Author: A_C_Unit

The content below is from Episode 167 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

This week’s recommendation ties in nicely with the main event 🙂

• Live like royalty for a bit.
  • Not all can afford this, I really shouldn’t be able to myself, but travel to a nice all-inclusive resort and just live like a lazy emperor for a week or so.
  • My wife and I (mostly my wife) threw quite the banger for our wedding. We had a blast and we had like 140 people attend.
  • Those people were kind enough to give us money towards our honeymoon and despite my boring urge to save it and put it towards an extension on our house, we did in fact spend that on a luxurious vacation.
  • We went to Costa Mujueres near Cancun Mexico.
    • We drank, ate, enjoyed entertainment, explored Isla Mujueres, and completly broke our mundane routine. It was phenomenal.
  • It cost lots of money, but was worth it and the money we spent was given to us to enjoy it the exact way we actually enjoyed it.
  • We met new people and talked about things that normally wouldn’t enter our minds had we stayed in our little valley mountain home in western Pennsylvania.
• One thing I learned while at this fabulous resort was that it is common for resorts to employ falconers to scare away pesky birds that might poop in resort guests’ cocktails… and that shizznit intrigued me to no end!
  • So of course, it is this week’s main event.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• So there I was, having a Bohemian Negra beer delivered to me poolside, as I smelled the salt coming in from the Mexican Gulf.
  • I was doing my typical people-watching when I spotted someone who looked different from the rest. Usually, you see relaxed guests getting drunk or chatting about, or perhaps a smiling and hardworking staff member busting their ass to make everyone happy. But I was looking at a woman wearing a white outfit, a white hat, and one giant leather glove on her left arm. Perched upon this glove was a badass-looking bird of prey wearing blinders.
    • All of a sudden the Great Tailed Grackles, gulls, and other tropical/sea birds in the area started losing their damn minds!

• It was such a bizarre experience.
  • One minute there were beautiful birds swooping down for people’s fries and squawking about… the next it was pandemonium. And within a few minutes, all the birds were gone except the blind falcon sitting on its owner’s arm at the edge of the pool.
  • One of the guys in our group told me he had read a few articles about this resort falconry. His name is Gabe and he explained how resorts in the US don’t employ this technique as often due to environmental groups causing a fuss.
    • When this brand of scare-away falconry is used, it scares the local bird species to flee for an extended period of time, which upsets the local ecosystem.
    • Apparently, during covid’s travel restrictions, the resorts were mostly empty so falconry wasn’t used as much and so a lot of bird species that had previously been scared away were now returning to a lot of tourist destinations.
• Now, if you’ve ever thought about falconry before (chances are you haven’t seeing as it isn’t a popular thing), but if you have…
  • you’ve probably pictured some Mongolian warrior from centuries past wearing steppe wolf coats and training a falcon to gather intel or hunt small game.

• Or perhaps a European noble in more recent centuries who’s taken up the rare hobby of falconry to impress his mates down at the pub.
  • I actually knew Falconry was still a thing because when I took Weight Training class in highschool and injured my knee, I was required to write essays each class about various sports. I found it more interesting to write about sports that were less common or bizarre… I thought it was a blow-off assignment because the teacher for Weight Training was the head football coach and I knew my coach wouldn’t flunk me no matter what… especailly since I was the #1 bench and squat lifter in my school… Turns out I actually learned something! LOL

Wikipedia says this about the sport of Falconry: Falconry is the hunting of wild animals in their natural state and habitat by means of a trained bird of prey. Small animals are hunted; squirrels and rabbits often fall prey to these birds

• But the thing that astonishes me is that falconry is still practiced for practical means in the tourist industry.

• The WashingtonPost writes:

Though falconry has historically been used for hunting, the modern practice has found a home at resorts across North America, Britain and the United Arab Emirates. The birds of prey function as a pseudo force field, providing an environmentally conscious form of pest control. According to the Los Angeles Times, there were 137 active permits issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for predatory-bird pest management between 2007 and 2019, with hotels, museums, vineyards, airports and even landfills getting involved.

“The presence of these predatory birds is a natural, nonlethal means of intimidating and scaring away nuisance birds,” said Paige Hansen, a falconer at coastal Georgia’s Sea Island Resort.

• Paige Hansen is one of these falconers who gets paid to walk around Sea Island GA in the spring and summer months with a freaking raptor perched on her arm.
  • She helps the local merchants and tourists by scaring away local birds (such as the Boat-Tailed Grackle) from stealing produce and boardwalk fries.
  • Sea Island GA hires a total of 3 falconers to keep the birds away.
    • The falconers don’t just parade the raptors around, they have to weigh and feed, train and perform hunting exercises and clear their enclosures (scoop out bird crap) daily.
    • The resort has 6 Harris’s hawks, 1 Peregrine falcon, 1 Eurasian eagle owl, 1 barn owl, and an Eastern screech owl. (all pictured below)

• Well, Sea Island Resort noticed that guests didn’t just appreciate the lack of loud grackles flying around and stealing fries… Some guests actually would come to get a closer look at these birds of prey.
  • The resort’s falconry program also served as a major draw for nature lovers and animal enthusiasts over the past decade.

According to Jon Kent, the property’s director of outdoor pursuits, the falconry program debuted in 2011 strictly as a pest-control measure. But interest from guests created demand for organized activities ranging from a brief Hawk Walk — where guests head to nearby Rainbow Island, try on a falconer glove and practice recalling the bird — to the full Falconry Experience, a program that offers an opportunity to watch Earth’s fastest bird, the peregrine falcon, hunt its flying prey.

Wikipedia explains: “The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird, and the fastest member of the animal kingdom, with a diving speed of 389 km/h (242 mph).”

On Mexico’s Caribbean coast, just north of Playa del Carmen, the Rosewood Mayakoba employs a small army of falconers equipped with Harris’s hawks — a species prized for its intelligence and agreeable disposition.

While there is no specific training regimen that the hawks require to scare off pesky birds, raptors are rewarded handsomely for their presence with abundant opportunity for fine dining, free flying and getting some much-needed beauty sleep.

Manuel García, the engineering director at Rosewood Mayakoba, said the hawks get a “high-quality diet” of quail, rabbit, chicken and rat, which helps domesticate them. Biologists and veterinarians who are trained to care for birds of prey tend to the hawks’ health needs. And while the birds are earning their keep, they have been known to slack off on occasion, going off-property to soak in the splendor of the Yucatán coast from a literal bird’s-eye view.

“From time to time, hawks feel like flying a little further and visiting the neighboring hotels, prompting their handler to run across the property in search of the bird,” García said.

• That was going to be the end of this episode, but I wanted more of that ancient Mongolian steppe falconry because it is so badass!
  • These crazy bastards use 17 pound eagles to hunt!
    • From NomadicTrails.com:

The Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Mongol traditions date back 900 years to the time of the Mongol Empire. Like traditional practices elsewhere in the world, the art of hunting with eagles is on the verge of extinction. But Mongolian Falconry is alive and well kept in Kazakh culture here in Mongolia.

Moreover, people all around the world practice the primal culture of hunting. But hunting with birds of prey is more challenging, as it takes three to four years to teach a bird to hunt. Further, the Golden Eagle weighs 3 to 7kg (7 to 17pounds) and the hunters have to keep their bird on a stretched arm. Not only this style of hunting makes it a difficult sport but at the same time, it offers an invaluable glimpse of the past and present of traditional hunting.

CREDIT:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/01/28/birds-of-prey-work-for-hotels/
  • By Jared Ranahan
  • January 28, 2022 at 11:42 a.m. EST
• https://www.audubon.org/news/the-birds-guard-brunch
  • By Shaena Montanari
  • February 24, 2020
• https://nomadictrails.com/mongolian-falconry-the-art-of-hunting/
  • October 3, 2021

The content below is from _165__ of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

This week I recommend you watch Community!

• The entire show is on Netflix right now (at least in the states) and it is one of the most bingable shows out there. Dan Harmon created this hilarious career boosting show almost a decade and ago (long before his success with Rick and Morty).
• Here’s the plot:
  • When fast-talking lawyer Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) finds his degree has been revoked, he is forced to go back to school at Greendale Community College. Hoping to score points with a pretty coed, he invents a study group and invites her to join it. Imagine his surprise when she’s not the only one who shows up for help with Spanish from the “board-certified tutor” he proclaims himself to be. Though his command of the language is anything but good, the members continue to meet and end up learning a lot about themselves.
• I binged this show back in college and decided to rewatch it after they announced the community movie (6 seasons and a move!). … and this one has the Shannon Stamp of Approval!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

This week is about… bomb sniffing bees LOL

TechnologyReview.com writes:

Last week, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, buzzed with the results of a rigorous study on sophisticated bomb detectors. Their research suggests that contained bees can be used to identify volatile compounds like TATP, the primary charge associated with last summer’s terrorist plot. Highly reliable and precise, these next-wave detectors are cheap to produce and easy to train.

• Apparently, in the entomologist world (entomology being the branch of zoology concerned with the study of insects) , it is common knowledge that honeybees are like little bloodhounds.
  • They are great at detecting different scents of all kinds… apparently even explosives
  • On the basis of this Bomb-Sniffing Bee idea, Los Almos National Laboratory launched SISP (Stealthy Insect Sensor Project) with a dude named Timothy Haarmann as the lead investigator.
    • Timothy and his team have actually trained bees to “extend their proboscises–tubular organs used to suck the nectar from flowers–in the presence of explosives.”
    • To layman’s eyes, it 100% looks like the bees are being kept in cages and coaxed into sticking out their tongues to lick explosive materials. … But scientists like to complicate things so I guess a bee’s tongue is called proboscises-tubular organ.
• The idea is that the bees lick the explosives and are given a treat right after. Similar to most pavlovian experiments, the bee associates the explosives with nutrients and therefore will seek out explosives…
  • Now, I’m going to remind you, this isn’t the plot of one of those abysmally crappy movies that first aired on the Sci-Fi channel in the 2000’s, this is reality.
  • I read a headline and saw a few seconds of a clip of these things being trained… I couldn’t believe it was real. Bees only live for a few months and the idea of releasing bees into an airport, train station, or any public space… it just didn’t seem like a practical tactic for security… but its real.
  • The first factor that made me think… OK, maybe they can pull this off for real was that the training is apparently pretty easy.
    • Bees are super programmable. It takes 3 hours to train about 50 honeybees.
    • “If you hold up sugar water [to bees], they stick out their proboscis,” Timothy Haarmann says.

TechnologyReview.com :

By combining a target substance with sugar water and then presenting the compound to the bee, the researchers manipulate the insects into recognizing a distinct smell. By the end of the session, successfully trained bees extend their proboscises toward explosives.

Bees trained at one concentration of vapor easily recognize lower doses. Chemist Robert Wingo, who works on the project, says that the bees proved to be more sensitive than many sophisticated man-made devices. “They are capable of detecting TATP, and the instruments I have available in the lab are not able to detect TATP,” he says.

Honeybees can also pick explosives out of more complicated bouquets–like the myriad scents that surround a typical human being. Trained bees can identify explosives whose odors were masked by “lotions, underarm deodorants, and tobacco products,” Wingo says. “Much to our surprise, the bees are capable of picking out TNT in motor oil … Even in the presence of insect repellent, we can train them to detect TNT.”

In Haarmann’s system the bees are contained in tubes so that their proboscises can be easily monitored. Unfortunately, a contained bee only lasts about two days. “We find that after about 48 hours you start to get a high mortality rate,” Haarmann says. Being confined is “hard on them.” Plus, not all bees prove to be up to the task of detecting explosives. Like dogs, some of the insects are more successfully trained than others. “We like to think of bees as these nice little robots, but there were certain bees that did better than others,” Haarmann says.

• At the University of Montana’s biological sciences division there’s a bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk… which is a cool name. BROmenshenk.
  • Anyway, Bromenshenk pioneered the bee detection system. He was one of the first to train bees and bee colonies to detect stuff like explosives, meth labs, and dead bodies.
  • But Bromenshenk’s training methods differ from Timothy Haarmann method.

Bromenshenk works primarily with free-flying bees that are allowed to roam large, outdoor spaces. When the bees detect the target scent, they tend to slow down and circle the area. Using audio, video, and laser systems, Bromenshenk and colleagues can analyze the flight patterns of thousands of trained bees and produce a density map indicating the most likely locations of the target substance. With tens of thousands of bees searching, they can quickly canvass an area of a mile.

But Bromenshenk says Haarmann’s “bee in a box” approach still has its place.

“Free-flying bees don’t work well in airports,” he says.

• An entomologist by the name of Jim Tumlinson from the Center for Chemical Ecology at Pennsylvania State University believes in the science of training insects (not a big shocker when you’ve dedicated your life to studying insects)… but Jim says finding a practical way to utilize trained insects is a challenge.
  • Jim works with boll weevils and parasitic wasps. Researching their biomechanics to improve man-made systems. Like right now, Jim is working on a mechanical sensor that works like an insect’s antenna.

Moving from the laboratory to the real world can introduce complicated obstacles, he says. “If you’re in the laboratory, you can get these insects to respond fairly reliably,” Tumlinson says. “In any field situation, the conditions are hard to control. It gets much more difficult.” But, he says, the high sensitivity of these insects is too fascinating to ignore.

“It’s very tempting to think we can do something with it, and maybe we can,” he says. “We’re in the process of learning as much as we can about how natural systems operate.”

• There are many skeptics out there (myself included) who think the whole bomb sniffing bee project won’t work.
  • But Timothy Haarmann’s SISP team have conducted field trials and they think they will be implemented within the year.

He envisions remotely controlled robots in battlefields, capable of carrying a small army of honeybees to a suspected IED (improvised explosive device) or car bomb. If the bees stick out their tongue, a bomb is close by.

“You lose a couple bees, and that’s disturbing to me,” says Haarmann, who keeps his own hives and used to teach beekeeping in South America. “But I’m the only one who is disturbed.”

Wingo, a SISP team member working with Timothy Haarmann, who had never worked with bees prior to this project, estimates that he received “hundreds” of stings during the 18-month research-gathering period. “It’s proven to be extraordinarily interesting,” he says, “but being stung is not fun.” 

CREDIT:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/us/bees-learning-smell-of-bombs-with-backing-from-pentagon.html
  • The Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base, in Texas, has just completed an analysis of a round of tests of bees’ bomb-sniffing ability and confirmed that they found the explosive chemical more than 99 percent of the time, project scientists said.
• https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/12/07/227361/using-bees-to-detect-bombs/
• https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/bees-can-detect-bombs.html#:~:text=Through%20%27classical%20conditioning%20training%27%2C,What%20is%20this%3F

Through ‘classical conditioning training’, bees learn to associate a particular smell with food, so that they automatically stick out their tongues. In this instance then, honey bees are being trained to respond by sticking their tongues out when they sniff the aroma from explosives. What is this?

The content below is from Episode 164 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

• This week I recommend the Apple TV short film The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse.
  • I have never experienced a more important children’s book. And I only call it a Children’s book because it is simple enough for children to understand… yet… as the book’s intro explains, it is just as important to read it “if you are eighty or eight.”

• I came across a clip of this movie on Facebook reels. That clip was under a minute long and yet it conveyed such meaning that I got a little choked up.
  • Here is that clip:
  • ===play audio clip===
• I started searching for the title and found it is included with AppleTv.
  • I immediately sat down and watched the whole 34 minutes. … I cried. Good thing I was home alone, just with my dog and cat, because I cried deep and ugly… but I didn’t cry for just sorrow, I felt so much better after I watched it.
  • I knew the person or people responsible for this had lived one hell of a life and had experienced quite a lot of suffering… yet they were on the other side of that suffering and made this story to tell the world “It’s okay. Love will prevail.”

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• In case you haven’t noticed, I like history. History tells the most compelling stories because they actually happened. Typically history is told through events (usually wars) or people (such as biographies). But sometimes history is told through places. Some places just beg to have their story told.
• History.com summarizes today’s topic:

On the Hawaiian Islands, a group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole overthrow Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, and establish a new provincial government with Dole as president. The coup occurred with the foreknowledge of John L. Stevens, the U.S. minister to Hawaii, and 300 U.S. Marines from the U.S. cruiser Boston were called to Hawaii, allegedly to protect American lives.

• The first homo sapiens known to reach the Hawaiian Islands so far out at sea were the Polynesian voyagers. It is believed they arrived sometime in the 700s.
  • 1778: Captain James Cook lands at Waimea Bay on the island of Kauaʻi, becoming the first European to make contact with the Hawaiian Islands. Cook names the archipelago the “Sandwich Islands” after the Earl of Sandwich.
    • In the 1700s the first Americans arrived. They were seeking trade of Hawaii’s sandalwood which apparently was very valuable in China at the time.
    • Of course these American traders were kind and respectful to the Hawaiians and didn’t exploit them or see them as lesser than themselves at all… JK.
    • Of course they exploited the Hawaiians.
• By the 1830s sugar had come to Hawaii and by the middle of the 1800s, sugar was the main product.
  • It was the sugar cane planters and American missionaries that greatly altered Hawaii’s culture, economic system, politics, and religion…
    • Another perspective, that of the natives, is that the colonizers gutted the Hawaiian native way of life.
  • By 1840 a constitutional monarchy was put in charge of the Islands. There was still a Hawaiian monarch in place, but they had virtually no power left.
  • In 1844 a guy named Sanford B. Dole was born on in Honolulu Hawaii.
    • In a way, this made Dole a native to Hawaii as it was the place of his birth, but His parents were American.
• After the Constitutional monarchy was set up, there were a bunch of treaties and political maneuvering going on between US and Hawaii.
  • By 1887 a little-known US Navy base was built on Hawaii, known as Pear Harbor. It was part of the new Hawaiian constitution.
  • At this point Sugar exports experienced another boom.
  • The sugar planters and investors sank their teeth in even deeper. Their power washed over the islands. They basically controlled US and Hawaiian affairs.

• King Kalākaua signed the Bayonet Constitution. It was a political document giving more power to the white landowners and farmers that attempted a coup on Hawaii.
  • The 1887 Constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom was a legal document prepared by anti-monarchists to strip the Hawaiian monarchy of much of its authority, initiating a transfer of power to American, European and native Hawaiian elites
• National Geographic writes about the so called Bayonet Constitution:

On July 6, 1887, King David Kalakaua signed a new constitution for the kingdom of Hawai’i. Kalakaua signed the law at gunpoint, which led to the document being nicknamed the “Bayonet Constitution.”

The guns surrounding Kalakaua on that fateful day belonged to members of a militia nicknamed the Honolulu Rifles, made up largely of white settlers. Kalakaua’s successor as monarch, his sister Liliuokalani, later speculated Kalakaua would have been killed had he not signed the new constitution.

The Honolulu Rifles were affiliated with a group called the Hawaiian League, which drafted the new constitution to transfer power from the monarchy to the more settler-friendly legislature. The document also granted suffrage to foreigners (generally Americans and Europeans) by linking the right to vote with property ownership.

The leader of the Hawaiian League, Lorrin A. Thurston, was the grandson of one of the first American missionaries to travel to Hawai’i. Many other members of the group operated or worked for Hawai’i’s giant, lucrative sugar plantations.

• By 1891, following death of her brother King Kalākaua in San Francisco CA in an attempt to negotiate fo his people, Queen Lilioukalani ascended the Hawaiian throne.
  • “Tell my people I tried”, was believed to be his dying words after suffering a stroke… but that was actually made up by novelist Eugene Burns in his 1952 biography of Kalākaua, The Last King of Paradise.
    • The King’s actual last words were “Aue, he kanaka au, eia i loko o ke kukonukonu o ka maʻi!,” or “Alas, I am a man who is seriously ill.”
    • LOL reminds me of Roald Dahl’s final words:
      • That were almost “You know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much” to his family. After seeming to fall unconscious, the nurse injected him with morphine to ease his passing, but she pricked him with the needle, and his actual last words were, “Ow, fuck!”
  • She straight up refuses to recognize the Bayonet Constitution, the bullshit law her brother was forced to sign. Instead, she writes her own constitution which legitimizes herself as the ruler of Hawaii and her people.
    • She was a Queen on a mission. She wanted to restore Hawaii’s power back to the Hawaiian people and stop American/European businessmen from taking all of her land’s precious natural resources.
• This is when things started to come to a head. In 1893, a group of white farmers and business men staged a coup against Queen Liliuokalani.
  • These guys had the audacity to call themselves the “REvolutionary Committee of Safety…” Like… who’s going to say the committee of safety is bad?
    who’s going to oppose that?
  • And to make matters worse, the US military blatantly took the side of the Committee of Safety.
  • It was February 1st when Minister John Stevens legitimized Sanford B. Dole’s new Committee of Safety government and proclaimed Hawaii a US protectorate.

The History.com writes:

President Grover Cleveland sent a new U.S. minister to Hawaii to restore Queen Liliuokalani to the throne under the 1887 constitution, but Dole refused to step aside and instead proclaimed the independent Republic of Hawaii. Cleveland was unwilling to overthrow the government by force, and his successor, President William McKinley, negotiated a treaty with the Republic of Hawaii in 1897.

Unfortunately,  only two years after coming to power, the business owners staged another coup, this time backed by the U.S. military. The landowners removed Lili‘uokalani from power, and after her supporters attempted a coup of their own, she was tried for treason. Lili‘uokalani gave up her powers as monarch in exchange for pardons for her supporters and the U.S. was able to annex Hawaii. Lili‘uokalani continued to fight for a free Hawaii, despite living in exile.

In 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out, and the strategic use of the naval base at Pearl Harbor during the war convinced Congress to approve formal annexation. Two years later, Hawaii was organized into a formal U.S. territory and in 1959 entered the United States as the 50th state.

A powerful female monarch who fought for the rights and the land of her people, under house arrest in the palace, was forced to sign away her power but never backed down. It’d be a powerful film centred around a strong performance – like Elizabeth, in another time and place. 

King Kalakaua was the last Hawaiian monarch recognized internationally and the last to wield independent political power. The monarchy was completely overthrown in 1893, the United States annexed the kingdom in 1898, and Hawai’i became the 50th U.S. state in 1959.

CREDIT

• https://setthetape.com/2022/01/20/5-crazy-true-stories/
• https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-overthrow-hawaiian-monarchy#:~:text=In%20January%201893%2C%20a%20revolutionary,proclaimed%20Hawaii%20a%20U.S.%20protectorate.

The content below is from episode 163 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

ANNOUNCEMENT

• I’ve talked about Mead before on the podcast
  • Last year I made about 50 or 60 bottles worth of mead
  • I gave them away and I drank quite a lot of them in the past year… delicious stuff… some of them
  • The 2022 bottles were not the best. I skipped the step that checks the alcohol content and only siphoned them once which left a bunch of dead yeast at the bottom of each bottle.
  • Well, this past weekend my beautiful wife, her twin sister, and her fiance kindly helped me start the 2023 batch!
  • We put away about 8 gallons of mead altogether.
  • There is a 5-gallon bucket of honey and maple syrup (added orange zest), a 2-gallon bucket of Agave nectar and honey, and a 1-gallon jug of mead that Shannon wanted to spice with some Mulling Wine mix she got as a gift.
  • This has nothing to do with today’s topic, I just really like making mead. It is exciting and I look forward to this year’s batch more.
  • For last year’s batch I didn’t really want to gift too much because of the dead yeast in each bottle, if that yeast was disturbed, it clouded the mead and made the taste go sour and gross.
  • This year I plan to double siphon and should eliminate that problem. They should be ready to gift by Christmas so I’m excited to give it away.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

• This week I recommend you watch MerPeople on Netflix.
  • Here’s google’s super short description:
    • The world of underwater performers who have turned their love of mythical sea creatures into real-world careers.
  • Now hear me out… I pressed play on this 4 part documentary show to get some laughs.
    • I’m no saint and I do enjoy watching shows or videos to laugh at others. I thought a documentary about people dressing up as mermaids would only be entertaining via laughter.
    • But I was wrong.
  • While the show’s first episode opens with some comedic tones and editing (a goofy sound bite added during mermaid permformances) that reinforced my belief that the show was meant to be funny… by the end of episode 4 (final episode), Shannon and I were getting emotional over these people and their lives.
    • I expected to laugh as I laugh at horse people. If you haven’t heard about the people that ride toy stick horses in competitions you are missing out. It is bizarre and funny.
    • But these merpeople all seem to be connected to this way of life. They are mostly rejects and outcasts from society that found something they are deeply passionate about… and that just so happens strapping their legs into huge silicon fishtails and swimming in (surprisingly dangerous) performances.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• Back in November of 2022 I released episode #138 “Philly Bombed Itself” about a cult-like group in the city of Philadelphia that was firebombed.
  • I was inspired to do the episode because I was a bit shocked that a law enforcement agency bombed its own city intentionally.
• Well, this episode is about another time the US dropped bombs on US soil… but it wasn’t intentional…
• A B-52 Stratofortress bomber was cruising over the American east coast on January 23 of 1961. It was carrying two thermonuclear Mark-39 bombs.
• National Archives -Pieces of History writes:
  • “Keep 19,” a Boeing B-52G-95-BW Stratofortress with the 4241st Strategic Wing, was on a 24-hour airborne alert mission off the Atlantic Coast of the United States. At that time, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War, the Strategic Air Command kept B-52 bombers, armed with nuclear warheads, flying 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The plane was commanded by Maj. Walter S. Tulloch, U.S. Air Force, with pilots Capt. Richard W. Hardin and 1st Lt. Adam C. Mattocks. It was armed with two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs, each with an explosive yield of 3–4 megatons.
  • The Mark 39 was a two-stage, radiation-implosion thermonuclear bomb produced from 1957 to 1959, with more than 700 built. It was fully fused, meaning it could be detonated by contact with the ground as an air burst, or “lay down”—a series of parachutes would slow the bomb and it would touch down on its target before detonating allowing the bomber time to get clear of the blast zone.
• During its flight, it had a fuel leak and then it started to fall apart in the air. The plane carrying nuclear weapons was doomed to crash and it crashed over the town of Goldsboro North Carolina.
  • While the B-52 refueled in flight from an air tanker, the tanker’s crew notified Major Tulloch that the B-52’s right wing was leaking fuel. The leak was severe, with more than 5,400 gallons (37,000 pounds) of jet fuel lost in less than three minutes as the B-52 was directed to return to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina to attempt an emergency landing.
  • The plane carrying nuclear weapons was doomed to crash and it crashed over the town of Goldsboro North Carolina.

• Goldsboro NC
  • Population 32,749
  • Elevation 108ft
  • From GoldsboroNC.com:
    • The City of Goldsboro is the home of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and famous for the best barbeque in Eastern North Carolina. We are a destination with rich cultural and heritage roots, which captivates visitors and residents alike.
  • I might argue what Goldsboro NC is most known for is having two nukes dropped ontop of it. But hey, that’s just me.
• The Bombs
  • The Mark 39 was considered a lightweight weapon, weighing 6,500–6,750 pounds, and the bomb measured approximately 12 feet in length, with a diameter of almost 3 feet.  The explosive yield of the Mark 39 was 3.8 megatons, 250 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and enough to vaporize everyone and everything within a 17-mile radius—roughly the area inside the Capital Beltway around Washington, DC. 
• The pilots of the B-52 Stratofortress bomber lost control of the aircraft. One of the bombs accidentally ejected… whoopsie
  • Thankfully the parachute attached to the thermonuclear bomb deployed as designed. Bomb one gently floated through the air and got tangled in some trees.
    • Bomb one never touched ground.
  • Bomb number 2 did not eject. It remained on the aircraft as it crashed and was submerged beneath mud.
    • slammed into a muddy field at over 700 miles per hour and buried itself more than 180 feet deep
  • As they descended, the unbalanced condition created by the disproportionate fuel load made the bomber increasingly difficult to maneuver. The bomber went out of control as the right wing was sheared away, and Major Tulloch ordered the crew to abandon the imperiled aircraft. Five crewmen ejected and one climbed out through the top hatch before the B-52 broke apart and exploded. Its wreckage covered a roughly two square mile area and, sadly, three crewmen—Majors Shelton and Richards and Sergeant Barnish—were killed.
  • This was happening 3 days after President John F Kennedy took office.

Fortunately, the safety mechanism worked and neither bomb detonated, despite coming dangerously close. A forensic investigation found that 5 of the 6  safety switches on the first bomb had triggered inadvertently. The final switch had not, preventing the device from exploding. When excavators located the second bomb, the safety switch was off, and the device was set to “arm.” Had the fail-safes not worked correctly, a nuclear explosion equivalent to nearly 8 million tons of TNT might have devastated the eastern North Carolina town of Goldsboro and the surrounding vicinity.

News of the crash shocked the small farming community, especially as they learned of its deadly cargo. However, information about how close the bombs came to detonation remained classified until 2013, when a FOIA request by Command and Control author Eric Schlosser revealed additional details about the bomb’s safety mechanisms.

To reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation, newly elected President John F. Kennedy ordered a reduction of Strategic Air Command alert activity, and the installation of permissive action links (PALs), which required a secret code to activate a nuclear bomb.

• A mishap like this, involving the loss of nuclear weapons, is known by the military code name “Broken Arrow.” (which is also the name of a cool 90’s movie starring John Travolta and Christian Slater)
  • Official statements indicate that there was no danger of the bombs exploding, while others indicate that five of the six steps (or six of seven) required for a thermonuclear detonation did occur.

• Recovery of the buried bomb proved to be challenging,
  • but after eight days the ordnance team had recovered most of the bomb, including the 92 detonators and conventional explosive “lenses” of the “primary,” the first stage implosion section. The uranium-235/plutonium-239 “pit”—the very core of the bomb—was recovered on January 29. The “secondary,” however, was never found. 

CREDIT

• https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-goldsboro-b-52-crash/#:~:text=In%20January%201961%2C%20a%20B,of%20the%20bombs%20accidentally%20ejected.
• https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2021/01/22/brush-with-catastrophe-the-day-the-u-s-almost-nuked-itself/
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/remembering-night-two-atomic-bombs-dropped-on-north-carolina
  • The amount of article I could read before Nat Geo asked me for money:
    • Billy Reeves remembers that night in January 1961 as unseasonably warm, even for North Carolina. But it got a lot hotter just before midnight, when the walls of his room began glowing red with a strange light streaming through his window.
    • “I was just getting ready for bed,” Reeves says, “and all of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘What in the world…?'”
    • The 17-year-old ran out to the porch of his family’s farm house just in time to see a flaming B-52 bomber—one wing missing, fiery debris rocketing off in all directions—plunge from the sky and plow into a field barely a quarter-mile away.
    • “Everything around here was on fire,” says Reeves, now 78, standing with me in the middle of that same field,