife in 1893 and becoming a tireless opponent of anti-Semitism and equally tireless supporter of women s rights late in his life, Masoch s name is inextricably linked with sexual deviance beyond the clinical diagnoses, he and Venus in Furs have been pop-referenced by bands ranging from The Velvet Underground to Marilyn Manson to Bauhaus. Masoch spent the last years of his life under psychiatric care in Germany. He died in 1895.January 27 is the anniversary of the 1910 death of Sir Thomas Crapper, one of several individuals upon whose name posterity defecates.crappern. toilet Merriam-Webster s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh EditionMention that you are writing a book on notorious eponyms and you will likely receive a yawn, a condescending eye roll, or an excited outburst that Sir Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. The first two responses demonstrate that there is just no accounting for some people s taste, while the third reflects the remarkable staying power of a satirical pseudobiography that launched one of the most ubiquitous urban legends in history. Let us make several things clear. Thomas Crapper most certainly did not invent the toilet, but it might be possible that we invoke his namesake when we ascend the porcelain throne.Wallace Reyburn was a war correspondent, magazine editor, and humorist who wrote a good many books in his life, some more serious (and factual) than others, but 1969 s tongue-in-cheek Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper and 1971 s teat-in-sling Bust-up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra proved to be swallowed whole by a generous portion of their readership. Despite the rampant puns in the latter bra-ography including an assistant named Hans Delving and a female athlete named Lois Lung the completely fictional Titzling eventually became a supposedly real answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. Meanwhile, Flushed describes Crapper s good friend B.S. and the many dry runs required to perfect the Crapper W.C. Cistern. People have been spouting this satire as fact for the last forty years.The truth is that Thomas P. Crapper did exist. He was a British plumber, born around 1836, who owned his own plumbing company and widely popularized flush toilets, but his connection to modern word usage is somewhat murkier. Certainly the word crap, derived from the Dutch krappe, precedes him by centuries, first appearing in English in 1440. Likewise, the prototypes and early patents for our modern flushing toilets are generally attributed to Sir John Harrington at the end of the sixteenth century and Alexander Cummings in the 1770s, decades before Crapper created his first movement. But Crapper s company in London did pioneer the use of the floating ballcock (to avoid overflow) and outfitted several royal lavatories including those of Edward VII and George V. The resourceful Crapper was never knighted for his contributions, however, as is often alleged.While fanciful anecdotes and jokes abound, it is still possible that our use of both crapper and crap are connected to the British plumber. Crapper first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a privy in 1932 in American usage, and crap is not used to mean defecation until 1937. One prevailing theory is that American soldiers serving in World War I traveled to Britain and spent a fair amount of time staring at Thomas Crapper Co. Ltd. fixtures while dropping personal bombs and brought Thomas s namesake back to the United States. Crapper thus slowly entered the lexicon over the next decade. Meanwhile, the name s close connection to the contents carried helped transform crap (a traditional word for chaff, residue, and rubbish) into its stinking incarnation today. Crapper himself retired from the crapper business in 1904 and is immortalized on a series of manhole covers in Westminster Abbey. He passed in 1910.Yet while Crapper s offal association might be debatable, there is a solid quartet of historical heroes who share the dubious distinction of having their names (and, sometimes, faces) directly conjoined with voiding vessels. Because only vespasienne appears in modern usage (Oxford English Dictionary), all have been relegated to footnote status here.vespasienneIn chronological order, our first stop on the Excrement Express is Italy. One year after Nero committed suicide in AD 68, the great military leader Titus Flavius Vespasianus (generally referred to as Vespasian) became Emperor of Rome. His primary goal seemed to be to institute new taxes, wherever possible, to fill the royal coffers and fund his grand new ventures including construction of the immense Colosseum, which would not be completed until his son s rule. One of his most creative moneymaking schemes was a urine tax imposed on public facilities. To maximize his supply-chain loop, he sold the collected urine to launderers, who aged it in giant vats (until it converted to ammonia) and then used it for bleaching. Italians henceforth called urinals vespianos, leading to the French vespasiennes, which was then absorbed into English. Vespasian was relieved of his mortal strain in AD 79 when he died of a diarrhea-racked fever.Oliver s skullRoughly 1,500 years later in England, a civil war over haircuts and political succession was under way. The short-haired, Parliament-supporting Roundheads were facing up against the curly tresses of the monarch-loving Royalists. The Roundheads ultimately won a victory in 1651 that would eventually establish a parliamentary monarchy 150 years later, but short-term leadership of the country fell to the alternately revered and reviled Oliver Cromwell. While soothing their wounds from their military losses over a few pints, the Royalists drunkenly stumbled across the hilarious notion of dubbing their chamber pots Oliver s skulls. The slang stuck well into the 1800s. Cromwell himself died in 1658 (somewhat ironically) from a urinary tract infection. Three years later, after the Royalists had returned to power, his buried body was exhumed, hanged at Tyburn, thrown in a pit, and then beheaded. His head was then placed on a spike above Westminster Hall.Details on the subsequent journeys of the head are mysterious. However, in 1799, what was believed to be the head was sold to three brothers named Hughes who set up an exhibit of Cromwellabilia. Despite an extensive marketing campaign, the exhibit was a failure, and the provenance of the head has been in question ever since. sacheverellPolitical tensions were not much relieved in the decades that followed, and soon the divine-right-of-kings-supporting Tories and the crown-threatening Whigs were at each other s throats. In 1709 ardent Tory and clergyman Dr. Henry Sacheverell successfully pissed off the entire Whig party in a series of sermons that accused the Whigs of being too tolerant of religious dissenters. His fomenting language initially led to his short suspension from preaching and an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for a stove blower, the implication being that he was famous for blowing the coals of dissension. However, more germane to the topic here, his name also became synonymous with chamber pots after several resourceful Whigs managed to manufacture the common household items with a portrait of Dr. Sacheverell painted on the bottom.twissThe Irish thought this piss-pot portraiture hilarious but had no appropriate target for their streams for nearly seventy years until British travel writer Richard Twiss published his decidedly unflattering Tour in Ireland in 1775. It was an enormous bestseller in his home country of England but struck heavy ire in the land to the west by asserting that the Irish primarily consumed whiskey and were notable for little more than the thickness of their legs particularly the women. In response, a Dublin pottery company began selling a chamber pot called a twiss that included a portrait of its namesake, facing forward, with an open mouth. Accounts (and, perhaps, versions) of its caption vary, but the general gist is as follows:Here you may behold a liar,Well deserving of hell-fire:Every one who likes may pissUpon the learned Doctor Twiss.As an editorial footnote to these etymological footnotes, any reader now inspired to sully the most extraordinarily large urinals east of the Mississippi River needs only swing open the saloon doors of the Old Town Bar in New York City, home to the grand porcelain towers of the Hinsdale Company, whose magnificence dwarfs even the mightiest sword. In contrast, the Old Town s crappers are nothing to speak of.n. a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a non-existent enterprise is fostered by payment of quick returns to first investors using money invested by others Oxford English Dictionary Bernard Madoff s $50 billion swindling operation was described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and it's only appropriate to draw attention to the original Ponzi schemer Charles Ponzi. Born Carlo Ponzi in Italy in 1882, this natural rogue dropped out of the University of Rome in 1903 and headed to America to make his fortune. He worked as an assistant teller in a failing Canadian bank that catered to Italian immigrants and used the money from new accounts to pay off interest payments of bad real-estate loans. He later became a check forger and immigrant smuggler and spent five years in prison before finally making his way to Boston in 1917. Always keen to find a get-rich-quick scheme, Ponzi fell upon an unglamorous but shrewd investment loophole. Nine years earlier, in 1906, the Universal Postal Union congress in Rome started issuing international reply coupons (IRCs) vouchers that could be sent to a participating foreign country in lieu of a self-addressed stamped envelope that a recipient could exchange for local postage to send a reply. Ponzi realized that American inflation after WWI resulted in postage in Italy costing far less than its equivalent in America, which meant that IRCs purchased cheaply in Italy could be cashed in for stamps in the United States and then sold at a tidy profit, all perfectly legally. Of course, to make real money with the system would require millions of coupons to be purchased and traded in for millions of stamps to be sold. Ponzi needed a few saps. Ponzi was dapper and charismatic, and his slogan of a 50 percent return on investment in ninety days attracted enough early interest to get him rolling. He formed the Securities Exchange Company and paid back initial investors handsomely with funds from later investors, which led to a flurry of investment from regular Joes hoping to beat the system. Between December of 1919 and August of 1920, a mere eight months, he had collected around $8 million from more than 10,000 individuals investing their life savings, mortgaging their homes, and reinvesting earlier earnings instead of cashing out. Meanwhile, Ponzi had never purchased a single coupon. What he did purchase was a mansion, a limousine, and passage for his mother to come from Italy to the land of opportunity. There were eventually a few skeptics, including some investigators from the Boston Post, Clarence Barron (the financial analyst for the Barron s financial paper), and a number of state officials. It was Barron who revealed that Ponzi s company would require 160 million postal coupons to cover all investments while the United States Post Office confirmed there were only 27,000 circulating, with none being bought in serious quantities in the United States or Italy. In August of 1920, federal agents raided the Securities Exchange Company and found no coupons. Ponzi was arrested, pleaded guilty to mail fraud, and spent three and a half years in federal prison before facing a nine-year state prison sentence. He quickly jumped bail, fled to Florida to set up a property scam, was deported to Italy where he was less successful as a swindler, and finally died penniless in a Rio de Janeiro charity hospital in 1949. The term Ponzi scheme is generally an American usage. Elsewhere in the world, it is almost always described as a pyramid scheme, although there are several important differences, the most important of which is that pyramid schemes are often quite explicit in their admissions that new investors will be the sole source of payout for early investors (i.e., a portion of each new investor s money is directed to earlier investors, who cash out of the system). The problem with this exponential model is that it is unsustainable, and the funds generated by new participants are soon vastly outpaced by the number of earlier investors expecting payout, at which point the system crashes. In contrast, a true Ponzi scheme requires that the schemer be directly involved with every investor, usually under the guise of some innovative new investment approach, and there have been many, both before and after the rise and fall of its namesake. In 1880, Sarah Howe opened the bogus Ladies Deposit in Boston promising 8 percent interest for women only before she vanished with the money. More than 100 years later, Louis Jay Pearlman ran an extraordinary Ponzi scheme in the 1990s in which he bilked more than $300 million from individuals investing in the fictitious Trans Continental Airlines, Inc. (though his greater crime against humanity is surely the fact that he was the one-time manager for American boy bands N Sync and the Backstreet Boys). Since Ponzi s day, the selling price and exchange value in stamps for international reply coupons have been adjusted to remove the potential for profit that he exploited. Regrettably, no similar regulations exist to remove the potential for profit from boy bands.January 12 is the birthday (1823) of the titan of TV dinners Dr. James Salisbury. Bon appétit.n. Hamburg steak Webster s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second EditionIs it more regrettable that Dr. Salisbury s medical legacy is his chopped beefsteak namesake or that his professional recommendation was to eat it three times a day?James Henry Salisbury was born in New York state in 1823 and worked as a chemist before becoming a physician in 1850. Like Sylvester Graham before him (see graham cracker), Salisbury was convinced that personal diet was the cornerstone of good health, though their theories could not have been more different. Graham was a staunch vegetarian who believed that a carnivorous diet led to lustful urges, while Salisbury was convinced that a daily beef tripleheader could thwart pulmonary tuberculosis, asthma, anemia, and gout.In addition to other battlefield horrors, Salisbury witnessed widespread diarrhea during his stint as a field doctor in the American Civil War. He eventually posited that a steady flow of coffee and ground beef was the best treatment. By 1888, he was the proponent of a full-fledged fad that called for two-thirds of one s diet to be filled with meat and claimed that too many vegetables and starch produced poisons in the digestive system that led to heart disease and even mental illness. Salisbury further advised that the beef be well-done and accompanied by hot water before and after meals.By the time of his death in 1905, the ground-beef patty Dr. Salisbury was prescribing was referred to in many parts as Hamburg steak, though historians (and business owners) often argue whether this refers to Hamburg, Germany, or Hamburg, New York. Regardless, the association with Germany was somewhat inescapable, and the advent of World War I and then World War II prompted some unusual patriotic revisionism. At the same time that sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and the German measles became liberty measles, the Hamburg steak officially became the Salisbury steak. This was by no means the last time such nationalistic menu-tweaking took place. Following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, restaurants in Greece began serving Ellinikos kafes (Greek coffee) instead of Turkikos kafes (Turkish coffee). In 2003, following French opposition to the United States invasion of Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives changed the menus in its cafeterias to serve freedom fries and freedom toast instead of their French counterparts. Meanwhile, the producers of French s mustard issued a press release assuring a worried public that its family name should imply no lack of patriotism. While the original names for hamburgers and sauerkraut have since largely returned to general usage, the Salisbury steak remains a jingoistic holdout. Today, Dr. Salisbury s prescription a minced beef patty, shaped like a steak, and typically served with thick gravy is an all-American icon.January 7 is the anniversary of the 1932 death ofAndré Maginot. Sadly, dying after eating bad oysters was just the start of his unfortunate legacy.line of fortifications along the frontier of France from Switzerland toLuxembourg, begun in the 1920s as a defense against German invasion and widelyconsidered impregnable, but outflanked in 1940n. inextended use, indicating a preoccupation with defense (of the status quo,etc.), or with a particular means of defense Oxford English DictionaryThough French foreignminister André Maginot did not live to witness its naming or its inability towithstand the German invasion in World War II, he will forever be associatedwith one of the greatest military failures in history the Maginot Line.Born in Paris in 1877,Maginot advanced through the political landscape to become the Frenchundersecretary of war in 1913. Had it not been for the outbreak of World War I,Maginot might likely have led a quiet bureaucratic life drinking wine andeating cheese. As it was, Maginot quickly enlisted, distinguished himself incombat, and was promoted to sergeant. He was badly wounded in the leg duringthe defense of Verdun and received France s highest military honor for hisbravery the médaille militaire but his experience of a German invasion stayedwith him for life.The French truly took aglove to the face in World War I, and after the war there were fewer youngFrenchmen, fewer French babies, and a national sense of dread that a future warmight be devastating. So France decided to start nesting. After becoming theminister of war in 1922, Maginot began supporting a plan to build a fortifiedwall, almost two hundred miles long, along France s eastern border fromSwitzerland to Belgium. He successfully argued that it was a better investmentto focus on static defense than modern armor and aircraft. It took four moreyears to secure funding, but construction finally began in 1930. Sadly, Maginotfell ill after an unsuccessful skirmish with tainted oysters and died oftyphoid fever in January 1932 (see also Typhoid Mary). Even though he had notconceived of the idea and was not responsible for its actual design (see also guillotine),the French decided to name the fortification after their fallen hero.The Maginot Line wasactually a series of self-sufficient forts dug deep into the ground,interspersed with machine gun posts, tank obstacles, and pillbox bunkers. Theline was never truly intended as an impregnable defense, only to provideadvance warning against a surprise attack. Unfortunately, its construction inthe 1930s fostered a false sense of security, and, in 1940, German tanksentered France relatively easily by circumventing the line to the north andentering through the Belgian forests. To be fair to the hapless French, theGermans did also use high-tech gliders and explosives to break through theBelgian line, and the French forts on the line proper did hold. But thesubsequent German roughshod run over the French countryside and the fall ofParis within a month led to a lamentable legacy for Maginot and his belovedline.France constructed amonument to Maginot near Verdun in 1966. Several structures along the MaginotLine were auctioned off to the public in 1969, but the rest lie in decay tothis day.December 31 (1860) is the birthday of John Taliaferro Thompson, co-inventor of the infamous Prohibition-era firearm.The 1920s provided dark fodder for the introduction of new words into our lexicon. The gangster era hijacked us, took us for a ride, and served us bathtub gin. But the gun that made the twenties roar was the invention of a World War I general and one-time bovine executioner who wanted a compact trench sweeper for close-quarter encounters.Born into a military family in 1860, John T. Thompson quickly distinguished himself as a soldier and, during the Spanish American War in 1898, became the youngest colonel appointed in the Army. He became a munitions expert and even helped form a Gatling gun unit (see Gatling gun) that supported then-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt s bloody charge at San Juan Hill. Three years later, then-President Roosevelt requested ordnance tests that would eventually bring Thompson to the Chicago stockyards in 1904 to fire different handguns, calibers, and bullet styles at live cattle (in fairness to the steers, Thompson also used human cadavers to assess various ammunitions). Thompson would have an on-again, off-again relationship with the military forever after.Thompson retired from the Army in 1914 and became a chief engineer for Remington. As World War I was marching along without involvement from the U.S. Armed Forces, Thompson became fascinated by the increased use of trench warfare and convinced that troops could really use a handheld, one-man machine gun that could clear out an enemy s position. Working with the designer of a similar weapon, he began work on a prototype for a charming, new, compact, large-caliber submachine gun called The Annihilator. Thompson briefly returned to the military after the United States joined the fight and was a brigadier general in charge of small-arms production before retiring at the war s end in 1918.Though The Annihilator arrived too late to be used by the military, post-war marketing meetings led its manufacturers to rename it the Thompson submachine gun and "Thompson Anti-Bandit Gun" for civilian sales. Costing nearly the half the price of a new car, the Thompson soon experienced illicit distribution into the Prohibition-era underworld where it acquired its street names of tommy gun, Chicago Typewriter, and Chopper. Gangsters loved it, and it achieved peak notoriety in 1929 following the St. Valentine s Day Massacre in which Al Capone s henchmen delivered seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts into seven of Bugs Moran s gang. It was not until after Thompson s death at the age of seventy-nine in 1940 that the U.S. military bought substantial numbers of the weapon for eventual use in World War II, the Korean War, and even Vietnam. Thompson was buried at the United States Military Academy at West Point.Though his namesake was eventually embraced by gangsters and generals alike, its earliest proponent was an unlikely customer The United States Postal Service which purchased the first tommy guns in 1921 following a rash of mail robberies. Decades later, the now-infamous going postal madness of the early 1990s led to the eventual prohibition of firearms in all mail facilities.December 29 (1721) is the birthday of Madame de Pompadour, magnificently bouffanted and one of the most stylish women of eighteenth-century France.n. a woman s hairdo in which the hair is swept up high from the forehead, usually over a roll n. a man s hairdo in which the hair is brushed up straight from the forehead Webster s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second EditionThe somewhat absurd hairstyle beloved by French courtesans and Elvis impersonators alike is the namesake of Madame de Pompadour, former mistress of King Louis XV.Madame de Pompadour was born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson in Paris in 1721. By all accounts she was extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, and well-educated. She also had a bit of a stage mother who ensured that she would learn to play the clavichord, paint, get married, become friends with Voltaire, and charm the pantaloons off the king, all before her twenty-fourth birthday.Within a month of their meeting, Louis XV had established Jeanne-Antoinette at Versailles as his mistress. He wooed her with an estate at Pompadour and gave her the title of marquise (more hoity than a countess, but not as toity as a duchess) so that she could appear in his court. Six months after seducing the king, the new Madame de Pompadour legally separated from her husband and began a lifelong crusade to have things named for her.Despite being loathed by the upper crust for her bourgeoisie background, she became a trusted advisor to the king, and it was she who recommended the hiring of her dear friendÉtienne de Silhouette to be France's new Controller-General (see silhouette). Outside of politics, she wasa devoted patron of the decorative arts, and the unrivaled center of the Parisian fashion scene. Her support of porcelain manufacturing led to the creation of Pompadour pink, a specific color for fine ceramics. Handbags, silks embroidered with sprigs of flowers, and even richly plumed birds (Xipholena punicea, the pompadour cotinga) all bore her name. Though she was only his mistress for five years, legend has it that, after she died at age forty-three from congested lungs, a grieving Louis XV commissioned his craftsmen to create the oblong marquise or navette cut for diamonds to remind him of the delicate shape of her mouth. Well after her death, a purple-uniformed regiment of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was nicknamed The Pompadours owing either to purple being her favorite color or depending on the discretion of your source the color of her underwear. Urban legend has also suggested that the classic French Champagne coupe may have been modeled from her breast Marie Antoinette is another contender for this distinction despite being designed several decades before either s bosom sprung into public consciousness.But it was her hair that brought her infamy. Though she classically wore it in loose rolls around her face, the style that became associated with her name eventually involved sweeping the hair upward to hang high above the forehead. And it was not simply for the ladies. As early as 1885, no less than the Atlanta Constitution newspaper recommended it for the gents: The pompadour is the most convenient way possible to wear the hair. It is cool, and simply running your fingers through it when you get up dresses it for the day. Elvis surely agreed.

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