Category: Writing

Welcome to an annual series I haven’t actually done on the blog yet: April Fools’, except it’s not.

The concept is simple: write about the modern world in such a way that it would sound like a bizarre April Fools’ joke to someone from the past. I wrote a version of this on social media in 2015 and 2016, but then in 2017 the joke stopped being funny. Fortunately, “Donald Trump was the President of the United States” actually is much funnier than “Donald Trump is the President of the United States,” so the joke can come back.

So imagine that it’s April 1st, 1999, and you have just received this letter from the future. Pretty good joke, right?

Except it’s not.

Dear 1999 fool,

The year is 2021, and the United States has been at war for 19 years.

Everything has changed in the two decades since terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, but the truth is the war has been going on for so long that it hardly ever makes the news anymore. Instead, the big news is something far more deadly: a new disease called COVID-19 has become a global pandemic that has killed nearly three million people and counting.

Fortunately, the end is may finally be in sight. We have four separate vaccines, created semi-collaboratively by four separate pharmaceutical companies at never-before-imagined speed. But 25 percent of Americans say they would rather take their chances with catching a deadly disease. We also know that wearing a thin cloth mask over your nose and mouth can cut the probability of transmission to near zero, but many people are saying that being told to wear a thin cloth mask over your mouth and nose is just like the Holocaust. It’s like the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, except that instead of the Grasshopper laughing at the Ant’s warning, the Grasshopper calls him a Nazi.

President Joe Biden has promised that vaccines will be available to all Americans by May 1st. Yes, that Joe Biden, who is still around at age 78, his 1980s-era scandals forgotten. But that’s not even the weird part. The weird part is that the previous president was Donald Trump. Yes, that Donald Trump. The national debt increased so much during the Trump administration that Republicans are now saying that the national debt isn’t so bad. Trump also claimed, with no evidence at all, that he was the real winner of last year’s Presidential election that he lost. His wife once posed for a nude lesbian photo shoot, but don’t worry, the Trumps oppose gay marriage.

Remember last year when Republicans impeached President Clinton for having an affair with an intern? Republicans now say that the President’s personal life doesn’t matter and the President should never be impeached for any reason.

If you’re into technology and have enough disposable income, you might have a cell phone – today, everyone has them. My phone comes with a video camera, a television, and music player to listen to songs like last year’s number one song, WAP (which of course stands for wet-ass pussy). It also offers instant access to all the knowledge of the world. I use it to catch Pokemon.

Have you heard of Tom Brady, the backup quarterback for the University of Michigan? He has now won seven Super Bowls, more than any single NFL team. But in Brazil he is still mostly known as Gisele Bündchen’s husband.

For the rest of 2021, we’re all looking forward to… anything, really. We’ve all been stuck inside for so long due to COVID-19. Here’s to better times ahead!

The Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Dryococelus australis) was one of the strangest animals ever to walk the earth.

It lived only on Lord Howe Island, a tiny island of 300 people about halfway between Australia and New Zealand. It was eight inches (20 cm) long. It looked like a weird cross between a cockroach and a lobster, and so it was nicknamed the Tree Lobster. It had no natural predators. It was completely harmless, living in and munching on trees.

In 1918, the SS Makambo ran aground on Lord Howe Island, and thousands of rats escaped like, uh, rats from a sinking ship. The rats ate and bred, and the tree lobster never stood a chance. Within two years, the Lord Howe Island stick insect was extinct.

Except it wasn’t.

The Discovery

Thirteen miles (20 km) southwest of Lord Howe Island is Ball’s Pyramid, an extinct volcano that juts 1,800 feet (560 meters) up from the remote Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the world’s truly beautiful places, and one that very few people ever get to see. But you can see it in this photo:

…and you can go there yourself with on Google Earth, embedded below. Be sure to zoom out until you can see Lord Howe Island, and then a looooooooong way farther until you can see the coast of Australia.

Scientists guessed – hoped, really – that some tree lobsters might have floated the 13 miles from Lord Howe Island to Ball’s Pyramid and established a sustainable population there. There are no trees on Ball’s Pyramid, but there are enough small bushes to provide a food and shelter for some stick insects. And so, two of them (scientists, not stick insects) decided to have a look for themselves.

In February 2001, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile traveled to Ball’s Pyramid to search. They climbed the rock, hundreds of feet above shark-infested waters, to search. And after a few searches, they found some sign of tree lobsters. And by “sign,” I mean “poop.”

But of course a few piles of poop isn’t enough evidence to conclude that a species has apparently risen from the dead. And the stick insect is nocturnal, so to find live animals, they knew they had to go back at night.

And so on the night of February 26, 2001, Priddel and Carlile went back to look again. “Went back” meaning “climbed up a sheer rock face above shark-infested waters in complete darkness.” Yes, they had safety equipment, but it must have still been terrifying.

And they found it: under a single tea tree plant (Melaleuca howeana) was the world’s entire population of Lord Howe Island Stick Insects. Twenty-four of them. The scientific paper Priddel and Carlile wrote uses detached academic prose, which completely fails to hide their excitement:

Two members of the survey team (N.C. and D.H.) ascended the Pyramid at night to conduct a nocturnal search of the area surrounding the shrub… Reaching this site at approximately [10 PM], they found, observed and photographed two adult female D. australis on the outer edges of the shrub (Figure 2).

These specimens, the first to be seen alive in more than 70 years, were highly conspicuous, their glossy bodies strongly reflecting the [flashlight]…

(Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003)

The Current Situation

Two years later in 2003, scientists returned to Ball’s Pyramid to collect specimens. They returned with two males and two females, which they sent to the Melbourne Zoo to start a captive breeding program.

Seventeen years and fifteen tree lobster generations later, a healthy population of 14,000 tree lobsters lives in captivity – mostly in Melbourne, with some pairs in zoos all over the world. Once rats are eliminated from Lord Howe Island (which they’re also working on), the plan is to reintroduce the tree lobster to its original habitat.

It’s a rare success story in a world full of creatures we are driving to extinction. But let’s take our success stories when we can. There’s hope.

More information

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating story, check out these resources:

• The Wikipedia article on the tree lobster (Dryococelus australis)
• This excellent NPR story by Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich
• The paper announcing the discovery (Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003). The abstract is public but the article is paywalled. If you’d like to read it in full, let me know, I might have a friend that can find it.
• This absolutely brilliant Australian animated short film about the tree lobster, linked there and embedded below

How you can help

The captive breeding program is expensive, so if this story is calling to you through a world full of need, the Melbourne Zoo is accepting donations to continue their work. Here is a two-page fundraising brochure explaining the program. If you feel called to donate to conservation biology more generally, a good place to start is the World Wildlife Fund. Obviously no pressure to donate during these trying times. I have no affiliation with either entity, so no conflict of interest.

Postscript

This has been super-fun, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Here’s that animated film, embedded via Vimeo.

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Be sure to check out the rest of my series on Things That Are Not What They Seem, Except They Weren’t.

Part 1: Joe Magarac
Part 2: Iron Eyes Cody
Part 3: Malba Tahan (with BONUS MATH!)
Part 4: Major William Martin
Part 5: Count Victor Lustig
Part 6: The Grass Mud Horse
Part 7: The Tree Lobster

Wikipedia is banned in the People’s Republic of China. You can imagine what the country’s notoriously repressive and information-controlling  government might think of a “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

Instead, China offers Baidu Baike, an editable encyclopedia site that is like Wikipedia, except that all entries are reviewed and approved by one of China’s many, many full-time Internet censors. In other words, not like Wikipedia at all.

You won’t find a Baidu Baike article on 六四事件 (the “June Fourth Incident,” their name for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests), and the article on æ°‘主 (Democracy) is underwhelming. But these curious omissions notwithstanding, Baidu Baike has more than 15 million articles covering all aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China.

In early 2009, a series of new articles appeared called the Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures (百度十大神兽), profiling some of the legendary creatures of Chinese folklore. The most famous of these was the famous grass mud horse, one of the most beloved creatures of ancient mythology.

Except it wasn’t – the whole thing was an adolescent joke.

Chinese is a a tonal language, in which words are built up from simple components and vocally distinguished by the relative pitch of your voice. Thus the opportunity for puns are endless – and grass mud horse (草泥马, pronounced “CÇŽo Ní MÇŽ,” which sounds very similar to the Chinese words for “f*ck your mother” (not providing the translation so I don’t get down-ranked by search engines that know Chinese).

The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures articles didn’t last long. Although they were perhaps mildly amused, the authorities were Not Impressed, and took down each article soon after it appeared, with little fanfare – and, as far as I can tell, no repercussions for the anonymous editors who posted them. But sometimes, a thing on the Internet becomes A THING ON THE INTERNET, and the 10 mythical creatures became such a thing. And none was a greater THING than the grass mud horse. It’s not immediately obvious how to depict an imaginary pun-based animal, but the Internet quickly decided that the grass mud horse looked like an alpaca.

As the grass mud horse became more and more popular, in One Of Those Bizarre Things That Happens Sometimes, it quickly took on an additional significance: as the unofficial mascot of the fight against internet censorship in China. It soon acquired an elaborate pun-based mythology: the only natural enemy of the grass mud horse is the river crab (河蟹, héxiè), whose name sounds like the Chinese government’s “harmonious society” policy, of which Internet censorship is a part. The river crab is usually depicted as “wearing three wristwatches” (帶三個錶, dài sān ge biÇŽo), which sounds like the “Three Represents” interpretation of communism promoted by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. It all came together in the Song of the Grass Mud Horse video, widely viewed on YouTube – except in China, which bans YouTube. Watch it below, with English subtitles:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezKfa0YOFSg]

Eventually, the censors caught on and banned the grass mud horse too. But it was fun while it lasted, and it has lived on as a symbol of the Chinese resistance. Sadly, that resistance has been powerless to stop censorship, particularly with the government’s new social credit system. But it was fun while it lasted. Because:

If your friend sent you a photo of an alpaca, at least you knew you weren’t alone.

April 30, 1943, off the coast of Spain.

World War II had been raging for nearly five years, but the Allies were finally starting to gain the upper hand. Both sides knew that the next logical battlefront would be an Allied invasion of somewhere in Southern Europe. The Germans were on high alert for any advance knowledge of the Allies’ plans. Late that night, a Spanish fisherman found a body floating in shallow water – wearing a British Royal Marines uniform with a locked a briefcase chained around its waist – and reported it to local police. Spain was officially neutral but informally allied with Germany, so the find soon ended up in the hands of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency.

The briefcase contained documents identifying the late soldier as Major William Martin. Martin’s briefcase also contained a letter from a high-ranking British army officer, addressed to another, with instructions to Martin to hand-deliver. The letter covered a number of topics, but most importantly for the story, described in detail the planned Allied invasion of Greece. When Hitler read the letter, he ordered more than 5,000 German troops to Greece to repel the invasion, along with fighters and U-boats to support them.

Thanks to this move, the Allies encountered little resistance in their invasion of Sicily.

Which of course was the plan all along.

And thus, presenting the man who saved Europe: Major William Martin.

Except he wasn’t.

He really did save Europe, but he really wasn’t Major William Martin. He was really Glyndwr Michael (first name pronounced GLIN-dor), a homeless man from Wales who died from eating rat poison. It was either a tragic accident or a suicide – we’ll never know for sure. Either way, he had no living relatives, so he was perfect for the plan; no living relatives means no one to ask where the body went.

British intelligence agents dressed Michael in a Major’s uniform, provided him with fake documents (including fake love letters from a fake fiancée), and published a fake obituary in the London Times. They included the all-important letter, which contained a mix of easily-verifiable truths and completely fictional invasion plans. Then they loaded Michael/Martin’s body onto the submarine HMS Seraph. At 4:15 AM on April 30th, the Seraph surfaced, its commanding officer led a service of burial at sea, and the crew lowered the body into the water. The fisherman found the body the same day, and the rest is history.

After the war ended, the body of Michael/Martin was returned to the British and buried in the British section of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad Cemetery in Huelva, Spain, not far from where it was first found.

There the story remained until 1953, when the British decided to reveal the truth. The commanding officer of the intelligence operation wrote The Man Who Never Was, which became a movie of the same name. But even in those works, the identity of “the man who never was” was not revealed. Finally, in 1996, an amateur historian identified the body as Michael’s. And in 1997, the British took the unprecedented step of carving a new message into the gravestone:

Glyndwr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM

And soon after, this man who would have likely been forgotten got a memorial in his hometown, reading:

Postscript

Thanks to one of my Internet Heroes, Tom Scott, for introducing me to this story thanks to his Things You Might Not Know video series:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lQtdhtw5eI&w=560&h=315]