• To keep the “spice” alive in a marriage: Take some of your own nail clippings and mix them with your spouse’s. Burn them together at midnight.
• To cure infertility: Borrow a (clean) diaper from a friend who has a baby. Tie the diaper onto the infertile woman like a bikini bottom, and drop a gemstone into the front of it.
• To give someone the mind of a frog: Point to the person and say “Higady, pigady, pong! I give you the mind of a frog.”
Gerber once tried to market a baby food for adults.
WEIGHT LOSS QUACKERY
The only things known to really help you lose weight are diet and exercise. But they’re so hard. And so boring. Magic pants are better.
MAGIC TIGHTS WEIGHT LOSS
Embedded into the fabric of the “Slim Fit 20 Caffeine Tights” are tiny capsules of caffeine. When the caffeine comes into contact with the skin, the body absorbs it, where it supposedly stimulates metabolism, burns fat, and tightens leg muscles. The manufacturer, a British company called Palmers, promises that if the tights (which cost $50 for a pack of three pair) are worn for a whole month, about an inch in diameter can be lost from each leg.
SPRAY-ON WEIGHT LOSS
CLAmor is sprayed onto food. It contains a chemical called “clarinol” that’s thought to shrink fat cells. When the clarinol-sprayed food is eaten, it reduces fat on the food and fat that’s already inside the body. It comes in four flavors: butter, olive oil, garlic, and plain. So what is clarinol? CLAmor, the name of the product and the company, says that it’s a naturally occurring bacteria found in the stomach of cows. It’s “harvested” from fried ground beef.
ALCHEMY WEIGHT LOSS
A magic pill called Phena-Frene/MD sold in the mid-1990s claimed to turn fat into water, which was then flushed from the body forever by simply peeing it out. Packaging claimed users could lose up to 10 inches off their waist in just two weeks. One problem: It’s physically impossible to turn fat into water. The product bombed, despite “medical school proof” from non-existent institutions such as the California Medical School and the U.S. Obesity Research Center. Phena-Frene was part of the diet-pill fad that came to an end in 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration banned all “fen-phen” products after studies showed they caused heart attacks.
On some Caribbean islands, the oysters can climb trees.
MAGIC PANTS WEIGHT LOSS
Sold via late-night TV commercials in the 1980s, “Slim Jeans” weren’t actually jeans, and they probably didn’t make anybody slim. Slim Jeans were silver, futuristic-looking sweatpants made of “an amazing polymer material” that was actually a cheap rayon knockoff. They were supposed to cause weight loss by trapping in body heat, making the wearer lose water weight by sweating. The makers of Slim Jeans said weight loss could occur if the pants were worn exercising, sleeping, or even while watching TV. For a while, Slim Jeans were sold with a matching shiny sweatshirt to allow for even more good-looking weight loss.
CLIP-ON WEIGHT LOSS
According to Ninzu, the manufacturer of a 1990s device called the B-Trim, weight loss could be attained by clamping this little object onto the ear. Here’s how it “worked”: The clip put pressure on a nerve ending, which supposedly stopped stomach muscles from moving, signaling to the brain that the stomach was full. This controlled appetite and resulted in weight loss. Ads for the B-Trim said these claims could be proven by “scientific evidence.” One problem: they didn’t actually list any of that evidence. Result: The Federal Trade Commission made Ninzu stop selling the B-Trim in 1995.
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ROBOTS: NOW WITH A TASTE FOR FLESH
Scientists at NEC System Technologies in Japan have invented a robot that can taste and identify dozens of wines, as well as some types of food. The green-and-white tabletop robot has a swiveling head, eyes, and a mouth that speaks in a child’s voice. To identify a wine, the unopened bottle is placed in front of the robot’s left arm. An infrared beam scans the wine—through the glass bottle—and determines its chemical composition. The robot then names the variety of wine, describes its taste, and recommends foods to pair it with. Scientists are still working out the kinks: At a 2006 press conference, a reporter and a cameraman put their hands in front of the robot’s infrared beam. According to the robot, the reporter tasted like ham, and the cameraman tasted like bacon.
St. Paul, Minnesota was originally called Pig’s Eye.
WHEN PIGS…
We’ve all heard the expression, “When pigs fly,” meaning “never.” Turns out that even if they can’t fly, they can do other things that are just as strange.
WHEN PIGS FISH
Pigs on the island of Tongatapu in the South Pacific nation of Tonga have learned to fish. Domestic razorbacks there, descendants of pigs left by European explorers centuries ago, have learned to wade into the ocean to eat seaweed, mussels, crabs, and even fish. The pigs have become a must-see for tourists to the island—and a must-eat for locals, since their seafood diet has given them a unique flavor. “It’s saltier than normal,” local tour guide Joe Naeata said.
WHEN PIGS ATTACK
A town in the German state of Bavaria was attacked by a drove of crazed pigs in November 2006. The wild boars knocked over bicyclists, caused traffic accidents, wrecked a store, and bit several pedestrians in Veitshöchheim, police said. The melee went on for almost two hours before police officers killed three of the boars and scared the rest away. Said local police chief Karl-Heinz Schmitt, “It wasn’t your everyday kind of incident.”
WHEN PIGS MILK COWS
Ermelino Rojas, from Calixto Garcia, Cuba, had a piglet picked out for Christmas dinner in 2004, but spared its life when he saw what he called a “moving scene”: The piglet was suckling from one of his cows. And the cow didn’t seemed to mind. Rojas spared the pig’s life, unable to kill it after seeing it with its “new mother.”
WHEN PIGS, YES, FLY
In 1974 flights at London’s Heathrow Airport had to be cancelled when a 40-foot-long flying pig was spotted in the area. The pig was seen by pilots at nearly 40,000 feet before it finally landed in the countryside southeast of London. What was it? An inflatable pig, a prop in a photo shoot for the Pink Floyd album Animals, that had broken its tether.
Indiana University’s main library sinks 1" per year—because of the weight of the books.
PAC-MANHATTAN
Are you old enough to remember odd but simple college stunts like swallowing live goldfish, or cramming people into Volkswagen Beetles? Here’s a new college fad that’s just as nutty…but a lot more complicated.
THINKING BIG
In 2004 graduate students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program set out to create a real-life version of the 1980s video game Pac-Man—one that could be played on the streets of Manhattan, with people in costumes assuming the roles of the five characters: Pac-Man and the four ghosts, Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. They called their game “Pac-Manhattan.” Been a while since you played a game of Pac-Man? Here’s a refresher:
• The playing field consists of a maze that’s filled with a trail of tiny white dots. Pac-Man must travel around the entire maze and eat all the dots while avoiding Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. If they catch him, he dies.
• There are four “power pellets” on the playing field, one in each of the four corners of the maze. When Pac-Man eats one of the pellets, he becomes energized, all the ghosts turn blue, and for a short time he can eat the ghosts—so they have to run from him.
GET REAL
So if one person can play Pac-Man, how many does it take to play Pac-Manhattan? Ten—five play Pac-Man and the four ghosts, and each of the other five serves as one of the character’s “generals.” While the characters run around on city streets, the generals remain in a special Pac-Manhattan “control room” and keep their characters updated on the game’s progress by cell phone.
• The area of play is a 6 x 4 city-block area surrounding Washington Square Park in New Yor
k’s Greenwich Village, which simulates the Pac Man video game board. The city streets serve as the maze; each time a character moves to a new intersection, they are required to report their position to their general. The information is then displayed on a computer screen in the control room that looks just like the screen on the original Pac-Man arcade game.
• There are no white dots on the city streets, but they are displayed on the computer screen. As Pac-Man moves from one intersection to another, the dots disappear from the screen. His general is responsible for keeping him up to date on which streets he still has to cover.
• The intersections at the four corners of the maze serve as power pellets. When Pac-Man reaches the intersection and tags the street sign, he “eats the pellet” and becomes invincible for two minutes. If he can tag any of the ghosts before the two minutes are up, they are “eaten” and have to return to their starting point before they can continue chasing Pac-Man. Of course, after the two minutes, the ghosts can chase and eat Pac-Man again.
• Pac-Man is the only character who knows everything that is happening in the game—his general is allowed to tell him where the ghosts are, but the ghosts’ generals are not allowed to tell them where Pac-Man is. Each ghost is allowed to know where the other ghosts are and whether or not Pac-Man has eaten a power pellet and become invincible, but they have to find Pac-Man on their own without help from their generals.
• The game continues until Pac-Man eats all of the dots or is eaten by one of the ghosts. Games can last anywhere from under 10 minutes to over an hour, depending on luck and how well the characters and their controllers work together.
Wilt Chamberlain had a superstition about always wearing a rubber band around his wrist.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME
Pac-Manhattan is a work in progress; the inventors say they’ll open their game to the public once it’s perfected. But you don’t have to wait until then—if you’ve got 10 people with 10 cell phones and a map of the streets where you live, you can set up your own game. The rules are posted on www.pacmanhattan.com.
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Famous people who have been homeless: Charlie Chaplin, Shania Twain, Jim Carrey, Ella Fitzgerald, Don Imus, David Letterman, George Orwell, Eartha Kitt, Colonel Sanders, and William Shatner.
Nutty: The first week in October is Squirrel Awareness Week.
WELCOME TO THE
MÜTTER MUSEUM
Warning! This unusual museum in Philadelphia is not for the faint of heart, but it’s worth a visit if you think you have the stomach. And if you don’t, don’t worry—they’ve got plenty of stomachs in the collection.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
In the 1830s a Philadelphia surgeon named Thomas Dent Mütter made a trip to Paris to round out his medical education. At the time Paris was one of the most medically advanced cities in the world and far ahead of anything the United States had to offer. Mütter came away very impressed by the systematic, scientific approach the Parisian doctors took toward treating human illness—patients suffering from the same malady, for example, were clustered together in special dedicated hospital wards, so that the doctors could compare their cases and gain insight from the experience.
Equally impressive were the enormous collections of medical specimens and models that the doctors had amassed—healthy (as well as diseased) skulls, skeletons, tumors, hernias, blood clots, appendages, bony growths, you name it—that were used to teach physicians the art and science of their craft. Mütter learned so much studying the specimens that when he returned to the United States he began assembling his own collection of specimens and using them in the lectures he gave as a professor at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
PASSING THE TORCH
By the mid-1850s Mütter’s own health had deteriorated to the point that he had to give up his teaching post. By then his collection had grown to more than 1,700 items, and he didn’t want it to sit in storage when it could still be put to good use. So in 1856 he donated the entire collection to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, along with an endowment of $30,000 to maintain and expand it. In those days Philadelphia was one of the leading centers of American medicine, and the Mütter Museum naturally became a popular destination for medical oddities, thanks not only to the acquisitions made possible by Mütter’s endowment, but also to the fact that physicians all over the country began sending the strange items they encountered during the course of their work—giant hairballs swallowed by patients in mental institutions, shrunken heads collected from natives in Peru, skeletons of people suffering from countless crippling and bone-twisting diseases, brains of several prominent surgeons and at least one executed murderer, deformed fetuses floating in formaldehyde-filled jars, plus any number of syphilitic skulls, gangrenous lungs, cirrhotic livers, and other diseased organs, appendages, growths, and limbs.
Three towns in Oklahoma: Greasy, Bushyhead, and Bowlegs.
A WHO’S WHO OF EWWWWW!
More than a few historically significant items found their way into the Mütter Museum as well: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s bladder stones were donated to the museum; so was a piece of the “thorax” (chest) of John Wilkes Booth, and a brain sample from Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881.
Have you ever heard of Chang and Eng, the original “Siamese” twins? When they died on the same day in 1874 at the age of 63 (Chang died first, leaving Eng to spend the last hours of his life helplessly attached to a corpse as he awaited his own imminent death), the autopsy was performed right there in the Mütter Museum. Most of their conjoined bodies were returned to the family for burial, but the museum got to keep their shared liver and a plaster cast of their bodies (complete with a visible autopsy scar and a few armpit hairs that got stuck in the plaster).
ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
A lot of things have changed in the nearly 150 years since the Mütter museum collection first went on display; medical school education has progressed far beyond the point where the skeletons of midgets and two-headed babies have any real educational value. By the early 1980s the museum was virtually forgotten, and the number of visitors had dwindled to well under a thousand people a year. Was it even worth keeping the museum open? The College of Physicians decided that it was—if nothing else the museum was certainly a fascinating artifact of 19th century medicine, and one of the few still in existence. In 1982 the museum’s newly appointed curator, 35-year-old Gretchen Worden, decided that the best way to ensure its future was to raise its public profile in any way she could. She became a sort of roving ambassador of medical oddities, granting countless radio interviews over the years and appearing on TV shows as diverse as The Late Show With David Letterman and science documentaries broadcast on the BBC. She also wrote a coffee table book about the collection and began selling an annual calendar. These publications brought in needed funds and also did the job of putting the Mütter Museum back on the map—today more than 60,000 people visit the museum each year and pay $8–12 apiece for the privilege.
A fork used for pitching dung is a yeevil.
STILL GOING STRONG
One of the strangest things about the Mütter Museum is the fact that it is still adding to its collection. Two examples: In 1973 a man named Harry Raymond Eastlack died from a disease called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, which caused bone to form in the muscles and connective tissue of his body. By the end of his life he was little more than a living statue, able to move only his lips. After he died at the age of 39, per his request his body was donated to science and his fused skeleton became a part of the collection.
In 1992, the parents of a baby born without a cranium (the part of the skull that holds the brain) donated her remains to the museum and she is currently on display in a formaldehyde-filled jar. In return for the donation, the parents asked only that they be allowed to visit the infant from time to time.
FEATURED ATTRACTIONS
Think you’re ready to visit t
he Mütter Museum? Here are some things to watch for:
• President Grover Cleveland’s “Secret Tumor.” Early in his second term as president (1893–97), Cleveland learned that he had cancer of the mouth. At the time the country was mired in one of the worst economic depressions in American history, and Cleveland feared the situation would get even worse if the public learned of his life-threatening illness. So on July 1, 1893, he slipped aboard a friend’s yacht and surgeons cut out a large part of his upper jaw as the boat steamed up New York’s East River.
The oligosaccharides in beans are what make you fart.
The secret surgery was a success—Cleveland was fitted with a rubber partial jaw that gave him a normal appearance and did not impair his speech, and he was able to serve out the remainder of his term without the public realizing what had happened. The full story did not emerge until 1917, when one of the attending surgeons, Dr. William W. Keen, donated the tumor and some of the surgical equipment used in the procedure to the Mütter Museum.
• The Soap Lady. Early in the 19th century (no one is sure quite when), a morbidly obese Philadelphia woman was buried in a downtown cemetery. Many years later when the cemetery was being relocated as part of an urban renewal project, it was discovered that the environment in which the woman had been buried—damp soil with just the right chemical makeup—had turned her remains into adipocere, a substance similar to soap. The womans’ body was never claimed by relatives; the museum later acquired her for the princely sum of $7.50. A “Soap Man,” who was buried near the Soap Lady, ended up in the Smithsonian Institute (no word on how much he cost).
• The Collection of Obsolete Medical Devices. Why stop at physical specimens? In 1871 the museum expanded into devices that are no longer put to use. Keep an eye out for the tonsil guillotines and the lobotomy picks; also watch for the brain slicing knife that, thankfully, was only put to use after the patient had died. “Two people are needed,” the display reads, “one to hold the brain in place, and the other to slice.”
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd Page 19