The Last Supper—as in, the One You Just Had
When a wolf returns to the pack from a solo romp, the other wolves lick its mouth to see if any prey has been captured and eaten. But that’s not the gross part. If any prey is detected, the swallower is supposed to share by regurgitation. Now that’s grossitating! Our guess is that they eat pretty fast at least. The expression “to wolf it down” has to come from somewhere.
It’s Raining Snakes
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…flying snake! Their official name is chrysopelea, but the truth is, these fellows don’t actually fly. Instead, they crawl to the end of a tree branch and launch. They do a good enough job of gliding by twisting their bodies back and forth between an S and a C shape that they appear to be flying as they make their way down.
Double-Duty Sucker
Octopuses use one of their arms in the process of reproduction. The hectocotylus arm is particularly flexible—that’s the one males use to enter the female cavity and fertilize the eggs. But wait, there’s more. Some kinds of octopuses up the grossness ante by leaving part of that arm behind. The female receives the sperm, along with a sacrificial limb. (The male dies soon after, so perhaps the amputation is not a big a deal in the overall scheme of things.)
“A Giant Mutant Rat” and “The Dead Body under the Christmas Tree”—these headlines are horrible, so why do we keep reading? Blood and gore in black and white—it’s the modern-day version of watching gladiators fight. There’s just some primal hankering in humans for blood and disgust that attracts and repels us at the same time. Kind of like a magnet if the two sides overlapped. But then it wouldn’t be a magnet. Okay, we need a better metaphor here. In the meantime, press on through the weird and terrible stranger-than-fiction truth! And be glad you’re not in print, at least for these stories.
Monster Rat
New York City subways are notoriously rat infested, but Jose Rivera was in for a surprise when he came upon a group of gigantic, mutant white rats in Brooklyn, where he was working for the housing authority. He ended up stabbing and killing one with a pitchfork. A wildlife expert believed the super-size rodent was likely a Gambian pouched rat that had once been a house pet (which, in our estimation, is even weirder than the image of one running loose outside).
Something’s Buggin’ Me
In 2004, National Geographic published a report called “For Most People, Eating Bugs Is Only Natural”. Examples throughout history and even the modern age are plentiful, from Aristotle’s advice on harvesting cicadas—full of eggs, if you’re lucky—to the coconut and ginger dragonflies favored in Bali today. (see Bizarre Cuisine for lots of great recipe ideas.)
Nailed the Landing
A car crash ended the reign of former long-nail queen Lee Redmond, who had not trimmed her nails for 30 years. Before it snapped off, the longest nail scratched in at just under 3 feet. Today’s record holder, Chris Walton, has a combined 19 feet and 19 inches. But that doesn’t stop her from texting her friends. She just uses her knuckles. (Hmmm, hard to picture, but if you say so (or we should say IUSS =)
Have Mercy on the Mercy Flusher
On the online zine The Poop Report “Your #1 Source for #2,” one user posted to say he was going to stop employing the “courtesy flush” because it did not really have the intended effect, instead, merely signaling that the flusher knows he or she stink bombed the place but can’t do anything about it. Why waste water just to be polite?
Rude Awakening
A Russian woman named Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov woke up from a deep sleep at a funeral—her own! She was lying in a coffin, mistaken for dead, while loved ones paid their respects. Sadly, the story takes yet another strange twist. The shock of waking up in such an odd state of affairs led to a heart attack that killed poor Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov.
Automatic Slither Machine
An unsuspecting customer in a Spanish bank once reached for cash and found a snake crawling out of his ATM instead. Bank managers brought the lost serpent to a shelter, and the man finally received his greenbacks.
She Meets Herself Coming and Going
In Chongqing, China, there’s a waitress named Wang Fang whose feet point backward (her toes are behind her).
Not Exactly Airborne
A woman once tried to bring a dead guy on a plane. She thought that sunglasses and a wheelchair would do the trick in getting him through security, but his silence started to arouse suspicion. That’s a whole lotta baggage, in our opinion.
Don’t Keep Your Trash Heap
People hoard all kinds of things, from clothes, to papers, to kitchen supplies. Some even hoard garbage. (Yuck! Why on Earth would anyone want to do that?) In 2007, the daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey conducted a massive removal from one hoarder’s home that included 75 tons of garbage alone.
Did You Know? In 2010, a Chicago couple was found buried alive under all the trash they’d collected. Guess they really devoted themselves to their collection.
Out with a Bang
In 2010, an Irish man named Michael Faherty died of apparent spontaneous combustion. Doctors were puzzled, but believed that it may have had something to do with excessive consumption of alcohol leading to a buildup of flammable oil in the blood. We can easily imagine what the priest said about poor Mr. Faherty in his eulogy: “He was here one day and then boom—just like that—he was gone.”
Don’t Let Them Get Away
Combine an interest in scatology with obsessive recordkeeping and you’ve got the Poo Log by Josh Richman and Anish Sheth, M.D. As they write in the book’s introduction: “Let’s face it. There is no substitute for the hard (hopefully not too hard) facts.” So get all the variations from Camouflage Poo to the Déjà Poo to Number Three (“liquid form”). Even the Hanging Chad deserves its time in the sun. Unless you’ve got the runs, run don’t walk to pick up a copy of the book; you don’t want to miss your chance to report on everything that exits.
Stick the Landing
Some people aren’t kidding when they talk about projectile vomiting. The longest projectile hurl on record is 27 feet!
Hoist on Your Own Petard
A man in Montreal once hijacked a car, only to find out it was a diaper deliver service on a return trip and was full of dirty diapers. Talk about getting hoist on your own petard.
Did You Know? The expression “hoist on your own petard” is used to mean that you got in trouble using something you had created for the purpose of foiling someone else. We can thank Hamlet, act III, scene IV for the colorful expression. The petard is a little explosive device. So, to put it simply, your own little bomb ends up blowing you up. The French employ petard to mean an explosion of natural gas (and we mean really natural: the man-made variety).
Mannequins Make Better Friends
One Russian historian took his love of all things past a bit far. He exhumed bodies from the cemetery, dressed them up, and decorated his house with them.
Giddy up and Eat up—at the Same Time
Most Americans recoil at the idea of eating horse meat, but the U.S. Congress recently lifted a ban on funding inspections of the usually taboo food. That means that slaughterhouses may soon start welcoming Black Beauty and Seabiscuit as dinner guests.
I Wasn’t Lovin’ It
Just why do French fries at fast-food joints taste so good? Well, besides enough grease and salt to block a lifetime of arteries, your local burger haven fessed up that they often dip the oily spuds in sugar—just in case they were a little too healthy for your taste.
Oh, I Hope I Hope I Get a…Dead Body this Year?
“Dead woman found under Christmas tree, hidden under presents”—a strange, but real, headline that ran in December 2011. And we thought all the dead body pranks had ended two months before with Halloween.
Don’t Drink the Water
Arsenic in the water is not just for murder mysteries anymore. A 2011 study by Consumer Reports found that levels of carcinogenic arsenic in several popular fruit
juices were higher than FDA-approved levels for drinking water. A study by Dartmouth College found the same for rice. Sometimes invisible stuff is the scariest.
Super-Duper Libation
At White Castle in Louisville, Kentucky, you can find a chocolate milkshake with 1,680 calories (a unique speciality of Louisville). The drink itself is portable, but we’re guessing that regular drinkers of these shakes may not be. We couldn’t verify this fact on the Center for Disease Control website, but we thought we heard once that’s exactly the same number of people whose pants exploded after drinking one.
Kiss and Tell, if You Can Still Talk
A kissing session once led to the accidental swallowing of false teeth–talk about an awkward first date!
Trapping Gas
“Under-Ease” are filter-equipped underwear that blocks the smell of farts from traveling to nearby nostrils. We wonder if those will cut down on hightails, too (when someone leaves the room to fart, then carries a trace of it back in with them). Experts tell us that if you’re attempting a deliberate crop spray, you’re better off with regular underwear or none at all.
It’s Not too Late to Become a Mummy
Late-19th-century farmer Graham Hamrick of West Virginia turned the cadavers of two women from the local insane asylum into mummies, using a potion of vegetables, snakes, and a severed head. Okay, that sounds like the work of some random crackpot, right? Not an experiment that would gain widespread support. Think again. P.T. Barnum later featured the two modern mummies on a circus tour of Europe.
BLUE ICE
Toilet waste from an airplane is called “blue ice.” The blue comes from the color of the disinfectant you see in the vacuum flusher. But talk about a euphemism. In our book, blue ice sounds rather nice,
“Would you like blue ice in your drink?”
“Sounds good to me…wait, what?“
It’s a Long Way Down
A New York woman had an unwelcome visit one day, when a piece of frozen waste dropped on her house from a plane. It had the force to crash through the roof and landed—wait for it—in her bathroom. How did this happen, when waste isn’t dumped midflight? Well, the hazardous waste is supposed to make the whole trip, but leaks do happen.
Did You Know? Ever wondered what happens when you flush the toilet on a plane? Most people think it gets “dumped” over the ocean or lake. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…flying crap! The truth is high-flying waste gets unloaded at the airport by the sanitation crew. So that’s why it takes so long at the gate: someone didn’t have enough fruit on vacay!
Earth, Breaking Wind, and Fire
Disposable diapers have sure made life easier for moms and dads, reducing household pollution to a significant degree. But trash—no matter how repellant—doesn’t just disappear. You know the children’s book Guess How Much I Love You, where a pair of rabbits says they’d love each other up to the Moon and back? That’s how far the number of diapers thrown out in the U.S. each year would stretch, if put end to end. But hopefully the diapers used in that experiment were super-absorbent. Otherwise that would be an awful lot of space goblins.
IN THE KNOW
Metaphor: a figure of speech that compares unlike things, substituting a word for something apparently unrelated to highlight an underlying connection.
Urban Legend or Real? You Decide: A cockroach egg once made it from an envelope to a woman’s tongue, where it hatched into a full-size roach.
Whopping Whopper
A quarter pounder? That’s nothing. How about getting your jaws around this one: the world’s largest-ever sandwich clocked in at 6,991 pounds.
Talk about Losing Your Mind!
You’ve all heard the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” Well, anyone who has seen a chicken farm can attest to the fact that chickens do run around for a minute or two after losing their heads, but one, Mike, “the Headless Wonder Chicken,” lived for 18 months without that most crucial body part. Next time you feel particularly scatterbrained, searching for your backpack or cell phone, ask yourself, “Where’s my head?” and then remember the chicken that really didn’t have one.
All around the world with rotten fish, cricket spit, moose droppings, and extreme body piercing. What are you waiting for? Plug your nose, cover your eyes, and let’s go!
First One There Gets a Rotten Fish!
The popular pickled herring served at a traditional Scandinavian Christmas is nothing. In August, the Swedes participate in a festival called Surströmming, which means fermented herring. Everyone gathers together to eat stinky fish, on purpose. Don’t worry, the rotten flesh is eaten with bread and raw onions to hide the taste and followed by vodka shots (for adults) to block out the memory. Not sure what you can do about the smell, though celebrants do have the common sense to eat outside so the stench can dissipate faster. Trying to imagine the taste? Think of rotten eggs mixed with butter that’s gone bad and a touch of vinegar.
Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest
This 94-year-old tradition takes place every July 4th at Nathan’s Famous in Brooklyn’s legendary beachside amusement park. Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi holds the record for eating with gusto: in July of 2009, he shoveled 68 dogs (plus buns!) down his patriotic throat in just ten minutes. That’s over 114 feet of food, which, when laid end to end, would be higher than a ten-story building.
Cricket-Spitting Contest
In 1990, Professor Tom Turpin at Purdue University began the annual “Bug Bowl” tradition. Along with cockroach races and an insect petting zoo, this entomologist has organized a popular cricket spitting competition for the past 11 years. Rules of the game? The bugs must be frozen and thawed prior to the event and remain fully intact throughout the spitting. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the farthest a cricket has ever been spat is 32.5 feet. The chirpers used in the contest aren’t ingested, but, in his classes, Professor Turpin encourages students to try a dry-roasted variety of crickets, along with fried mealworms, and other insect-based snacks. Sounds like he’s not only an entomologist but an entomophagist as well. (See Grubby Grub)
Moose Dropping Festival
Who says Alaska is not packed full of stuff to do? For starters, every July in Talkeetna, there used to be an entire festival based solely on moose droppings. Five thousand people flooded the area in 2009, eagerly joining in the moose-nugget toss and moose-nugget dropping contests and buying up moose-dropping jewelry. Things got too rowdy, however, and the Talkeetna Historical Society that sponsored it had to give the potty party the royal flush.
Vegetarian Festival
A vegetarian festival is the last place you’d expect to find spears stabbing through live flesh. At the Vegetarian Festival in Thailand, however, you can enjoy a bowl of veggie noodles or curry (hard to find during the rest of the year), but the main event of this annual cleansing period is body piercing—and it’s pretty extreme! Participants in the Gin Jay Festival channel evil spirits and mutilate themselves by stabbing their skin with gigantic sticks and spears, sticking them all the way through. When the spears come out, so the story goes, the spirits are gone.
La Tomatina
If you like your gross festivals to be pretty tame, try the tomato fight in Spain. La Tomatina takes place every year at the end of August in Buñol. The tomato battle is the climax to a week of street parties, parades, lots of food and wine, and even fireworks. When the fiesta is over, the guts of over 90,000 tomatoes are spilled around the city.
Anyone up for a Nice Game of Headless Goat?
Polo is a highly civilized game played in the U.K. and India, where players ride around on horses hitting balls with mallets, right? So civilized that it’s even known as “The Sport of Kings.” Well, not always. There’s a version that’s a little more gruesome. It’s called buzkashi and, instead of a ball, it uses a headless goat. It’s Afghanistan’s official sport and is popular throughout Central Asia.
Putting the “Ick” in Trick or Trea
t—Ideas for a Grossophile Halloween
Here are some easy tricks for spooking your friends at your next Halloween party. Stick these objects in bowls, blindfold your willing victims, guide their hands into the bowls, and tell them what they’re feeling.
• Cold spaghetti for brains
• Dried apricots for ears
• Banana peel for tongues
RECIPE FOR FAKE BLOOD
1 pint white corn syrup
1⁄4 cup creamy peanut butter
1⁄4 cup dishwashing soap red and blue food coloring a clean bottle
Grossopedia Page 3