by Uncle John’s
However, as you probably know, Santa Claus isn’t real, and the Elf on the Shelf doesn’t really have magical spying capabilities. But it’s a vital part of the delightful Santa tradition in millions of American homes. In December 2012, Good Morning America ran a segment on the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon. It included video of parents talking about how they hide their elf, along with video of parents moving the elf. Reporter Lara Spencer even manhandled one, robbing the elf of his magic! Spencer had to apologize on the air after hundreds of parents complained to GMA that their kids had seen the report and figured out the truth. Spencer backpedaled, claiming the elf she touched hadn’t been named yet, and so was safe.
SKYFALLS
DIE ANOTHER DAY
“It was terrifying!” said Fearless Felix, negating his own nickname. To be fair, he did spend four and a half terrifying minutes hurtling toward earth while caught in a “death spin.” Fearless Felix is Felix Baumgartner, 43, an Austrian “supersonic skydiver.” In 2012 he attempted to become the only human being to ever break the sound barrier without the aid of a vehicle. He ascended to the stratosphere 24 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, in a helium balloon made just for the stunt. Then—wearing a 100-pound insulated, pressurized suit—he jumped out (from a world-record highest altitude) and assumed an arrowlike “delta position” to gain momentum. “The exit was perfect,” he said, “but then I started tumbling. I really picked up speed, it got very brutal.” Amazingly, Baumgartner maintained consciousness while spinning at 830 mph in thin, subfreezing air. He finally got out of the spin at about 5,000 feet, but when he opened his parachute, his hand got stuck in the cord. After he freed his hand, he looked up to see that the strings had twisted around the main parachute. Luckily, the chute untangled just in time to not kill him. Afterward, Baumgartner became engaged to his girlfriend and he promised to take up a safer hobby—piloting rescue helicopters.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
Two skydivers whose combined ages were 135 met their end in tandem. The older of the two, 75-year-old Claudette Porter, had listed skydiving as one of her bucket-list items. So in 2011, her granddaughter, Anna Vera, set up the jump in Mesquite, Nevada, as a birthday present. Porter’s instructor, James Fonnesbeck, 60, had more than 11,000 successful jumps to his name (including one as a skydiving Elvis in the 1991 film Honeymoon in Vegas). Vera was jumping, too, also in tandem with an instructor. Up in the plane, Porter smiled at her granddaughter and then jumped out. Vera and her instructor followed. Everything went fine for the younger pair, but Vera watched in horror as something went horribly wrong with her grandma’s jump. Neither of the chutes opened properly and the pair spun toward the ground. Vera screamed. Her tandem instructor just kept repeating, “Don’t look.” Neither skydiver survived.
LIVE AND LET DIE
Englishman Liam Byrne’s first jump nearly became the last thing he ever did. But luckily he missed a church (barely) and landed next to it…30 feet up in a tree. Then he hung there for 45 minutes until firefighters could get him down. Despite six hours of training, “he was supposed to be in an arched position when he jumped so that he moved away from the deploying parachute.” But Byrne, who said he was “nervous,” flailed when he exited the plane, and the chute became tangled in his arm. “What do I do?” he yelled into his radio. “Deploy your backup chute!” the instructor yelled back. So he did, but then the backup chute became tangled in the primary chute, and he went into a spin. Thankfully, the big tree saved Byrne’s life. He walked away with only a few scratches and bruises. “I normally don’t like heights,” he said—and he probably still doesn’t.
November 22, 1963, is a dark day in history—that’s the day President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. A few hours later, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president. But Johnson almost died an untimely death that day, too. At his residence in Washington, D.C., that night, his private Secret Service detail, Gerald Blaine, was routinely patrolling the premises. On high alert due to the Kennedy assassination, Blaine saw a dark figure coming out of the house. Blaine pointed his semiautomatic gun at the man, and put his finger on the trigger. That’s when he realized he was holding a gun— and had nearly shot—President Johnson. Johnson, Blaine later recounted, didn’t say a word, and went right back inside.
PLASTIC SURGERY DISASTERS
Michael Jackson was once the poster child for extensive plastic surgeries rendering a person nightmarishly unrecognizable, but he can’t hold a candle to Jocelyn Wildenstein. She’s a New York socialite who went under the knife numerous times in order to look more like an exotic cat.
Born into a middle-class family in Switzerland in 1940, Jocelyn Périsset started dating a movie producer at age 17 and joined the jetset, living in Paris and globetrotting in style. While on safari in Kenya in 1977, she met Alec Wildenstein, a French billionaire. Jocelyn, a skilled hunter, helped him track down a lion that was causing trouble on his family’s ranch. They got married in Las Vegas in 1978.
The Wildensteins continued to share a passion for big cats—they kept two tigers as pets in a “bulletproof glass cave” at the ranch. After a year of marriage, the two decided to visit a clinic for “his-and-hers eyelifts.” This is when Jocelyn developed an unhealthy desire to endlessly improve herself. Friends claim that Alec preferred women who were youthful and catlike, and that Jocelyn was eager—perhaps too eager—to please him as she grew older. Over the 1980s and 1990s, she underwent so many plastic surgeries that she took on an appearance somewhere between an alien and a feline.
“SHE TOOK ON AN APPEARANCE SOMEWHERE BETWEEN AN ALIEN AND A FELINE.”
Upon seeing his wife’s face after a series of drastic procedures, Alec supposedly screamed in horror, which only encouraged her to return to her surgeon for even more tweaks. He later told a reporter “she seems to think that you fix a face the same way you fix a house.” Total cost of the surgeries: reportedly in excess of $4 million.
And if her intent was to keep her cat-loving husband interested, it didn’t work: Jocelyn filed for divorce in 1997 after catching Alec in bed with a Russian model, presumably fresh off the catwalk.
THE OLD BALLS GAME
It’s a baseball tradition to hand out free hats, shirts, and souvenir balls to fans. The Los Angeles Dodgers did this on August 10, 1995, gifting most of the 53,000 fans in attendance with a Dodgers-branded ball before a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a routine day at the ballpark until the bottom of the ninth inning. The Cardinals led 2–1, and Cardinals pitcher Tom Henke struck out the Dodgers’ Raul Mondesi, who was caught looking; Mondesi immediately argued the call with home plate umpire Jim Quick.
Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda also came onto the field to argue with the umpire. Quick ejected both from the game. The crowd erupted, and reacted with the one tool at their disposal— thousands threw their baseballs onto the field. The Cardinals fled for the safety of the dugout until the barrage ended. After a few minutes they returned to the field… and then balls came flying out of the center-field bleachers. That was it—the umpires declared the game over, and, as is the rule in baseball, the home team, the Dodgers, forfeited.
“THOUSANDS THREW THEIR BASEBALLS ONTO THE FIELD.”
COSTUME DRAMAS
ICE-CREAM-KKKONE
It was a sunny day in Ocala, Florida, in 2012. Cars made their way along the main drag. Pedestrians walked to and from work and local eateries. And a bizarre Ku Klux Klan monster thingy stood in front of an ice-cream shop enthusiastically waving at passersby. Many of those passersby were outraged. One woman even called the ice-cream shop in tears to complain that she had to cross the street to avoid the jovial white supremacist. The owner of the shop, Liza Diaz, was confused by the uproar. She had never even heard of the “Ku Ku Klan” (as she described it to a reporter). All she knew is that her customers were gone and she was the scorn of the neighborhood. So what was all the hubbub about? Trying to drum up business, Diaz had hired a man to stand outside her shop wearing an ice-cre
am costume. “It’s just an ice-cream cone!” she said. But the top of the vanilla cone looked a lot like a pointy KKK hood. Diaz threw the costume away.
MAYOR McMEAT
In a similar costume mishap, London’s Daily Mail reported (as only they could), “Barmy councillor gives shocked onlookers the willies in costume that looks more like a terrifying eight-foot phallus than tasty banger.” Translated into American, that goes: Jill Makinson-Sanders, mayor of Louth, Lincolnshire, England, dressed up in a sausage costume that made her look like a big pink penis. The 61-year-old mayor wanted to do something special when the Olympic torch was to be carried through her town in July 2012. So instead of wearing the traditional mayoral chain and robes, Makinson-Sanders decided to celebrate Louth’s most popular export—sausage— by dressing up as one. To most of the embarrassed townsfolk, she looked like a giant pink Johnson running alongside the confused man carrying the Olympic torch.
SEXY BACKLASH
Ricky’s, a costume superstore based in New York City, specializes in “sexy (fill-in-the-blank)” costumes. Many of these costumes generate complaints, none more so than a little black dress with a skeleton pattern that came with a measuring-tape ribbon belt and a measuring-tape choker chain. The name of the costume: Anna Rexia. The backlash was severe. “I’m just appalled,” said Trish Jones-Bendel of the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa & Associated Disorders, “because eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.” Or, as one commenter said, “What’s next—a ‘Sexy Tumor’ outfit?!” In 2011—two years after Anna Rexia became available—Ricky’s pulled the costume.
NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORONER
The Sexy Jane Doe DOA costume brings new meaning to the phrase “death becomes her.” Here’s the actual description (typos preserved for your reading pleasure): “Although she doesn’t have much of a personality, she is still drop dead gorgeous in this body bag dress, Im sure you have the personality and in this you will be gorgeous. Stretch satin mini dress with hood and a two way zipper front which can zip all the way up the hood. One breast has an outline of a body printed on to it an PROPERTY OF THE CORONER. Pack includes Coroners name tag fitted to a choker Jane Doe and matching fingerless gloves.”
KING OF PAIN
King Richard the Lionheart of England was leading troops in battle in 1199 when he stopped a charge, hypnotized by an arrow fired at him by a French soldier. The arrow hit him in the shoulder, and he died of blood poisoning.
GRANT’S TOMB
The American economy was vibrant and healthy in 1969. Retail was an especially strong sector, and a new type of store was emerging: the discount variety chain, basically department store–size versions of five-and-dimes and neighborhood drugstores. Target, Walmart, and Kmart all began this way. One contemporary chain not around today is Grants, also known as W. T. Grant, founded as a dime store in Massachusetts in 1906. By the late 1960s, there were nearly 1,100 locations around the United States.
The overall financial health of the company, as well as that of the economy at large, led the Grants board of directors to expand the chain into new geographic areas, build bigger stores, and institute incentives to get people to shop at Grants, instead of at its biggest competitor, Kmart. The big idea was to offer store credit to its customers. Any customer. Any customer at all. While that immediately sounds bad, at the time, default rates on small loans, under $1,000, the kind of debt incurred at a store over time, were low. Grants thought they would make money on the deal.
Each store was given jurisdiction over its own credit system, and they lacked the record-keeping or resources to determine whether applicants were good credit risks or not. For example, no credit checks were done. Thousands of customers took advantage of this system to open credit lines at multiple Grants stores. Beyond that, Grants offered super-low repayment terms (interest rates under 5 percent) and plans with small minimum payments.
The American economy slowed down in 1970 and 1971, meaning people were paying their debt back even less, and certainly not to Grants. Few changes were made to the credit system, and by 1975 the company was bankrupt and closed its doors. Total amount of outstanding customer debt at that point: $276.3 million.
BATS OFF!
It’s one of the most famous myths in rock music history…except that it’s true. At a 1982 Ozzy Osbourne concert in Iowa, a fan threw what Osbourne assumed to be a rubber bat onstage. In a very heavy-metal gesture, Osbourne bit the head off of the rubber bat—except that it was a real bat. Blood spewed forth from the bat, and all over Osbourne and into his mouth. The singer had to undergo a round of rabies vaccinations.
AN ELEVATING TALE
Construction workers Edward Tyler, 26, and Wendell Amaker, 48, were doing renovation work at New York City’s Staten Island Hotel one day in August 2011. They took an elevator between some of the old hotel’s upper floors with a cart full of supplies—but the elevator door wouldn’t open. They tried another floor—same thing. So they decided to ride the elevator to the basement to see if the doors would open there.
Shortly after passing the ground floor, the elevator car hit water. Tyler and Amaker were unaware that the city had been flooded by a storm that day—and that the hotel’s basement was now basically a pool. The elevator stopped working and sank to the bottom of the shaft. Water started leaking into the car. Worse: The two men were the only people working in the hotel that day. Luckily, they were able to reach 911 by cell phone. Unluckily, they didn’t know the hotel’s address. All they could tell the operator was the name of the streets at a nearby intersection. Then the phone connection cut off.
New York City firefighters were soon in a mad scramble to find the trapped men. They got to the intersection and—on nothing more than a hunch— went to the Staten Island Hotel. But the security guard told them nobody was in the building. The firefighters persisted. They went to the rear of the building and saw a door that was ajar. They approached it…and heard screams. When they got to the car, Tyler and Amaker were standing on their supply cart, their heads three feet from the elevator’s roof—and water up to their necks. It had been more than an hour since they had called 911. The firefighters dropped a narrow ladder into the car through an emergency hatch on the car’s roof, and the trapped men were able to climb out of the car, their ordeal finally over.
Tyler and Amaker were taken to the firehouse, uninjured but badly shaken up. “They were happy to see us,” FDNY captain James Melvin told reporters. “I think they thought the end was near.” Asked why he and his men had chosen the hotel to check out first, Melvin answered with a shrug, “Lucky guess.”
No surprises: A Norwegian man (unnamed in reports) found out that his surprise 40th birthday party was happening in a cabin in the woods in southern Norway. As the first of about 30 guests began to arrive, the birthday boy hid behind some trees near the house. He planned to surprise the friends who were there to surprise him: He took his shotgun and fired a round into the air. The first shot definitely surprised the partygoers. So did the second shot, which happened when the man emerged from his hiding spot, tripped, and accidentally fired. He shot one friend in the leg.
FUNNY MONEY
Nice tip. Dakoda Garren went to Rocky’s Pizza in Battle Ground, Washington, in August 2012, and paid for his meal with coins, including a quarter—a 1930s Liberty Head quarter worth about $18,500. According to police, Garren had stolen the coin, along with several others, months earlier, and was spending them around town at face value, having no idea of their real worth. Garren was arrested on a charge of first-degree theft.
Unamused. Larry Jones bought an order of French fries at Darien Lake Theme Park in New York in September 2012, paying for it with a $50 bill. The cashier didn’t like the look of the bill and called security. When they questioned Jones about the money, he showed them roughly $1,200 worth of $50 bills that he said he got as payment for a remodeling job he’d done. Then he stuffed a bunch of them into his mouth and tried to swallow them. Security officers
were able to stop him. Jones was charged with possession of a forged instrument and tampering with physical evidence.
Cooking the books. In July 2012, a man in Sydney, Australia, sold his Toyota Supra for $15,000 in cash. He hid the cash in his oven “because his wife never used it.” Sometime later his wife came home…and turned on the oven. (She was going to cook some chicken nuggets for their two children.) Australian bills are made from a plastic polymer, so the stacks of bills melted into lumps. Worse: The man had meant to use the cash the next day to make a mortgage payment—the couple was already behind on their payments—but the bills were so damaged that the bank wouldn’t accept them. “It was everything I had,” said the man, who was too embarrassed to have his identity made public.
Socked away. Dana Leland bought a pair of socks at a Rhode Island Target in November 2012 and paid for them with a $100 bill. The bill was counterfeit—and it was not exactly professionally made: It had Abraham Lincoln’s face on it. (Real $100 bills carry Ben Franklin’s face.) Police said Leland had gone into the same store three days in a row, buying items that cost less than $25 and paying for them with the Abraham Lincoln $100 bills. He was arrested.
Blank check. Leah Jarolimek was arrested at a gas station in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in 2006, for trying to buy potato chips and cigarettes with what the clerk suspected was a counterfeit $20 bill. The tip-off? While the front looked like a normal bill, the back was totally blank. Jarolimek protested, claiming she had no idea the bill was bogus.