by Josh Bazell
Note that turtles can buffer their lactic acid, but only for six months or so of inactivity.
Sherlock Holmes says “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth” in The Sign of the Four, 1890. He uses another version of the same phrase later in The Sign of the Four, as well as in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” 1892, “Silver Blaze” (my favorite Holmes short story), 1893, “The Adventure of the Priory School,” 1905, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” 1917, and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” 1927. So apparently he means it. The other contender for stupidest thing said by Holmes is his report of having met the “head llama” of Tibet in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 1903, which people who have difficulty separating Holmes from reality will tell you was just a spelling error by Watson. Like they don’t have llamas in Tibet!*
Although Sarah Palin is a real person, the events of this book, as I’ve said earlier, are entirely fictional. I have never met Palin, nor have any of my characters, who are themselves fictional. I know of no events involving Palin similar to the ones that transpire in Minnesota in the book, and as far as I know I have entirely fabricated the belief system Palin espouses to Pietro in the book, as well as her relationship with anyone like the (also fictional) Reverend John 3:16 Hawke. The character of Palin’s young relation is fictional, too, and not meant to resemble any actual relation of Palin’s, young or otherwise. Furthermore, although I provide citations below for some references in the book that might be taken to apply to past events from the life of the actual Palin, please note that the actual Palin stands nowhere near the frontline of the anti-rationalist movement in the U.S., even among current and former politicians. For example, as I write this, the Republican frontrunner for the 2012 presidential election is Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas once proclaimed a period of three “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,”* and who has publicly repudiated both evolution and human involvement in climate change.*
Palin’s quotation of Westbrook Pegler in her acceptance speech as Republican candidate for vice president runs, in total, as follows: “And a writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.” The second part is particularly odd, since Pegler once called Truman “a thin-lipped hater,”* but may simply have to do with the fact that both the line in the speech and the “thin-lipped hater” line appear on the same page in Pat Buchanan’s autobiography,* and maybe the speech was concocted in a hurry by someone familiar, but only partly, with that book. Palin describes the writing of the speech as a “team effort” led by Matthew Scully in her memoir, Going Rogue, 2009.* For additional details see “The Man Behind Palin’s Speech,” by Massimo Calabresi, Time, 4 Sept 2008. Details on the tightness of the schedule leading up to the speech are from “Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting,” by Elizabeth Bumiller, the New York Times, 1 Sept 2008. For more information on Pegler see “Dangerous Minds: William F. Buckley soft-pedals the legacy of journalist Westbrook Pegler in The New Yorker,” by Diane McWhorter, Slate, 4 Mar 2004, which is my source for the “clearly it is the bounden duty…” quote. My source for the quote about RFK is “Palin and Pegler,” by Marty Peretz, the New Republic, 13 Sept 2008.
Video of Palin being prayed over by Pastor Thomas Muthee, famous for claiming to have successfully battled a witch named Mama Jane in Kenya, in which Muthee asks Jesus to “bring finances her way” and protect Palin from “witchcraft” is available on YouTube and elsewhere under the title “Sarah Palin Gets Protection from Witches.”*
Palin’s mother is quoted recounting Palin’s father’s fondness for ambushing seals as they surfaced in Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin, by Lorenzo Benet, 2009, pg. 9.*
Palin not knowing which three countries were in the North American Free Trade Agreement was reported on-air by Fox News Channel reporter Carl Cameron on 5 Nov 2008. Cameron also reported that Palin didn’t know until debate preparations began that Africa was a continent and not a country.* Similarly, Michael Joseph Gross in “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” Vanity Fair, Oct 2010 reports that at the time of her nomination Palin didn’t know who Margaret Thatcher was, although this seems to have changed: Palin’s Facebook page of 14 June 2010 called Thatcher “one of my heroines.”
Current discussion of Israel, particularly in Europe, resembles in tenor and factuality the conversation that swept Europe in 1348 about whether to burn the Jews for causing the Black Death. For some reason,* and to the detriment of Palestinians as well as Israelis,* large numbers of people who have never, say, read a book on the subject by someone whose credentials they trust, and who might be surprised by what they’d learn if they did, now hold as their strongest political belief that Israel—not just the right-wing government that it, like most western countries (including the U.S. and U.K.), currently has, but the entire country—should be dismantled, and its civilian population, 20 percent of whom are Arab, subjected to random violence, something that gets wished on no other people in the world. For more on this phenomenon, see A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, by Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, 2009, or, if you can take it, Anthony Julius’s magisterial Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, 2010.* Alternately, perform the following thought experiment: imagine the largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation after the Murdoch family has turned out to be the government of Israel—instead of who it really is, which is the Saudi royal family. Now picture some British people.*
For evidence-based information on modern Israel and its history, two books that are particularly short and easy to read but at the same time heavily annotated and (to my mind) convincing are The Case for Israel, by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, 2003, which is organized into chapters like “Did European Jews Displace Palestinians?” and “Is Israel a Racist State?,” and The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, by James L. Gelvin of UCLA, 2005. Longer books I like on the history of the mess include Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, professor and head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program of King’s College, London, 2010, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev of Haaretz, 2000, and A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard M. Sachar of George Washington University, 1985. Robin Wright’s Dreams and Shadows from a couple of footnotes ago is a great interview-based account of the more recent history. For even less of a commitment I recommend the attempt to separately describe the history of Israel from the perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs generally in the first chapter of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, by Dennis Ross, chief Middle East peace talks negotiator for the Clinton administration, 2005, although the whole book is good.* If you don’t have the time or interest to read even that much, but feel compelled to have strong opinions about Israel anyway, that’s your business. By which I mean shut the fuck up about it, at least around me.
There are fewer books in English about Tiananmen Square than you might think.* For the crackdown and the origins and legacy of what has come to be called in China the July 4th Movement, the sources that have been most important to me have been Tell the World: What Happened in China and Why, by Liu Binyan with Ruan Ming and Xu Gang, translated by Henry L. Epstein, 1989; and Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, by Philip P. Pan, 2008. Liu was a prominent Chinese intellectual who was investigated by the Central Disciplinary Committee (which doesn’t sound fun) after an earlier round of student protests in 1987. Ruan was one of the actual student demonstrators. I don’t really know what Xu’s deal was, but his chapter in the book is good. Their book overall, though showing some of the strains of having been produced so quickly after the events, is invaluable, and its narrative of the massacre happening en route to the Square rathe
r than within it (an element semantically exploited by the Chinese government to argue that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre) was corroborated by leaked U.S. embassy cables published by the U.K. Telegraph in June 2011.* Philip Pan is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. His book is brilliant and will make you newly appreciate your own liberty, then make you wonder whether you would fight for it as hard as some of Pan’s heroes have. Li Gang is that guy’s father for sure. Particularly helpful was his profile of Wang Junxiu.
The number of people killed remains unknown. There were at least a million people involved in the demonstrations in Beijing. Millions more participated in over two hundred other Chinese cities. There were 120,000 arrests afterward. The Chinese Red Cross is said to have initially reported 2,600 dead during the first night of shooting in Beijing alone, but later retracted that number under pressure from the government.*
The idea that closing a coal plant in China could quickly cause noticeable changes in child development, likely due to a reduction in exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that can bind to and warp DNA, comes from the research of Dr. Frederica P. Perera of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. However, its presentation here is exaggerated and not at all meant to accurately reflect Dr. Perera’s actual studies or findings. For more on the dangers of ash from coal plants, see “Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste,” by Mara Hvistendahl, Scientific American, 13 Dec 2007.*
For more on income disparity in China, see “China’s unequal wealth-distribution map causing social problems,” by Sherry Lee, ChinaPost.com.tw, 28 Jun 2010, and “Hidden trillions widen China’s wealth gap: study,” by Liu Zhen, Emma Graham-Harrison, and Nick Macfie, Reuters, 12 Aug 2010.
For information on how radio stations work I am indebted to Douglas Thompson of Minnesota Public Radio / American Public Media Engineering and to the RCA section of The Broadcast Archive (oldradio.com) maintained by Barry Mishkind.
I first came across the idea that the “H” in Jesus H. Christ, while probably an eta, might also (as “an old bio major joke”) stand for “haploid,” in “Why do folks say ‘Jesus H. Christ’?,” by Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope, 1986. Other sources give different definitions of the “IHS” monogram, such as “Iesus Hominem Salvator,” “In hoc signo,” etc. But the “IHS” entry by René Maere in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Herbemann et al., 1910, agrees with Adams.
The biblical quote about apples is from Song of Solomon 2:12. In the King James: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” Which to me sounds more like Shakespeare than Psalm 46 ever did.
Note that while fresh fog is transparent to infrared, so-called old fog, which has had time to equilibrate in temperature with the air, is opaque.
The amphibious boat that appears in the book is based on models produced by the Sealegs corporation. See sealegs.com for pictures and other information.
Promotional materials of United Poultry Concerns quote the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service as counting 8,259,200,000 “broiler” chickens slaughtered in the U.S. in 2000; the 22-million-a-day figure is just that figure divided by 365. Non-broiler chickens I don’t know from. Incidentally, Humanefacts.org says chickens are typically slaughtered at five weeks of age but have a natural life span of seven years.
Ronald Wright argues in A Short History of Progress (see section on catastrophic paleontology, above) that technology progresses logarithmically because every new piece of it has at least a theoretical chance of interacting with every previously existing piece. Patent law, of course, would limit this.
The controversy over whether modern, or “atypical,” antipsychotic medications are any more effective than older and much cheaper ones* was probably inevitable in a system where the only thing pharmaceutical companies have to do to get a new drug approved for sale in the U.S. is show that it doesn’t kill people (at least within the time frame of the study) and that it works better than a placebo. (In other words, they don’t have to test it against other medications, which in addition to being cheaper could be twice as effective with half the number of side effects.) Not to mention a system in which you can spend 11.5 billion advertising dollars a year* promoting new drugs that, if they were actually better, physicians would presumably prescribe anyway.
The quote from Karl E. Weick is from Weick’s Making Sense of the Organization, 2001, Vol. 1, pg. 105, but cites work by him going back to 1985. I added the italics. Many thanks to Dr. Weick for kind permission to use it.
The statistics about “New World” populations and Spanish gold are from Ronald Wright’s What Is America?, pgs. 20–30, but Virgil Burton’s worldview is influenced by all three of Wright’s books. (Again, see section on catastrophic paleontology, above.) Note that the term “First Nations” is uncommon in the U.S., where “Native Americans” is used much more often, but since the Ojibwe lands are on both sides of the border I’ve taken the liberty.
There are reasons to at least wonder whether Hitler had syphilis besides the chapter of that name in Mein Kampf. By the end of his life, Hitler had numerous symptoms consistent with late-stage neurosyphilis, such as tremors, hallucinations, digestive problems, skin lesions, and so on. The memoirs of his former confidant and press agent Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (who also claimed to have invented the “Sig Heil” chant, basing it on the fight song of his alma mater, Harvard) say he heard Hitler contracted syphilis at a young age in Vienna. Most sources on the topic (e.g., Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, by Deborah Hayden, 2003, which is agnostic) make a point of not trying to use syphilis to excuse or even explain specific actions taken by Hitler, but occasionally you luck into articles like “Did Hitler unleash the Holocaust because a Jewish prostitute gave him syphilis?,” by Jenny Hope, the Daily Mail (London), 20 June 2007. In any case, the symptoms could also have had other causes. For example, D. Doyle in the Feb 2005 issue of the Journal of the Royal College of Edinburgh notes that “the bizarre and unorthodox medications given to Hitler [during the last nine years of his life], often for undisclosed reasons, include topical cocaine, injected amphetamines, glucose, testosterone, estradiol… corticosteroids [and] a preparation made from a gun cleaner, a compound of strychnine and atropine, an extract of seminal vesicles, and numerous vitamins and ‘tonics.’ ”* Doyle calls Hitler a “lifelong hypochondriac,” and concludes that “it seems possible that some of Hitler’s behaviour, illnesses and suffering can be attributed to his medical care.” See also “Did Adolf Hitler have syphilis?,” by FP Retief and A Wessels, in the Oct 2005 issue of the South African Medical Journal, which examines evidence that, Retief and Wessels conclude, “swings the balance of probability away from tertiary syphilis.”
For a relatively recent discussion of the origins of syphilis, see “Genetic Study Bolsters Columbus Link to Syphilis,” by John Noble Wilford, in the New York Times of 15 Jan 2008.
Despite much subsequent information coming to light, the best book about Hitler in his bunker, as far as I’m concerned, remains The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, originally published in 1947 but revised, God spare me, until 1995.
The one-in-four figure for diabetes among the Ojibwe/Chippewa is for people over twenty-five years of age, and is from “Diabetes in a northern Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Prevalence and incidence of diabetes and incidence of major complications, 1986–1988,” by SJ Rith-Najarian, SE Valway, and DM Gohdes, in Diabetes Care, 16:1 266–70, Jan 1993.
The story of Houdini shocking Arthur Conan Doyle by pretending to remove the end of his thumb is in Houdini!!!: The Career of Erich Weiss, by Kenneth Silverman, 1997, which is definitive and a great read.*
When I talk about the ancients linking invisibility to bad behavior, I’m thinking most directly about the parable of the Ring of Gyges in Book II of Plato’s Republic (which is a clear influence on Tolkien, although it’s interesting that in Plato, Gyges’ use of the ring, whatever moral corruption it brings, leads to lasting
material success for his descendants, one of whom is Croesus), but also about the association of vision with shame (and both invisibility and sightlessness with relief from shame) in Oedipus Rex and so on.
Current digital pocket cameras often have a simple IR filter over the light sensor, because few of them still use IR to focus. For example, if your camera emits a series of stuttering flashes before it takes a picture in the dark, it’s focusing with visible light from the flash. In which case you could theoretically remove the IR filter and (to keep the signal from being drowned out) replace it with something that filters visible light but not IR,* ending up with a functional night-vision relay.
The fake article on bull sharks isn’t meant to be entirely scientifically sound but mostly is, because it draws heavily on two actual research papers, “Osmoregulation in elasmobranchs: A review for fish biologists, behaviourists, and ecologists,” by N. Hammerschlag, Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology, September 2006; 39(3): 209–228 and “Osmoregulation in Elasmobranchs,” by P. Pang, R. Griffith, and J. Atz, American Zoology, 17: 365–377 (1977).
John Boehner spokesman Michael Steel* is quoted from “House G.O.P. Eliminating Global Warming Committee,” by Jennifer Steinhauer, in the Caucus blog of the New York Times, 1 Dec 2010. Darrell Issa is quoted from “12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming,” by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 3 Feb 2011. The number of investigations debunking the “Climategate” scam (five) is from “British Panel Clears Scientists,” by Justin Gillis, the New York Times, 7 Jul 2010. Note that Darrell Issa has never to my knowledge been convicted of anything, nor has he been charged with arson. For more on his indictment for stealing a car (1972) and indictment for grand theft (1980), both dropped, and for details about suspicions that Issa may have been responsible for the 1982 burning of a warehouse three weeks after he more than quadrupled the fire insurance on it (as well as for details about his arrest on gun charges, and biography in general), see “Don’t Look Back: Darrell Issa, the congressman about to make life more difficult for President Obama, has had some troubles of his own,” by Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, 24 Jan 2011.
