by Cary McNeal
FACT 57 The concept of nymphomania was first laid out by the French physician M. D. T. Bienville in his 1771 treatise Nymphomania, Or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. Among the behaviors Bienville cited as symptomatic of nymphomania: dwelling on impure thoughts, reading novels, and eating too much chocolate.
FACT 58 Victorians believed that masturbation could lead to insanity, blindness, and death, which is why at least one British gynecologist at that time, Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, recommended that any woman who masturbated should have her clitoris removed. I say that if God didn’t want us to masturbate, He would have made our arms shorter.
FACT 59 Boys who masturbated during the Victorian era risked having their foreskins sewn up, with only a small hole left for urination.
FACT 60 Other Victorian boys had their hands tied to their bedposts during the night or wore straitjacket pajamas to prevent masturbation.
FACT 61 Patented in 1876, the Stephenson Spermatic Truss is an antimasturbatory device that squeezed the penis into a small pouch that was stretched and strapped down between the legs to prevent erections.
FACT 62 Another device, the four-pointed penile ring, is a metal collar lined with spikes that was worn around the penis, effectively thwarting erections.
FACT 63 Wearers of the Bowen Device would have their pubic hair ripped from the body should erection occur. Nowadays people pay good money to have their pubes ripped out.
FACT 64 The penis-cooling device uses cold water or air to prevent erections.
FACT 65 In an early American pediatric guide, the Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children (1825), Dr. William Dewees advised expectant mothers in late pregnancy to allow “a young but sufficiently strong puppy” to suckle at their breasts to toughen the nipples and improve milk flow in preparation for breast-feeding.
THE FIRST THING I did after researching this chapter was to go online and order one of those umbrella hats. It’s not particularly fashionable, I know, and my family now refuses to go anywhere in public with me, but I don’t care. I’ll be damned if I let falling birds or frozen dung from an airplane toilet take me out and make me the laughingstock of the next life, if there is one.
FACT 66 Blue ice occurs when an airplane’s sewage tank or drain tube develops a leak, exposing the blue waste treatment liquid from a plane’s toilet to freezing temperatures at high altitudes. In most cases, blue ice forms and remains attached to the aircraft’s exterior, but it can sometimes break off and plummet to the ground.
FACT 67 In 2007, a Leicester, England, couple was “enjoying a spot of good weather” outside when a chunk of blue ice hit their home, then struck their heads. The husband reported that the ice had “a particularly pungent whiff of urine.”
FACT 68 Along with being a hazard to those on the ground, waste leakage is a safety issue for air travel. In some cases, blue ice has damaged planes, in one instance knocking an engine off a wing.
FACT 69 In 2012, a Long Island couple complained that they were struck with blackish-green fluid that fell from an airplane overhead. The liquid was first thought to be oil but was later identified as excrement, presumably from the plane’s lavatory.
FACT 70 In 2002, the home of a woman in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, was pelted with blue ice, which landed on her car and her child’s swing set, and in the swimming pool. Some melted ice also seeped into her air-conditioning unit.
FACT 71 In 2006, a large chunk of blue ice ripped a two-foot hole in an elderly couple’s roof in Chino, California, and crashed into their bed, which, luckily, was unoccupied at the time.
FACT 72 Blue ice can fall from the sky with enough force to crash through roofs and crush cars.
FACT 73 In February 2013, a meteor exploded over the Ural Mountains in Russia. The blast shattered windows and injured nearly eleven hundred people.
FACT 74 Entering Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of at least thirty-three thousand miles per hour, the ten-ton meteor broke into numerous pieces about twenty miles above the ground.
FACT 75 Small asteroids can also explode with tremendous power, explains Andrew Cheng of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “It doesn’t take a very large object. A ten-meter-size object packs the same energy as a nuclear bomb,” Cheng said.
FACT 76 In 1976, a meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded in the skies near the city of Jilin in northeast China. Witnesses confirmed seeing the red fireball split into several pieces before falling to the ground.
FACT 77 At the meteor’s impact site, investigators found eleven large masses weighing a total of four metric tons. Now on display in Jilin City, “Meteorite 1” has the honor of being the largest stone meteorite discovered in recent years.
FACT 78 In 1954, a Talladega County, Alabama, woman was the first recorded human to be hit by a meteorite when an eight-pound chunk tore through her roof and struck her while she was napping. The woman was not seriously injured.
FACT 79 Histoplasmosis, a disease that can affect humans and animals, is caused by a fungus in bird droppings.
FACT 80 When histoplasmosis spores are inhaled, infection can occur.
FACT 81 While most infections produce only a flu-like illness or no symptoms at all, severe cases of histoplasmosis can cause high fever, blood abnormalities, pneumonia, and even death.
FACT 82 Some areas near the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers show evidence of previous histoplasmosis infection in up to 80 percent of the population.
FACT 83 Pigeon droppings can contain E. coli bacteria and the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans. Pigeons can also be carriers of viruses commonly borne by mosquitoes, such as West Nile encephalitis.
FACT 84 Every year in Britain, an estimated two thousand people catch infections from wild pigeons. Worse yet, the number of pigeons in Britain is estimated to have doubled in the past five years.
FACT 85 An estimated thirty to forty thousand wild pigeons roost in London’s Trafalgar Square alone.
FACT 86 The dead body of a Dutch skydiver went undiscovered for more than a week in 2012 before it was found by chance in a field. No one in the man’s jump group noticed that his parachute failed to open or that he did not check in after the jump.
FACT 87 An experienced fifty-one-year-old skydiver was attempting a complex stunt in March 2013 when both his parachutes failed, sending him into a three-minute spin. Despite hitting the ground at thirty miles per hour, the man survived with minor injuries.
FACT 88 When both of her chutes failed to open during a 2004 jump, veteran South African skydiver Christine McKenzie fell into a hundred-mile-per-hour free fall from eleven thousand feet. Luckily, McKenzie’s plummet was broken by power lines, and she suffered only a broken pelvis.
FACT 89 For several days in November 1976, hundreds of dead blackbirds and pigeons fell intermittently on the streets of San Luis Obispo, California. The California Department of Fish and Game theorized the birds had been poisoned and were soon proven right: California Polytechnic University admitted to seeding a field near the town with poison grains in the hopes of better controlling the bird population.
FACT 90 On New Year’s Eve in 2011, thousands of dead birds fell on the town of Beebe, Arkansas. Preliminary tests showed the birds had died from blunt-force trauma before they hit the ground. Investigators believe that the five thousand dead blackbirds, European starlings, and others were flushed from their roosts by local fireworks and were driven to fly lower than usual, where their poor night vision sent them crashing into buildings, trees, and other stationary objects.
FACT 91 After meat chunks fell from the sky and struck a Kentucky woman in 1876, analysis revealed the meat to be venison. One professor wrote in the Louisville Medical News that the “only plausible theory” for the meaty rain was “th
e disgorgement of some vultures that were sailing over the spot.” In other words, buzzard vomit.
FACT 92 In 1902, clouds from a giant Illinois dust storm blew across the eastern United States, mixed with rain clouds, and later fell as mud showers.
FACT 93 During storms, waterspouts can suck up fish, frogs, and snakes from oceans or lakes. Strong winds can carry the animals miles inland before dropping them to the ground.
FACT 94 Witnesses from England to India to the United States have reported instances of fish falling from the sky.
FACT 95 The United Kingdom’s Great Yarmouth has the dubious honor of being named the country’s most likely place for strange objects to fall from the sky. The British Weather Services cites the instability of the atmosphere and the town’s proximity to the North Sea as contributing factors.
FACT 96 In 2002, hundreds of tiny silver fish rained upon Great Yarmouth. The fish were fresh but dead.
FACT 97 For two days in 2010, hundreds of small white fish poured onto the town of Lajamanu in Australia’s Northern Territory. Though Lajamanu is hundreds of miles from the nearest body of water, this was the third incident of falling fish in the town in thirty-six years.
FACT 98 In October 2012, a two-foot-long leopard shark fell on a golf course in San Juan Capistrano, California. Experts believe a bird grabbed the shark from the ocean and then dropped it onto the course.
FACT 99 If you think spiders are scary, imagine them falling from the sky. That’s what seemed to be happening in February 2013 when thousands of large spiders descended upon Santo Antonio da Platina, Brazil. Turns out the spiders weren’t falling but dangling from power lines and poles while mating. Which isn’t any less frightening.
FACT 100 In 1969, the town of Punta Gorda, Florida, was pelted with “dozens and dozens” of golf balls falling from the sky during a rainstorm. Officials theorized that the passing storm had sucked up a golf-ball-filled pond.
FACT 101 In March 2013, an eight-year-old schoolgirl on a field trip in Berkeley, California, was surprised to discover that her leg had been pierced with a two-foot-long crossbow bolt that had fallen from the sky. The girl’s injury wasn’t life-threatening.
FACT 102 A seven-year-old Wisconsin girl took a hunting arrow to the back in 2012 while outside playing. She suffered lung and spleen injuries.
FACT 103 A Manson, Washington, couple narrowly escaped injury in 2007 when a six-hundred-pound cow fell off a two-hundred-foot cliff and onto their minivan, causing significant damage.
FACT 104 In 1942, a British forest guard in the Indian Himalayas discovered a frozen lake filled with hundreds of skeletons. The cause of these deaths remained unsolved until 2004, when a National Geographic team examined the bones and determined that the victims had suffered blows to the head and shoulders caused by “blunt, round objects about the size of cricket balls.” The conclusion: two hundred travelers were crossing the valley in 850 C.E. when they were caught in a deadly hailstorm.
FACT 105 Ninety-two people were killed in Gopalganj, Bangladesh, in 1986 when grapefruit-size hail fell during a storm.
FACT 106 The Guinness World Records has designated hail from the Gopalganj storm as being the heaviest ever recorded, at two pounds.
FACT 107 The deadliest hailstorm on record occurred in 1888 in Moradabad, India, and killed 246 people.
FACT 108 While most of the pollen we inhale doesn’t go farther than the shallow portions of our airways, some tiny fragments can make their way deeper into our respiratory system. These fragments can be dangerous to anyone with existing respiratory and health issues, including sufferers of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and pneumonia.
FACT 109 Studies suggest that pollen fragments can impair health. One Dutch study showed a “strong association between day-to-day variations in pollen concentrations and deaths from cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and pneumonia.”
FACT 110 In June 2010, a mother holding her baby daughter at Central Park Zoo in New York City was struck by a large tree branch that snapped and fell thirty feet. The child was killed instantly; the mother was critically injured but survived.
FACT 111 A Brooklyn, New York, man was killed in February 2010 when a large branch, weighed down by snow, snapped off a tree and struck him.
FACT 112 On July 30, 2010, a man was seriously hurt when a rotting branch from a large oak tree in New York City’s Central Park broke off, fell twenty feet, and hit him.
FACT 113 An expectant mother and her unborn child were both killed in August 2013 when a huge tree branch fell on them in a Queens, New York, park.
FACT 114 A study of a Papua New Guinea hospital shows that over a four-year period, 2.5 percent of all admissions were due to people being struck by falling coconuts. And you thought it only happened on Gilligan’s Island.
FACT 115 Falling coconuts can cause blows to the head of a force greater than one metric ton, since mature palms can grow up to 115 feet and an unhusked coconut can weigh up to nine pounds.
FACT 116 Though firing weapons into the sky is an accepted expression of celebration in parts of the world, the practice has, not surprisingly, led to unintentional killings.
FACT 117 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites a Puerto Rican report that concluded that a bullet fired into the skies can return to earth with enough force to kill a human being.
FACT 118 The same Puerto Rican study found that eighteen people were injured and one killed during that country’s 2004 New Year’s Eve celebrations.
FACT 119 A widely cited study by doctors at a medical center in Los Angeles between 1985 and 1992 identified 118 injuries nationwide believed to have come from bullets falling from the sky.
FACT 120 A seven-year-old Virginia boy was killed in 2013 when a stray bullet pierced the top of his head and lodged into the base of his skull. The boy and his family were on their way to a Fourth of July fireworks display when the accident occurred.
FACT 121 On New Year’s Eve in 2010, a four-year-old boy at church with his family died after a bullet came through the roof and struck him in the head. A ballistics expert estimated that the shot came from a half mile away.
FACT 122 A fifteen-year-old Amish girl was killed in 2011 near Wooster, Ohio, after being struck by a bullet fired by a man cleaning his musket rifle over a mile away. Who knew a musket rifle could fire a mile?
FACT 123 Stray bullets fired during a New Year’s celebration killed three people in the Philippines in 2011.
FACT 124 In 2010, a Turkish groom fired an AK-47 into the air at his wedding and killed three family members when the bullets returned to earth.
FACT 125 Celebratory gunfire was blamed for three deaths in Baghdad after the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in 2007’s Asia Cup.
FACT 126 Twenty people were killed by celebratory gunfire at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
FACT 127 In July 2013, a five-by-five-foot piece of a U.S. Air Force C-17 fell off the aircraft and landed in a San Antonio, Texas, man’s backyard. “We saw something drop off from the plane,” said one witness, “and shortly after we heard a loud bang.” No one was injured.
FACT 128 In September 2012, a refrigerator-size sheet of metal fell from the sky and onto a heavily trafficked street in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington. The object, a landing gear door from a Boeing 767, fell off the plane and skipped thirty feet on the street before stopping.
FACT 129 In June 2013, a Long Island, New York, man says he was standing outside when a metal clipboard fell from the sky and crashed onto the pavement only a few feet away. The clipboard is believed to have fallen from a passing airplane, possibly left by the pilot on the wing.
FACT 130 Any type of precipitation—including snow and fog,
and small pieces of dry material—with high levels of nitric and sulfuric acids is considered “acid rain.”
FACT 131 The biggest cause of acid rain? The burning of fossil fuels by automobiles, factories, and coal-fueled power plants—all human activities.
FACT 132 Acid rain causes lakes and streams to absorb aluminum from the soil, making bodies of water toxic to fish and other aquatic animals.
FACT 133 By robbing the soil of essential nutrients and releasing aluminum into it, acid rain makes it hard for trees to absorb water. It also damages the leaves of trees.
FACT 134 Volcanic eruptions can cause fires, damage to existing structures, and changes in climate. However, one of the most deadly parts of an eruption (aside from the molten lava, of course) is the ash, which carries harmful poisonous gases.