Murder! A few months later, a 28-year-old nurse named Lucia de Berk was arrested. Police said she had been on duty at the time of the death, and that she had acted suspiciously when questioned. After further investigation, several earlier deaths and near-deaths—all of which had been viewed as unremarkable when they occurred, and all of which occurred while de Berk was on duty—were suddenly suspect. At the ensuing trial, prosecutors told jurors they had proof that de Berk had murdered three of the victims, and that there was an overwhelming statistical probability that she had killed or had tried to kill the others. (The odds that one nurse would be on duty for so many “suspicious” events, said prosecutors, were 1 in 342 million.) That convinced the jury, and in 2003, Lucia de Berk was convicted of murdering seven people and attempting to murder three more, making her the worst serial killer in Netherlands history. She was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Only two countries have more cell phones than people: Taiwan and Luxembourg.
…or Not: In 2008, after years of serious questions regarding aspects of de Berk’s case, a Dutch court ordered it reviewed. In 2009, the review’s findings were released: The three murder victims for which prosecutors had said they had “proof” of de Berk’s guilt—hadn’t been murdered at all. They’d died of natural causes (not uncommon for very ill people at hospitals). As for the other deaths, they’d never been physically determined to be murders in the first place. Overzealous investigators and prosecutors, the review found, had used “statistical probabilities” to create suspicion where none was warranted. Result: Lucia de Berk was exonerated of all charges, and received an official apology—and an undisclosed amount of money—from the Dutch government. By the time of her release in 2010, she’d spent six years in prison.
Victim: Bob Woolmer of Cape Town, South Africa
Details: On March 18, 2007, international cricket star Bob Woolmer was found unconscious in a Jamaica hotel room and died a few hours later. At the time, he was the coach of Pakistan’s national team; a day earlier the team had been knocked out of World Cup contention in an upset loss to Ireland. Newspapers reported that Woolmer had suffered a heart attack.
Murder! Four days later, Jamaican police announced that Woolmer hadn’t died from a heart attack—he’d been strangled. In April, the BBC reported that the police had further determined that Woolmer had been poisoned before being strangled. Allegations that Woolmer had been murdered by gangsters—because he was about to reveal details of match-fixing in his sport—made headlines around the world.
Value of all of the gold mined in a year worldwide: more than $12 billion.
…or Not: Nearly two months later, Jamaican police made yet another announcement: The earlier reports that Woolmer had been poisoned and strangled were wrong. He hadn’t even been murdered. His death was caused by chronic bad health, possibly diabetes. Case closed. Understandably, the conflicting reports caused international embarrassment for Jamaican law enforcement and raised serious questions regarding what had actually happened. (Had cricket gangsters gotten to the Jamaican police?) In November 2007, an inquest into Woolmer’s death was ordered. After five weeks of testimony, the jury returned an open verdict, meaning Woolmer may have been…and may not have been…murdered. Case closed again.
Victim: Nicholas Loris
Details: In February 1987, the body of six-year-old Nicholas Loris was found in a wooded area about 150 yards from his home in Davidson County, North Carolina. He’d been last seen leaving his home to walk his family’s dog less than an hour earlier. Police reported that the boy had been badly beaten.
Murder! The county coroner ruled that the cause of Nicholas’s death was strangulation. Because he was found so close to home, and because his single mother, Elizabeth Watkins, was the only person in the area at the time, Watkins became the chief suspect in her son’s murder. But since police never found any evidence to support their suspicions, she was never brought to trial. She simply remained a suspect—a fact the police made no attempt to conceal from the public—for more than two decades.
…or Not: In January 2012, almost 25 years after the event, the Davidson County Sheriff’s office made an announcement: They had reinvestigated the death using new technology and determined that the boy had been killed by a group of dogs. One or more of the dogs pulled tightly enough on Nicholas’s sweatshirt to strangle him. After two and a half decades, Elizabeth Watkins was finally—and publicly—cleared of all suspicion.
Armadillos can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes.
A HISTORY OF Y
Why Y? Because it’s our 25th anniversary and Y is the 25th letter of the alphabet.
BACKGROUND
The letter Y has been in the English alphabet since the beginning, sometime around the 7th century A.D., about 1,300 years ago. But the story of the letter—and why it’s located at the end of our alphabet—is even older.
Y’s ancestor, according to alphabetologists, is the letter waw, the sixth letter in the world’s oldest alphabetic system, the Phoenician alphabet. “Waw” meant “hook,” so the letter was drawn to look like one. The sound it represented is unknown, but linguists believe it was a long “u” sound, as in the word “tube.” The seafaring Phoenicians developed their 22-character alphabet more than 3,000 years ago and over the following centuries spread its use from their home (modern-day Lebanon) throughout the Mediterranean.
IT’S GREEK TO THEM
In the 9th century B.C., the ancient Greeks, still centuries away from becoming the civilization that shaped the modern world, adopted the Phoenician alphabet. But they changed the name of the letter waw to upsilon—from u psilon, meaning “plain u”—to distinguish its “u” sound from similar sounds in their own language. (Some languages today still use this name—in German, for example, Y is called ypsilon.)
In the 1st century B.C., the Romans conquered the Greeks and, being admirers of Greek culture, added many Greek words to Latin. One problem: The Romans had their own alphabet, and couldn’t properly spell some of their new Greek words. Because the words had an unfamiliar sound—the “u” mentioned above—the Romans added the letter upsilon to their own alphabet. Not long after, they stole the Greek letter Z, too. (That’s why Y and Z are at the end of the Latin alphabet.)
THE ROAMIN’ Y
The Romans called their new letter Y igraeca (meaning “Greek I”) because the “u” sound it represented was somewhat similar to the sound represented by their Roman letter I. (This explains the letter’s name in many Romance languages today: In French, for example, it’s i grek; in Spanish it’s i griega.) The Romans famously spread their alphabet over their vast empire, and although the empire came to an end in the 5th century A.D., the alphabet lived on.
Grave robbers stole Pres. Benjamin Harrison’s father’s corpse and sold it as a medical cadaver.
In the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxons, a scruffy conglomeration of battling kingdoms in what is now England, scrapped their primitive, rune-based alphabet and took up the Latin alphabet the Romans had left behind. The Anglo-Saxons were descendants of Germanic tribes that had invaded England a few centuries earlier, which explains why the pronunciation of the letter Y changed a bit at this time, becoming more like the German ü—somewhat similar to the “eu” sound in “feud.” The Anglo-Saxons also gave Y its modern name—“wye.” Why? Nobody knows.
After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, French became a major influence on English, and Y changed again: For the first time it was used as a consonant, representing the “yuh” sound in words like “you” and “voyeur.” Over the next several centuries, it lost its “ü” sound altogether, kept the “yuh” sound, and gradually added all the vowel sounds we associate it with today—in words such as try, day, myth, and happy.
FINAL NOTE
You’ve probably seen Y used in place of “th” in the word “the”—for example, in the names of businesses like “Ye Olde Cake Shoppe.” Reason: In the 1400s, the English alphabet had a letter
called “thorn.” It looked like Þ and represented the sound “th.” So words like “the” were spelled “Þe.” When the first printing presses were brought to England in the 1470s, the type was from non-English-speaking countries that had no letter “thorn,” so printers used Y in its place, and words like “the” ended up being spelled “ye.” This went on until the 1600s, when the letters T and H finally took over from Y in words like “the,” and the letter thorn was lost for good.
Americans collectively consume about 900 billion calories each day.
BURNED AT THE SKATE
Why would a 16th-century king of Spain go nuts over ice skates? Blame it on the Dutch, a group so stubborn that they fought the mighty Spanish Empire through the 80 Years’ War…and (eventually) skated to a win.
ICE FOLLY
It’s not like Spain, with its mild Mediterranean climate, is well known for its frozen lakes and canals. So why would its king contact craftsmen and tell them to drop everything and make 7,000 pairs of skates? And this was back in 1572, long before there were indoor skating rinks, hockey, couples-ice-dancing, or Disney on Ice. It’s unlikely that there were 7,000 Spaniards who had even heard of skates, let alone who would have been willing to put them on and stand on a slippery surface.
THE SPANISH ACQUISITION
Remember, there was a time when Spain controlled much of the world—not just in the New World or Africa, but in Europe as well. One of their holdings was the “Seventeen Provinces,” consisting of present-day Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of France and Germany. The territory was acquired when the Duchess of Burgundy married into the Spanish royal family in 1482.
The Dutch got the rawest part of the deal. Being the farthest north of Spain’s European holdings meant that obtaining even a minor bureaucratic decision could require weeks or months of waiting while horsemen or ships traveled the 2,200-mile round trip from Amsterdam to Seville.
That was bad enough. Then came the Spanish Inquisition.
INQUIRING MINDS
During this time, the Spanish king was also Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. That was one of the reasons Spain’s kings and queens tended to go brutally overboard in enforcing faith in the Roman Catholic Church. They forced Jews and Muslims to convert or get out of the country in 1492. Then they created the infamous Inquisition to root out atheists, freethinkers, Christians of the wrong kind, and “former” Jews and Muslims who were only pretending to be converts to Catholicism. Torture, forced confessions, and burning at the stake were common tools of saving the souls of those deemed insufficiently Catholic.
Viruses mutate more in one day than humans did in the last several million years.
THE OTHER MARTIN LUTHER
In 1566 the Spanish king Philip II got disturbing news about its most northernly provinces. There, people like Martin Luther and John Calvin had planted the seeds of Protestantism, and the noxious weed was growing deep roots. After trying out slightly gentler methods, Philip sent in Spanish troops with orders to scare the devil out of the Dutch, by any means necessary. But instead of thanking Philip II for his concern about their immortal souls, the Dutch people rose up in rebellion.
Philip redoubled his efforts. The effect, of course, was to turn many of the Dutch provinces—even Catholics and normally pro-Spanish noble classes—against Spanish rule. Not all of them, however. Some towns were filled with people who still considered themselves Catholics and loyal subjects (or didn’t want trouble) and went out of their way to welcome and placate the troops.
In November 1572, for example, the citizens of Naarden tried to negotiate surrender to the Spanish by inviting the invading army to a feast. After food and toasts and expressions of friendship, the army gathered the 3,000 townspeople into the church and attacked them with swords, then burned the survivors alive. Other cities and towns were similarly stacked, with an estimated 18,000 men, women, and children put to death.
DUTCH THREAT
The news quickly spread through the rest of the Netherlands that if cooperation and surrender weren’t an option, resistance was the only alternative. But that wasn’t going to be easy.
By late August 1573, the Spaniards were marching toward Amsterdam, and the small cities along the way didn’t have armies to resist them. Their leaders desperately considered the nearly non-existent options: Cold weather was just around the corner and not even evacuating citizens to hide in the woods would work.
You’re my inspiration: In Disney’s Fantasia (‘40), the Devil’s face was modeled on Bela Lugosi.
The Netherlands don’t have high places to use defensively. On the contrary, much of the Dutch countryside is flat (Netherlands means “low lands”), created by filling in swamps, lakes, and even the ocean floor. Twenty-five percent of the country’s land is below sea level, and most of the rest is just barely above. How do you defend a land like that?
AMSTERDAM UNDAMMED
Perhaps inspired by the bible story of Israelites luring the Egyptian army into death in a boggy sea, the leaders of Alkmar decided on a plan so crazy that it probably shouldn’t have worked: They would save their cities and towns by flooding them. Volunteers with shovels and pick axes went to work, breaking holes into the levees and dikes that kept the rivers at bay. When the Spaniards arrived, they discovered a huge, shallow lake where the maps showed farmland. In the center, barely raised above the water, the city sat on an island.
Townspeople had flooded the land with just enough water to make it too shallow for troop transit boats, but too deep to cross on foot without succumbing to the cold or the arrows of marksmen hiding behind trees and dike walls. Even in warm weather, the water would slow attackers and leave them with nowhere to hide. The Spaniards looked at the setup and decided to go way around instead of through, leaving the city unharmed…for now.
Other towns followed suit, using small, fast flat-bottomed boats to get around. Since a lot of the land became a temporary inland sea, the Spanish retreated back to their ships and decided to attack Amsterdam through its harbor. They were aware that winter was coming on, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. In fact, it might be a solution, because all those impassable water defenses would freeze into ice highways leading straight to the so-far unpunished Dutch strongholds. The Spanish watched and waited.
HANS BRINKERMANSHIP
A few months later, the ragtag Dutch fleet got frozen into the Amsterdam harbor, giving the Spanish a chance to try out their strategy. Taking advantage of the helpless ships and undefended coastline, Spanish troops got their marching orders and set off on foot across the ice to attack the sitting-duck ships.
A healthy horse can travel up to 100 miles in a day (more if it’s riding in a trailer).
As they stepped cautiously across the ice, they were confronted with a horrifying apparition. Off in the distance they saw a dark, shape-shifting mass of humanity moving toward them at terrific speed, then splitting amoeba-like and taking up positions on all sides of them.
HERE COMES TROUBLE
Skates were not known in Spain at the time, and the sight of Dutch soldiers gliding or flying across the ice with incredible speed, flitting into range just long enough to fire a musket before retreating again behind ice walls, was unlike anything the Spaniards had ever seen. The Spanish at first thought the Dutch were using some sort of Lutheran voodoo to grow new appendages that let them travel on ice as fast as the steeds of Satan. “It was a thing never heard of before,” Spain’s appointed governor, the Duke of Alva, recounted later with grudging admiration, “to see a body of musketeers fighting like that on a frozen sea.”
Alva didn’t gawk for long. He ordered a quick retreat, or at least as quick as the Spanish soldiers could go with slippery shoes and frostbitten toes. The Dutch masters followed behind, skating Alva and his men off the ice and picking off several hundred of them in the process. The Dutch had won, for now.
General Alva eventually commandeered a pair of the skates. He sent them back to a Spain with a
message: If you don’t want to lose these faraway provinces, we need as many of these as possible, as soon as possible. And that’s why the king of Spain ordered 7,000 pairs of skates, and up on mountain lakes, the Spanish military started offering mandatory skating lessons for the next battle.
COLD COMFORT
• The Dutch, of course, having learned to skate skillfully from childhood, maintained a certain level of tactical advantage, but the Spanish did become reasonably competent at skating. As defenders, however, the Dutch held on to a significant advantage: They were able to get the Spaniards skating on thin ice, literally, by cutting the ice at tactical spots, creating deadly weak spots luring their enemies into a deep, often fatal plunge into freezing water.
The first North American magazine ad appeared in Ben Franklin’s General Magazine (1742).
• The Dutch doubled their forces by training civilian women to fight and to repair the ice walls under fire (often raiding Catholic churches for statues of saints, using them as building materials and missiles to taunt, anger, and demoralize the Spaniards).
• The war lasted for eight decades, alternating between years of stalemate and years of horrifying brutality. Finally, in 1648 the provinces of the Netherlands and Belgium were able to drive out the Spanish, already deep in debt and spread thin by having to defend their empire all over the world.
• The Dutch would continue to use and refine strategic flooding as a defensive tactic, adding mini-forts to hold tactical roads and bridges, often planting trees along them that could be half-felled toward the invading forces to create nearly impassable barriers. The “Dutch Water Line” tactic remained effective for nearly four centuries, until World War II’s bombers and paratroopers made it obsolete.
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 59
