Free Anonyponymous by John Bemelmans Marciano Page A

Angeles. The original was a diner constructed in the shape of a hat, but the second, more upscale version became headquarters for the great stars of the day. One of its owners, Bob Cobb, raided the Derby’s fridge late one night, chopping up what he could find into a salad. Whether the snack he made was for himself or for Clark Gable, as varying legends have it, the Cobb salad would become Hollywood’s homegrown dish of fame.

    sa·dism n. The urge to derive pleasure from the abuse and humiliation of another; cruelty.
    Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 to one of the oldest families of French nobility. At a young age he began a military career that would last until the end of the Seven Years’ War, at which point he married a loving woman who would bear him three children.
    In 1768, de Sade decided to celebrate Easter Sunday by bringing home a beggar woman to imprison, sexually assault, and torture. Though the incident landed him in jail, the marquis saw no reason to repent. In 1772, he had an orgy with a male servant, a couple of prostitutes, and a pillbox of Spanish fly. It was all going swimmingly until the girls became convinced that the aphrodisiac was making them sick, and de Sade found himself sentenced to death for sodomy and poisoning. Though he escaped execution, the rest of the marquis’s life was a merry-go-round of incarceration and freedom. Prison, however, provided de Sade time to write. His most depraved work, The 120 Days of Sodom , was composed on a forty-foot roll of paper inside the Bastille. In it, he chronicles the doings of a group of wealthy middle-aged men who spend the allotted 120 days in a castle abusing and killing a gaggle of victims, which includes various pubescent girls and boys, four old ladies, their own wives and daughters, and eight men chosen solely for the enormous size of their penises. It’s worse than it sounds. A lot worse.

    The French Revolution proved to be de Sade’s lucky day; the new men in charge were far more accepting of his sexual escapades than the previous administration. In fact, not only did the marquis get released, but as Citizen Louis de Sade, he took an active role in local politics. Even for de Sade, though, the Reign of Terror was a bit over the top; he found himself again in jail, this time convicted, amazingly, of the crime of “moderatism.” With the overthrow of Robespierre, de Sade was spared the guillotine and released, only to be tossed back into jail by Napoleon for his pornographic writings. Declared insane, de Sade was transferred to an asylum, where he began a paid affair with a chambermaid in her early teens that continued until he died in his sleep, peacefully.
    The Marquis de Sade, by the way, was really fat.

    shrap·nel n. Fragments from an explosion.
    Henry Shrapnel was a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery when, on his own initiative and dime, he developed an exploding cannonball. Originally dubbed “spherical case shot,” the weapon came to be called the Shrapnel shell after its 1803 adoption by the British army. Jacques Chauvin and French soldiers everywhere just called it bad news, and in 1814 Shrapnel was awarded a lifetime twelve-hundred-pound-a-year pension for his contribution to the empire.

    side·burns n. The hair that grows on the side of the face in front of the ears.
    General Ambrose Burnside had about as bad a war as any general on the winning side can have. In the early days of the Civil War Burnside presided over the left wing of the Army of the Potomac at Antietam, where he failed to distinguish himself. Nevertheless, when Lincoln fired the overcautious General McClellan from overall command of the Union army, he promoted Burnside, who himself doubted he was up to the job. Burnside promptly led the North to its humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg and the even more humiliating “Mud March.” Excoriated by his inferior officers, Burnside wanted them punished for insubordination and