by Cary McNeal
FACT 294 The breaking wheel was used in eighteenth-century America to punish slaves who tried to revolt.
FACT 295 Until it was outlawed in 1905, ling chi was used as a method of execution in China. Known as death by a thousand cuts, ling chi involved an executioner slowly slicing off body parts, prolonging the suffering of the condemned.
FACT 296 For centuries, the garrote was used to execute criminals in Spain. Victims were tied to a stake with a loop of rope placed around their necks. A rod in the loop would be turned to tighten the rope until the person asphyxiated.
FACT 297 Until as recently as 1940, Spain also employed a variation of the garrote in which a metal spike was driven into the victim’s spinal cord as the loop tightened.
FACT 298 Considered more humane than burning at the stake, execution by garrote was generally reserved for heretics who had confessed their crimes. The method was popular during the Spanish Inquisition.
FACT 299 The most recent recorded use of garrote was in 1975 during Franco’s regime in Spain; a student was executed but was later proved innocent of his crime.
FACT 300 Execution by boiling was used throughout Europe and Asia until the seventeenth century. The victim was either placed in boiling water or oil, or made to sit in a cauldron full of cold liquid as it was heated to boiling.
FACT 301 In Europe, boiling was used throughout the Middle Ages to execute poisoners and forgers. More recently, the Uzbek government is reported to have boiled several people who opposed the political regime.
FACT 302 Ancient Romans practiced the method of Damnatio ad bestias or “condemnation to beasts”: the execution of live prisoners, often early Christians, by feeding them alive to large animals.
FACT 303 Along with Christians, other offenders who suffered death by beasts included military deserters, sorcerers, and kidnappers.
FACT 304 Though less common than other methods, execution by sawing was used in Europe, ancient Rome, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The condemned was hung upside down and sawed vertically in two, starting at the groin. In other words, they fought the saw but the saw won.
FACT 305 Because blood continued to flow to the brain during sawing, the victim is believed to have remained alive for much of this agonizing process.
FACT 306 The notoriously cruel Roman emperor Caligula had those who had fallen out of his favor sawed in half across the torso while he watched and dined.
FACT 307 From the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries, anyone in England who committed high treason faced execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering. The accused would first be hung to near death and disemboweled. Then his genitals would be removed and the body cut into four pieces.
FACT 308 In 1606, Guy Fawkes was sentenced to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. During the hanging, Fawkes somehow escaped the scaffold but broke his neck in the process. His body was quartered anyway, with all the parts later displayed for the public.
FACT 309 Bodies of executed criminals were often displayed publicly in chains or hung in metal cages as a way to warn other possible perpetrators. The process, used predominantly in England, was known as gibbeting.
FACT 310 Travelers were often greeted with the sight of gibbets with bodies inside, which were placed along roads to deter highway robbery and piracy.
FACT 311 While most gibbeting was carried out with dead bodies, some lucky criminals were left alive in the gibbet to die slowly of dehydration.
FACT 312 The ancient Greeks practiced a particularly sadistic form of execution known as the brazen bull. The accused would be locked inside a hollow bronze bull. A fire was then lit under the bull, and the victim would slowly roast to death inside.
FACT 313 The bull itself was designed to mimic a real animal. Plumes of smoke escaped through the bull’s snout, and a system of tubes made the victim’s cries sound like a bellowing beast.
FACT 314 According to legend, Emperor Hadrian condemned the martyr Saint Eustace and his family to die inside a brazen bull.
FACT 315 The heretic’s fork was a double-sided iron tool that was belted around a victim’s neck, causing one end of the fork to pierce the underside of the chin, and the other end to pierce the top of the chest. Any attempt to move caused the wearer more extensive damage.
FACT 316 The medieval torture device called the Judas cradle was a large wooden stool with a pyramid-shaped seat. The condemned was suspended over the pyramid and either dropped or lowered slowly until the seat penetrated the vagina or rectum. In either case: ouch.
FACT 317 Sometimes victims of the Judas cradle had weights strapped to their feet to intensify the pain.
FACT 318 Long before it was a rock band, the iron maiden was an upright coffin-like device filled with internal spikes on its walls and door. An unfortunate victim would be placed standing inside and couldn’t move without being stabbed.
FACT 319 The exterior of the iron maiden was usually carved to look like a woman, hence the name.
FACT 320 Immurement, or enclosing someone within a wall while still alive, was a rumored medieval torture method.
FACT 321 Victims of immurement die slowly of dehydration or hunger.
FACT 322 The thumbscrew was a medieval torture device that crushed the victim’s fingers and hands as a wooden or metal plate was slowly screwed down. The plate was sometimes stippled with metal studs or nails to pierce the nail beds and inflict more pain.
FACT 323 A square wooden frame with pulley-operated rollers, the rack was often used in interrogations. The victim was tied spread-eagled to the rack, which would slowly be extended to pull apart ligaments, joints, and bones. On the bright side, it probably felt good for the first couple of minutes.
FACT 324 Used against homosexuals, blasphemers, and women, the pear of anguish was a mutilating device inserted into the anus, mouth, or vagina and slowly opened. Here’s hoping they disinfected the thing between uses.
FACT 325 Another favorite of the Spanish Inquisition, the head crusher was a torture device that held the victim’s head between a metal cap and a bar underneath the chin. A screw at the top of the cap was used to tighten the device slowly to crush the victim’s skull and jaw.
FACT 326 Head-crusher torture sessions typically lasted for several hours to deliver maximum pain. Occasionally the victim’s eyeballs would pop out.
FACT 327 Primarily used in the Middle East and Africa in the Middle Ages, flaying was the act of suspending a victim from a pole and slowly peeling off his skin from head to toe. Most victims died before the torture was finished.
FACT 328 Some flaying victims were boiled or purposely sunburned for added fun before their skin was removed.
FACT 329 Similar to the breast ripper, the Spanish spider was a chain attached to a wall with spider-like claws at the end, which were sometimes heated. The claws would be latched on to a woman’s breast and the torturer would rip the woman away from the wall, tearing off her breast.
FACT 330 Use of the Spanish spider was rare and generally reserved for women who were adulterous or self-aborted their unborn children.
FACT 331 A humiliation device for meddlesome women or gossipers, the brank was a metal head enclosure that victims were forced to wear for hours, days, or sometimes months.
FACT 332 Some branks were adorned with spikes to pierce the skin every time the wearer spoke, or with bells to let everyone know she was coming.
FACT 333 Toe wedging dates back to Ancient Egypt but was also widely used in the Middle Ages. The torturer placed a metal or wooden wedge between the victim’s toe and toenail, and slowly lifted the wedge to rip the nail from the nail bed. If the victim didn’t confess, on to the next toe!
FACT 334 Many toe-wedging victims ended up as amputees or contracte
d severe—and sometimes fatal—infections because the wedges were rarely cleaned.
FACT 335 Victims of the copper boot had their feet locked into the device, which was then filled with water and boiled over a fire. Molten metal was sometimes used instead of water.
FACT 336 Copper boots were used mainly to extract confessions, though victims would occasionally pass out or die before confessing.
FACT 337 The street sweeper’s daughter or scavenger’s daughter was a compression device that forced the victim so tightly into a fetal or crouching position that it caused broken bones and spine dislocation.
FACT 338 The street sweeper’s daughter also made victims’ noses, ears, and even fingertips spray blood.
FACT 339 Though the street sweeper’s daughter was used primarily for public humiliation, some victims were left in the device for weeks until they went mad or died.
AT FIRST GLANCE, “PUBLIC bathrooms” looks like “pubic bathrooms,” and that’s not really a stretch, either. Every time you use a public toilet, you are basically sharing genital germs with every other person who has been in there since the place was last cleaned—which in some instances looks to be around 1974.
Here’s my beef with public bathrooms: every time I go into one—which is as infrequently as I can—some 475-pound guy camped out in the end stall with the Sunday paper is absolutely destroying the place with his colon. I really hate having to hold my breath when I pee. It’s not nearly as satisfying.
FACT 340 One in five people have accidentally dropped a cell phone in the toilet. No word on what percentage of them pull it out.
FACT 341 The stall closest to the door is likely to be the cleanest and least-used seat in a public restroom; the stall in the middle is usually the dirtiest.
FACT 342 Tech-savvy travelers can scope out the best public bathrooms in an area by using mobile device apps to read how other users have rated a bathroom’s cleanliness. I never want to use public bathrooms enough to need that app.
FACT 343 The dirtiest places in a public bathroom are typically the sanitary napkin dispenser and the floor. Toilet seats are actually among the cleaner spots in a public bathroom.
FACT 344 Americans spend an average of two weeks a year on the toilet.
FACT 345 The hole still found in the spine of every issue of the Old Farmer’s Almanac is a carryover from the days when the magazine was typically hung on a hook in outhouses.
FACT 346 More homes in Japan have a washeretto—a high-function toilet with multiple features—than a computer.
FACT 347 Game company Sega has a new way to keep you occupied while you pee: they are testing video games in public bathrooms that are controlled by targeting your urine stream.
FACT 348 Medieval castle dwellers would do their business in a room called a garderobe, which was built to extend out beyond the rest of the castle so that waste would fall outside the walls or into the moat. Yeah! Fuck the neighbors!
FACT 349 Ancient Rome’s more than 140 public toilets were social hubs where friends would meet and chat while doing their potty business.
FACT 350 In Singapore, you can be fined up to $150 for failing to flush a public toilet.
FACT 351 Some Singapore elevators feature urine detectors that will lock the doors shut and alert the police if someone tries to pee inside them.
FACT 352 Airplane bathrooms are among the dirtiest of all public bathrooms. The small space makes it harder to wash your hands, and the flushing mechanism of the toilet sprays germs and fecal particles over the small area.
FACT 353 Nine of ten baby-changing tables in UK public bathrooms were found to have traces of cocaine on them. Now there’s a great idea: snort something off the same surface where you change poopy diapers.
FACT 354 After its invention, toilet paper wasn’t immediately popular. People were too ashamed to ask for it in drugstores. But they weren’t embarrassed to wipe their asses with corncobs?
FACT 355 In 1997, teen Melissa Drexler gave birth in a school bathroom during her prom, used the edge of a paper towel dispenser to cut the cord, then left the baby in a Dumpster and returned to the dance.
FACT 356 The Pentagon was built with twice as many bathrooms as necessary because at the time it was constructed, Virginia law dictated that there be separate facilities for blacks and whites.
FACT 357 Among the germs we risk exposure to in public restrooms are “streptococcus, staphylococcus, E. coli and shigella bacteria, hepatitis A virus, the common cold virus, and various sexually transmitted organisms.”
FACT 358 Because germs in feces are dispersed through the air when you flush the toilet, one expert recommends you leave the stall right after flushing. Says Philip Tierno, M.D., director of clinical microbiology and diagnostic immunology at New York University Medical Center and Mt. Sinai Medical Center, “The greatest aerosol dispersal occurs not during the initial moments of the flush, but rather once most of the water has already left the bowl.”
FACT 359 Due to organisms breeding in water, sinks tend to contain the largest concentration of germs in restrooms.
FACT 360 Though 95 percent of people claim to wash their hands after using public restrooms, a study conducted by the American Society for Microbiology found that only 67 percent actually do.
FACT 361 Philip Tierno, author of The Secret Life of Germs, says that even people who do wash their hands might not be doing it right. “Some individuals move their hands quickly under a flow of water for only a second or so, and they don’t use soap. That’s not going to do much good.”
FACT 362 Fecal germs can travel through ten layers of toilet paper.
“LIES, LIES, LIES, YEAH,” the old 1980s song goes, “they’re gonna get you!” So true. Lies and deception are tireless pursuers; just when you think you’ve gotten away with something, BAM! Busted!
What’s funny is that we know this! Even as we’re lying through our teeth or trying to pull a fast one on somebody, in the back of our minds we’re saying, “I’ll never get away with this.” But do we stop? Nope.
Then, to top it all off, we have the nerve to be surprised when we get caught!
FACT 363 Thermographic cameras show that your nose becomes warmer when you lie.
FACT 364 Small lies told over text messages, such as “Can’t talk, in a meeting,” are called “butler lies.”
FACT 365 Unbroken eye contact is not a sign of honesty, but a good clue that someone is lying.
FACT 366 Lie detection expert Dr. Paul Ekman claims that he and the researchers he trains can spot a lie with 95 percent accuracy.
FACT 367 People are more likely to lie when they are in a hurry.
FACT 368 A study at Notre Dame University found that the more you lie, the less healthy you will be. Test subjects who told more lies reported more mental and physical complaints than the non-lying group, including stress, sadness, headaches, and sore throats.
FACT 369 Research suggests that the average American tells about seven lies a week. OK—that’s a lie. We tell about eleven lies a week, on average.
FACT 370 Eight percent of Americans have lied on their résumés.
FACT 371 People trust bearded men more than clean-shaven ones.
FACT 372 A person’s dying words are often admissible in court thanks to an old legal concept that a person would not lie with his dying breath.
FACT 373 In an experiment intended to replicate a survival-of-the-fittest scenario, robots learned to lie to each other about the location of food resources in order to improve their own chances of survival.
FACT 374 Rosie Ruiz cheated her way to first place in the 1980 Boston Marathon by running onto the course about a mile before the finish line.
FACT 375 A reporter later claimed t
hat Ruiz had also faked her run in the New York Marathon, which had qualified her for the Boston race, claiming Ruiz had ridden the subway for part of the New York race.
FACT 376 Famous con artist Victor Lustig once sold the Eiffel Tower to a scrap dealer in Paris for $70,000, convincing the man he was a representative of the government, which was selling the monument.
FACT 377 A few years after the execution of Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family during the Bolshevik Revolution, a young woman came forward claiming to be the czar’s daughter, the grand duchess Anastasia. The woman maintained her story until the day she died, but her claim was proved false when DNA tests showed no relation between her and the former royal family.