Marie Curie: Not Attractive Enough to Represent a Threat to Anyone.

Marie Curie is best known as the first person to win two Nobel prizes. But, according to some she should have been known first and foremost as a Jew-temptress. Curie was not Jewish and four years after her husband Pierre died in a carriage accident she began an affair with renowned physicist and former student of her husband's, Paul Langevin. Langevin's estranged wife got wind of the affair and hired a PI who obtained certain letters exchanged between Curie and Langevin. These letters were then leaked to the French press who ran wild with the story labeling Curie as a home-wrecker-Jew-temptress. Ever vigilant, the French public ate the story up and Curie came back from a conference in Belgium to find her home (with her two children inside) surrounded by an angry mob. Incensed, Langevin challenged the editor of one of the newspapers running the story to a duel. The two men did face off against one another but no shots were reportedly fired. Still, Albert Einstein thought he needed to intervene on Curie's behalf so, strangely, he issued a statement, noting that Curie “has a sparkling intelligence, but despite her passionate nature, she is not attractive enough to represent a threat to anyone.”

Pythagoras v. Beans

Though all of his writings were lost, it is widely accepted that Pythagoras believed strongly that beans should be avoided at all costs. This was incorporated as a tenet into the quasi-religion he developed and his acolytes, the Pythagoreans, are said to have adhered to it unflinchingly. Bertrand Russell has gone on record as saying that bean-eschewing was among the two most important principles of the religion, yet may have led to its eventual downfall. Russell notes that Pythagoras "founded a religion on which the the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. His religion was embodied in a religious order, which, here and there, acquired rule of the state … But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled."

However, even as the perfidious revolted others came to the support of the protein prohibition. The Pythagorean poet Callimachus even wrote a poem about his concurrence:

Keep your hands from beans, a painful food:
As Pythagoras enjoined, I too urge.

His fellow poet, Empedocles, took up the cause as well with his own turn of phrase:

Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans.

As did the Christian ‘heresiologist’ Saint Epiphanus in his collection the Panarion (‘Medicine Chest’) or Adversus Haereses:

Pythagoras the Samian, son of Mnesarchos, said that the monad is god, and that nothing has been brought into being apart from this. He was wont to say that wise men ought not to sacrifice animals to the gods, nor yet to eat what had life, or beans, nor to drink wine.

Cicero too, attempting to further explain the proscription in the process:

So Plato bids us go to our beds with our bodies so composed that there is nothing that brings distraction of disturbance to the mind. That, it is thought, is why the Pythagoreans are forbidden to eat beans which cause considerable flatulence and are thus inimical to those who seek peace of mind.

Yet whether Pythagoras actually refrained from eating beans is a source of some dispute. Aristoxenus, musical scholar and student of Aristotle, has noted that Pythagoras was no vegetarian and certainly had no problem with beans - even suggesting that beans were his absolute favorite food:

Pythagorus esteemed the bean above all other vegetables; for he said that it was both soothing and laxative – that is why he made particular use of it.7

Yet still the wretched among us long after these forbidden little pockets of iniquity and wonder why peace eludes us.

This Week in Crazy: Saparmurat Niyazov

A Turkmen politician who served as President (later President for Life) of Turkmenistan from November 2, 1990 until his death in 2006, Niyazov preferred his self-given title Türkmenbaşy, or Turkmenbashi, meaning Leader of Turkmens, referring to his position as the founder and president of the Association of Turkmens of the World. Niyazov is perhaps best known for his reputation of imposing his personal eccentricities upon the country, including renaming months after members of his family, and replacing the Turkmen word for bread with the name of his mother. Despite this reputation his decision to create a National Melon Day is still honored and celebrated to this day. He was famously quoted as saying "let the life of every Turkmen be as beautiful as our melons." Other laws and decrees did not survive Niyazov including: his 2005 ban on lip-syncing (believing it beneath the Turkmens' great creative spirit); his 2004 ban on beards and long hair on men; his ban on television reporters wearing makeup; and his decision to outlaw gold teeth advising his followers instead to chew on bones in order to strengthen their teeth and prevent tooth loss (he described his basis for this decree: "I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw to strengthen their teeth. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not chew on bones. This is my advice..."). In December 2008, after his death, his successor reversed Niyazov's changes to the national anthem which had made numerous references to him.