Holy Shit, James Harrison!

In 1951, a 14-year-old Australian kid named James Harrison underwent major chest surgery. There were no major complications, and he ended up fine, but it struck him as incredible that he required almost 3.5 gallons of donated blood in order to survive the ordeal. From that moment, he made a personal vow to donate as much blood as he possibly could once he had fully recovered. As soon as he turned 18, he started giving plasma every 2-3 weeks.

Which I guess was exhausting? This pictogram is weird.

Once he had one or two donations under his belt, there was an interesting development. It turns out James Harrison's blood contained an antibody called Rho(D) immune globulin. That probably doesn't mean much to you, but to OB/GYNs and medical researches, finding this antibody in someone who was vowing to donate as much blood as humanly possible was like planting a garden and finding El Dorado in your backyard as a result.

I have a sudden urge to start gardening...in November.

To understand why, you need to know a bit about blood types and pregnancy complications. If a pregnant woman has a negative blood type but the fetus is positive, the mother's blood often treats the baby as a disease. The medical term for that situation is Rhesus Disease, but it's also known as "Bad News Bears." In the best case scenario, the baby is born anemic. More often than not, it could cause miscarriage or stillbirth.

Rhesus Disease used to be one of the most common causes of pregnancy and birth complications. But then James Harrison came around. When his fancy-pants antibody is given to pregnant women, it essentially hides the part of the baby's blood that causes the mother's body to treat it as a parasite. Thousands of babies were born and lived because Harrison was constantly donating. It wasn't long before researches developed RhoGAM, which is essentially a vaccine that protects at-risk pregnancies from Rhesus Disease.

James Harrison is still around and donating, and he's become a major voice for blood donation. He currently holds the world record for lifetime blood donations -- which, by now, is well over 1,000. It's estimated that his blood has saved over 2.4 million babies.

Well that's just ungrateful.

I don't usually get personal on this blog, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. My daughter is quite possibly alive today because of James Harrison. Her blood type is Rh positive and her mother's is Rh negative. My daughter is easily the single best thing that's ever happened to me. She's brought immeasurable happiness into my life, and I owe that happiness, in part, to James Harrison.

There is nothing like this.

Holy shit.




By the way, you ought to consider donating blood yourself. You've got a ton of it, and it's not like you're using it all. Might as well, right? The Red Cross is a good place to start, but a quick Google search for "donate blood" should show you what your options are.



James Harrison with two babies. Australian Red Cross.

"Muisca raft Legend of El Dorado Offerings of gold" by Andrew Bertram - World66. Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0 via Commons

"Human-Male-White-Newborn-Baby-Crying" by Evan-Amos - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

Holy Shit, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

I was, maybe, a bit too kind to Erwin Rommel when I wrote about him. He did some great deeds for a Nazi, but in the end he was, after all, a Nazi. Maybe he wasn't a model citizen in the modern, not-complicit-in-a-brutal-dictatorship sense of the word.

If you want an example of what a bold and decent person does against the rise of National Socialism, maybe a better choice would be Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow-Vorbeck was a hero to the German people after World War I. He led the only successful invasion of Imperial British soil during that conflict, and he did so by waging what has been described as the greatest guerrilla operation in history.

There are other contenders.

He led about 14,000 men in East Africa on a campaign that was meant solely to divert as much resources as possible away from the Allies on the Western Front. That way, he reasoned, the folks in the thick of the war could get the important fighting done. There was essentially no hope of success, and Lettow-Vorbeck proved it by surrendering entirely undefeated under orders from high command after the Armistice.

While he was in command, more than half of his men were native Africans. He lived in a different time -- when the White Man's Burden was considered progressive -- and yet, he showed a remarkable amount of tolerance and even respect for other races. He spoke fluent Swahili and named black soldiers as officers, a rarity at the time. When questioned, he firmly stated, "We are all Africans here."

A bunch of white kids would say the same thing years later in the Book of Mormon. The musical. Not the book.

After the war, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck became involved in politics. He is chiefly known today as a vehement opponent of Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. He was one of Hitler's chief adversaries, and when the Führer offered him an ambassadorship as an olive branch in 1938, rumor has it that his response was, "Go fuck yourself." Imagine saying that to Hitler near the peak of his power. Even better, Lettow-Vorbeck's nephew was asked about the incident decades later, he said, "I don't think he put it that politely."

And everybody was like "OOOOOH YOU GOT SERVED MEIN FÜHRER!"

Pretty cool guy, right? Well, here's the thing: the guy was a major warhawk. He disobeyed direct orders by the governor of German East Africa in order to engage the British. The governor wanted to remain neutral in the war, because he rightly feared that war would destroy any positive change Germany brought to the region in favor of starvation and violence. That's exactly what happened, and Lettow-Vorbeck shrugged it off as an unfortunate fact of war. Add to that the fact that he regularly (albeit strategically) denied food to civilians so that his army could stay in the fight and he doesn't seem all that terrific.

That's the problem with heroes. They're all so human, and they all have to live in the real world.

Still, he told Hitler to go fuck himself. Major props for that one, right?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Frank Slide!

The town of Frank in Alberta, Canada was founded in 1901 as part of the ever-growing network of railroad towns in the Pacific Northwest. The Canadian Pacific Railway, coupled with a nearby coal mine, made it a lucrative option for anyone who wanted to have...you know...work. And food. Those things were pretty important back then, as they are today.

Although this was always an option. (I went pretty obscure on that joke)

This particular frontier town was located in the shadow of Turtle Mountain. I say was not only because the town was eventually moved, but also because so did the goddamn mountain. Very quickly, in fact. In less than two minutes in 1903, more than 90 million tons of the mountain moved...right on top of poor Frank. The event is known as the Frank Slide, and it was one of the costliest and deadliest landslides in recorded history.

In the months leading up to the Slide, coal miners reported seeing unusual fissures in the mines. The limestone inside the mountain was cracked, and the fissures allowed water through to further erode the rock, which led to a dangerously top-heavy mountain. Stir in a bunch of mining activities and you've got yourself a disaster brewing. It got to the point where the coal was practically mining itself when the mountain finally collapsed.

Everyone agreed that it kind of took some of the reward out of the whole process

Somewhere around 600 people lived in Frank at the time of the landslide, and of them somewhere between 70 and 90 were killed. We don't know for sure, because only 18 bodies were ever found, and 6 of those were discovered years later by a crew building a road in what was probably the most terrifying manual labor they would ever perform. The actual number is probably a lot higher - there were about 50 people camping near the base of the mountain hoping to find work in the mines who weren't listed among the population of the town.

In the aftermath of the Slide, Sid Choquette got to thinking. Being a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he had a pretty good idea of the train schedule. Checking his pocket watch and twirling his handlebar moustache worriedly (I assume), he realized that the Spokane Flyer a passenger train goddamn full of people, was overdue to arrive and had no way of knowing what had happened in Frank. The rails that were supposed to speed it along were, at this point, hindered by a two mile long pile of rubble. This is what can be referred to in layman's terms as really shitty conditions for a train ride.

The only worse conditions would be "anywhere near Sabin."

So, ignoring the rubble and choking cloud of dust, Choquette ran over a mile without stopping and got the message to the approaching at literally the last possible second. His actions saved the lives of everyone on board the train, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad was so grateful they gave him...a kindly worded letter. And $25.

CANADIAN.

You can see the results of the Frank Slide to this day:

That's mountain guts. That's what you're looking at. The guts of a mountain.

Holy shit.