MODERN TIMES: “MAD MIKE” HOARE
Thomas Michael Hoare was an Irishman, born in 1920, who served the British in North Africa during World War II. After the war he moved to South Africa, where he became one of the most notorious mercenaries in modern history. He lived the high life in South Africa in between stints leading his “Wild Geese” mercenary troops in wars in the Congo, Angola, and South Africa from 1961 though the 1970s. (They were the inspiration for the 1978 film The Wild Geese starring Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore.) Hoare’s downfall came in 1981 when he and a force of 43 soldiers made a botched attempt to overthrow the government of the island nation of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. They ended up hijacking a plane to get back to South Africa, where all of them were arrested. Hoare served four years in a South African prison—not for attempting to overthrow a government, but for the hijacking. An inquiry later found that South African Defense Force officials, and possibly French and American intelligence officials as well, were involved in the planning and financing of the attempted coup.
EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES
If you are in need of some hired killers with a respectable corporate feel—these are your guys. EO was incorporated as a “private military company” around 1990, just after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The first leader of the group: Eeben Barlow, former leader of South Africa’s eerily-named Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert group whose job it had been to perform “black ops” against black South African organizations. EO didn’t just have a few mercenaries to offer: they claimed to have more than 3,000 highly-trained soldiers, plus weaponry including guns, anti-aircraft missiles, tanks, planes—you name it. They were a war waiting to happen…for a price. In the 1990s, they fought battles in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Indonesia, to name just a few. They were also hired by multinational corporations for “security,” including—allegedly—De Beers, to protect diamond mines, and Chevron and Texaco, to protect oil drilling operations in Africa. EO disbanded in 1999 (maybe).
Super Bowl XXVI, in 1992, was the first Super Bowl at which the National Anthem was performed in sign language as well as sung.
SIMON MANN
Mann was born in 1952 and, like Mike Hoare, was a former British military officer. He became involved in Executive Outcomes in the 1990s, then started his own mercenary outfit, called Sandline International, in 1996. Sandline mostly fought rebel groups in African countries, but became well known internationally when an attempt to put down a rebellion in Papua New Guinea—for which Sandline charged $36 million—went awry and led to the toppling of the nation’s government. Things went awry again in 2004 when Mann and 69 mercenary troops attempted to take over Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa. At the behest of a group supporting exiled ex-president Severo Moto, they were arrested on the way there—in Zimbabwe—and after years of legal wrangling, Mann was sentenced to 34 years in prison in Equatorial Guinea. Mann claimed the coup was planned and financed by a reclusive London oil tycoon (Equatorial Guinea has a lot of oil) named Ely Calil. Mann said the goal of the operation was to install exiled opposition leader Severo Moto, who was living in Madrid, as president. Calil admitted involvement, but said he thought Mann and his mercenaries were simply going to provide Moto with security for a trip to Equatorial Guinea. Calil was never charged with a crime. Mann also named Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as a financier and member of the “management team” of the coup plot. In 2005 Thatcher pleaded guilty to being “unwittingly” involved, and was fined $500,000 and given a four-year prison sentence (suspended).
ACTUAL NEWS ITEM
“An Australian Army vehicle worth $74,000 has gone missing after being painted with camouflage.”
IT’S A WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction.
SEX, VIOLENCE, BUTTER PECAN
Leon Kass is President George W. Bush’s Morals and Ethics advisor. In 1994 he published an essay about what he believed to be the worst moral menace threatening human dignity today: ice cream. “Licking an ice cream cone,” Kass wrote, “is a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America, but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.”
THE STRONG, SILENT TYPE
Eija-Riitta Eklöf of Sweden saw film footage of the Berlin Wall on TV when she was a child. It began a lifelong love affair that, in 1979, culminated in “marriage.” Eklöf threw a wedding ceremony at the Wall in front of a group of friends and changed her last name to Berliner-Mauer (“Berlin wall” in German). She claims to have had a loving (and physical) relationship with the Wall until it was torn down in 1989 (in what Berliner-Mauer calls “frenzied attacks by a mob”). Now, after two decades of widowhood, Berliner-Mauer says she’s still not ready to begin dating again. “The Great Wall of China is attractive, but he’s too thick,” she told a London newspaper. “My husband was sexier.”
PAWS BETWEEN EACH COMPRESSION
In 2008 German medical student Janine Bauer took her year-old son to the zoo in the city of Halle. While looking at the tigers, Bauer noticed that one of the baby tigers was choking on a piece of meat. Zookeepers came to the aid of the tiger and got the meat out of its throat, but it still passed out. So Bauer, a medical student, offered to help. She performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions, and after about four minutes, the tiger regained consciousness. The grateful zoo named the tiger Johann, after Bauer’s son.
That comes to about…12 lattes? In 2007 Starbucks sold $26 million worth of coffee every day.
LAND SHARK
Sam Hawthorne, a 14-year-old from Dudley, England, was attacked by a small shark in 2008. His mother saved him—she heard the boy’s screams and pried the shark, which had clamped down on his cheek, off her blood-covered son. Hawthorne escaped with just a small scar. The weird part: The shark had been dead for years and was mounted on a wall in Sam’s bedroom. While sleepwalking, he ran into it and knocked it off the wall. Its teeth dug into his cheek for 15 minutes before he woke up.
NOT THEIR TYPE
In December 2007, authorities in Sarasota, Florida, responded to a call about a suspicious package found under a stairwell in a parking garage. Police closed off several blocks and called in the bomb squad, who prepared to detonate the device. At the last moment they realized that the strange-looking contraption wasn’t a bomb—it was an old-fashioned manual typewriter.
HOLY INSULTING TRADE, BATMAN!
In professional sports, players sign contracts and basically become the property of their team. When they’re traded, it’s generally done in exchange for other players, money, or draft picks. But not always. At the beginning of the 2008 baseball season, pitcher John Odom was traded from the minor league Calgary Vipers to the Laredo Broncos. In exchange for Odom, the Vipers got 10 baseball bats, worth about $650. (Odom reports that umpires, players, and coaches now relentlessly call him “Batman.”) It’s not the first odd deal the Vipers have made. While renovating their stadium in 2004, the team traded a pitcher for 1,500 new seats.
A SHOT IN THE DARK
A 35-year-old man was walking to his car in a parking lot in Guelph, Ontario, when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his leg. He went to the hospital, where doctors discovered a bullet wound. But the man had been alone and hadn’t heard any shots, so where’d the bullet come from? Police believe a man taking target practice on his property in Waterloo, more than a mile away from Guelph, was the culprit. The stray bullet had traveled through “several acres and a tree-lined area” en route to the unlucky victim.
The average American household gets 104 TV stations, but watches only about 16 of them.
THE TAPEWORM DIET
And a few other odd ways people try to lose those extra pounds they’ve been lugging around.
NAME: The Original Grapefruit Diet
BACKGROUND: The granddaddy of modern fad diets, it was known as the Hollywood Diet when it first caught on back in the 1930s. How’
d it work? Through the supposed fat-burning power of the enzymes in grapefruit.
DESCRIPTION: Breakfast was half a grapefruit and tea or coffee. Coffee drinking was encouraged, probably to pep up the food-deprived dieter, who was allowed very few calories—only 800 per day in some versions of the diet (the typical person eats about 2,000 calories per day). Every lunch and dinner started with half a grapefruit and ended with either coffee or tea. The rest of lunch might be two eggs, a tomato salad with vinegar and herbs (no oil), and a piece of melba toast. Dinner, after the grapefruit, might be six ounces of chicken or lean meat and half a head of lettuce with a tomato. The diet lasted for 12 days. Strangely, the rapid weight loss caused by the diet was attributed to the magic of grapefruit…rather than to the lack of food.
NAME: The Cabbage Soup Diet
BACKGROUND: The exact origin of this fad diet is unknown, but it became popular in the 1980s when it was passed around via fax machines (much like similar e-mail fads today).
DESCRIPTION: A seven-day diet (and it’s so boring that seven days is probably all anyone could stand). It consists of homemade cabbage soup—as much of it as you like on any day of the diet. There are numerous recipes in circulation, but here’s the basic one: cabbage (and other fresh vegetables), canned tomatoes, onion soup mix, and V8 juice. On Day 1 you eat cabbage soup, plus any fruit except bananas. Day 2: same soup, vegetables (no bananas), baked potato with butter. Day 3: more soup, fruits and vegetables (no potatoes, no bananas). Day 4: still more soup, as many as six bananas, fat-free milk. Well, you get the idea. The obvious drawback of the cabbage diet: flatulence.
San Francisco has more dogs (120,000) than children under 14 (93,000).
NAME: The Caveman Diet
BACKGROUND: Also called the Stone Age Diet, the Paleolithic Diet, or the Hunter-Gatherer Diet. Proponents are a little vague about the actual time frame to which it refers, but the idea is that cavemen were thin and healthy from eating the animals and plants they hunted and gathered. So if we emulate their diet, we’ll avoid modern illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.
DESCRIPTION: Lean meats, eggs, and seafood are a big part of the Caveman Diet, as are raw fruits and vegetables (although you’re allowed to cook the vegetables). But you can’t have any grains (or grain products, like pasta), legumes, potatoes, dairy products, yeast, vinegar, sugar, salt. Good news for Neanderthals: Some paleo diets allow diet soda, coffee, wine, and beer. (Yee-ha!)
NAME: The Cookie Diet
BACKGROUND: The 1975 brainchild of Dr. Sanford Siegal, the Cookie Diet sounds as if you’re going to get to eat cookies—and you are…but not just any cookies.
DESCRIPTION: You eat six of Dr. Siegal’s special cookies—“made under his personal supervision in his private bakery”—followed by a high-protein, low-carb dinner of six ounces of meat or fish and one cup of green vegetables. That’s it for the day, a total of about 800 calories. The cookies, with a “secret protein blend” that supposedly suppresses hunger, come in five flavors: chocolate, oatmeal raisin, coconut, blueberry, and banana. The Cookie Diet made big news when Madonna complained that while her husband Guy Ritchie was on the diet he lost interest in sex.
NAME: Tapeworm Diet Pills
BACKGROUND: This one almost lands in the “urban legend” category. But it’s true, and it goes back to the craze for quack-diets between 1900 and 1920.
DESCRIPTION: The pills contained live tapeworms, which, according to the plan, would infest your gut (just as they do when dogs get them) and mess with your intestines, making you lose weight. There are a number of problems: Tapeworm infestation causes, among other things, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, flatulence, nausea…and pieces of worm passing through your system. (Ewww!)
The track of oil left on the surface of water by a fast-swimming whale is called glip.
THE COMSTOCK LODE, PART II
Here’s the second installment of our story on one of the most famous mining strikes in American history. (Part I is on page 47.)
GET A LODE OF THIS
When you’re pulling gold out of the earth by the pound, word of what you’re doing has a way of getting out. In June 1850, a rancher named B. A. Harrison, living in Truckee Meadows, about 10 miles away from the Comstock mine, learned of the strike and went to see it for himself. He collected some samples and brought them to the town of Grass Valley, where he gave pieces to friends. One of them, a local judge (and a miner) named James Walsh, had the ore “assayed,” or analyzed, to see what was in it and how much it was worth.
The assayer estimated that an average ton of the ore would yield about $969 worth of gold. No surprise there; Harrison and Walsh knew there was plenty of gold in the ore. But what really stunned everybody—including the assayer, who was so incredulous that he tested the ore a second time—was that each ton would also yield nearly $3,000 worth of silver.
Silver? What silver? The assayer explained to Harrison and Walsh that the blue dirt that had proved so frustrating to the prospectors was actually silver sulfide, or silver ore, and a very rich deposit of it at that. It was, according to the experts, “an almost solid mass of silver.” As Harrison had seen with his own eyes, the exasperated prospectors had already dug up tons and tons of the blue ore and were dumping it in huge waste piles all over the place. They had absolutely no idea what they had stumbled onto.
SHHH!
That night, Harrison, Walsh, and a few other associates made plans to sneak out of town the following morning without attracting attention, so that they could stake their own claims next to the existing ones and maybe even buy out the original claims if they could. But who could keep that big a secret? If you won the lottery on Monday evening, could you really keep it to yourself until Tuesday morning? At least one person must have talked, because by the time the men were ready to leave the following morning, Grass Valley was buzzing with news of the discovery.
What a fun guy! A mature mushroom can release more than 16 billion spores.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
It took just days for word of the strike to spread from Grass Valley to the California gold country. Soon miners who’d been unlucky there began abandoning their existing claims and heading east. But the real rush didn’t begin until after Judge Walsh had shipped nearly 40 tons of the ore to San Francisco in fall of 1859, where it yielded more than $118,000 worth of gold and silver.
Many of San Francisco’s leading citizens were men who had struck it rich during the gold rush of 1849 and had managed to hang onto their money since then. They weren’t the kind of fellows who took to the hills chasing every rumor of a new strike. But seeing the newly minted bullion in the offices of Walsh’s bankers made believers out of everyone, and soon they, too, were on their way over the Sierra Nevadas. By the first week of November, when snowfall blocked the mountain passes for the rest of the winter, several hundred people—from the wealthiest speculators to the lowliest prospectors—had made their way to the area and were riding out the winter in tents or whatever shelter they could improvise.
DOWN…AND OUT
Mining the surface gold and silver out of a deposit like the Comstock Lode is easy enough: the ore was so soft, in fact, that it could be mined with just a shovel. But once all the surface ore is gone and prospectors have to start digging deeper into the earth to get at the rest, mining becomes a much more dangerous and expensive proposition. And who knew how long the rich deposit would hold out? Each time the prospectors lifted a spadeful of ore, they faced the very real prospect of finding nothing but worthless dirt or rock underneath.
The thinking among experienced prospectors was that the best way to profit from a lucky strike was to sell out before the limits of the strike had been discovered—hopefully at top dollar to feverish investors foolish enough to think the good times would last forever. So when the big money boys from San Francisco rolled into camp, many of the original claim holders sold out for what must have seemed like obscene profits at the time and happily went on their way.
The computer acronym TWAIN stands for “Technology Without An Interesting Name.”
FINDERS, WEEPERS
Pat McLaughlin sold his claim for $3,500. His partner, Peter O’Reilly, held out the longest of all the original stakeholders, eventually selling out for $40,000, after collecting about $5,000 in dividends.
Henry Comstock sold his claim to Judge Walsh for $11,000 and used the money to open mercantile stores in Carson City and Silver City, both of which he hoped would profit from the mining trade he’d helped create. No such luck—both stores failed. Comstock spent the rest of his life roaming the American West, looking for a second mother lode. No luck there, either. In September 1870, Comstock—by now broke, broken, and mentally deranged—committed suicide in Bozeman, Montana.
NAMING RIGHTS
Old Virginny, the man who made the first discovery, was also one of the very first to sell out, reportedly surrendering his interest in the mine for “an old horse, worth about $40, and a few dollars in cash.” Another version of the story says he got a couple of blankets and a bottle of whiskey in the bargain as well. It didn’t make much difference either way—Old Virginny wouldn’t have lived long enough to enjoy his riches even if he’d gotten any. In the summer of 1861, he was thrown from a bucking mustang while drunk and died from head injuries a few hours later.
But Old Virginny does have another claim to fame. According to local legend, in an earlier drunken escapade he fell down and shattered a whiskey bottle. As he watched the contents soak into the dirt, he rose to his feet and proclaimed, “I baptize this ground Virginny.” And the town that grew up around and on top of the Comstock Lode was named Virginia City in his honor.
Part III of the rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags story of the Comstock Lode is on page 338.
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Page 25
