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Why is your stamp collection worthless? For anything after 1930, it's Franklin Roosevelt's fault. The man was an obsessed stamp collector, going so far as to personally design the Byrd Expedition stamp (I've already written about that twice). He was so into stamp collecting that he also wanted you to get into stamp collecting.

To bring attention to the nascent hobby, a scheme was devised with Postmaster General James Farley in 1939 where a rolling stamp museum would tour the entire country. Using a converted armored car, examples of basically every American stamp made until then were on display, which proved to be an enormously valuable collection: At the time, those stamps were worth $1 million, or $21 million today. Who knows what the actual book value of them would be now.

FDR also had a penchant for circumventing Congress, and using funds to make this rolling museum was no exception. He and Farley had already angered Congress by printing "Farley's Follies", collectible reprints of stamps. I don't know if you know collectors of absolutely anything, but remaking old stock is the biggest sin imaginable. One stamp institution called it "nauseous prostitution".

Anyways, the truck was just as controversial. Journalists derided it as a use of taxpayer money to promote a product (The Postal Service's stamps) and FDR's personal hobby.

The truck was a huge hit with the public anyways. Everyone who visited received a special (non-postal) stamp. At first, these were given to visitors with gum just like a real stamp, but people started pasting them everywhere like lightposts, buildings, and the museum truck itself. The souvenirs were quickly switched to non-gum.

The truck also had for sale your very own stamp collecting starter kit, including a letter from FDR and a special envelope which you would buy and then they'd take to the nearest post office to mail to you.

The truck toured for years straight all the way until the attack on Pearl Harbor, where FDR suddenly had other things to occupy his attention than his stamp collection. The truck itself ended up abandoned, but the collection itself went back to Washington, where I'm sure a chunk of it is still on display in the National Postal Museum.

All of FDR's work paid off, and stamp collecting skyrocketed. Stamps from before the 30s got snapped up and still tend to be pricy except for the most common (some 1800s stamps were printed by the billion). Meanwhile, just like Beanie Babies in the 90s, when everyone started buying and holding onto post-30s stamp, they quickly became near-worthless.

At least if they're new, you can still use them for postage.

During World War II, Germany's spies were... legendarily awful. Or, depending on your perspective, extremely talented, as long as you expect them to be actually working for the British.

One brilliant idea the German intelligence agency had was to recruit potential spies from prisons in occupied British territory, such as the Channel Islands. There, they found Eddie Chapman, serving a sentence for burglary. The deal: He gets to go free, as long as he works for Germany as a spy.

Chapman got training in explosives, parachuting, radio operation, and other spycraft. His job would be to parachute into England and sabotage factories. Even that started off poorly. Using decrypted messages, the British knew he was coming from the moment his plane took off, and were tailing it, prepared to arrest him once he landed.

And then that turned out to be unnecessary. Chapman immediately found a police officer and turned himself in.

Chapman agreed to work as a double agent. Of course, he still needed to accomplish his task for Germany, which was sabotaging the De Havilland aircraft factory. The British arranged to make it happen.

The factory produced the De Havilland Mosquito, one of the most painful aircraft the British produced from the German perspective, and so it was an extremely high-priority target.

With the help of magician Jasper Maskelyne, also known for exploits like creating inflatable tanks as a fake invasion force, the factory was destroyed. Or rather, made to look so. They built fake electrical transformers and blew them up, scattered rubble around, and disguised the real power plant for the factory with netting.

To top it off, MI5 published a news story in the Daily Express that the factory had been sabotaged during the night. Normally such stories weren't allowed to be published, but they sent it out in an overseas first edition and then had it retracted, making it appear the censors had pulled the story.

Chapman had more spying work to do. Britain wanted samples of German explosive devices, so Chapman suggested sabotaging a British merchant ship with a fake lump of coal. Nobody noticed that the ship didn't actually get damaged, but the explosives were handed over to the ship's captain for later study.

One of his last jobs as a spy was reporting on the V-1 flying bomb. Chapman returned that they were hitting central London accurately, and no adjustment was needed. In reality, the attacks were falling quite short.

It's the Summer Olympics. A hushed crowd watches the lone athlete on the field, waiting for the performance of a lifetime. Judges stand by to offer their criticism of the effort. And so the single person begins. They pull out... an easel and start doing a watercolor?

If you thought breakdancing was an unusual inclusion, the Olympics from 1912 to 1948 may look entirely unrecognizable to you. The original goal of the Olympics was the complete person, proficient with both body and mind. And so the games included not just athletics, but art in the form of painting, writing, music, and many more.

How did such a competition look and be judged? It's complicated, and for many of them, it turned out not to work very well. There were a few requirement universal to the art. The works had to be original, not published before the Olympic Games, and they had to be inspired by sport in some fashion.

Who were the entrants? Nobody you know, probably. The organizers were hoping for big names at least in the literature and poetry competitions, but failed to attract them. Well-known writers weren't interested in a competition set up and judged by people who weren't writers, or maybe there was just no desire to compete and be judged.

In fact, often the celebrities were on the side of judging, instead of competing. The judging was difficult. There's not exactly a clear-cut first person across the finish line. Most of the judges weren't experts, and gauging something like an original song with nothing but one live performance and the sheet music doesn't exactly produce consistency.

Often, the judges would decline to award the gold medal, or sometimes when especially disappointed would award no medals at all.

The oddest category in the art competitions, to me, is architecture. It's the only one excluded from the rule for already-published works. How were entries sport-themed? They'd design the stadium, of course! I mean that literally. In Amsterdam 1928, the gold medal winner was for the very stadium in which the games were being held.

Anyways, this post is getting long and I can't cover all of the odd competitions, but let me rapid fire some of the eyebrow-raisers: Sculpture (a subcategory being designing medals), town design, printmaking, orchestral music.

So what killed off the mind half of the Games? Money, of course. The Olympics had another difficult rule that all contestants must be amateurs. If you'd made any money in the sport from sponsorships, teaching, or winning, you were ineligible. Surprise, artists need to eat too.

The rules are different for that now, but in the 1948 Olympics, essentially everyone competing was considered a professional. They gave up and only held an art exhibition, awarding no medals in 1952. Skipping it that round kept going, and the art competitions never returned.

It's not too uncommon a scam: You work the counter at a gas station, someone comes in for a pack of gum. You hand over the gum, but just pocket their cash without ringing it up. Ultimately, you'd get caught when someone goes counting how many packs of gum there are (or checks the cameras).

But what if you could hand the customer a fake pack of gum? What if you never got caught?

This is basically what happened some time around 1872 at the London Stock Exchange, but instead of gum, the clerk was handing out telegraph revenue stamps. The typical way the system works is this: A customer comes in to send a telegraph, and gives the clerk a shilling.

The clerk would then apply a 1 shilling postage stamp to their message, cancel the stamp, and take the message away to be sent. Those bundled telegrams are taken to the clearing house, and the physical form later stored.

You can spot the perfect crime in there. Someone, maybe multiple people, created forgeries of those one shilling stamps.

Of course, they weren't perfect forgeries, but they didn't have to be. Whereas a paper bill might be handled and inspected by many people, nobody saw those telegrams after they got sent to a warehouse. They'd be destroyed as waste paper within months!

The profit for every forged stamp, by the way: The princely sum of about $3.50, when plugged into an inflation calculator. The perpetrator may have been pocketing the money directly, or maybe they were reselling the real stamps after applying a fake one.

The perpetrators of this, you may have picked up from the phrasing, were never found. So how do we even know it happened? Stamp nerds! A small number of those telegraph forms didn't get burned and made their way into private collectors' hands (quite possibly via theft from the warehouses, adding another layer of crime to this story).

Over twenty-five years later, a philatelist was checking through his collection for errors and misprints when he noticed something funny about the stamp on a telegraph form. It was, frankly, actually a rather amateur reproduction. There was no watermark, the lettering was all mismatched, the printing was blurred, and the letters in the corners were wrong.

Exhaustive checking of other surviving telegraph forms found the period in which this scam occurred, but we still have no idea who did it. It might have been the head clerk at the office, or his subordinates, but by then they had all died or retired. The sole remaining suspect was interviewed and the details of that haven't been published either.

Get seasick often? Henry Bessemer (Yes, that Bessemer) has the fix for you! Henry Bessemer suffered from extreme seasickness, but he wasn't the sort to go "Oh, I'll just never be near water again." No, he decided this was a problem to be solved.

Today we're more likely to solve the problem with Dramamine/dimenhydrinate, but this was 1874, and that over-the-counter medication wouldn't be available until 1949. Bessemer probably wouldn't wait that long, so instead of a handy pill, he devised a bulkier solution in the form of an entire ship.

This ship would, of course, be dubbed the SS Bessemer, or more aptly, the Bessemer Saloon. The magic trick of the ship to fix Bessemer's seasickness was in its passenger cabin. The entire room would be independent from the rest of the ship, moved on gimbals.

The cabin's movement could be matched to that of the sea, keeping everything nice and level and Bessemer's lunch in his stomach. The rest of the ship was a pretty standard paddle steamer, though luxuriously appointed with hand-carved wood detail and murals.

(Such luxury, of course, was only for the first-class passengers. Second-class passengers had their quarters outside of the moving passenger cabin and could just put up with their seasickness)

One little catch: The lounge's movement wasn't stabilized naturally with gravity. It had to be done by hand. A crewman had a spirit level to watch, and he had to activate the hydraulics to move in the appropriate direction. It could only move inline with the ship, so one axis of movement, and I really don't think a person watching a level could realistically time things quite right.

In fact, I'd be more worried about overcompensating with the back and forth and turning the entire room into a blender, but we'll never find out.

On its first outing, it ran into the shore, damaging the ship. When taken back out for its first and only trip with actual passengers, it... once again crashed. The passenger cabin wasn't even moving during the trip, it was locked in place, probably because of the earlier damage.

It rammed the pier multiple times, eventually breaking the thing. This pathetic performance caused investors to pull their funding, and the company behind it all collapsed too. Ultimately an enquiry found the captain to be at fault, but that didn't help the ship design.

Here's the proposition: All the live musical performance, sports, and theater you could want to listen to, right there in your phone, all for just five pounds a year. Sounds like a pretty stellar deal, right?

Well, I'm talking about 1895, and the system is the Electrophone. Or really, several different systems in different countries, but I'm going to call them all "Electrophone", because their stories are essentially all the same.

This was one of the earlier tries at monetizing the telephone system in ways that weren't just one person talking to another. France established a similar system earlier, the Théâtrophone. A complex system of microphones would be set up in a theater where there would be an opera, play, etc.. The audio was then connected to the phone system, and you, sitting at home, could enjoy all of the performance in comfort.

Of course, if you didn't have your own phone in your home, hotels and such also installed coin-operated Electrophone systems, just sixpence to listen for a few minutes.

The system also had its drawbacks, like needing to be physically close to the source. Amplifiers also weren't practical yet, so headphones were a must. Some fancy setups included a hexagonal table with several headsets built into it. And it tied up your phone line, so forget calling a friend during their favorite soaps.

The system had its adherents, including Queen Victoria, but it wasn't especially successful in getting an audience. That five pounds a year in 1895 would be £840 today, which is a pretty exorbitant sum when you're already paying just to have the phone line.

An American system, Musolaphone, offered even more benefits, such as daily news readouts, prize fight commentary, and baseball games. The cost? A cool $3 a week. Not so bad, until you plug it into an inflation calculator and that's $5,000 a year. I think you'd struggle to pay that much for subscriptions even with today's Balkanized streaming services.

Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in 1926 made the history books, but there's another, slightly more forgotten person to make the trip. He might be remembered more for infamy than fame. The man was Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan.

Charles Lindbergh, seeking to win a $25,000 prize (nearly $500k today), had a custom plane constructed. Although the builder, Ryan Airlines, would later try to market similar models as "Lindbergh's Plane", the Ryan NYP "Spirit of Saint Louis" was a true one-of-a-kind.

In just two months, the Ryan NYP was built from the ground up to Lindbergh's specifications. It was built around holding enough fuel. The landing struts were reinforced to support the tanks, and the front seat was replaced with a massive fuel tank, leading to a periscope being required to see straight ahead.

Everything was a little kludged, including the compass being mounted on the panel behind Lindbergh. He used a makeup kit's mirror to see it over his shoulder. His wicker chair was deliberately uncomfortable to keep him awake, and he carried no radio to save weight. What good would a radio do him if anything went wrong in the middle of the Atlantic? he reasoned.

The NYP, however, was a finely-built piece of art compared to the plane used by Douglas Corrigan. Corrigan saw Lindbergh's fame and success and thought "Hey, I could do that." It took him years to scrape together the resources, but by 1938 he was ready to replicate Lindbergh's flight, flying from New York to Ireland (instead of Paris).

His plane was a nine-year-old Curtiss Robin "the most wretched-lookin jalopy". Corrigan, a skilled aircraft mechanic, had patched it together from spare parts from his work with metal bits and baling wire. The gas tanks were jammed wherever they fit, leaving the pilot awkwardly hunched over.

The plane was, of course, completely unsuitable for a transatlantic flight, and officials told him as such. They directly refused him permission to make the attempt.

He was, however, given permission to do a cross-country flight from Los Angeles to New York, which he did. On arrival in New York, he filed for permission to then make the return journey westward to LA.

He took off. To the east. Corrigan claimed he misread his compass and didn't notice he was flying east until he was already twenty-six hours into the flight, nor did he notice he was over the ocean. His supplies for the trip: Two chocolate bars, some fig bars, and a quart of water.

When one of his fuel tanks sprung a leak, he used a screwdriver to punch a hole in the floor. The sloshing gasoline was only inches away from a hot exhaust pipe.

Against all odds, Corrigan made it to Ireland. Lindbergh was greeted on arrival by a cheering crowd. Corrigan was greeted by a 600-word telegram listing all the aviation regulations he'd broken.

"There are more airplanes in the sea than submarines in the sky" is one of those funny aphorisms. But guess what, there's been at least one submarine in the sky! No, there's probably a good reason we don't do it that often.

As early as 1920, people have wanted flying submarines. I'm really not sure what the benefit would be. On the other hand, we did also have submarine-launched airplanes in that era. These were "submarine aircraft carriers", which sounds a whole lot cooler than they actually looked, which is still pretty cool.

They worked by having a tiny waterproof hangar on top of the submarine, carrying just one or two small planes with folding wings. Typically, these would be for reconnaissance. Submarines have pretty bad vision above the surface.

More enthusiastic minds tried to do aerial bombing based out of submarines (and did so in WWI), but the small size of the planes limited their range more than just launching them from actual land.

(A WWII Japanese design with a hangar for torpedo bombers)

Anyways, why not cut out the middleman and have the plane be able to fly underwater? Well, lots of reasons, but let's ignore all of those and forge ahead with the design. For starters, your engine needs to work underwater. Jet engines can handle a lot of water going through them (look up a jet engine water test!), but I don't think they're quite able to go underwater.

So instead you need an electric engine for underwater propulsion and shut off the aerial one. Oh, and all that air a plane has in its fuselage won't let you go underwater, so that needs to be designed to flood. Maybe give the pilot a rebreather for that step, since you'll need all the ballast you can get to stay under.

Still with me? Glad you're reading my post, Donald Reid. Reid designed The first (and only?) practical flying submarine, the aptly-named Reid Flying Submarine 1. It did all of the above.

Now, prepare to be disappointed. Wikipedia notes that with such a compromised design, "the performance expected from such a construction is usually rather moderate." The RFS-1 is no exception. Going underwater required first landing, removing the propeller, then putting a rubber cover over the engine. So don't expect a Thunderbirds-esque dive into the water from the air.

After all that, it was a pretty lousy plane and submarine. It only demonstrated flight up to 25 meters in distance, and 10 meters in altitude. It couldn't get near that same depth underwater, just 3 meters.

So there's a reason Reid's the only one to really do it. There have been lots of proposals and drawing board designs. As for submarine aircraft carriers, we may be working our way back toward that with much smaller drone designs launched from submarines.

A watch that loses thirty-nine minutes every day. Sounds kind of useless, right? The good news is that there was, at one point, a very real reason to need it, and it was to solve yet another incredibly difficult timekeeping problem.

I talked earlier about the annoyances of knowing what time it in various places on Earth, where in the old days, the time would depend entirely on your exact location. How much worse can the problem get? Oh, much, much worse, especially if in the future we actually manage to live on other planets.

The problem is that planets other than Earth don't have the exact same length of a day, of course. Mars is the easiest case, having a day only thirty-nine minutes longer than Earth's. And still, we have to account for it when talking to the various probes we've sent to explore there.

The first step in adjusting is to stop calling them "days". "Sol" is the term for a Martian day, divided into twenty-four "solar hours" of sixty-one minutes and thirty-nine second each. Years are right out. Don't try to count Martian years. Missions to Mars are counted starting from zero on up for a reason, or in the number of days that have passed since December 29, 1873 (don't ask).

Anyways, for our purposes, timekeeping on Mars matters most because most of our probes are solar-powered, so we mostly work with them when the sun is up there. Unfortunately for the people doing the work, that doesn't always correspond to when the sun is up here.

For most, the local time is set on arrival to Mars based on the current solar time, and conveniently, they don't typically move far enough for the distance to matter. Opportunity (rest in peace) travelled about 25 miles, or enough distance for its clock to be off by only a few seconds.

While operators were controlling Spirit and Opportunity, they had what might have been one of the worst work schedules out there. They needed to stay on Martian daytime, meaning that every day, they started work 39 minutes later than the last.

I'll admit that I take having ice readily available in my house for granted. Back in the day, if you wanted ice and it wasn't currently doing winter-y things outside, you'd have to go somewhere that it was and bring back the ice. The "ice trade" was a major industry in the 19th and 20th centuries, with countries like Norway exporting as much as a million tons of ice per year.

The invention of modern refrigeration pretty much killed off that industry for everything except niche ice-carving events, but I wanted to talk about one specific last hoorah of bulk ice harvesting and transportation, the Ice Block Expedition of 1959.

Specifically though, this didn't concern an ice distributor, but rather a Norwegian insulation manufacturer called Glassvatt. who wanted to show off how effective their glass wool was. In 1958, Radio Luxembourg issued a challenge to transport three tons of ice all the way from the Arctic Circle to the Equator.

The reward: For every kilogram of ice that made it, they'd pay about $2,000 in today's money. No refrigeration would be allowed, only insulation material. Glassvatt did the math and realized that with their glass wool, this would give them a profit of millions.

Radio Luxembourg also did the math and promptly retracted the challenge.

Still, it would make for great PR, so Glassvatt went ahead with it anyways. They picked out a nice Norwegian glacier and brought a large team, including engineers and a glaciologist. The block was too large to extract in one piece, so they cut it apart and melted the blocks back together, ending up with 3,050 kilograms of ice aboard a truck, placed inside an iron container insulated with wood and glass wool.

They also loaded up the truck with a few hundred kilograms of medicines to be delivered to a hospital near their destination in Gabon. And off they went! They went through several major cities in Europe to boost visibility, getting a great reception everywhere except Belgium, where they nearly got sent back due to a missing customs declaration.

On getting across the Mediterranean to Algiers, they drained the container, finding barely a gallon of water had melted off the ice block so far. Allegedly, some camels were allowed to drink it and found it the most delicious water they'd ever had. This story is doubted because first, it's hard to get a solid opinion from a camel on anything, and second, the water was disgusting having filtered through the glass wool and tar paper.

They were escorted across the Sahara by the French Foreign Legion, being warned "No stops, drive for your lives, even if you get a flat tire" due to the ongoing Algerian War and raiders who would want the medicine and truck.

It took three weeks and they lost about 46 gallons of water, but the Ice Block Expedition of 1959 was a success. The block still weighed 2,714 kilograms, losing about 11% of its mass.

Charles de Gaulle sent a message that if they would repeat the journey back to France, he would personally greet them in Paris. The exhausted crew declined this and chose to fly home. The ice was broken up and distributed to the citizens of Libreville.

"I just inherited this stamp collection, how much is it worth?" is a pretty common question. The good news is that it has a simple and straightforward answer: It's worthless!

Okay, it's a bit of a generalization, but basically any US stamps issued after about 1933 just don't have any value. Some people put the date even further back to only 1800s stamps, but there are some zeppelin stamps from 1930 that I personally would love to own...

Why 1933 specifically? It's when Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office and really brought stamp collecting into the mainstream. He was the first president to be really, really into the hobby. And that brought a lot of public interest, and more issues started to be preserved in mint condition. For how it goes when you collect things in bulk expecting their value to rise, see Beanie Babies.

When I say he was avid about stamps, the guy was so stamp-centric that he spent quite a bit of time in his otherwise very busy time in office personally designing stamps for the Post Office Department. One of these designs was the 3-cent Byrd Antarctic Expedition stamp.

Sometimes his stamp-collecting obsession caused problems. James Farley was the Postmaster General under FDR, and while he didn't really bother with collecting stamps, he was very interesting in currying favor with Roosevelt.

To that end, he ordered the Post Office to make numerous special souvenir sheets of stamps, which wouldn't be perforated or gummed. These were then autographed and given to Roosevelt and several other close friends and family as gifts.

If there's anything that absolutely disgusts stamp collectors, it's rare stamps being intentionally created that they'll never be able to acquire, and this situation was exactly that. Something had to be done! To fix the self-inflicted problem, Farley simply had production of the souvenir sheets massively increased and made available to the public.

These sheets became known as "Farley's Follies" and you can still find them around today, differentiated from regularly-issued stamps because they don't have any gum. More rare are the original autographed full sheets that kicked off the scandal, but you can see those in the National Postal Museum, with some more in private hands.

Anyways, the 1930s saw a huge expansion in public interest in stamp collecting, but more importantly, an expansion in governmental interest. People started holding on to stamps and buying full sets for their collections, and if you saw how that went with Beanie Babies, well, that's exactly how it went for stamps.

I will admit that today I judged something too soon. This is the flag of Zamora, Spain, a city of about 60,000 and capital of the province of Zamora.

So, the flag is a bit unusual in that it consists of several separate strips of fabric. I am all about non-rectangular flags. Ohio has the best state flag of any, and Nepal is doing great with its "mathematical formula on how to draw it is in the constitution" design too.

But Zamora's flag is not really that flag-like. Being nine separate strips of fabric, one green and eight red, it doesn't work that well in the flag department. It just sit there on the pole as an awkward tangle. So I very quickly dismissed it as a bad idea.

I spoke too soon! What it is is the Red Sign or Seña Bermeja, and its history goes back much further than I expected. In fact, it goes back thousands of years to the Roman era. The alleged start of the design is from 140 BCE, where a defeated Roman general offered Celtic leader Viriatus his cape. The cape was torn up and mounted on a spear haft.

The latest addition to the flag was in 1476, when the green strip was added after the people of Zamora aided a king in battle, who gave them the green ribbon. This makes the flag of Zamora one of the longest-used flags in the world.

That spear haft decoration then stuck around for centuries in the form of the flag. It's not very practical, but once you know the background, it's a lot more interesting than most other municipalities' flags.

I will mention, however, that the flag also features on the Zamora coat of arms, where it has the wrong number of strips and is also being held by a hand with six fingers. But only in this one depiction, because heraldry is a serious mess when it comes to anything more complicated than stripes and basic devices.

The Zamora flag's unique design leads to it being badly misrepresented, especially in digital form, with the separations between the strips being shown as solid white.

I got on this page when I was looking at the list of non-rectangular flags. I need you to understand the physical revulsion I feel for the flag of Tampa, Florida, which was shockingly designed by one person. I thought it was like Milwaukee's abomination, which was created by having a design competition and then deciding to much all of them together instead of actually picking a winner.

What is a sandwich? Is a hotdog a sandwich? It's caused many internet arguments, most of which produced nothing of value for humanity. Just like most internet arguments. The good news is that I do have an answer for you!

More specifically, the New York Department of Taxation and Finance has an answer for you, because this is once again a story of "court warps reality by declaring an answer to a question that needs to have a solid answer".

Now, I'll be honest here: My definition of a sandwich starts and stops with the Earl of Sandwich. Is it two slices of bread that the man could hold in one hand while playing cribbage? Yeah? Sandwich. Would he go "by jove, what is this?" if you handed it to him instead of his requested two slices of bread with salt beef?

Not a sandwich. So put your grilled cheeses, your hotdogs, your pitas, your open-faced sandwiches, your Uncrustables, and stick them on some other side of the Bread Formations Venn Diagram.

I will note that it's entirely likely that the origin story with John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, is apocryphal and never happened. But hey, it's an easy explanation for where it started, so we may as well make that the truth as well.

In the US and outside of my arbitrary definition for a Tumblr post though, 'what is a sandwich' depends on your tax jurisdiction. This is due to some types of food being taxed differently, especially if they're pre-prepared or served hot, along with some zoning restrictions by food types.

So we have three major examples. In Boston: A sandwich includes at least two slices of bread, and is "not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos, and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla". They made that ruling because of a restaurant in a shopping complex having exclusive right to sell sandwiches, but then a place selling burritos wanted to set up.

Next up is New York, where legally, burritos, hot dogs, and wraps are indeed sandwiches. In fact, their page includes a massive list of "everything that is, taxably, a sandwich". But generally, it's anything made ready-to-eat and with some form of edible bread-ish wrapper. Number of layers and size does not matter.

They seem to skirt the question of why an open-faced sandwich is a sandwich, but not a pizza. I'll avoid it too.

Finally, the state of Indiana in 2024 made a similar court decree that tacos and burritos are "Mexican-style sandwiches". The impetus for this decision was zoning not allowing 'restaurants', but it would allow a sandwich shop, and they needed to decide on which side a taco should fall.

There was a public hearing on this, and I would really, really enjoy finding a recording of a whole crowd of people arguing over what is a sandwich.

What time is it right now? It's a surprisingly complicated question, and one that I think is downright miraculous that we've (nearly) managed to answer it.

In the olden days, the answer used to be both simpler and a lot more complicated, depending on where you cared about the time. If you only needed to worry about your town, it's easy: Just base it on the position of the Sun. Every town kept its own time zone, called Local Mean Time or LMT.

The LMT is still not completely based on the Sun, but rather a small correction from "local apparent time", because the Sun and Earth wobble a little in their orbits. Still, your local sundial is the best bet for knowing what time it might be at the moment.

That's where we get things like Dublin Mean Time, which was defined as a twenty-five minute and twenty-one second offset from Greenwich Mean Time. That's when the Sun is just about directly overhead in Dublin's Dunsink Observatory, so it worked well enough.

It's no coincidence that things got complicated when the railway came into fashion. Suddenly, your town wasn't the only thing to worry about. When is your train leaving, and when is it arriving, when that's hundreds of miles away, keeping its own local time? The town a few miles to the east is also a few minutes ahead of you in their time.

And so we created railway time in the 1850s, a system of transmitting time signals via telegraph and splitting continents into time zones. Time zones grew organically into larger and larger coordinated areas. We still haven't yet hit the system you know today with a global time system with offsets.

The US got split into four time zones with an hour offset from each, but it was still a mess. Every railroad used their own time zone based on their headquarters or other landmark, so you could be sitting at a railroad station and see multiple clocks with different times for different incoming trains.

With increased globalization of trade and communication, most of the world was on a standardized system by 1900, with a few holdouts like Nepal (who are still on a 45-minute offset), or Eucla in Western Australia, which has a population of 37 and also a 45-minute offset for some reason.

The International Meridian Conference was held in 1884, with the result being the global adoption of a single Prime Meridian (rather than everyone keeping their own central time). The big controversy there was where the meridian should be. France argued it should be neutral and not cut through any major populations, whereas places like Britain said it should stay put right where it was, in Britain.

Lions on a plane! It sounds like a bad sequel to an already questionable movie, but no, it's instead a questionable historical infatuation with putting lions on planes for PR purposes.

The Gilmore Oil Company needed to make sales with a flashy advertisement, and what better method than by putting a lion cub on a plane? In 1930, they gave famous barnstormer and air racer Roscoe Turner $15,000 to buy both a plane and a lion cub, with the cub being named "Gilmore" for the company.

Gilmore was equipped with a custom-fitted flying suit and parachute (on petition from the Humane Society), which really cemented the image of "Gilmore the Flying Lion". Gilmore went on to flying over 25,000 miles and became Turner's companion while setting many airspeed records. And would also frequently scare mail deliverers while not in the plane.

When Gilmore got too big to fly by 1935, at 150 pounds, and didn't fit the cockpit or parachute, he was retired to a jungle-themed amusement park, where Turner continued to visit. You can still visit Gilmore today at the National Air and Space Museum, though he died in 1950.

But stopping when the lion is too big to safely fly with is for quitters, or at least, that's what MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Studios thought in 1927. Jackie was the second lion used as their mascot "Leo the Lion", and the first to roar audibly on their logo intro.

Jackie was known for surviving quite a few incidents, such as "two train wrecks, a sinking ship, a 1933 earthquake, and an explosion in the studio". In 1927, at about 12 years old and 350 pounds, Jackie was to fly cross-country in a plane similar to Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.

The plane was modified with a glass-encased iron cage behind the pilot for Jackie. Guess what? 350 pound lions don't fly well and the plane was massively overweight. It crashed in the mountains of Arizona. Shockingly, both the pilot and Jackie survived, leaving them stranded in the wilderness for four days, eating sandwiches and water.

How long can an airplane fly? In 1928, that was a very good question. Air-to-air refueling was still a novel concept, and Major Carl Spaatz (you may recognize that name later) wanted to find out. Well, specifically, this event started as a publicity stunt for the new Army Air Service, but Spaatz was told it needed to have some real military value.

With that in mind, Spaatz got a Fokker C-2A transport and made some modifications with the goal of demonstrating long-range endurance flights with refueling. It was modified with access doors and catwalks that would allow the mechanic to repair the engines in-flight.

How long would the flight last, the public asked. Nobody knew, so the plane was named "Question Mark" and painted with a large question mark on the fuselage. It didn't carry a radio, since those were heavy and unreliable. Instead, messages were sent via flares, flags, lights, and notes passed on the resupply lines.

Or, in the most interesting method, using "blackboard planes" where fighters flying adjacent were painted black and had messages written on them for Question mark.

It was a hairy ride. Spaatz got drenched in high-octane gasoline during refueling. Fearing chemical burns, they considered stopping, but nah, he just changed his clothes (having to direct another refuel and resupply without them first), wiped down, and kept going.

They also encountered windows blowing out and engine problems. The mechanic put on a parachute and taped his pants in place to climb out under the wing to make repairs.

After six days of flying, they were finally forced down by pushrod failure, where the left engine seized and the other two began to lose power. Still, they broke all existing records for sustained flight and distance. Although civilians proceeded to immediately break their record within months.

The event inspired "aeronautical flagpole sitting" with people competing for longer and longer flights. This culminated in the 1958 flight of Hacienda, a Cessna 172 that stayed in the air for over two months, being refueled from a truck following under it.

So cars can be front-engine, rear-engine, or mid-engine (the last of which is good for weight distribution). How about planes? Of course, we could be talking about the actual engine itself. The Bell P-39 Airacobra has the engine in the center of the plane so a large cannon could be mounted in the nose.

Anyways, talking about the position of the engine is kind of boring, since you can put it wherever and move power with a driveshaft. But what about the propeller? Of course, that can go in the front or the rear of the fuselage. How about the center? And no, not on the wing. The center of the fuselage.

And so we have the SPAD S.A, a French design from 1915. Early aircraft were typically intended for observation, often with a separate person in charge of observing. The problem with a tractor configuration (the usual propeller-in-front) is that there's a big spinny thing in the way of the person trying to look around.

So the SPAD S.A used a novel solution: It put the observer in front of the propeller using a 'pulpit' or 'basket' supported on a shaft going through the prop. The good news: This made for a great view. The bad news: They've found a way to make World War I-era aviation even more dangerous.

It was noted that the observer really couldn't communicate with the pilot. They at least fitted a screen behind the person so they don't lean back into the prop. But the pulpit would vibrate quite badly, and was noted as occasionally detaching from the rest of the plane in flight.

And when landing, the taildragger landing gear made it easy to drop the nose forward, which would be unfortunate for the person in the nose. A British review said "it would be expensive in observers if flown by indifferent pilots".

The S.A was not a popular aircraft even with the French. It was retired nearly immediately after introduction (the real wonder being that it went past being a prototype). It was also used by the Imperial Russian Air Service, who likely found the name SPAD comical since it translates to "plummet" in Russian.