Did you know that pozzee-wallah was an early 20th century term for a man who is inordinately
fond of jam? It apparently originated in the military. I don’t know what was going on in
the early 1900s that required this slang phrase. I do know that the definition of
pozzee-wallah is just the first of our team’s 20 favorite facts from 20 years of Mental Floss.
My personal entry to this list was, disturbingly, obvious to anyone who knows me:
lobsters pee out of their faces. I will never get sick of this fact! The urine comes from
glands located near the crustacean’s antennae. As Bob Bayer, the former head of the University
of Maine’s Lobster Institute told us a few years ago: "They're greenish brown spots. They actually
look like two pieces of snot—that’s the best way to describe them. You'd have to open them
up to see them." Peeing at one another is part of both fighting and courtship. For lobsters.
John Tyler is not generally considered one of the United States’ most impressive presidents.
After coming into office following William Henry Harrison’s untimely demise in 1841, Tyler was
sometimes called “His Accidency”—not quite “The Great Emancipator,” as presidential nicknames
go. But Tyler did contribute one of our favorite presidential facts. One of his grandsons, Harrison
Ruffin Tyler, is still alive as we film this video. Not great-great-grandson—his dad’s dad was
the 10th president of the United States. It helped that President Tyler’s son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler,
sired his second son at a spritely 74 years old. While we’re talking about family connections,
let’s discuss Mary Shelley and her beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary was so fond of
her husband that after he drowned at age 29, she was said to have kept his
heart—which somehow survived cremation—in a poem wrapped in silk. Creepy, yet romantic.
That means Shelley very well could’ve been carrying around her husband’s heart in 1835.
That same year, in another unusual display of passion, dairy farmer Colonel Thomas S.
Meacham sent president Andrew Jackson a wheel of cheese weighing in at nearly 1400 pounds.
That is—and I never thought I would say this—too much cheese. At his last public reception as
President, Jackson offered up his massive fromage to the masses, who quickly polished it off.
As a contemporary spoilsport noted, “A day more disgustingly spent in the President’s house there
could not with difficulty be . . . Pockets, hats, handkerchiefs, everything was filled with cheese.”
That was, to our eternal delight, not the end of Meachem’s impact on The White House.
As then-Senator John Davis’s wife, Eliza, wrote in an 1838 letter:
Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, “ ... had a hard task to get rid of the smell of cheese,
and in the room where it was cut, he had to air the carpet for many days … ” Let that be
a lesson to all those planning on cutting the cheese in the hallowed halls of government.
Another smelly fact: when a dead beached whale sat on the shore just south of Florence, Oregon,
in 1970, it began to emit a horrifying stench. The Oregon State Highway Department’s solution to this
problem involved a half ton of dynamite. Yes, they decided to blow the whale up. A crowd of onlookers
gathered at the scene, but their hopes for a wholesome whale-exploding diversion were soon
waylaid. When the blast went off, the smell of putrid whale engulfed the area, and a large chunk
of flying whale carcass did some serious damage to a 1969 Oldsmobile parked nearby. Even with the
collateral damage, a large portion of the whale remained, and eventually it had to be buried in
sand. It was not the finest moment for municipal problem-solving, but the area’s residents
evidently have a good sense of humor about the whale thing. In 2020, Florence unveiled a new
public space: Exploding Whale Memorial Park. That’s not the only time government employees
had an unconventional idea to deal with an animal issue. In 1948, beavers near Idaho’s Payette Lake
were proving to be a nuisance for the new (human) residents. Officials at the Idaho Department of
Fish and Game wanted to relocate the critters, but driving them through the undeveloped, mountainous
terrain would’ve been difficult—past experience had taught authorities that beavers don’t like
traveling via truck or pack animal—especially when there aren’t any roads to traverse. Instead,
they decided to parachute the animals to their new homes in the wilderness. A
total of 76 beavers were eventually moved, via airplane and surplus World War II parachutes.
Let’s stay on the topic of ridiculous information about animals, which made up a surprising number
of our top 20 favorite facts. Jurassic Park sound designer Gary Rydstrom was responsible, in part,
for some awe-inspiring cinematic moments. Think about the noises made by the brachiosaurus in that
iconic early scene, or the terrifying footsteps of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But Rydstrom’s true genius
best shines through when you hear the movie’s velociraptors bark at one another. That sound
was captured at the Marine World theme park—it’s two tortoises having sex. Showing commitment to
his craft, Rydstrom explained to Vulture, “ … tortoises mating can take a long time. You’ve
got to have plenty of time to sit around and watch and record them.” We salute you, Gary Rydstrom.
Thomas Edison had some nerdy nicknames for his eldest children, Marion and Thomas,
Jr. The elder Edison had worked in the telegraph industry early in his career, and it seems he had
some fond memories of that time. He called his oldest kids “Dot” and “Dash,” like the
Morse Code signals—that is pretty delightful. Wombats poop cubes. I don’t really feel like
that fact needs any further analysis to merit its place on this list, but I will tell you that a
group of researchers may have determined the cause of this unique fecal shape. Wombat intestines are
stretchy, but not uniformly so—the stiffer parts of the organs may help form the unusual sides of
the fecal matter. And there may actually be an evolutionary benefit to this squarish stool.
Science News suggests that the shape lends itself to stacking and doesn’t
roll off of rocks as easily as other feces would. This helps when wombats mark their territory,
and the smell may even act as a nighttime navigational aid for the adorable marsupials.
If you enjoy pumpkin pie with your thanksgiving meal, you may want to save a word of gratitude
for mastodon poop. Tens of thousands of years ago, North American megafauna had an affinity for wild
gourds—the ancestors of squashes and pumpkin. This made the giant creatures somewhat unusual amongst
animals, as the plants had a bitter-tasting toxin in their flesh that kept many would-be
gourd gourmands away. By dispersing gourd seeds through their feces, creatures like mastodons
helped widely propagate the crops until humans decided to domesticate them—the, um, squashes
that is. Though I would love a pet mastodon if we can get ahold of that Jurassic Park technology.
Here is a far more horrifying food fact: Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti once called for the
abolition of pasta. Marinetti was a leading figure in the futurist movement, which was a
far-ranging school of thought that began in the art world and spread to other parts of society.
Eventually, Futurists were advocating for a future in which the government replaced all
food with nutritional pills, powders, and other artificial substitutes. Until chemists could
create such innovations, the Futurists advocated swapping out pasta with rice, which was easier
to produce in Italy. They thought this would “ … free Italy from expensive foreign wheat.”
Marinetti co-wrote the “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking” with Luigi Colombo. In it, they described
pasta as an “absurd Italian gastronomic religion” and accused pasta lovers of being “shackled by its
ball and chain like convicted lifers or [carrying] its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing. On the subject of foods and beverages
for which moderation is advised, let’s talk about beer. Specifically Jane Austen’s beer,
which she was fond of brewing. One of Austen’s specialties—aside from devastatingly romantic
comedies of manners—was her spruce beer. She was also a big fan of mead, apparently. It might
sound like an odd hobby, but in the Regency era and years prior, it wasn’t unusual for
women to brew beer—we actually got into that history a bit in an episode of Food History.
In a different episode of Food History we discussed an amazing fact about the science
of food. Nacho cheese—the semi-liquid stuff you might get at a sports arena—is
often made possible by an ingredient with the chemical formula Na 3 C 6 H 5 O 7.
Seriously. When Frank Liberto, the owner of Ricos Products, had the idea to sell nachos at sporting
events in the late 1970s, he knew customers wouldn’t wait around for cheese to melt.
Adding a specific kind of salt allows the proteins in the cheese to become more soluble.
That means the emulsified liquid and fat is less likely to separate when melted, creating a cheese
that melts more easily and stays liquidy. One of the most popular compounds used to achieve this
perpetually melty cheese is sodium citrate, whose chemical formula spells out nacho.
You might think that Goodyear is the world’s leading producer of tires,
but to identity the real #1 in that field you have to think bigger. Or, smaller. They won’t help you
when your car pops a flat, but the LEGO company actually makes around 381 million tiny tires for
their sets each year, making them, technically, the world’s most prolific tire manufacturer.
Let’s stay in the toy aisle. Christopher Clayton Hutton was an intelligence officer during World
War II who helped supply Allied soldiers with tools to escape German POW camps. Hutton’s
clever methods included hiding piano wire in a pair of trousers and a flashlight in a bicycle
pump. While German authorities were eventually able to stymie many of Hutton’s methods,
one particular strategy evaded Axis interference. With the help of a Leeds-based manufacturing
company, Hutton hid escape kits for POWs in ordinary-looking board games like Monopoly.
Games like Monopoly were often allowed in the prison camps, as Germans believed
it was a diversion for soldiers who might otherwise use their free time to plot escapes.
Unbeknownst to them, some prisoners were actually receiving contraband within the gamesets like
silk maps—which could help them navigate to safety once outside of the prisons, and were
quieter than paper maps. Along with the maps, the Monopoly boards could contain a small compass,
a saw, and a file. Real money could even be concealed within the play money of the game.
It’s a fascinating story, laid out in greater detail in Hutton’s biography, Official Secret.
In total, according to historian Philip Orbanes, over 700 airmen used kits like
the ones prepared by Hutton to escape. If you want to bring a pet fish aboard
your next flight—and who doesn’t?—there’s no need to hide her inside a board game. The TSA
allows people to fly with live fish, as long as they’re contained in water and
inside a transparent container. And yes, it seems that water can exceed the usual 3.4-ounce limit.
If we set our sights even higher than those flying fish, we can recall the first moon
landing. But if you want photographic evidence of Neil Armstrong’s time on the lunar surface,
you have a surprising dearth of options. Buzz Aldrin’s suit lacked the special camera holder
that Armstrong’s had, so Neil handled most of the photography. As the astronauts had a limited
amount of time on the surface, Neil focused on taking incredible photographs of his surroundings,
not on rounding out his Tinder profile with the ultimate travel shot. Besides, Armstrong was
married at the time…and Tinder didn’t exist. Buzz Aldrin did spend a bit of time as a
lunar shutterbug, providing us with a shot of Armstrong from the back,
but we do have a photo of Neil from the front, as well—and it’s hidden inside a
very famous photo of Aldrin. If you look closely at Buzz’s visor in this shot,
you’ll see that it contains the reflection of Neil Armstrong. The first moon mirror selfie,
an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, courage, and collaboration.
And then there’s the time Mr. Belvedere sat on his own genitals.
OK, it was actually actor Christopher Hewett—Mr. Belvedere would never do such a thing—but
that ridiculous story was confirmed by Belvedere producer Jeff Stein.
“He fell backwards riding in a convertible in the Hollywood Christmas Parade,” Stein said,
briefly halting production on the show. I will not out the Mental Floss editor who chose that
as their favorite fact in 20 years of publication, to protect the innocent and/or ignorant.
And I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t wrap up with a Titanic fact, even if my producers have
strongly suggested a moratorium on Celine Dion impressions. Over the years, a lot of suggestions
have been made on how to salvage more of the famed vessel. My personal favorite dates back to 1985,
when an expert proposed filling the wrecked ship with 180,000 tons of Vaseline in polyester bags.
Theoretically it would've hardened in the cold waters of the Atlantic and floated the ship
up to a more accessible depth. Sadly for science, and for the Unilever company,
the petroleum jelly plan never came to be. I wanna send you all at home 20 years worth
of gratitude from all of us at Mental Floss. I’ve been here for the last 9 years, and I can
honestly say that running the website and making videos for this channel has been the most fun
I’ve had in my professional life. Our audience is a bunch of curious weirdos, just like us,
and we love you for it. And if this is the first Mental Floss video you’re watching,
please subscribe and start catching up with the hundreds of videos on our channel. I’m pretty
sure if you watch the entire catalogue, you’ll have learned the entire sum of human knowledge.
Or at least a healthy slice of the human knowledge about animal poop. We’ll see you next time!