Interesting story of Chicle (chewing gum)

In 1869 a Staten Island photographer named Thomas Adams made friends with exiled Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, he of Alamo fame.

Adams noticed the old general didn’t smoke but liked to chew a plug of tree sap he called “Chicle”. Adams took the chicle and put a candy shell around it, getting rich on the invention of Gum Balls.

Santa Anna hoped the invention would finance his return to power in Mexico City but that never occurred. Gumball machines appeared in 1918, Bubble Gum in 1928.

In the same year 'inventor' William Semple of Mount Vernon Ohio received a patent for chewing gum.

Since early times frontiersmen and Indians had the habit of chewing on a piece of pine resin or sap. At 9,000 years old, the oldest chewed piece of gum was found in Sweden in a glacier in 1993. As early as 1842 Charles Curtis was selling spruce chewing gum from his home in Bangor Maine.

Henry Ford, the man who truly understood Business

In 1914, the Ford Motor Company shocked the captains of American Industry by raising it¹s wage rates for work shift from $2.40 a day to $5.00 a day and adopting the new 8 hour work day.

Henry Ford¹s idea was when workers have more money they buy cars. The idea worked and sales of cars quadrupled and the economic climate of Detroit boomed.

Would that companies and the US government learn from this example that bore such sweet fruit!

Don't piss off the wrong people

In 1522, Adrian VI, a Dutchman was elected Pope. He was the first non Italian since 1378 and the last non-Italian until John Paul II in 1978. He really tried to be a true Christian spiritual guide and agreed with Martin Luther that the church was too corrupt and sinful in it’s ways.

He demanded he and his cardinals live on only one ducat a day, about $12.50, he walled up the Belvedere Palace and it’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman art, as pagan idolatry.

Poets and artists were furious that this Pope canceled all their rich contracts. The unemployed poet Aretino called the cardinals “miserable rabble” and that they should all be buried alive for electing this lousy pope. After three months as Pope, Adrian died at the age of 64, of unspecified causes. (With the Medici's and all the intriques revolving around power and money, its easy to imagine he was assisted to death, probably poisoned.)

This time the cardinals elected a Medici Pope who loved art, music and parties. The people of Rome sent flowers to Adrian’s doctor to congratulate him for losing his patient.

Cosmic Bombs

During the Manhattan project, director Gen. Leslie Groves has a private meeting with FDR at the White House. Groves tells the President the two "cosmic bombs" (Atomic Bombs) they are building will end the war.

The reason they were making two was one was uranium based and the other was plutonium based.

To those who believe the U.S. atomic bombed Japan out of racism Franklin Roosevelt wanted one dropped on Germany immediately to stop the Battle of the Bulge and kill Hitler.

But Groves argued the A-bomb hadn’t been tested yet. He worried that if the bomb was a dud, the Germans were smart enough to take it apart and build their own from the fissionable material, which they might shoot in a V-2 at London.

Three horrible ways to die

Way back in 1326, Hugh Despenser the Younger, onetime gay lover of King Edward II, was executed by order of Eddie’s wife Queen Isabella the She-Wolf of France. She had his penis and testicles amputated and burned in front of him before he hanged.

I thought that was pretty horrific but there is another one that had people gagging, vomiting and running out of the room.

Several hundred years later, in 1757, a man named Robert Damiens attacked French King Louis XV and stabbed him. It was a flesh wound that Voltaire described as a pin-prick.

The king survived and the court sentenced Damiens to the most horrible death they could think of, the medieval punishment for regicides. Nobody had done it for generations so the court executioner, Charles Samson, had to consult the history books.

Drawing and quartering....cut off assailants hands and stick stumps in pan of burning sulfur... The execution was so ghastly that the witnesses vomited and fled, Samson passed out, so his assistants had to finish the job.

Robert Damiens believed he was doing it for the people but unfortunately he was 32 years too early for the French Revolution.

A story I heard here in Mexico, about 9 years ago, 3 gringos were killed in the period of about a year, by male prostitutes they picked up on the streets of Guadalajara. Throats cut and the place robbed. Several gringos, friends of the dead men, got together and decided they needed to send a message.

After the 3rd murder, the killer went to a bar, got drunk and was openly bragging about cutting a gringos throat. The bartender called the cops and on interrogation at the police station, the killer admitted he had in fact committed two of the murders. He was tried, convicted and sent to a federal prison.

Friends of the dead gringos chipped in money for a total of $1000US which was given to a go-between who had cholo (gangster/thug) and gang contacts that even extended into the prison. Money was distributed and plans made.

When the day came, the murdered was taken by prison guards into an isolated room, several other burly prisoners were also brought in. The guards locked the door and stood outside waiting.

Two the other prisoners were shall we say, well hung, so one forced himself down the murderers throat and the other raped him rectally without use of lubrication. Blood poured out and the man was screaming with pain. The guards ignored it.

After all the other prisoners had raped this murderer, they cut off his penis and testicles. Earlier they had prepared with a corncob soaked in habanero juice...this they shoved up his ripped rectum and left for 30 minutes as the man cried and screamed in pain. Finally they sliced his throat and let him bleed to death.

Word got out on the streets of Guadalajara not to screw around with gringos else they be subjected to similar fates. I am told that for years after that, male prostitutes wouldn't steal even an ink pen from any gringo apartment or house.

I don't know if that is true or not but I do know the guy who told me claimed to have been the go-between who arranged all this for a fee. I have long since lost contact with him over the years.