14,001st use of salt
There are 14,000 known uses of salt and I've just run across one I hadn't heard before, but it may be on the list already. I'm in Prince Edward Island for the annual meeting of the Transportation Association of Canada and here learned among the local lore of a means by which the Prohibition-era bootleggers avoided interdiction of their off-shore deliveries: by using salt. The bootleggers would weigh-down barrels of rum with blocks of salt and pitch them over the side of their ships at the appointed delivery point; then, depart, perhaps hotly pursued by the Coast Guard. Their land-based confederates would wait until the salt blocks dissolved enough to release the buoyant rum barrels and then row out and retrieve them when no Coast Guard was around. Let's hope someone has developed a means to thwart this tried-and-true method of clandestine "importation."
