The “ruptured duck” on May 9th’s #stampoftheday spurs a narrative that goes from honoring soldiers, to a mid-20th century film star, to Bluetooth and finally to Mel Brooks.

Here goes…the stamp is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1946 “Honoring All Those Who Served” in World War II. It pictures the Honorable Discharge Emblem, surrounded by five stars, which honor those who died in each of the five services: the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, and Merchant Marines. Created in 1943, the emblem, pictures an eagle preparing for flight. The image’s official name, “The Eagle Has Flown,” was meant to coincide with the first major Allied offensives against the Axis Powers in the Pacific and Atlantic.

Unofficially, the emblem was known as the “ruptured duck.” Supposedly this moniker originated with actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, an actress, producer and inventor, who described her flight from Austria to America in the late 1930s as a hazardous flight on a “segeltuch gebrochen” or broken bird (or, more literally, a “ruptured duck.”) Also supposedly, when women working in the manufacturing plant that produced the honorable discharge pins heard her story, they began labeling the boxes “ruptured ducks” partially in honor of her story and partially because they weren’t allowed to label them with what exactly was in the boxes.

Lamarr starred in several films including “Sampson and Delilah.” She also was an inventor who, along with composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, intended to use frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology (whatever that is) to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. However, the US Navy did not adopt this invention until 1957. And similar techniques based on their patent not only were used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi and but also were incorporated into Bluetooth technology In recognition of this work, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

How, you might ask, does this get us to Mel Brooks? Well, the conniving attorney general in “Blazing Saddles” is Hedley Lamarr (and keeps getting upset that everyone in the movie keeps calling him Hedy).

So there you have it…As Madeline Kahn, famously said in the movie about something else entirely: “It’s true. It’s true!” (or, more accurately: “It’s twue! It’s twue.”)