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EAT LIKE A KING
Elvis Presley’s love of belly-busting fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches is well known—he once ate nothing but them for two months. Here’s the recipe for another one of the King’s favorite recipes: Ugly Steak.
Rub a one-pound top sirloin steak with garlic and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Completely cover the steak in flour and fry in a pan filled with oil deep enough to cover the steak. Fry until both sides are brown and the steak is well done. Now, pour out all but about 3 tablespoons of the used cooking oil. Add 3 cups of water and mix thoroughly with all the cooked brown bits and gristle in the bottom of the pan. Boil until you get a thick paste. Add salt and pepper and drizzle over buttered mashed potatoes. Serve with a can of peas simmered in butter. (The King’s favorite beverage complement: a quart of buttermilk.)
Cowabunga! A single dairy cow can pass more than 300 pounds of gas per year.
HE VOODOOED THE PREZ
Maybe there’s more to voodoo curses than we think…
CURSES
In November 2006, President George W. Bush made a brief stop in Jakarta for a meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Yudhoyono. At the same exact time, an Indonesian man was slitting the throats of a goat and a snake and stabbing a crow in the chest so he could mix their blood together—with some spices and broccoli—and then drink the concoction. And whatever he couldn’t drink, he smeared on his face.
Ki Gendeng Pamungkas, a well-known “Black Magic” practitioner in Jakarta, was performing what he said was a Voodoo ritual to curse the president and his Secret Service contingent. The ritual, he said, would put Secret Service agents into a trance, making them believe they were under attack, which would lead to chaos. As for President Bush: “My curse will make him bloat like broccoli,” he said. He added that it was sure to work, because “the devil is with me today.”
VOODOO? WHO DO?
While the president never complained (publicly) of any intestinal trouble during his trip, shortly after the curse several strange incidents occurred. Voodoo or coincidence? You be the judge.
• Just hours before arriving in Jakarta, the auto-brake on Air Force One malfunctioned and six tires blew out as the plane was landing in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (nobody was hurt).
• The next day, the presidential contingent traveled to Hawaii, where the president’s travel director, Greg Pitts, 25, was mugged and beaten after leaving a nightclub in Waikiki. Newspaper reports said he was “too drunk” to describe the suspects to police.
• And across the globe, presidential daughter Barbara Bush had her purse stolen from her table at a restaurant in Argentina…right under the noses of her Secret Service guards. (The night before, another agent was involved in an altercation after a night out. Secret Service officials said it was a “mugging.”)
Marie Antoinette took her bidet to prison with her.
NEW PRODUCTS
Just when you think everything that could possibly be invented has already been invented, along comes something like rejection-letter toilet paper.
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING
Say, what’s that suspicious looking device? It’s the “Suspicious Looking Device!” A darkly humorous response to the increased fears of terrorism in recent years, the SLD is a red metal box with dotted lights, a small screen, a buzzer, and whirring motor. What does it do? Nothing. It’s just supposed to appear suspicious.
I WISH…FOR AN FTC INVESTIGATION
A company called Life Technology Research International has created the seemingly impossible: a magical wishing machine. You simply speak into the microphone on the Psychotronic Wishing Machine to tell it what you want…then sit back and wait a few days for your wish to come true. Just make sure the machine is on—LTRI says that the wish is far less likely to ever come true if the machine is turned off while the wish is still being “processed.” Nevertheless, results are still not guaranteed. How does it work? “Conscious human interaction and energy fields.” Cost: $499.
GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN’
For the cat owner who has everything: A California man has invented the Purr Detector. It’s a small motion detector and light embedded inside a cat collar. Whenever the cat purrs, the collar glows. It’s only available by mail order, so if you need to know if your cat is purring before the Purr Detector arrives, you can always use your ears.
TASTE IS NOT A FACTOR
The gross-out game show Fear Factor is no longer on the air, but it’s still going strong with a line of candy based on its most memorable segment: people eating disgusting animal parts. There are lollipops in the shape of a chicken’s foot, pig’s snout, and cow’s heart (flavored lemon, bubblegum, and cinnamon, respectively) as well as candy sheep eyeballs (mango) and “coagulated blood balls” (mmm…cherry!).
The opposite of “cross-eyed” is “wall-eyed.”
POT STICKERS
Many toddlers resist potty training because they’re afraid of the toilet. The white porcelain behemoth is supposed to look a lot less imposing with Toilet Buddies: brightly-colored animal stickers that affix to the toilet, making it look kid-friendly enough for the little ones to use it. They’re available in Poo P. Bunny, Puddles Puppy, and Ca Ca Cow.
NO, YOU’RE REJECTED!
Most successful writers had a period of frequent rejection letters from publishers (even Uncle John). Now, jilted authors can hap pily take out their revenge on those who have denied them literary glory with Rejection Letter Toilet Paper. You go to the Web site of a company called Lulu, upload the text of a rejection letter, and the company prints it onto four rolls of toilet paper for you.
ZOMBIE-UTIFUL
A few years ago, friends of Canadian artist Rob Sacchetto asked him to draw pictures of them as zombies to use as decorations for a Halloween party. Now Sacchetto runs a business selling Zombie Portraits. For $80, Sacchetto takes a photograph of you and uses it as the basis for a hand-drawn caricature of you as a zombie, complete with rotting flesh, oozing brains, and sagging eyeballs.
BRUSH YOUR CASTLE
Sarah Witmer had a tradition with her grandchildren: Whenever they lost a tooth, they’d put it under their pillow and the “tooth fairy” (Witmer) took it away. But this tooth fairy was a little different: A couple of days later, the kid would get a small sculpture of a castle made out of sand and the ground-up tooth. Now Witmer makes “Fairy Tooth Castles” professionally. When your child loses a tooth, you can send it to Witmer. She’ll grind it up, mix it with sand and a hardening agent, sculpt a nine-inch-tall castle out of it, and send it back to you.
How about you? Only 30% of people can flare their nostrils.
SHANGHAIED!
Here’s a look at one of the strangest crime waves in American history—one that terrorized even the toughest characters in town—as city officials, the police, and even the public looked the other way.
OUT TO SEA
One evening in the early 1900s, 19-year-old Max DeVeer and a friend were living it up in a San Francisco honky tonk called the Barbary Coast. There they met a man who asked them if they’d like to meet some girls.
“Well, naturally at that age we were raring to go anywhere—females were few and far between,” DeVeer told an interviewer half a century later. On the promise of meeting women, he and his friend went to the man’s room, where he served them drinks.
“That was the last that I remember,” DeVeer said. “The results of it was we woke up on a three-mast ship going through the Golden Gate....Besides my partner and myself, there were three other guys. One of them was a city fireman, and one was a store clerk and the other one was a wino, I guess.”
DeVeer and company had all been “shanghaied”—drugged, kidnapped, and sold for as little as $50 a head to the captain of a sailing ship headed for the high seas. When they might make it back to San Francisco was anyone’s guess; people who had been shanghaied might remain at sea, working as little more than slaves, for years at a time.
DeVeer’s experie
nce wasn’t unique. For more than half a century it had been a common practice in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and other West Coast ports for men known as “crimps” to shanghai thousands of men every year. Shanghai, China, was a distant port of call, so when someone of seafaring age disappeared from city streets without a trace, people said they’d been “sent to Shanghai” or “shanghaied.”
CANVAS AND GOLD
Two events led to the heyday of shanghaiing in the late 1840s. The first was the invention of the clipper ship, a sleek and very fast sailing ship that got its speed from more than 30 sails that were mounted on three giant masts. Lots of sails required lots of sailors to manage them, which increased the demand for sailors.
Fairy penguins moo, quack, growl, scream, and hiss.
The second was the California gold rush of 1849, which caused men to abandon the low-paying, dangerous life of a sailor to seek their fortune as “Forty-Niners.” There were always plenty of sailors willing to go to San Francisco; the problem was that as soon as a ship dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay, the crew abandoned ship and headed for the gold fields. By the end of 1849 more than 700 abandoned ships lay at anchor in the bay in need of crews to sail them back out again.
For San Francisco’s merchants and city fathers, the situation was intolerable. If the city was going to grow, the port had to function normally—San Franciscans had to be able to import the supplies they needed and export the goods they produced, and ship owners had to feel confident that if they sent a ship to San Francisco, they’d eventually get it back again. So when ship captains began offering $50 per head to anyone who could find them sailors to get their ships back out of port, crimps with colorful nicknames like Scab Johnny, Chloroform Kate and the Shanghai Chicken set to work meeting the demand. Business leaders, City Hall, and even the police turned a blind eye.
THE WORST PORT IN THE WORLD
Shanghaiing was a common practice in just about every port city on the West Coast. But San Francisco’s reputation paled in comparison to Portland, Oregon, which was known as the “Unheavenly City,” the “Forbidden City,” and “The Worst Port in the World.” If the sophistication of the city’s shanghai network was any measure, the nicknames were well deserved.
Portland’s waterfront was one of the seediest parts of town. The neighborhood was filled with saloons, pool halls, brothels, and even opium dens that served not only sailors on shore leave, but also any loggers, ranch hands, river workers, and other laborers who might be in town looking for a good time. Even when these establishments weren’t owned outright by crimp gangs, they were usually in cahoots with them.
Some business owners trapped their victims just by letting nature take its course—when a customer passed out drunk in a bar or became incapacitated in an opium den, the saloon keeper left them to the mercy of the crimp gangs. If two drunks got in a bar fight, the crimps waited for it to end and then dragged away the loser. (If the winner got enough of a beating, they’d drag him away, too.)
The Uape Indians of Brazil mix the ashes of their dead with their alcohol.
Other proprietors took a more active approach: They served up punches made of beer mixed with schnapps and laced with laudanum or other drugs, or gave their customers “Shanghai smokes”—cigars laced with opium. Some businesses even had trap doors in the floor that sent unsuspecting victims plunging to the cellar, into the arms of waiting crimps. In Portland alone, 1,500 people were shanghaied in a typical year. In the busiest years the number climbed as high as 3,000—more than eight victims a day.
THE SHANGHAI TUNNELS
Nearly everyone who was shanghaied in Portland ended up in a cellar below street level. In the neighborhoods near the waterfront, all the buildings’ cellars were connected to a network of tunnels and alleyways that ran all the way to the water’s edge. This elaborate maze of underground passages, infamously known as the “Shanghai Tunnels,” are what set Portland apart from other West Coast cities.
In other towns crimp gangs only shanghaied sailors as the need arose. If a ship pulled into port and the captain let it be known that he needed seven men to fill out his crew, the crimp gangs went out and kidnapped seven men. But Portland’s crimp gangs outfitted the Shanghai Tunnels with makeshift prison cells, which allowed the gangs to kidnap people, then hold them captive underground for weeks at a time. Then, when a ship needing men sailed into port, the crimp gangs were ready. They slipped drugs into their victims’ food and dragged them through the tunnels to the waiting ship. By the time the drugs wore off, the victims were out to sea with no hope of escape. They had only two choices: work or get thrown overboard.
Some captains paid their shanghaied sailors nothing; others paid a nominal wage but then charged the victims for their food and necessities and even deducted the crimp gang’s kidnapping fee from their pay. Either way the result was the same: After everything was totaled up, the sailors were essentially working for free.
Wrestler “The Rock” has a degree in criminology.
NOBODY’S PERFECT
Crimp gangs and sea captains weren’t the only ones who benefited from the shanghai system; that was why it lasted as long as it did. Kidnapping waterfront riffraff and sending them off to sea lowered the crime rate (excluding kidnapping, of course). If you had lent someone money and they refused to pay it back, you could arrange to have them shanghaied. Likewise, if you owed someone money and didn’t want to pay it back, you could have the lender shanghaied, too. Not many people concerned themselves with the plight of shanghaied sailors or even noticed when they disappeared—most were transients with few ties to the community.
The crimp gangs protected their interests by being active in the political machines that dominated government in cities like Portland and San Francisco. In California, two crimps named Joseph “Frenchy” Franklin and George Lewis even managed to get themselves elected to the state legislature, where they succeeded in blocking laws that attempted to outlaw shanghaiing.
PULLING INTO PORT
In the end it wasn’t a legal or moral crusade that ended the cruel shanghai system, it was steam: Steamships didn’t have sails, and could get by with less than half the crew of a sailing ship. By the time Max DeVeer and his friend woke up on their sailing ship as it was headed out of the Golden Gate, steamships were already overtaking sailing ships and the age of shanghaiing was drawing to a close.
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SEEING IS BELIEVING
The age of shanghaiing may be over, but Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels are still there, and parts of them are open for public tours. Look them up online or contact the city’s tourist bureau for more information. Reservations are required, and it’s a good idea to book well in advance—the tours are popular and frequently sell out.
Studies show: Toast lands butter-side down 62% of the time.
ANIMAL ODDITIES
Strange tales of creatures great, small, and stupid.
TURTLE POWER
A family in Kent, England, accidentally threw out their pet turtle, Murphy, with the trash. Murphy then went through a trash pulverizing machine, was scooped up with a load of garbage by a bulldozer, and processed through a giant, bottle-smashing drum. Somehow, the turtle survived and was discovered alive at the recycling plant.
JIVE TURKEY KITTY
In March 1993, a cat named Cingene (Turkish for “gypsy”) appeared on a television news show in Turkey and reportedly spoke seven words in clear Turkish. The words: ver (give), demen (“I don’t say!”), Nalan and Derya (popular girls’ names), naynay (a slang term for music), nine (a colloquial word for grandmother), and babaane (grandmother).
BAD NEWS BEARS
In 2002 dozens of drivers were injured by rockslides on a mountain road between the Russian resort towns of Adler and Krasnaya Polyana. The reason for the rockslides: malicious bears. Locals say Caucasian bears had taken to killing cows for entertainment by rolling rocks down the mountains onto them. They had since moved on from hitting cows to trying to hit people and their ca
rs.
CAT NIPS
Katie Perfitt of England wondered why her one-year-old cat Joey’s behavior became erratic at night. Turns out he was sneaking out every night and going to the Teal Arms, the local pub. Patrons routinely fed him rum, beer, and hard cider. “He’d attack the duvet, then jump on my plate while I was eating,” Perfitt said. “The next minute he’d be snoring his head off.” Joey’s bar visits ended when the vet discovered Joey had suffered minor liver damage.
Cisvestitism is the act of wearing weird clothes.
THE IRON LADY
In February and March 2003, nearly 50 bulls in Wisconsin suffered severe groin injuries trying to mate with an unreceptive cow. The “cow” was made of cast iron and had been placed in a field by a farmer to scare off crows. “I’m currently being sued by several dairy farmers for vet bills,” the farmer with the iron cow said.
DOG CALLS
While playing in a park in Erith, England, 14-year-old Nathan Ferro was suddenly blindsided and knocked to the ground by a Labrador retriever. It didn’t bite the boy, but it pinned him down, stuck its snout in his pocket, grabbed his $130 cellular phone, and ran off with it. “It seemed to know exactly what it was looking for,” Nathan said. The (tooth-marked) phone was later recovered.
STAMPEDE!
A bus in Voi, Kenya, accidentally ran into and killed a three-month-old elephant calf in January 2006. Immediately seeking revenge, eight full-grown, screaming elephants surrounded the bus and tried to tip it over. A 50-car traffic jam ensued as wildlife wardens tried to get the elephants to disperse.
GOOD AIM
In May 1989, an eight-hour traffic jam was caused on the Isle of Wight when falling seagull droppings hit and jammed the electric eye of a bridge’s traffic light control system. In April 1994, New-bridge, England, experienced a blackout when a bird of prey dropped a lamb on an electricity substation. (The same thing happened a month later in Morongo Basin, California, except that bird dropped a rosy boa snake.)
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd Page 26