Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Who Was E.C. Segar?

He was the creator of Popeye. Yay, Popeye! Here are a couple of articles from The Guardian and The CS Monitor. I was particularly amused with a bit of trivia regarding spinach in the first article. I grew up with the "common knowledge" that spinach has an equivalent amount of iron as red meat. That always sounded suspicious to me, but hey, everyone knows it, so it must be true. Turns out, not so much...
Spinach is the source of Popeye's muscular prowess – upon eating it, his biceps immediately swell to three times their normal size. Segar chose the vegetable due to an 1870 German study which claimed it contained the same amount of iron as red meat.

The strength-giving properties of spinach were later revised however, after it was found a stray decimal point had led researchers to believe the vegetable contained ten times its actual iron content.
Darned decimal points, always screwing up good myths.

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