From Vanity Fair: “At 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963, bullets fired into the open roof of the presidential limousine tore through John F. Kennedy’s body. The first shot to hit the president went through his neck, but did not kill him. Within five seconds another shot damaged his brain and skull. During the critical time between the first shot and the fatal blow—about five seconds in which the president’s life might have been saved—the Secret Service agents within a few feet of the man they were duty-bound to protect—failed to take evasive action. Nine of the 28 Secret Service men who were in Dallas with the president the day he died had been out until the early hours of the morning. A few of them were sleep deprived and had been drinking while traveling with the president, an activity that was clearly prohibited in the Secret Service rulebook.”
Grocery billionaire claimed a tax deduction for the ransom paid after his kidnapping
From Wikipedia: “Theodor Paul Albrecht was a German entrepreneur who established the discount supermarket chain Aldi with his brother Karl Albrecht. In 2010, Theo was ranked by Forbes as the 31st richest person in the world, with a net worth of $16.7 billion. In 1971, Albrecht was kidnapped. A ransom of seven million German marks (approximately US$2 million at the time) was paid for his release. He was held at gunpoint by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg, a lawyer, and his accomplice Paul Kron. The ransom sum was delivered by Franz Hengsbach, then Bishop of Essen. His kidnappers were eventually caught by authorities, but only half of the money was recovered. Albrecht later unsuccessfully claimed the ransom as a tax deductible business expense in court.”
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There is a strange heat island lurking beneath metropolitan Minneapolis
From Atlas Obscura: “Greg Brick knew it was there, lurking beneath his city, hidden within the Minneapolis water and sewer system: an enticing geologic anomaly called Schieks Cave. For years, he’d read about this maze, carved through the sandstone by rushing water. But his first attempt to find it led to a dead end. Then, in 2000, Brick found a way in. When Brick arrived at the cave, he shined a flashlight into the thick darkness of the city’s underbelly. He found not just the natural void but also concrete walls that previous generations of civil engineers had built to support the natural structure. Also: roaches, a spaghetti dinner’s worth of earthworms, plastic straws, and a subterranean waterfall dubbed “Little Minnehaha Falls.” The thermometer gave him a surprise: The water was about 20 degrees hotter than it was supposed to be. It was more like the groundwater of Mississippi than that of Minneapolis. Something was warming the water beneath his city. Brick was determined to understand what.”
You don’t really need to drink eight to ten glasses of water every day
From McGill.ca: “It is a common belief that you have to drink 6-8 glasses of water per day. Almost everyone has heard this recommendation at some point although if you were to ask someone why you need to drink this much water every day, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. There is usually some vague idea that you need to drink water to flush toxins out of your system. Perhaps someone will suggest that drinking water is good for your kidneys since they filter the blood and regulate water balance. Unfortunately, none of these ideas is quite true and the 6-8 glasses myth comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of some basic physiology. The actual notion of 8 glasses a day originates from a 1945 US Food and Nutrition Board which recommended 2.5 litres of daily water intake. But what is generally forgotten from this recommendation is, firstly, that it was not based on any research and that secondly the recommendation stated that most of the water intake could come from food sources.”
The terrifying car crash that also inspired a literary masterpiece
From the New Yorker: “On the evening of April 20, 1972, Craig and Janice Eckhart loaded several bags of luggage into a Buick in Wichita, Kansas, and put their two daughters—four-year-old Lori and year-old Cindy—in the back seat. Craig was going to see about a job in Iowa, where he and Janice had relatives. They planned to drive through the night and arrive in Northwood, just south of the Minnesota border, by morning. About three hours into the trip, they stopped at a gas station outside Kansas City. After Craig filled the tank, a young man, wrapped in a sleeping bag and dripping wet, politely asked for a ride to Iowa City. Craig had picked up hitchhikers in the past, though never when Janice and the kids were in the car. Still, the young man seemed friendly, and a cold rain was falling, so Craig asked Janice if it would be all right. She reluctantly said yes.”
Food bank director in Oregon arrested for selling methamphetamines
From KZTV: “The leader of a food bank in Bend, Oregon, was giving out more than meals to locals in need: he was selling meth, claim authorities, in commercial quantities. Gary Lee Hewitt, executive director of St. Vincent de Paul of Bend, was arraigned Friday on charges of methamphetamine posession and delivery within 1,000 feet of a school. Detectives applied for and were granted a search warrant for Hewitt’s home. Assisted by detectives from the Central Oregon Drug Enforcement (CODE) Team and sheriff’s office patrol deputies, detectives executed the search warrant and found a commercial quantity of meth, along with scales, packaging material and US currency, Wall said. Hewitt was booked into the county jail and arraigned Friday afternoon on one count of delivering meth within 1,000 feet of a school, a Class A felony, and one count of possessing substantial quantities of the drug, a Class C felony. He remained held on $250,000 bail.”
He built his own tank to make playing a tank video game more realistic
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com