by Cary McNeal
FACT 464 Advisers to King Otto of Bavaria (who ruled from 1886 to 1913) included ghosts in his dresser drawers, who Otto claimed told him to have a peasant shot every day.
FACT 465 The last ruling king of Egypt, Farouk (who ruled from 1936 to 1952), indulged in excessive partying and gambling. He reportedly drank thirty bottles of soda a day and ate caviar from the can.
FACT 466 Farouk was a kleptomaniac who once stole a watch from Winston Churchill.
FACT 467 After having nightmares about lions attacking him, King Farouk shot all the lions at the Cairo zoo.
FACT 468 Found among Farouk’s treasures after he was overthrown in 1952 was the world’s largest collection of porn.
I LIVE IN THE South, where cockroaches are so common, they should be a state bird, especially those flying ones that people euphemistically call “Crescent bugs.” Crescent bug, my ass: that’s a roach! I don’t mind most creepy crawlies, but I hate me some roaches.
That said, there is one thing I do like about roaches: the crunching sound they make when I crush them with my foot. It’s like they are made of tiny brittle twigs, each one snapping as I press down harder with my shoe. *Snap* *Crackle* *Pop*
It’s not that I’m cruel. Most bugs in my house get taken outside to live another day. But not cockroaches. They are the exception. If you are a cockroach and you come into my home, you will die. Slowly and painfully. And loudly.
You are warned.
FACT 469 The scabies mite is a tiny eight-legged insect that can live under our skin. After mating, the female mite burrows into the top skin layer and lays several eggs a day.
FACT 470 The scabies mite’s preferred burrowing locations are the hands, wrist, armpits, and genitals.
FACT 471 Scabies’ eggs and poop trigger an allergic reaction in our skin, causing severe itching.
FACT 472 A cockroach will eat almost anything, including dead skin and dirty clothes.
FACT 473 Cockroaches will also eat particles from your eyelashes, eyebrows, and nails as you snooze. Good luck sleeping tonight.
FACT 474 Debris from cockroach skins, dead bodies, and droppings can cause allergies in people, especially children and those with existing allergy issues.
FACT 475 Cockroaches can be difficult to find in your home because they are nocturnal and adept at hiding. Many over-the-counter insecticides also prove ineffective on their eggs.
FACT 476 A cockroach can live two weeks without water and almost a month without food. Just like Kate Moss.
FACT 477 Bedbugs bite mostly during the night. Their mouths are specially adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood.
FACT 478 Bedbug bites are hard to detect because the insects inject anti-inflammatory agents that make you less likely to feel irritation or get a sore. They are thoughtful insects.
FACT 479 The toxins produced by mold are invisible and can penetrate food. Even if you remove visible mold from foods, toxins can remain and cause illness if eaten.
FACT 480 Insects and spiders have been known to take up residence in the human ear. Your ear suddenly itches, doesn’t it? Mine does.
FACT 481 Itching and strange noises in her ear led a woman in Cardiff, Wales, to seek medical treatment in 2003. Doctors found a spider living in her ear canal.
FACT 482 In 1997, a man suffering from severe ear pain visited a doctor, who found the man’s ear canal filled with maggots. The doctor suspected that a fly had gotten into the man’s ear as he slept and lain eggs.
FACT 483 The bites of two insects, the blackfly and the buffalo gnat, can introduce a parasitic worm larvae into the human body that can be carried through the bloodstream and take up residence in your eyes. That’s right: worms in your eyes.
FACT 484 These parasitic worms can cause inflammation, bleeding, and blindness.
FACT 485 Known as the “brain-eating amoeba,” Naegleria fowleri is a microscopic organism that can cause primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a rare and fatal disease of the central nervous system.
FACT 486 The Naegleria amoeba is found all over the world in warm stagnant bodies of fresh water such as lakes, rivers, hot springs, and unchlorinated swimming pools.
FACT 487 The amoeba enters the body through the nose, then climbs along nerve fibers through the skull and into the brain.
FACT 488 Naegleria amoebas love the warmth of the brain and will multiply in the millions until the victim drops dead, usually within three to seven days of infestation.
FACT 489 There have been roughly two hundred recorded cases of Naegleria infection worldwide in the last four years. Children are thought to be more at risk because of weaker immune systems.
FACT 490 Rats tend to live in subterranean sewers, which allows them to take advantage of the food waste that accumulates there. They have been known to follow the waste trail in toilets or sinks into homes.
FACT 491 Rat has become a common meal in a number of Asian countries—vendors in Thailand sell them both raw and roasted. Barbecued rat, which can be found in Vietnam and Cambodia, is said to have a stringier consistency than chicken.
FACT 492 Rats are known to eat their young in certain situations. Scientists think mother rats feed on their weaker young to save the energy they’d otherwise have to spend caring for the runts.
FACT 493 A 2008 study found that cannibalism of infant rats occurred more frequently when the rodents were kept in cleaner cages. Scientists believe that the rats struggled to detect family members’ natural scents because of the cleaner environment.
FACT 494 A rat’s teeth are extremely sharp. A rat bite can penetrate a toenail.
FACT 495 Your food may contain rat feces. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows a small amount of droppings to be present in commercial food products because rats find their way into the products so frequently.
FACT 496 Indonesia’s Mallomys rat is five times bigger than the average rat and weighs in at roughly six pounds.
FACT 497 Rats have indiscriminate mating habits, often copulating with siblings or parents. As a result, rats are the largest single group of mammals in the animal kingdom.
DON’T YOU LOVE THIS word that politicians like to use nowadays: misspoke? As if any idiotic statement or flat-out lie can be wiped away by saying, “Oops, I misspoke.”
We should apply the same logic to other screw-ups, especially big ones. Did you run your passenger ship into an iceberg and kill thousands of people? Just say you misboated. It’s much less se-vere, isn’t it? If you accidentally carve the wrong word into a stone monument meant to last for eternity, simply say you mischiseled. See how easy this is?
By the way, if you find any errors in this book, forgive me: I miswrote.
FACT 498 All of the original footage from America’s first moon landing was permanently lost in the 1980s when other video was recorded over it.
FACT 499 In 2007, a New Jersey cable company inadvertently broadcast hard-core porn during children’s programming. Instead of the regularly scheduled show, Handy Manny, the kids saw the movie Mandy Gives a Handy.
FACT 500 When Norway fired a research rocket toward Russia in 1997, Norwegian officials forgot to alert the Russian government, nearly causing a retaliatory strike from that country.
FACT 501 In 1981, 114 people were killed when skywalks collapsed at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. The accident was attributed to a last-minute design change that left one skywalk hanging from another instead of both being bolted to the ceiling.
FACT 502 The Lincoln Memorial originally had a typo: the word future was spelled “euture.” The correction is still visible on the statue. Oh well, at least it wasn’t carved in stone.
FACT 503 In 1987, an observant college student found a mistake in
Isaac Newton’s published mathematics work that had been overlooked by scholars for three hundred years.
FACT 504 In 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter got too close to the red planet and burned up because of a simple error: one group working on the project was using imperial units while the other used metric.
FACT 505 The steamship Eastland rolled over on its side in the Chicago River in 1915, killing 844 people in twenty feet of water. The accident was blamed on the weight of the lifeboats that were added after the Titanic disaster.
FACT 506 In 1913, a man falsely yelled “Fire!” at a crowded Christmas Eve party in Calumet, Michigan, setting off a stampede that killed seventy-four people, most of them children.
FACT 507 In 1972, a conservation group dumped millions of tires in the ocean off of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to help clear landfills and buffer dying coral reefs, but the debris has destroyed more marine life than it has saved.
FACT 508 There is a growing population of radioactive wild boar in the area around the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
FACT 509 A Japanese commercial 727 crashed in 1971 after being struck by a student pilot. All 162 people aboard the commercial jet died, but the flight student parachuted to safety.
FACT 510 More than seven thousand people die every year due to their doctors’ bad handwriting.
FACT 511 In 1992, underground explosions rocked the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, damaging hundreds of buildings and killing more than two hundred people. The explosions were caused by a gas leak that officials had been warned about hours before but had ignored.
FACT 512 During World War I, two ships struck each other in port at Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a brief dispute over right of way. One ship was carrying munitions and blew up, creating the largest man-made explosion in history; it killed fifteen hundred people and caused a tsunami.
FACT 513 Only four months after it was erected in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington collapsed in a windstorm.
HAVE YOU EVER FELT like the world’s worst parent? Of course you have. Most parents have those days, including me. But get ready to feel a lot better about yourself, because you and I have nothing on the nitwits you’ll read about in this chapter. Did you ever let your toddler fire a submachine gun at police while driving a car with a dead body in the trunk? No? Then you’re doing just fine as a parent.
FACT 514 Jessica Black of Craigsville, Virginia, let her seven-year-old dress as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween in 2013. She defended the choice by claiming that the Klan raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
FACT 515 After she allowed her nine-year-old son and his five-year-old playmate to go on a joy ride in her car to “take out the trash,” Michigan mom Leah Michele Jaglowski was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
FACT 516 In October 2013, Shambreya Barfield and Trevell Washington caused a thirty-person brawl in front of dozens of children at a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Chicago after arguing over prize tickets. Both were arrested and charged with battery.
FACT 517 A Redmond, Washington, father was charged with attempted murder in September 2013 after injecting his four-year-old son with heroin. The boy, who also had codeine, ketamine, and morphine in his system, miraculously lived.
FACT 518 An eleven-year-old boy in Las Vegas, Nevada, suffered burns on 40 percent of his body after his mother got behind on her minivan payments in September 2013 and instructed the child to douse the car with gasoline and set it on fire.
FACT 519 When a woman in Yuzhou, China, was stopped for recklessly operating her moped in September 2013, police found out why: she was breast-feeding her child while driving. Her driving was probably fine until the baby started biting.
FACT 520 In December 2013, sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch struck and killed four pedestrians while drunk driving. Incredibly, Couch was sentenced only to probation after his defense attorneys argued that he suffered from “affluenza,” meaning his wealthy parents never set limits for him.
FACT 521 A Missouri woman faced a criminal charge in December 2013 after snapping a topless photo of herself and her fourteen-year-old daughter in a hot tub. Police were made aware of the photo after it began circulating at a pair of local high schools.
FACT 522 In January 2012, a Florida mother was arrested for child abuse and contributing to the delinquency of a minor after police saw a Facebook video of the woman encouraging her teenage daughter during an after-school fight instead of stopping the altercation.
FACT 523 Another Florida mother was busted for felony child abuse in August 2013 after biting her sixteen-year-old daughter’s “right breast in the nipple area” during a fight over Social Security benefits for the daughter’s newborn baby.
FACT 524 In March 2014, a Maryland grandmother was arrested while trying to steal a teacher’s wallet as she visited her grandchild’s elementary school for a morning assembly. Because teachers make so much money.
FACT 525 Police were summoned to a 2013 Easter egg hunt at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle when one woman reportedly “pushed a child aside as her own child scrambled toward some brightly colored eggs.” The two mothers began fighting, leaving one woman with a bloody nose.
FACT 526 A new father in China filed for divorce in 2012 after his wife gave birth to what he considered to be an ugly child. He later sued his ex for misrepresenting her contribution to the gene pool when he found out she’d had extensive plastic surgery. A judge ruled in the man’s favor and awarded him $120,000 in damages.
FACT 527 An Arizona mother was arrested in 2013 after giving beer to her two-year-old son at a pizza parlor. After the toddler fell out of his high chair, a witness called police to report the incident.
FACT 528 A Sacramento, California, grandmother was arrested for felony child endangerment in October 2013 after trying to give her four-year-old granddaughter away to a stranger. The woman had taken the child to a grassy area near a busy intersection and drunk vodka until she passed out, prompting the stranger to stop and offer assistance.
FACT 529 An Oklahoma woman was arrested in March 2013 for trying to sell her children on Facebook. The mother offered her two kids, ages two and ten months, to another woman for cash, which she said she needed to bail her boyfriend out of jail.
FACT 530 In 2012, a Wisconsin father of nine was given an unusual edict by a judge: stop having kids. The order was a condition of the man’s parole after he was arrested for falling $90,000 behind on child support and related payments to the six women who bore his children.
WARNING: THIS CHAPTER MIGHT make you never want to get on an amusement park ride again. If this were ten to fifteen years ago when I still liked amusement park rides, I wouldn’t have tackled this subject. But now that I’m older, and suddenly and inexplicably unable to enjoy the same rides I used to love without barfing, there’s nothing left to ruin for me. So I will ruin it for you instead. Call me selfish, but come on, did you really think that giant wood-and-metal rides operated by pimply-faced teens or inbred carny types were safe?
FACT 531 An average of forty-four hundred kids a year are hurt on rides at carnivals and amusement parks, according to a twenty-year study of injury data from nearly a hundred nationally representative hospitals.
FACT 532 Almost seventy kids a year sustain amusement park injuries serious enough to require hospitalization.
FACT 533 Half of all amusement park accidents involve children age thirteen and younger.
FACT 534 Between May and September each year—peak season for amusement parks—approximately twenty children are hurt on park rides each day, or one every two hours.
FACT 535 Records show that fifty-two ride-related deaths occurred between 1990 and 2004.
FACT 536 Data from the U.S. Consumer Product Saf
ety Commission (CPSC) suggests that the rides at mobile carnivals and fairs have a better safety record than those at the big fixed-site parks because the former are subject to federal oversight while the latter are not.
FACT 537 Records between 1987 and 2004 reveal only thirteen mobile ride–related fatalities, but forty-six fatalities associated with rides at fixed-site parks.
FACT 538 In 1981, the U.S. Congress stripped the CPSC of its authority to regulate rides at fixed-site parks like Six Flags and Disneyland, determining that fixed-site amusement rides were sufficiently monitored by experts employed by the parks themselves. Right. Experts like my sixteen-year-old booger-eating nephew. I feel so much safer now.
FACT 539 Six states have no laws requiring state government oversight of park rides: Alabama, Mississippi, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. One of those, Wyoming, has no amusement parks.