For the next couple days I’m going to be hanging out with a few hundred people with strange fashion sense at a clown convention. So many clowns, but I shouldn’t have any trouble telling them all apart. You see, to copy another clown’s look is about the worst thing you could do in the funny business.

One form of protection a clown can use is to save their face on an egg. Yes, I just said what I said. There is an “egg registry” for clowns. Around 1946 a member of the International Circus Clowns Club in England started painting his fellow members onto chicken eggs. Each calcified work of art sought to perfectly copy each clown’s look including make-up, wigs, and hats.

It grew to contain thousands of eggs, and became a bit of an official way to lay claim to one’s unique appearance. There is at least one documented court case where the egg was involved to prove intellectual property of a pilfered make-up design. Don’t mess with a clown and his egg!

There is also a separate egg registry started in the U.S. that has grown in the last 25 years to over 700 faces. To see the miniature works of art, I direct you to this photo gallery.

• Source: The story of Clown Eggs from National Clown Week

P.S. In case you’re curious… I’m not a clown myself. At least not in the sense of putting on make-up. I’m attending the convention to teach a workshop on improvisational theatre.

Aspartame! The mere mention of it sends shivers through the spines of proactive label-readers. It is an artificial sweetener that was accidentally discovered to be 180 times sweeter than sugar with no calories. Featured prominently in “NutraSweet” and diet soda drinks, where you will find the words “CONTAINS ASPARTAME” emblazoned on the front label as required by law. But I’m not talking about the health concerns here today.

Rather, I came across a curious history of the legal side of aspartame, and how it came to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to be allowed in food products. In 1970 there were two artificial sweeteners on the market, and they both got banned due to linked health problems. This was just when the GD Searle company was trying to launch its new discovery. Early tests on animals went terribly. Monkeys died. Baby mice got holes in their brains. The company spent millions of dollars on studies until they felt they had enough safety evidence. The FDA wasn’t impressed.

The research was so bad, inaccurate, and apparently manipulated that the FDA asked the US Attorney to start a criminal investigation against the company. That had never happened before. Bad news for the GD Searle company. They bring in reinforcements. They hire Donald Rumsfeld as CEO. Even then he was a heavy-hitter in Washington, having served as Secretary of Defence for former President Gerald Ford. (and of course, he infamously came back to the post for George W. Bush)

As the federal grand jury is investigating GD Searle for criminal intent, the lead attorney on the case jumps ship. He is hired on to the other side working for GD Searle. Call me crazy, but that seems… umm… slightly suspicious. It causes such a mess that the case drops off the map entirely due to the statute of limitations. (they took too long to investigate)

Now 1980, the FDA’s Public Board of Inquiry decides aspartame should not be approved as being a safe food additive. Another serious blow to the fate of the GD Searle company, but the political winds were changing.

Ronald Reagan becomes President of the United States. It just so happens, Reagan has Donald Rumsfeld on his team of advisors, and in the transition, a new FDA Commissioner is hand-picked for the job. One of his first official acts, within months of the switch, was to overrule the previous findings and approve aspartame for use in dry foods. NutraSweet hits the shelves. Ummm… slightly suspicious?

A couple years later, aspartame gets the FDA green light for liquid use, despite safety concerns from the National Soft Drik Association. They say that aspartame can decompose above 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 C) into the toxins DKP and formaldehyde.

In 1983 this “proactive” FDA commissioner resigns under a pile of controversy, and yet another “umm… suspicious” move, gets hired on as a scientific consultant for the public relations firm of the GD Searle company.

CEO Rumsfeld wins awards for the succesful turnaround of the GD Searle company, which is later bought by Monsanto, the agriculture giant and producer of RoundUp herbicide and genetically-modified seed, which is the subject of some scary conspiracy stories that would curl aspartames’s toes!

And we all live happily ever after… with aspartame!

• Source: The timeline of aspartame’s approval from the Swankin-Turner law office (who may well have some other agenda… I don’t know)

As I was driving down a remote highway this afternoon I saw a curiosity-inspiring sign. “Speed Limit Enforced By Aircraft”. It immediately induced several silly scenarios to play out in my head. I suppose if you got it up to 260 km/h (160 miles per hour) you could potentially be chased by a Cessna aircraft… but if you then slowed down again you would be resisting arrest?

The fact of the matter, which happens to be what I do best, is that planes are used on long open stretches of highway to observe and report “aggresive drivers”. Where you see these signs, you’ll also notice large white marks along the side of the road. It’s a similar feeling as an ant walking along a yardstick. These marks are used for aerial measurement.

The pilot can watch how fast you go between these white marks to figure out your speed visually. Then they call it in to see if a regular patrol car wants to pick up the chase the old fashioned way and track you down. In the case of commercial vehicles that can be recognized from the air, you could potentially get a speeding ticket in the mail directly from the pilot.

Should you ever find yourself with an aerial-observed infraction (and assuming you had slowed down before the patrol car found you) rumour has it that you’d do well to challenge it in court. Both the patroller and the pilot must be present to testify, or else it is dropped.

• Source: A user discssion forum, though totally unofficial, it was the most thorough source I could find on the topic

It wasn’t all that long ago that we learned tomatoes (along with peppers, cucumbers, and anything else with seeds) are really a fruit, however that is not true in a United States court of law. In 1883 the US Supreme Court passed a law that classified tomatoes as a vegetable.

The reason, of course, was taxes. An importer of produce refused to pay the usual tariff on vegetables arguing that tomatoes were not actually vegetables. That’s true, and the senate agreed in the botanical sense… but they made the law anyway.

That’s how the tomato can cause taxes, so how about death? Well when that law was passed, North American people would have only been eating the tomato for about 60 years prior. Before that, it was widely believed and assumed that the tomato was very poisonous.

The tomato was picked up by European explorers around 1500 from it’s native home in South America, and it was experimented with once they got it back home. So I don’t know where along the line this poison belief crept in, but in 1820 nobody would dare eat a tomato. Except one man.

The brave mythbuster was Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, and one day he staged a public demonstration on the courthouse steps of Salem, New Jersey where he dared to eat a tomato. Obviously, the event had an anti-climactic ending and people started eating tomatoes fearlessly.

• Source: http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/botany/botany_map/articles/article_35.html
• Inspired by my friend Shawn who asked about the poison myth (which I had never heard of)