Hug me
The three colors on a typical traffic light have near-universal meaning: red means stop, green means go, and yellow is slow down — or something in between. Most everyone knows this, even preschoolers, which is to say that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the signals above.
Yet Mensa uses it anyway. Not to regulate traffic, though — Mensa uses it to regulate hugs.
Mensa is an international society of high-IQ people; in order to be a member, one needs to have an IQ in the 98th percentile or above. It was founded in 1946 in England with the express rule that the only criteria for admission be that the prospective member meets the IQ (or equivalent) requirement; the organization is apolitical and does not discriminate based on race, religion, etc.
Over the course of the organization’s half-century plus history, Mensa gatherings have adopted a culture to themselves. For example, it is very common to find a large room at any given Mensa convention dedicated to games — board games, typically — and that room is often open and well-attended around the clock. (American Mensa even honors five games each year with an award called “Mensa Select,” given to games which are “original, challenging, and well-designed.”) And for some reason, hugging has become part and parcel of Mensa meetups.
Of course, not everyone has the same tolerance for hugs. So Mensa — most likely organically and informally — developed a red-yellow-green system for hugs. Meetup attendees can adorn their name tags with little circular stickers, as demonstrated above, via blogger Jen McCreight
When the hugging custom emerged is not publicly known. And it was not limited to McCreight’s experience. In his 2004 book, The “Know-It-All,” A.J. Jacobs recounts a similar story, available here (with some colorful language).
Bonus fact: Mensa members may be disproportionately fans of board games, and they may be geniuses, but if you ask the board gaming community what board games are the best, you’ll see very few Mensa Select winners on the list. Of the top 10 games on BoardGameGeek.com
Die hard
Michael Malloy was a fifty year old erstwhile fireman and a full time drunk. Like many in his situation, he spent more time drinking than employed, but because he lived in the early 1930s in New York, his hobby happened to be illegal. A regular at the local speakeasy, Malloy also became the central figure in another crime: insurance fraud. The scam: kill someone and collect on his life insurance policies. His role: be the guy who dies.
Michael Malloy was not very good at this.
At the end of 1933, Prohibition, too, would come to a close. But that January, five men at the speakeasy Malloy frequented came up with a get-rich-quick scheme. The plan was simple: Malloy, a homeless alcoholic who appeared on the verge of death anyway, would be tricked into taking out three life insurance policies naming the five schemers as beneficiaries. One of the five, a man named Tony Marino, would provide Malloy with all the liquor he could drink, and then some. Malloy, as the plan went, would drown himself in booze, finally dying.
As recounted by the New York Daily News
Drinking — hour after hour for days on end — did not kill Malloy. So they upped the ante, replacing his drink with antifreeze. Malloy passed out, but survived — and returned to the speakeasy for more free drinks. So the quintet tried turpentine instead of antifreeze. Malloy again survived, and returned for more. Turpentine yielded to horse liniment. Same result. And Malloy, finally…
No, he still survived.
In fact, he’d survive a few other attempts at poisoning: rat poison in his “drinks,” oysters soaked in methanol, and sardines mixed with poison and carpet tacks. But none were able to fell Malloy. The would-be murderers turned to a different tactic: wait for a very cold night, get him so drunk that he’d pass out (which he regularly did anyway), and dump him into the snow in sub-zero temperatures. The next day? Malloy returned to the bar for a drink.
With subtle methods failing, the group went with a more direct approach. One of them, Hershey Green, operated a taxi. They got Malloy drunk (again, this was the easy part) and then ran him over while driving at 45 miles per hour. And finally, Malloy went to the hospital. And three weeks later, he returned the bar, battered and injured but very much alive.
In the end — and yes, Malloy’s life finally came to an end — the five guys afterward dubbed the Murder Trust stuck a gas pipe down a passed out Malloy’s throat. On February 22, four to six weeks into the campaign to kill him, Malloy died, officially of pneumonia, and was buried. But the conspirators could not keep their plan from leaking out, as Malloy’s ability to avoid death became the stuff of local legend. Ultimately, officials exhumed Malloy’s body and via an autopsy, detected foul play. The five conspirators were tried for murder and convicted; all except Green were executed for their crime.
Bonus fact: In 2007, New York City began a program which aimed to get homeless people off the street while relieving pressure on the shelters they would have otherwise gone to. The solution: one-way tickets to other cities
Mysterious meeting on Jekyll Island
When the 1907 financial panic hit the United States, there was no central bank, so a consortium of private banks led by JP Morgan had to dramatically intervene to rescue the banking system. America was the only major power without a central bank - a bank with the power to issue currency such as Britain’s Bank of England and France’s Banque de France. Even though the 1800s had been filled with banking panics, to the banker’s dismay Americans had resisted the idea of a central bank, with Thomas Jefferson blocking the renewal of the First Bank of the United States in 1816, and Andrew Jackson blocking the renewal of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836. So after 1907 a renewed effort was made to create a central bank, which included a monumental and secret meeting on Jekyll Island that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913: “The 1907 panic exposed how fragile and vulnerable was the country’s banking system. Though the panic had finally been contained by decisive action on Morgan’s part, it became clear that the United States could not afford to keep relying on one man to guarantee its stability, especially since that man was now seventy years old, semiretired, and focused primarily on amassing an unsurpassed art collection and yachting to more congenial climes with his bevy of middle-aged mistresses. “Shaken by the crisis, the U.S. Congress decided to act. In 1908, it created the National Monetary Commission, consisting of nine senators and nine representatives, and chaired by Senator Nelson Aldrich, to undertake a comprehensive study of the banking system and to make recommendations for its reform. Over the next few years, the commission produced a voluminous set of studies on central banking in Europe but not much else. Memories of how close the system had come to imploding progressively dimmed and the momentum for reform stalled. “In 1912, Henry Davison, a Morgan partner, frustrated by the lack of progress and fearing that without changes the next panic would be even more catastrophic, set out to convene a meeting of experts to develop a formal plan to establish an American central bank - the third in the nation’s history. Only five men were invited. Besides Davison himself, there was Senator Aldrich; Frank Vanderlip, the forty-eight-year-old president of the National City Bank, the largest in the country; Paul Warburg, of the well-known Hamburg banking family, a forty-two-year-old partner at Kuhn Loeb who, although he had only just moved to New York, was probably the greatest expert on central banking in the United States; A. Piatt Andrew Jr., the thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the treasury, who had been a professor at Harvard and accompanied the original commission on its European study tour; and Benjamin Strong, then thirty-nine years old. “Davison was worried, and for good reason, that any plan put together by a group from Wall Street would immediately be suspect as the misbegotten product of a bankers’ cabal. He therefore chose to hold the meeting in secret on a small private island off the coast of Georgia - in effect creating the very bankers’ cabal that would have aroused so much public suspicion. The preparations were elaborate. Each guest was told to go to Hoboken Station in New Jersey on November 22 and board Senator Aldrich’s private railroad car, which they would find hitched with its blinds drawn to the Florida train. They were not to dine together, nor to meet up beforehand, but to come aboard singly and as unobtrusively as possible, all under cover of going duck hunting. As an added precaution, they were to use only their first names. Strong was to be Mr. Benjamin, Warburg Mr. Paul. Davison and Vanderlip went a step further and adopted the ringingly obvious pseudonyms Wilbur and Orville. Later in life, the group used to refer to themselves as the ‘First Name Club.’ “Disembarking at Brunswick, Georgia, they were taken by boat to Jekyll Island, one of the small barrier islands off the Georgia coast, owned by the private Jekyll Island Club, which had opened in 1888 as a hunting and winter retreat for wealthy northerners. Described by one magazine as ‘the richest, the most exclusive and most inaccessible club in the world,’ it numbered only some fifty members, including J. P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt, William Rockefeller, Joseph Pulitzer, and various Astors and Goulds. Membership was now closed and had become hereditary. Title: Lords of Finance
