Part 18 (1/2)

4 Presidents Who Overindulged

Feeding an appet.i.te for power rarely fills a guy's belly. These four pudgy heads of state were as happy raiding the pantry as they were creating policy.

_01:: Grover Cleveland: The Gla.s.s Is Always Half Empty Large, jovial Grover Clevelandalso known as ”Uncle Jumbo”enjoyed his beer. In 1870 (15 years before he became president), Grover ran for district attorney of Erie County, New York, against Lyman K. Ba.s.s. It was a friendly contest. In fact, it was so friendly that Cleveland and his opponent drank and chatted together daily. In the interest of moderation, they agreed to have no more than four gla.s.ses of beer per day. But soon they exceeded that and started ”borrowing” gla.s.ses from the next day and the next until they'd exhausted their ration for the whole campaignwith the election still weeks away. The solution: Each brought his own giant tankard to the tavern, called it a ”gla.s.s,” and went back to the four-aday ration.

_02:: An Extra-Cuddly Teddy The standard scoop on Teddy Roosevelt was that he was a scrawny, sickly weakling from New York City who built himself up into a rough, tough cowboy type through vigorous outdoor pursuits. What's seldom mentioned is that Roosevelt went from skinny boy to robust young man to plump (though vigorous) president to obese (though still active) ex-president. While running on the Bull Moose Party ticket in a 1912 attempt to regain the White House, Roosevelt was described as ”an eager and valiant trencherman” (it meant he ate a lot). If the main course was roast chicken, TR would consume an entire bird himself, in addition to the rest of the meal. Not to mention the four gla.s.ses of whole milk the portly prez routinely threw back with dinner. Photos and films show an aging Roosevelt carrying a decidedly wide load.

_03:: W. H. Taft and His Presidential Privileges William Howard Taft often dieted because his doctor and his wife told the 290-pound president that he must. But without supervision, Will ”the Thrill” didn't just give in to temptation, he sought it. Once while traveling he asked a railroad conductor for a late-night snack. When the conductor said there was no dining car, Taft angrily called for his secretary, Charles D. Norton, who had probablyunder instruction from Mrs. Taftarranged for the diner to be unhooked. Norton reminded the president that his doctor discouraged between-meal eating. Taft would have none of it. He ordered a stocked dining car attached at the next stop and specified that it have filet mignon. ”What's the use of being president,” he said to Norton, ”if you can't have a train with a diner on it?”

_04:: Bill Clinton: With an a.s.sist from Helmut Kohl President Bill Clinton, who famously frequented McDonald's, was known for eating whatever was put in front of him. He showed a more discriminating, if just as hungry, side in the company of Germany's chancellor Helmut Kohl, though. Kohl was called ”Colossus,” at least in part because he carried 350 pounds on his 6-foot-4 frame. But, in Kohl, Clinton found a gourmand soul mate. In 1994, Clinton hosted the chancellor at Filomena Ristorante of Georgetown for a lunch at which both consumed ma.s.s quant.i.ties of ravioli, calamari, and red wine, as well as plenty of antipasto, b.u.t.tered breadsticks, Tuscan white bean soup, salad, and sweet zabaglione with berries. Each ended the meal by ordering a large piece of chocolate cake to go. Clinton once remarked that he and his German counterpart, though the largest of world leaders, were still too slim to be sumo wrestlers.

5 Deadly Digestive Problems On the long list of unpleasant ways to die, it's hard to imagine anything topping ”exploding colon.” We'll take the stomach flu, heartburn, death by paper cuts even! Just please, please, spare us these fates.

Touch of Evil The most deadly digestive problem of all may prove to be bovine in nature. Cows emit so much methane in their flatulence that some experts claim it to be a contributing factor to the erosion of the ozone layer.

_01:: Farting to Death Sounds like a third-grade punch line, but maybe it's so funny because it's true. The average person expels about a half liter of gas per day. Put bluntly, that's somewhere between 13 and 17 daily farts. And although any 11-year-old with a matchbook and curiosity knows that gas pa.s.sed is flammable (since it contains primarily hydrogen and methane), it's not dangerous for the excessively ga.s.sy to work around open flames. Once in a great while, though, someone will blow up from gas. The problem usually occurs during colonic surgery, when heat (or a spark) comes into contact with flammable intestinal ga.s.ses after inadequate ”bowel evacuation.” The resulting explosion is sometimes fatal. Anyone who's ever suffered through colon surgery can tell you exactly what ”bowel evacuation” entailsyou drink a laxative the day before surgery and find yourself in the bathroom with enough time to read Anna Karenina. Unpleasant, sure, but better than blowing up on the operating table.

_02:: Pica Pica, an eating disorder in which sufferers feel compelled to eat nonfood items, is usually seen in children. At least 10% of kids enjoy eating dirt or paste or plaster, but adults suffering from pica often develop unusual tastes. Strangely, the same such cravings pop up so often they have their own names. Pagophagia is the compulsive eating of ice; coprophagia describes eating (often animal) feces; coniophagia involvesget thisthe pathological consumption of dust from venetian blinds. And pica can be fatal. Too much plaster might lead to fatal lead poisoning, for instance, and consuming clay can lead to a potentially deadly intestinal blockage.

_03:: Roundworms About 25% of the world's population is infected with roundworms (that's Ascaris lumbricoides to the Latin scholars), which is even more disconcerting when you consider that one generally contracts roundworms by swallowing egg-ridden human feces. Once infected, the eggs hatch in the stomach and intestines, then migrate throughout the body. Although completely disgusting, roundworms are only occasionally deadlythey can cause edema in the lungs; and the female worms, which can grow 18 inches long, sometimes perforate the intestines, leading to peritonitis. But the most terrifying wormy complication involves anesthesia. Because worms find anesthesia irritating, they sometimes migrate up the trachea and nasal pa.s.sages or down the intestines during surgery. It's been reported, for instance, that one pregnant woman had several of the nematodes worm out of her nose and mouth while she was giving birth.

_04:: Celiac Sprue Dieters seeking a low-carb lifestyle might do well to seek out celiac sprue, an intestinal ailment that amounts to an allergy to the protein glutenfound in such foods as wheat, barley, and rye. When celiac sufferers ingest the dreaded stuff, the immune system responds by attacking the small intestine, which leads to a sort of intestinal baldness. Villi, hairlike protuberances that line the small intestine, absorb nutrients into the body, but when people with celiac eat gluten, the villi get flattened or otherwise damaged, making proper nourishment impossible. If left undiagnosed, celiac can lead to ma.s.sive malnutrition, wasting, and even death. But people with celiac can lead perfectly healthy lives provided they forswear gluten. Which means no beer. Which is, frankly, unacceptable.

_05:: Megacolon A blessedly uncommon but life-threatening disorder, megacolon is characterized by the one-two punch of a ma.s.sively inflated colon (one), and the accompanying abdominal distension (two). Although generally a complication of bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, megacolon occasionally develops from severeand we mean severeconstipation. One such example is on display at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, which collects all manner of medical oddities (from John Wilkes Booth's thorax to a tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's jaw). The crown jewel of the Mutter Museum's collection is a five-foot-long megacolon. Bearing a distinct resemblance to Jabba the Hutt, the monstrosity was removed from a man who, unable to move his bowels, died with 40 pounds of excrement in his gut.

All You Need Is Drugs:

3 Philosophers Who Liked to Get

Groovy Thoughts

Philosophy requires precise reasoning and intense concentration on the most complex and intractable problems of human existence. But when your job involves developing elaborate proof about subjects like epistemology (the science of figuring out what we know, and how we can know it, and whether we can really know what we think we can know, and so on), perhaps you can be forgiven for winding down with a bit of illicit pleasure.

Touch of Evil In 1963, Timothy Leary was fired from his job as a psychology professor at Harvard University due to continued experiments with psychedelic agents.

_01:: Aldous Huxley and His Rave New World While no one confuses him with Aristotle, Aldous Huxley is considered something of a minor philosopher. Most famous for his tome Brave New World (1932), which featured the drug Soma, Huxley became fascinated with Hindu philosophy in the late 1930s, and eventually wrote a book (The Perennial Philosophy) and many essays on the subject. By the time 1953 rolled around, Huxley had tried the hallucinogen mescaline, and believed the visionary experiences he'd had reflected a truer world. In fact, Huxley was so enamored with hallucinogens that he dropped acid on his deathbed, pa.s.sing away on November 22, 1963. For the record, C. S. Lewis, who abstained from drugs, and John F. Kennedy, who took copious amounts of tranquilizers, died on the same day.

_02:: Plotinus and the ”Good” Life Plotinus, the third-century Roman credited with founding Neoplatonism, traveled more extensively than most ancient philosophers. And in those days, the easiest way to see the world was by joining a war. So in 242, Plotinus accompanied Emperor Gordian III in his battles against Persia, where Plotinus likely encountered Persian and Indian philosophies. He also probably encountered opium. Upon his return to Rome, the older, wiser, and definitely groovier Plotinus founded a loosely affiliated school of philosophers who placed great emphasis on union with ”the Good,” or G.o.d. And while it's not clear whether or not he thought it helped him in his search for this union, Plotinus also became a regular opium user. In fact, some scholars have even argued that his opium addiction shaped his high philosophical beliefs.

_03:: Foucault: The Thinking Man's Drinking Man Being something of a postmodernist, the French philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault (19261984) didn't believe drugs to be intrinsically good or bad, true or false. But he did use them. In addition to drinking heavily, Foucault dabbled in psychedelics and opium, and reportedly grew marijuana plants on the ledge of his Parisian apartment (he also enjoyed S and M, but that's neither here nor there). Luckily, the drugs didn't affect the quality of his intellectbooks like The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge were the first major reb.u.t.tals to existentialismand Sartre called the latter ”the last rampart of the bourgeoisie.” Foucault's books are also so exceedingly dense and his definition of ”truth” and ”knowledge” so nuanced that, frankly, it's difficult to imagine he ever wrote stoned.

Booze Is to Comedy as Pen Is to Literature: Funny Lushes There's nothing funny about alcoholism. But for whatever reason, there's often something very funny about alcoholics. We can trace the phenomenon back at least 23 centuries, to the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, who is recorded as having said, ”Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine so that I may wet my brain and say something clever.” When full-blown alcoholism took hold of the comedians below, it was usually with tragic consequencesbut until then, their wet brains made some great jokes.

_01:: W. C. Fields (18801946) Of all the alcoholic comedians, the bulbous-nosed W. C. Fields (ne William Claude Dukenfield) was by far the least embarra.s.sed by his indulgence. Fields started his career as a juggler but found fame with his impeccable wit and comic timing, first on Broadway and then in the movies. Although also noted for his dislike of children (”Any man who hates children and dogs can't be all bad”) and his ostentatious immorality (he claimed to religiously study the Biblein search of loopholes), Fields is probably best known for his drinking. At his peak, Fields downed two quarts of gin daily. ”I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy,” he once remarked. Fields died on his least favorite of daysChristmasin 1946.

_02:: Lenny Bruce (19251966) Among his many contributions to American culture, we ought not forget that it was Lenny Bruce who coined the term ”T and A.” Who knows what other witty obscenities he might have added to the vernacular were it not for his prodigious drinking and drug abuse. Attacking everyone from JFK to Dear Abby, Bruce brought social commentary into stand-up (although it didn't always pay well...he once dressed up as a priest and ”solicited money for lepers” to supplement his income). After repeated arrests for obscenity and worsening addiction, though, Bruce lost his sense of humor. He took to reading transcripts of his trials onstage, and on those rare occasions when he'd tell a joke, he'd often forget it midsentence. Sadly, Bruce pa.s.sed away, bankrupt and alone, of a heroin overdose in 1966.

_03:: Bill Hicks (19611994) Considered by many to be the Lenny Bruce of a new generation, Bill Hicks's innovative, ranting stand-up style inspired everyone from Sam Kinison (also an alcoholic, and also dead) to Denis Leary. Raised in Georgia, Hicks abandoned his conservative Baptist upbringing and quickly garnered critical acclaim on the comedy circuit. But his rages, both onstage and off, made him quite a misanthrope throughout much of the 1980sheavily intoxicated, he once said Hitler ”had the right idea, but was an underachiever.” Unlike Lenny Bruce, though, Hicks managed to sober up. He never drank after 1988, making his 1994 death from pancreatic cancer all the more tragic.

_04:: Buster Keaton (18951966) Buster Keaton, who was discovered by Fatty Arbuckle (and stood by him throughout his trials), also drank to excess. An innovative filmmaker, Keaton's masterpiece, The General, mixed his trademark slapstick comedy with his obsessive fascination with trains. But when Keaton's film company was bought in 1928, he soured on moviemaking, and his alcoholism worsened. In fact, by 1934 he was strait-jacketed and placed in a sanitarium. Some claim that Keaton, whose G.o.dfather was none other than Harry Houdini, escaped the jacket using his G.o.dfather's tricks and then left the sanitarium to find some booze. Maybe so, but Buster eventually sobered up, and continued to be productive, if less famous. He starred, for instance, in playwright Samuel Beckett's only movie, cleverly t.i.tled Film. In the end, though, liquor didn't beat Buster Keaton; smoking did. He died of lung cancer in 1966.

WRATH.

4 X-treme (Aggressive) Sports You Haven't Heard About The 5 Best Tales of Revenge Taken by Scorned Women 6 Gangsters Who Earned Their Names 4 Angry Queens 5 Trials or Cases Where Reason Was Turned Upside Down 5 Deities with Anger Management Problems 5 Armies Hopped Up on Goofb.a.l.l.s 3 Historical Bar Brawls 5 Prophets on the Edge 7 Close Calls in the Nuclear Age 5 Charming Episodes of Violence from Medieval Iceland 5 Dictators Who Worked Their Way to the Top War, What Is It Good For? Well, 3 Things, Actually 4 Angry Authors and Even Angrier Critics 6 Natural Disasters Explained 3 Leaders Who Murdered Family Members to Get Ahead 4 Animals Subject to 'Roid Rage 7 G.o.ds of War 3 Historical Figures Who Struck Back with a Vengeance 5 Wars Waged on Familial Insults Working It Out in Court:

4 X-treme (Aggressive) Sports You Haven't Heard About

Ah, sportsmans.h.i.+p. It summons up images of compet.i.tion, camaraderie, broken bones, disembowelment, and brutal, disfiguring death. No wonder players have always had fans to cheer them on.

_01:: Dead Goat Polo The modern game of polo, favorite pastime of English aristocrats and sn.o.bbish upper-cla.s.s wannabes, is usually played with a small ball about the size of a billiard ball, and almost never with a human head or a dead goat. But that's how the sport of kings began thousands of years ago under a different name”bughazi.” In fact, bughazi wasn't so much a leisure activity as military training for Persian cavalry, and it was possibly adopted from tribesmen in what is now modern-day Pakistan or Afghanistan. Aside from the dead goat factor, there were also other differences in play. Instead of four players on a side, for instance, the ancient version involved armies of menliterallywith hundreds or even thousands of players on each side. In fact, it's believed that the first tournament was won by Turkish tribesmen playing against the Persians in 600 BCE. And although the game was often played with animal heads, the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan made a popular change, inst.i.tuting the practice of decapitating military opponents and making a game ball of their noggins, still in their helmets.