The dead rats never saw active duty; according to the BBC, “The first consignment was seized by the Germans and the secret was blown. The Germans were fascinated by the idea, however, and the rats were exhibited at the top military schools. Indeed, SOE files show that the Germans actually organized searches for these rodent explosives.”
• Project Airport Gerbil. In the 1970s the MI5 section of the British Security Service tried to use gerbils to detect spies and terrorists as they passed through the country’s airports. Gerbils are able to detect increased adrenaline levels in human sweat when people are nervous; the idea was that passengers prepared to board would walk past a fan that would blow air into a hidden gerbil cage. If the gerbils smelled extra adrenaline, they were trained to press a lever that would alert security and also give them a treat. So how many terrorists did the gerbils catch? Not even one: The program was abandoned after researchers discovered “the gerbils could not tell the difference between terrorists and passengers who were scared of flying.”
* * *
RANDOM ODDITY
Burlington, Vermont, is home to the World’s Tallest Filing Cabinet, made of dozens of individual cabinets welded together. (It’s also home to the eight-foot-tall “Shopping Cart Arch.”)
The scientific name for stinky armpits: Tragomaschalia.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE CREDIBLE KIND
Investigations into 99% of UFO sightings have resulted in rational and very Earthly explanations. But then there are those few that simply have no explanation. Here are three cases that still have the experts baffled.
STRANGE BALL
In 1783 a London, England, man named Tiberius Cavallo, Fellow of the Royal Society, witnessed something that was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. “Northeast of the Terrace,” he wrote in his memoirs, “in clear sky and warm weather, I saw appear suddenly an oblong cloud nearly parallel to the horizon. Below the cloud was seen a luminous body, brightly lit up and almost stationary.” Cavallo described the object as a “strange ball” that was faint blue when he first saw it but then grew brighter and brighter. At one point, it flew high up into the air, then back down, and flew low across the horizon. After a few minutes, “it changed shape to oblong, acquired a tail, and seemed to split up into two bodies of small size.” The object then disappeared over the horizon in a flash, and the last thing Cavallo heard from it was a “loud rumble like an explosion.” Thinking the object may have crashed, Cavallo and other witnesses searched the area, but couldn’t find a craft or an impact crater. One possible explanation: The “explosion” may have been a sonic boom, created when an object goes faster than the speed of sound…but this happened more than 150 years before humans had invented any type of vehicle that could break the sound barrier.
STS 48
While stationed in Earth orbit in September 1991, the Space Shuttle Columbia’s aft-mounted TV camera recorded video of several unidentified objects that seemed to be “swimming around.” The camera was focused on an experimental tether 44 miles away, and beyond that was the horizon of the Earth. The glowing white objects intermittently entered the frame, and then turned and swam around, like microbes swimming in a petri dish. After a few minutes, a white flash appeared in the bottom left corner of the screen and suddenly, as if on cue, the little white objects all turned in unison and zoomed out of the frame. A few seconds later, a streak of light entered the frame and seemed to pause. Then, inexplicably, the camera rotated down toward the cargo bay, which was completely out of focus, then rotated back up…and the lights were gone.
Shortest war in history: the Anglo-Zanzibar war. It lasted 45 minutes. (Zanzibar lost.)
NASA has dismissed the objects as “normal ice and debris” that sometimes float around ships in orbit. But these weren’t floating; they were moving independently of each other and changing direction. And the occasional “debris” NASA referred to is usually found close to the ship. The camera was focused miles away on the long tether, and some of the objects appeared to fly behind the tether. So what were these things? No one knows for sure. They are truly unidentified flying objects.
FLAMING ARROW
On the night of June 30, 2002, a UFO was sighted across nearly all of central China. It was first seen over the eastern province of Jiangsu, then moved west, over Henan province, then Xiaxi province, and then Sichuan. “At 10:30 p.m., an object resembling a flaming arrow appeared in the night sky,” wrote Henan’s City Morning Post the next day. “Then the tail of the fiery arrow opened up like a fan, which emitted bright light. The light-emitting section then changed into a crescent. A fireball on top of the crescent glowed brilliantly. Five minutes later, the UFO disappeared.”
Dozens of other newspapers reported the event, based on thousands of eyewitness accounts. The government had no explanation, except to say that it was definitely not a Chinese craft. Wang Sichao, a well-respected astronomer at Nanjing’s Zijinshan Astronomy Center, studied the reports and photographs, and offered this conclusion: “It is a dimensional flying machine. But whether it is of human origin or extraterrestrial, whether it is controlled inside or remotely, are still unknown. Maybe we will not be able to uncover the truth for many years, but human curiosity will never let us stop searching.”
What does author Bram Stoker’s Dracula have that movie Draculas do not? A mustache.
WHAT’S EATIN’ YOU?
Do you have a nagging, gnawing feeling that…well, just a nagging, gnawing feeling? You should—odds are you’re being slowly devoured by one of these tiny, vicious parasites right this very second.
EATIN’ YOU: Fleas
BIO: Fleas are tiny insects that just can’t live without blood. They can eat more than 15 times their body weight in blood in a single day. That includes the blood of dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, and any other mammal that’s handy‚ including you. They’re also “Super Bugs”: Fleas can pull 160,000 times their own weight (the equivalent of a human pulling 24 million pounds) and can jump over 150 times their own size (the equivalent of a human jumping about 1,000 feet).
DANGER! In the right—or wrong—conditions, fleas are disease machines. They can transmit tapeworm to pets or humans, and can carry a number of diseases, including the blood parasite babesia, and the dreaded bubonic plague. Thankfully, they’re not nearly as bad as they were in the days before the vacuum cleaner. (Most eggs hatch in your carpet.)
EATIN’ YOU: Bedbugs
BIO: Tiny, painful, smelly, and disgusting, bedbugs are nocturnal, spending the day in walls, furniture, or your bed. At night they crawl out of the mattress and suck your blood. And they can wait up to a year in that mattress between feedings.
DANGER! Their bites are often painful, but, thankfully, bedbugs are not known to transmit any diseases.
EATIN’ YOU: Ticks
BIO: Ticks are arachnids—not insects—and are related to spiders. There are no ticks that live solely on humans, but if there are no deer, cattle, birds, or reptiles handy, you’ll do. They have three life stages after hatching—larva, pupa and adult—and each stage needs a “blood meal” before morphing into the next stage. Ticks use a hunting technique known as “questing.” That means that since they can’t hop or fly or run after prey, they wait around on grass or twigs for a host to come to them. How long will they wait? Years, possibly decades. And despite all that sitting they can leap into action the instant they sense a host coming by. One female tick can increase its body weight 200 times in a six-day feeding. Human equivalent: going from 170 pounds to 34,000 pounds in a week.
The Mt. Rushmore monument was never finished—Lincoln’s head is missing an ear.
DANGER! Only mosquitoes transmit more diseases to humans than ticks do.
EATIN’ YOU: Chiggers
BIO: Chiggers are the blood-sucking, infant larvae of mites, but before they can grow up, they must eat. They prefer rodents and lizards, but they’ll happily dine on you. These ravenous babies digest skin cells by spitting up powerful enzymes. Irritated s
kin cells react by building a hard mound around the tiny hole created by the enzymes, forming a “straw” (called a stylostome) through which the chigger continues to suck your mushed skin.
DANGER! Chigger bites are possibly the most irritating and itchy bites in the world—and the sores can itch for weeks—but they’re not known to carry any diseases. Old wive’s tale: Putting nail polish over the hole will suffocate the submerged parasite. Wrong! Chiggers do not burrow underneath the skin. If you have sores, you probably already scratched the chiggers off.
EATIN’ YOU: Face mites
BIO: What’s that on your eyelid? It might be one of these microscopic mites. They live in the pores and hair follicles of the face, especially around the nose and eyelashes. They plant themselves head-down in a pore or follicle, and happily live there feeding on sebaceous secretions and dead skin debris.
DANGER! Usually you wouldn’t notice them, but bad infestations can cause the face to become polluted by the excrement and corpses of these invisible bugs. That and their eating of hair roots and oil glands may cause hair loss, rashes, and rough skin. They are not known to transmit diseases.
EATIN’ YOU: Head lice
BIO: These bloodsuckers live their entire lives on the human scalp and hair. They puncture your skin with special piercing/ sucking mouthparts and feed two to six times a day. They’re particularly prevalent among children, who can spread them easily by sharing hats and combs, and by playing games such as “I’m gonna rub my lice-infested head against your head…because it’s fun!” (But personal hygiene is irrelevant—they’ll live on anybody.)
Stallions and bulls don’t have nipples.
DANGER! The bites may itch, but head lice aren’t dangerous.
EATIN’ YOU: Crab lice
BIO: Also permanent human residents, these larger lice live in the warmer, moister climes of pubic and armpit hair. They’re sluggish: If not disturbed, one can live its entire life within a half-inch of where it was born, but, like all lice, can be passed to other people through close contact. Not gross enough? Crab lice can also live in beards, moustaches, eyebrows, and eyelashes.
DANGER! Like head lice, you’re only in danger of embarrassment from crab lice.
EATIN’ YOU: Human river fluke
BIO: This flatworm is contracted from eating infected fish, and primarily targets humans. They live in your bile ducts and liver tissue, as well as blood, and can grow up to an inch long and can live inside you for 10 years.
DANGER! Symptoms can range from none…to death, for heavy infestations. (There have been cases where one person housed more than 20,000 of the parasites.) They are most prevalent in Asia, where raw and pickled fish are dietary staples.
EATIN’ YOU: Mosquitos
BIO: Contrary to popular myth, mosquitos do not live on blood. They survive on nectar and other fluids sucked out of flowers. But females take a “blood meal”—they need the protein to develop their eggs. You can’t hide: Mosquitoes home in on their prey using specialized organs that can sense heat, carbon dioxide—which you just exhaled—and other gasses from up to 100 feet away.
DANGER! Mosquitoes traveling between hosts can transmit several diseases to humans, including malaria, sleeping sickness, and elephantiasis. Mosquitoes are the most deadly animal to humans on earth, causing more than 1,000,000 deaths a year.
About 27 people die each year of suffocation from a dry-cleaning bag.
CINEMA ODD
In the 1960s, three Italian filmmakers set out to reinvent the documentary. Did they succeed? Well, film critic Pauline Kael once called them “the most devious and irresponsible filmmakers who have ever lived.”
THREE MEN AND A CAMERA
Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi were three budding documentary filmmakers with a problem: documentaries bored them. They didn’t want to paint sedate National Geographic-style pictures of foreign cultures. They wanted to show the lurid, shocking, and weird parts of human life that were rarely committed to film. The result: Mondo Cane (Italian for “a dog’s life”). Released in 1962, the film was a 108-minute travelogue that visits 30 bizarre, violent, and odd places. It’s sensational, exploitative, trashy…and really entertaining. Among the scenes recorded by Mondo Cane cameras:
• Asian cannibals eating a corpse
• The slaughtering of a bull and a pig
• A Taiwanese tribe eating a dog
• Ritualistic fattening of African women (to increase fertility)
• Sexualized tribal dancing
• A trip to a pet cemetery
• A South Pacific “cargo cult” that worships man-made objects
Critics called the movie “vulgar” and “pornographic,” but it was a hit. Surprisingly, the movie’s theme song “More” was nominated for Best Song at the 1963 Academy Awards. And, not surprisingly, it inspired several rip-off “Mondo” films including Mondo Bizarro and Mondo Balardo. Cavara, Jacopetti, and Prosperi themselves had enough leftover footage for three sequels.
• Women of the World (1963) All of the vignettes were about women, many of whom were naked.
• Mondo Cane 2 (1963) Footage includes flamingo babies dying of sewage poisoning, transvestite cops, a look at torture devices, and a visit to a mortuary school.
• Farewell Africa (1966) Shocking scenes of Africa, including animal poaching, mercenary tribal slaughter, and executions.
Human birth control pills are effective on gorillas, too.
WEIRDMART
It’s weir you go to buy weirly weird stuff. Weir going today!
BUY IT NOW! Picking up your dog’s or your cat’s poop is gross. That’s why there’s Poop-Freeze. It’s an aerosol spray that, according to the Rockville, Maryland, manufacturer, “forms a frosty film on dog poop (or cat poop) to harden the surface for easy pick-up.” And it’s “perfect for both outside and indoor use.” Cost of a four-ounce can: $9.95.
BUY IT NOW! Inventors John Packes and Ramon Peralta have come up with a way to spice up the game of golf: flavored tees. They’re made from sanitized, flavored wood, and come in mint, cherry, strawberry, and grape. And you suck on them. “It will knock out the foulest of cigar or beer breath within five seconds,” says Packes. Cost: 25¢ each.
BUY IT NOW! Want to save a step in getting the game birds you shoot from the field onto your plate? You soon may be able to with Season Shot: Ammo with Flavor—shotgun shells with pellets that flavor the meat of the animal you just killed. Flavors planned: cajun, lemon pepper, garlic, teriyaki, and honey mustard. The product’s inventor, Brett Holm of Chaska, Minnesota, says Season Shot will not only season the birds, but also prevent tooth damage caused by steel shot. “The heat from the stove melts the pellets,” he says. He hopes to have the product ready by 2007.
BUY IT NOW! Need a good prank gift? How about “Liquid Ass”? It comes in a small squirt bottle and the makers promise it has a “genuine, foul butt–crack smell.” A four-pack costs $17.50. (Available at liquidass.com.)
BUY IT NOW! If you go to Powys County in Wales, you can buy Welsh Dragon Sausages. Well, you can’t anymore: The Powys County Council made the manufacturers, Black Mountains Smokery, change the name to “Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages”… because they thought some consumers might be confused. “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages,” said company owner Jon Carthew.
If you had eaten an apple a day until you were 30, you would have eaten 10,957 apples.
BUY IT NOW! Need a set of gallows? British farmer David Lucas has been building them for countries in Africa for years. A single-hanging gallows goes for $22,000, he recently told reporters, and the Multi-Hanging Execution System, mounted on a trailer, goes for $185,000. “The beauty of it,” says Lucas, “is you can use it over and over again.” When news of of his macabre industry was revealed in May 2006, Lucas defended himself from the storm of criticism that followed. “Business is business,” he said.
Update! In June, 2006, Lucas’s business partn
er, Brian Rutterford, came forward and said the entire story was a hoax. “David sells pet food,” he told The Times. “If he was building gallows for foreign governments, I think I would know about it.” The BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Taipei Times were just a few of the news agencies around the world that had been duped by the story. (Lucas still denies that the story was a hoax.)
BUY IT NOW! The Isdaan restaurant in Gerona, Philippines, has a unique feature: the “Wall of Fury.” For 15 pesos (about 25¢) you can buy a dinner plate, which you then take to the Wall—printed with words like “ex-wife” and “boss”—and smash the plate against the target of your choice. “The top three targets are ‘boss/manager,’ ‘wine, women and gambling,’ and ‘loan sharks,’” says manager Arnold Viola. For the equivalent of $25 you can also smash a television set. (All this while an Elvis impersonator entertains the guests.)
BUY IT NOW! Got a fish? Gotta go? No problem. AquaOne Technologies, of Westminster, California, released their “Fish-n-Flush” toilet tank in 2006. It’s a fully-functioning toilet combined with an aquarium. Half of the two-part see-through tank comes with gravel, plastic plants, a filter system, and lighting, and its operation isn’t affected when the toilet is flushed. “We wanted to develop a product that had a dual purpose,” said CEO Richard Quintana. “To serve as a proper, fully functional toilet—and also as a source of entertainment and conversation.” The Fish-n-Flush is yours for $299.
Live scorpions glow a greenish color when exposed to ultraviolet light.
THEME RESTAURANTS
Dining out can get kind of boring. After all, how many times can you have the same old burger at the same old coffee shop? Fortunately, in the last 20 years, the “theme restaurant” has emerged, offering diners not just a meal…but an experience.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd Page 21