Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Oct 19, 2007 - 23 comments

I've always lumped musician Eugene Chadbourne in with the likes of Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston, but I may have been mistaken. While his songs are often absurd, experimental, and silly, he's much less eccentric than I'd always thought. In addition to having an incredible output (full discography with notes here and in-depth review here), he has worked with everyone from John Zorn to Jello Biafra, even fronting the band Camper Van Beethoven as Camper Van Chadbourne. He has also been a writer for MaximumRocknRoll and AMG and is the inventor of the electric rake (a musical instrument that would certainly annoy your neighbors). YouTube has two awesome Chadbourne finds: THIS is a 19-minute documentary about him and THIS is a cable access show he appeared on called I'm Going to Make a Drug with My Mind (if you like cable access television, this is awesome, but please note that this video is 31-minutes long, including 60 seconds of color bars. Eugene comes on a little after the 17-minute mark). [WARNING: YouTube. A lot of YouTube in this post]
posted by elr on Aug 11, 2006 - 34 comments

Patrick Dawes and Eugene Bazodis aka Patrick and Eugene. Mr Dawes is the sometime percussionist for Groove Armada, but the pair may be most familiar to Americans through that catchy little number heard on the Volkswagen rabbit commercial entitled The Birds and The Bees. (They apparantly did this earlier as an instrumental to push Gordon's Gin). They do have albums, most notably Summerisle , a mixture of jazz, ska, world, unlikely covers, and what have you. Possibly a little twee for many, but not without merit. A cartoon video of the great hit found here. So now you know.
posted by IndigoJones on Aug 6, 2006 - 2 comments

After reading that beef has been recalled from my local grocery store, I spent some time reading Mad Cow USA a book written back in 1997 but not widely published because of fears of repercussions under the Texas food disparagement act. AlterNet has an article written by one of the book's authors summarizing some of the key points of the book. Some claim that only ground beef is infected, while others claim that's bull. mad-cow.org has a lot of good information on the topic, and it seems the powers that be are going to blame Canada.
posted by woil on Dec 30, 2003 - 14 comments

Virginia regrets.... Lots of boys were named Eugene in honor of eugenics movement, likened here to what the Nazis were also doing
posted by Postroad on Feb 16, 2001 - 8 comments