Davy Crockett and Jimmy Hoffa both had plenty of attitude.  As Hoffa put it, “I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.”  As for Crockett, he was a thriving politician. but he had a falling out with Andrew Jackson, a fellow Tennessean and his political mentor.  According to the Tennesseeencyclopedia.net, Crockett lost his seat in Congress to “Adam Huntsman, a peg-legged lawyer,” and decided to move to Texas and make his fortune as a land agent, “prompting him to make the now-famous remark: ‘Since you have chosen to elect a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”  That was a bad idea that led to his demise at the Alamo.  Jose Enrique de la Pena, a colonel in the Mexican Army at the Alamo under General Antonio de Santa Anna, kept a diary and wrote “some seven men had survived the general carnage and, under the protection of General Castrillón, they were brought before Santa Anna. Among them … was the naturalist David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures … Santa Anna answered Castrillón’s intervention in Crockett’s behalf with a gesture of indignation and, addressing himself to … the troops closest to him, ordered his execution. The commanders and officers were outraged at this action and did not support the order … but several officers who were around the president and who, perhaps, had not been present during the moment of danger … thrust themselves forward … and with swords in hand, fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. Though tortured before they were killed, these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers.”

Sometimes bad ideas come in swarms.  Take Florida’s politicians who not only banned thousands of worthy, credible books from their school and public libraries and then destroyed them, are actively rewriting history books in biased and distorted ways, and they’re threatening librarians with jail time and fines if they do the sorts of things librarians are generally expected to do.  There are some good ideas around it you seek them out.  “Popeye. Mickey Mouse, & Winnie the Pooh Walk Into a Bar …”, an article from the Internet Archive (a nonprofit digital library dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge”), noted that last January Popeye joined Mickey and Pooh in the public domain in the US, along with other works published in 1929, and sound recordings from 1924.  Now the first five Silly Symphony cartoons, the songs “Am I Blue, “You Were Meant for Me,” and “Ain’t Misbehaving,” the opera Bolero, and many more are all the public’s.  An uplifting NiceNews .com article reported that “New ‘Bone-Inspired’ concrete is 560% Stronger, Without Using Plastics or Fibers.”  This improved strength comes from Princeton engineering researchers who developed “a new type of concrete which is full of hollowed-out shapes … inspired by the cortical bone structure of the human femur …. Cortical bone (also known as compact bone) is dense, strong bone tissue … made up of tiny, tube-like structures called osteons.”  The osteons are surrounded by softer material known as “cement lines.”  When a human bone cracks, “the cracks follow the cement lines and stop at the osteons, preventing the bone from breaking.”

Another bit of good news came from a Facebook posting titled “I Accidentally Started a ‘Silent Book Club’ at My Local Coffee Shop.”  One day the author was reading in a coffee shop when “an older gentleman” asked her about her book, and they had a brief chat about reading.  Next time she was at the coffee shop, the same man was there reading a book.  They nodded and continued reading.  Next time he’d brought a friend, and the three of them read in comfortable silence at a table.  Now a dozen people meet and read together there every Wednesday and sometimes chat afterwards.  That buoyed an old librarian’s heart until he discovered that “Silent Book Club” is an ®, a registered trademark of Silent Book Club, whose site warns “you must register through our website if you want to host Silent Book Clubs,” but they will let you use other words to describe your group.  However, what is our public library if not the ultimate place for silent reading and even has its own coffee shop?

H. L. Mencken once stated that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  In that vein, a Mental Floss article titled “14 Experiments Gone Wrong” described some awful examples.  For example, Winthrop Kellogg, a psychologist in the 1930s, was interested in stories about feral children, and when his wife had a baby, Donald, he located an infant chimpanzee, Gua, to raise alongside his son.  Gua’s early development started off strong but soon plateaued, and Kellogg abruptly ended the experiment when Donald began imitating Gua’s vocalizations.  Fittingly, number 10 on the list is the infamous “Cleveland Indians 10-Cent Beer Night” that was played against my Texas Rangers in 1974.  Concerned about lagging attendance, Cleveland’s owners rightly figured that unlimited dime beer would draw a crowd.  I attended that game via the radio, and among the memorable events that transpired were a woman running to the on-deck circle to flash the umpire, a naked fan sliding into second base, and a father and son duo mooning the crowd from the outfield.  Then it got ugly when “fans launched fireworks into the Rangers’ dugout and the whole thing turned into an all-out riot.”  Players hit with folding chairs, fistfights were everywhere, and “Woodstock had turned into Kent State,” as sports writer Mike Shropshire wrote in “Seasons in Hell,” his memoirs about covering “the worst baseball team in history – the 1973-1975 Rangers.” 

One of the all-time worst ideas began with Pope Lucious III, who in 1184 ordered his bishops to make “judicial inquiry,” or inquisition, to ferret out heresy in their dioceses.  Most didn’t, so in 1227 Pope Gregory IX “appointed the first judges delegate as inquisitors for heretical depravity,” according to Wikipedia, and in 1252 Pope Innocent IV upped the ante when he licensed inquisitors to torture “obdurate heretics.”  Spanish King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella raised the stakes again and created the Spanish Inquisition, which prosecuted 150,000 people, starting with Moors and Jewish converts to Catholicism, and executed only 5,000, but there was plenty of torture in between.  If there was any evidence an accused was lying, “a single short application of non-maiming, unbloody torture was allowed to corroborate the evidence.”  In 1914 Spanish historian Julien Juderias wrote about his nation’s inquisition in “La Leyenda Negra,” “The Black Legend.”  The phrase came to mean “an unfavorable image of Spain and Spaniards, accusing them of cruelty and intolerance.”

Nuno Beltran de Guzman was the Black Legend’s poster boy.  Indigenousmexico.org,  wrote “a conqueror, he succeeded in bringing a vast new territory under the domain of the Spanish Empire,” but “Nuño de Guzmán, as an archfoe of Hernán Cortés, terrorized both Spaniards and Indigenous people who stood in his way.”  Guzman was installed in New Spain by King Charles I, who worried about Cortez assuming too much power.  However, the Britannica noted that Guzman promoted the enslavement of the Indigenous people and “also impressed thousands of Indigenous people into his army and was careless in his concerns for their welfare. Over time, he made so many enemies that he was eventually removed from all his posts and thrown into jail.”  He was tried, sent back to Spain in shackles “where he lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity.”  By contrast, Bartolome de las Casas was a Spanish soldier and clergyman in New Spain, who, according to Britannica, “was the first to expose the oppression of indigenous peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there.”  His book, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” itemized the atrocities committed by gold and land hungry Spanish conquistadors who were rewarded for their depravity with land and slaves.  It convinced King Charles who named de las Casas “the first officially appointed ‘Protector of the Indians’,” and began forbidding slavery.  This irked powerful jerks in New and old Spain, and when Charles died, his heir, Philip II, reinstituted it.

A more current concern is the wrong-headed decision to teach children reading using tablets instead of hard print books.  As Sarah Schwartz wrote a few days ago in an Education Week article, “Reading on Screens Worsens Comprehension for Younger Students,” “Study after study has shown that reading on screens just doesn’t have the same benefit as reading print book …. a new metanalysis, published in December … concluded that digital reading doesn’t provide the same comprehension benefits that print reading does. The paper examined 26 studies of leisure reading in K-12 and university students, published over the past two decades. For some students, digital reading was actually detrimental.”  Apparently, it’s like Thomas Paine said, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”