• In 2006 two U.S. Navy warships spotted a suspicious vessel towing two fishing boats 25 miles off Somalia’s coast. This is a standard tactic for pirates: One medium-size “mothership” tows two smaller boats, which carry out the raids. The warships tailed the pirates through the night, and at dawn the Navy sent two boats to investigate. The pirates opened fire on the boarding party. It was the first attack on a U.S. Navy ship in the 21st century. The destroyers easily disabled the fishing boats.
• Seven Somali pirates spotted what appeared to be a commercial tanker on the horizon in March 2009. They approached it and started firing at its hull. But it wasn’t a commercial ship…and it wasn’t alone. Belonging to the German navy, the heavily armed tanker was participating in “Operation Atalanta”—a military operation designed to combat piracy. The pirates turned around and fled, but by then they’d attracted the attention of an international fleet that included two Greek warships, a Dutch frigate, a Spanish warship, a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, several Spanish fighter planes, and two U.S. Marine Cobra helicopters. The armada easily captured the pirates.
• On November 29, 2009, about 800 miles off Somalia’s coast, pirates closed in on the Maran Centaurus, a Greek vessel carrying a crew of 28 people…and two million barrels of crude oil, worth $150 million. The pirates boarded the ship and captured the crew—who didn’t dare fight back because a single shot could have ignited the oil and blown up the ship. What followed was a month-and-a-half-long standoff, which lasted until the ship’s owner agreed to the ransom demands on January 18, 2010. But shortly before delivery, a rival group of pirates sped up to the ship, firing their weapons, determined to grab the ransom for themselves. The pirates onboard the Maran Centaurus, knowing how combustible the cargo was, actually radioed an anti-piracy task force for help. A nearby warship dispatched two helicopters to protect the ship and the pirates. A short time later, a plane flew over and dropped a package containing $9 million—the largest haul in the history of Somali piracy. The hostages, all unharmed, were released. And the pirates took their loot back home.
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Some Indian villages have a “No toilet, no bride” policy Men may not marry unless they have a toilet.
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BIG BUSINESS
As violent as these pirates are, they’re fairly tame compared to other crime syndicates. According to Steve Rosenbush of Portfolio.com, “For their part, at a time when terrorists and global drug cartels from Mexico to Brazil have pushed violence to mind-numbing levels, the Somali pirates seem positively businesslike, avoiding unnecessary gunplay and raising capital in an orderly fashion on a small stock exchange.” Stock exchange? Yes—in Somalia investors can buy shares of pirate operations and collect dividends after ransom money is delivered. This is the new face of piracy: well-organized plunderers who employ accountants…and even publicists to make statements to the media. And the well-insured shipping companies have come to expect piracy as a cost of doing business in the Gulf of Aden, so they’re likely to quietly give in to the demands rather than risk losing a crew, passengers, or cargo. The emboldened Somali pirates have even started patrolling their shores as a makeshift coast guard, running off fishing trawlers and capturing boats that dump their waste.
And much of the hundreds of millions of dollars made by Somali pirates each year goes straight back into the country’s tattered economy. As a result, poor coastal towns are starting to thrive again…and the pirates are looked upon as heroes in a country that has had little to cheer about for decades.
REALITY BLIGHTS
Even “normal” reality shows are weird. But these are not normal reality shows.
Superstar USA (2004, The WB)
Contestants on this show were told that they were in a singing competition, but they were actually being judged for their lack of singing ability. The show’s producers also told the live audience that the singers were terminally ill patients who were getting their last wishes fulfilled by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The “winner,” a tone-deaf woman named Jamie Foss, won $50,000.
Mr. Personality (2003, Fox)
This derivation of The Bachelor featured a woman choosing from a series of men. The twist was that she could judge potential mates only on their personalities—because all the men wore gruesome masks. The show was hosted by Monica Lewinsky (famous for her scandalous relationship with President Bill Clinton).
Dating in the Dark (2009, ABC)
Another Bachelor variation, this show asked single people to pick partners based on personality instead of looks, but it upped the ante even more: They had to choose each other entirely in the dark. The show was shot with night-vision cameras, allowing viewers to watch the contestants not only flirt, but also bump into walls and each other.
My Bare Lady (2006, U.K.)
Four American adult-film stars attempted to become legitimate actresses by performing scenes from classic musicals (including My Fair Lady) alongside British theater actors.
Gimme My Reality Show (2008, Fox Reality)
Contestants from other reality shows competed on this reality show to win a contract to star in another reality show. It aired on the Fox Reality Channel, a short-lived network that showed only reality shows. Really.
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Biggest complaint of office workers: The office is too cold. Second biggest: The office is too hot.
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KILLER ’ROOS
As Australia’s population grows and more space is needed to put a couple shrimp on the barbie and throw back a few coldies, boomers are getting hopping mad at the humans encroaching on their territory—and they’re starting to fight back.
Date: October 27, 1996
Victim: Steven Shorten, 13, of Grafton, New South Wales
Attack! Steven was playing a round of golf at the Grafton District Golf Club when he hit a wayward shot into some tall grass. As he wandered into the grass to find the ball, he heard a sound “like the growling of a dog.” He looked up…and just a few yards away was a six-foot-tall “boomer,” or large male kangaroo. Before Steven could react, the animal leapt at him, grabbed him, threw him to the ground, and began to stomp on him with its powerful hind legs. Another golfer finally scared off the animal and Steven was rushed to the hospital, where he was treated for a fractured cheekbone and deep gouges all over his body. He couldn’t open one eye for a year, but eventually recovered from his wounds.
Date: June 2003
Victims: Doug and Pauline Lawson of Monto, Queensland
Attack! Pauline Lawson looked out a window one day and saw her husband Doug running toward the house, screaming, with his face covered in blood. Doug ran into the house, and a large kangaroo hopped in after him—and began attacking both Doug and Pauline in their kitchen. The duo fought back with hands, feet, a broom, and a water hose until it finally left. The Lawsons were both badly bruised and scratched but not seriously injured. And that same animal is believed to have struck again…
Date: July 2003
Victims: John and Helen Crouch of New South Wales
Attack! During a vacation in Monto, the site of the previous attack, the Crouches were standing outside their motor home when a huge kangaroo seemingly appeared out of nowhere and pounced on Helen. It gouged her on the face, back, and groin (kangaroos have stout, sharp claws on both their front and back legs) before John was able to get the animal off her. Then the kangaroo turned on him. “It was kill or be killed,” said John. He grabbed an axe and struck the kangaroo several times before finally killing it. Authorities believe it was the same animal that had attacked the Lawsons. It was probably driven by hunger because the area was suffering a severe drought.
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75% of all men’s underwear is purchased by women.
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Date: July 18, 2008
Victim: Rosemary Neal, 65, of Mudgee, New South Wales
Attack! As Neal was walking through a horse pasture on her farm about 160 miles northeast of Sydney, a 6 ½-foot-tall kan
garoo “just jumped up and launched straight at her,” according to her son, Darren. The Neals’ dog was able to chase the kangaroo off, but not before Rosemary suffered extensive cuts as well as a concussion. The attack brought a heated response from residents of the area, who called for the police to find and kill the offending ’roo. “How do you propose we do that?” Mudgee Police Inspector Greg Spinks asked. “By doing some kind of kangaroo lineup?” A hunt for the animal was not attempted.
Date: July 3, 2004
Victim: Christine Canham of Canberra, New South Wales
Attack! Canham was watching her four dogs swim in a pond in a city park one day when a large kangaroo appeared on the shore. Then it jumped into the water, swam up to one of her Golden Retrievers (kangaroos are excellent swimmers), and, as Canham watched in horror from the shore, held the dog underwater until it was dead. “The kangaroo just stared back at us,” Canham told the Canberra Times. “I will never forget that.” Surprisingly, reports of kangaroos trying to drown dogs and other perceived predators are not uncommon.
“You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to run much faster.”
—Lewis Carroll
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1st U.S. church to open a fast-food franchise: True Bethel Baptist Church in NY. (It was a Subway.)
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YOU’RE SICK? I’M SICK!
What do you call a panic that causes an imagined illness to spread over a population? Mass hysteria.
THE SWEET SMELL OF PANIC
In 2009 a worker sprayed herself with perfume at the Bank of America corporate office in Fort Worth, Texas. Apparently, two people nearby were allergic to it, reported feeling dizzy, and went home. Soon after, a public-address announcement instructed that any worker who was also feeling dizzy should go outside for some fresh air. Within a few hours, more than 140 people reported feeling ill, with symptoms including dizziness, shortness of breath, and hallucinations—the symptoms of carbon-monoxide poisoning. As the news spread throughout the building, more than 30 people rushed to the hospital, while others were treated at the scene. The fire department sent in a hazardous materials unit, but they never detected any carbon monoxide—only perfume.
SOAP SICKNESS
Morangos com Açúcar is a popular Portuguese soap opera. On a May 2006 episode, all of the characters were stricken with a mysterious disease whose symptoms included dizziness, difficulty breathing, and a rash. A few days later, more than 300 students at 14 high schools throughout Portugal suddenly came down with the exact same symptoms. All of the kids quickly recovered, and the federal health department dismissed the outbreak as mass hysteria.
ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
In 1999 large quantities of animal feed in Belgium were found to be tainted with the poisonous compound dioxin. The reports set off fears over contamination of the food supply, although scientists reassured the public that it was “unlikely” to be a threat to humans. A few weeks later, 26 children at a Belgian school were hospitalized with severe fatigue and upset stomachs after having consumed Coca-Cola. Soon, hundreds of people claimed that they’d felt sick after drinking Coke, and they blamed dioxin. The Belgian Health Council briefly banned the sale of Coca-Cola, but never found dioxin in any samples. The scare was attributed to mass hysteria.
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No joke: Studies show that 80% of adult laughter is unconnected to any joke or funny situation.
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THE ONE MILLION
GUESSES QUIZ, PART I
Here’s how it works: We’ll tell you an actual news story and leave out one important piece of information—and you have to guess what it is. And we’ll give you one million guesses, because you’ll need at least that many to get it. Good luck!
STORY: 27-year-old Jens Wilhelms of Frankfurt, Germany, was climbing the stairs to his top-floor apartment one night in April 2008 when he noticed that the door to an elevator was open. The elevator had been broken for some time, and he peered in through the door to see if it was finally being worked on. Then he slipped—and fell 25 feet to the floor of the shaft. But he wasn’t injured, because he landed on something. What?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: He fell on a woman who had fallen down the same shaft a day earlier. The unidentified 57-year-old woman was unconscious and bleeding internally, and Wilhelms managed to climb out of the shaft and call emergency services. And although he made her injuries worse by falling on her, police said she was lucky—because she almost certainly would have died if Wilhelms had not landed on her and then gotten help.
STORY: A woman pulled into a Winona, Minnesota, auto repair shop in August 2009 with a broken fan belt. The mechanic told her it would take an hour to fix, and the woman let him in on a secret: She had something special in her trunk. What was it?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Did you guess “a live goat that had been painted purple and gold, the colors of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, with the number 4, the number of new Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, shaved into each of its sides”? Then you were right. She told the mechanic that she planned to butcher it later. The mechanic called animal control, and police arrived shortly afterward to arrest the woman on animal-cruelty charges. The goat was saved and was eventually given a new home on a Wisconsin farm. Its new owners named it Brett.
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Experts say: The best badminton shuttlecocks are made of the feathers from a goose’s left wing.
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STORY: In April 2009, Artyom Sidorenko, 28, of Izhevsk, Russia, started coughing up blood and having seizures. He was admitted to a hospital, where doctors told him that he had a cancerous tumor in his lung and would need surgery to remove it. He was operated on—and doctors discovered that the growth in his lung wasn’t a tumor. What was it?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Hopefully one of your guesses was “A piece of a fir tree.” Dr. Vladimir Kamashev opened Sidorenko’s chest and, he said later, was about to remove most of the lung but decided to analyze the growth first. He cut into it and found what looked like a needle from a pine tree. “At first I thought that I was seeing an illusion,” he said. “I asked my assistant to check it out, and he confirmed it. There was a fir tree in his lung.” They removed the approximately two-inch-long piece—complete with several needles—and were able to save Sidorenko’s lung. Even stranger, the doctors actually believe that it was a tiny tree growing in his lung. Kamashev said that Sidorenko must have inhaled a fir tree seed or bud, and that it had somehow germinated and started growing. Botanists said that that’s not possible because trees, like all plants, need light to grow. Sidorenko, they say, must have somehow inhaled the tiny branch as it was. (The question is: Wouldn’t he have noticed that?)
STORY: In September 2009, Tatiata Kozhevnikova, a 42-year-old housewife and fitness enthusiast from the Russian city of Novosibirsk, made it into Guinness World Records. What was her world record?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Kozhevnikova set the record for having “the world’s strongest vagina muscles.” Fifteen years after she had children, she explained to reporters, she developed an exercise for what she called her “intimate muscles.” It involved a specially designed device that she clamps down on with—well, you get the idea. The other end of the device is attached to a set of weights. Her record lift: 14 kilograms (just over 30 pounds).
If you’ve got a few more million guesses in you, we’ve got some more quiz questions on page 313.
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Why sue? Only 3% of all legal cases in the U.S. ever make it to the courtroom.
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MADOFF WITH
THE GOODS
Here’s a news item from the future: “June 29, 2159: 231-year-old former stockbroker Bernard Madoff was released today after his 150-year prison sentence ended. His first words to reporters: ‘I want my stuff back.’”
EVERYTHING MUST GO
Over a career of more than two decades, stockbroker—and scam artist—Bernie Madoff bilke
d thousands of investors out of nearly $20 billion in what is considered the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. He was arrested in December 2008, and pleaded guilty to securities fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, perjury, theft, and six other charges four months later. In November 2009, while Madoff was beginning a 150-year prison term, the U.S. Marshals Service attempted to return some of that money to his victims by holding a series of auctions. The first one was held at the Sheraton Hotel in New York City. Purses, ashtrays, dishes, jewelry, golf clubs, stationery, duck decoys, and a Wayne Gretzky action figure were among the 200 items stacked on folding tables or leaned against walls, ready to go to the highest bidder. What did these things all have in common? They belonged to Madoff and his family, and were seized from their Manhattan penthouse and Montauk, Long Island, vacation home.
As collectors from around the world queued up to bid on the items from the New York sale, the auctioneers estimated they’d fetch about $500,000. Turns out they grossly underestimated just how crazy some people will go for anything (no matter how seemingly insignificant) that has “celebrity” status.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 9