Thing You Didn’t Know: You should never, ever throw away your mother’s old mattress.
Story: In July 2009, a woman in Tel Aviv, Israel, identified only as Annat, decided to do her mother a favor and throw out her old, tattered mattress and buy her a new one. When her mother found out what she’d done, she told her daughter that for decades, she’d been stuffing her life savings inside the mattress—there was more than $1 million in cash in it. The two women notified authorities, and a massive search of the city’s dumps began—complete with security guards to keep treasure hunters away. But after weeks of digging through garbage, the old mattress was never found. Annat told reporters, “Mom said, ‘The heart is crying, but, you know, we could have been in a car accident or had a terminal disease.’”
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Not so crazy after all? The insanity plea is used in less than 1% of all U.S. criminal cases.
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Thing You Didn’t Know: If you’ve been unlucky enough to lose a large part of your skull, don’t worry—it may grow back.
Story: In the 1950s, Gordon Moore of Hexham, England, was in a horrific car crash in which the front of his skull was crushed from just above his eyes to nearly the top of his head. The damaged portion of his skull had to be removed, and doctors replaced it with a large titanium plate. In 2009, more than 50 years later, doctors removed the plate to treat an infection—and were astounded to find that his skull had regrown underneath it. “They took the infected plate out,” Mr. Moore told the BBC, “and found I had grown a completely new skull underneath, so they just stitched me up.” Doctors said that such a thing is so rare that they could find only one similar occurrence in history. Bonus: The new skull bone even had a crease where the metal plate was dented in a minor car accident years earlier.
Thing You Didn’t Know: Fatty foods can clog a lot more than just your arteries.
Story: Officials in Seattle, Washington, reported in 2009 that fatty foods are also clogging up the city’s sewer pipes. Just as it does inside human arteries, the glop hardens, builds up, and then backs up—causing stinky bubbles to infiltrate residents’ sinks and toilets. Most of these deposits come from restaurants, which collectively wash thousands of greasy dishes every day. However, according to Seattle’s pollution-prevention coordinator, Julie Howell, “One thing that has been a real surprise is that there is much bigger residential component than people might think”—meaning much of the grease comes from households.
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Odds of Earth having a catastrophic collision with an asteroid in the next 100 years: 1 in 5,000.
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THE WORLD’S
GONE LAZY
These actual products are for people so lazy they can’t even fini
PROBLEM: Pancakes are so hard to make. First you have to read the directions on the box. Then you have to mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients. Then you have to grease a pan. Then you have to fry the pancakes. That’s seven minutes of your life…gone!
SOLUTION: The Chefstack Automatic Pancake Machine does all the work for you. Simply pour in a “batter pouch,” turn it on, and the machine makes and stacks pancakes in 30 seconds. But it’s only for real pancake lovers—it costs $3,500.
PROBLEM: When you use a pair of scissors, you have to move your thumb and forefinger slightly apart and then back together again, and then again, and again, and again…
SOLUTION: Try Whizzers! Perfect for the 21st-century lifestyle, they’re battery-operated, automatic scissors that cut while you guide. (It’s actually a motorized knife.)
PROBLEM: You’re hungry, but that delicious cake is all the way over on the other side of the table. Come here, cake!
SOLUTION: The Extendable Fork. It’s just like a normal fork, except that it telescopes out to 18 inches, long enough to reach across the table without having to get up.
PROBLEM: Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is hard work. First you have to spread the peanut butter on a piece of bread; then you spread the jelly on another piece of bread. And don’t even get us started on how hard it is to put the two together.
SOLUTION: Goobers. Made by Smuckers, it’s a jar filled with alternating columns of peanut butter and grape jelly. And if sticking a knife into that is still too much work, Smuckers also makes UnCrustables: preassembled PBJ sandwiches (with the crusts cut off).
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University of California scientists built a “tickle machine” to study why you can’t tickle yourself.
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PROBLEM: Playing “fetch” is a great way to spend some quality time with your pooch, but what if you’re too busy, or there’s something good on TV?
SOLUTION: The GoDogGo Fetch Machine. Like a miniature tennis ball machine, it shoots balls a few dozen yards away so your dog can chase them. If the dog brings them back and drops them into the bucket, the machine shoots them again. And you don’t have to miss a second of Survivor!
PROBLEM: Losing weight requires exercise, which requires movement, which requires getting up off the couch.
SOLUTION: The Vibro Power Belt lets you burn fat while sitting down. How? The belt “rigorously massages the skin and underlying tissue to get circulation moving and break up deposits.” The jury’s still out on whether it works, but at least you can make a game of it: Eat some pork rinds, turn on the Vibro Power Belt, and let the two battle it out.
PROBLEM: Stirring your coffee or hot chocolate can be hazardous. If you get too rambunctious, it can spill and burn you. And if you stir a lot, there’s always carpal tunnel syndrome to worry about.
SOLUTION: The Chunky Mug is a cup that looks like a cow and has a built-in agitator that automatically stirs your beverage for you. Just press the button, and your stirring worries are over!
PROBLEM: Licking an ice cream cone involves moving your tongue up and down, in a circle, side to side, up and down, in a circle, side to side…and you’ve barely made a dent.
SOLUTION: The Motorized Ice Cream Cone does all the work. Simply place your ice cream cone into the green plastic receptacle, and it will slowly rotate the cone for you. All you have to do is stick out your tongue, and the ice cream comes to you.
“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
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That’s strict! Classroom rules in Japan dictate which shoulder students must carry their bookbags on.
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THE MAYAN PROPHECY
If you’re reading this before December 21, 2012, your time on this planet may be limited. If you’re reading this after that, you’ve either survived the apocalypse, or it never happened. Either way, congratulations!
COUNTDOWN…
Have you heard the news? We’re all gonna die…or else we’re all gonna become superhuman. Either way, it’s supposed to happen around December 21—the winter solstice—in 2012. Who says? The ancient Mayans, whose civilization in Mexico and Central America reached its zenith from A.D. 250 to 900.
The Mayans were remarkable astronomers. Without the benefit of instruments like telescopes, they charted the movements of stars and planets over centuries, and were eventually able to predict celestial events like equinoxes, solstices, and eclipses with staggering accuracy, even into the far distant future. Those skills, combined with a developed counting system and a written language, allowed them to create very accurate written calendars, including one that tracked a 365-day year, and a “Long Count” calendar that tracked much longer periods of times. That one, according to some theorists, foretells big trouble.
END OF THE LINE
The Long Count calendar divides enormous lengths of time into “eras,” each of which is roughly 5,125 years long. The era we’re currently in begins on the Mayan creation day, a date astronomers and other scientists have translated to our calendar as August 11, 3114 B.C., and ends on December 21, 2012.
None of this would mean anything to us today if Mayan hieroglyphic writing hadn’t been deci
phered. Archaeologists had been trying to decipher it for centuries before the first major breakthroughs occurred in the 1950s. Soon after that, they started writing about the Long Count calendar and the significance of its “end date” in December 2012. And in 1966 Michael Coe, one the most noted archaeologists studying the calendar, wrote in his book The Maya, “Our present universe [will] be annihilated when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion.” Take that dire bit of news, run it through the 1960s and 1970s New Age movements—and you get some truly weird theories.
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In Bahrain, a male gynecologist must examine a woman with a mirror; he can’t look at her directly.
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THE AGE OF AS-WEIRD-AS-US
• In the mid-1970s, California writer Terence McKenna used a complex system of mathematics, Chinese philosophy, and a lot of psychedelic drugs to develop his “Timewave Zero” system, which he claims can predict when especially significant events will occur around the world. And he says his analysis pointed to a profound “cosmic awakening” in 2012…on the exact same date the Mayan calendar ended. “You may not believe that I didn’t know about the Mayan date when I made this prediction,” he said, “but I didn’t.”
• In the 1980s, José Argüelles, in his book The Mayan Factor, describes a 25-year “harmonic convergence” leading up to December 21, 2012, at which time we’ll experience an evolutionary upgrade from human to superhuman. The date will mark the end of a Mayan World Age and the beginning of a New Age. People will become more intuitive—and even telepathic. (Woo-hoo!) However, only the enlightened ones will be able to adapt. Everyone else, Argüelles says, will be taken away on “silver ships.”
• In 1995 a Wisconsin woman named Nancy Lieder—who claims to communicate with aliens from a world called Zeta Reticuli—said that an enormous “Planet X” is going to enter Earth’s “orbital zone” and knock the planet off its axis, causing an apocalypse. When? May 27, 2003. When that didn’t happen, she changed the date to December 21, 2012. (You can read more about Nancy “I want to believe!” Lieder on page 307.)
• In the 1990s, John Major Jenkins wrote a book titled Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, in which he claims that Mayan “skywatchers” were able to observe and track the “Precession of the Equinoxes,” a celestial cycle that began about 26,000 years ago. It will lead to a point when “Earth and the winter solstice Sun align at the same point at the center of the Milky Way.” Jenkins called this the “Galactic Alignment” and says it will happen on…December 21, 2012. “It will provide the opportunity for the rebirth of creation,” Jenkins says.
• Richard C. Hoagland, known mostly for talking about conspiracies and UFOs on late-night radio, claims that Earth’s “torsion fields” are out of balance. And if we don’t fix them, he says, life as we know it will end…on December 21, 2012. He claims the Mayan Long Count calendar also contains instructions on how to survive the coming disaster, and says the government has been misleading the public about it since the 1940s. According to Hoagland, several so-called natural events—the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile—were actually botched attempts to fix the torsion fields.
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The St. Lawrence Agency offers UFO abduction insurance, with double indemnity if the abduction results in a close encounter of the “fourth kind”—an alien baby.
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• Authors Patrick Geryl and Robert Bast go even further, claiming that both the Mayans and the ancient Egyptians were actually from the lost continent of Atlantis. After a catastrophe sank Atlantis, the survivors spread out across the planet to preserve their knowledge for use by future generations, including how to survive the 2012 disaster. Unfortunately, that particular bit of information is written in an unknown language, and as of yet, it hasn’t been deciphered.
BACK HERE ON EARTH
So should we all start stocking up on duct tape, canned foods, and flashlight batteries as soon as possible? Sure—why not? But in the meantime, real scientists say it’s all a bunch of hooey. Whatever it is the Mayans may have thought about the winter solstice of 2012, there is no conclusive reasoning that suggests anything either cataclysmic or wonderful is going to happen. In fact, NASA has even issued an official statement on the subject:
“Nothing bad will happen to Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than four billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.”
Spoilsports. (See you in 2013…hopefully.)
SOUNDS LIKE FUN!
New Jersey’s Action Park amusement park became so run-down and accident-prone during its 1978–96 existence that local doctors who treated customers’ injuries nicknamed it “Traction Park,” “Accident Park,” and “Class Action Park.”
MEMBERS ONLY
Emergency-room workers have all sorts of disgusting stories having to do with…well, private parts. (Warning: These stories aren’t for everyone.)
A TREE GROWS IN GRANNY
An elderly North Carolina woman arrived at the ER saying she had green vines growing in her “virginny,” as she quaintly called it. An exam and a few X-rays confirmed her story: It was a vine, and it had sprouted…out of a potato. The woman explained that her uterus had prolapsed, or fallen out (a condition not uncommon in elderly women), so she’d popped in a potato to hold it up—and forgotten about it.
BAD KITTY!
A woman brought her unconscious boyfriend into the ER in a panic and explained that she’d found him lying in the bathtub. Doctors noted a large lump on the man’s head…and some curious scratches on his scrotum. As they were trying to determine what happened, the man woke up and told his story: He’d been cleaning his tub in the nude, and while kneeling to scrub the drain, he didn’t realize that his swaying testicles had drawn the attention of his cat. The cat pounced, and the man jumped in pain…then hit his head on the tiles and knocked himself out.
WIENER DOG
In a fit of depression and self-loathing, a middle-aged man did the unthinkable—he cut off his own penis. The urologist at the ER believed he could reattach it if it was found, but time was running out. So a police officer rushed to the man’s house to look for it. There, he heard a choking sound coming from the man’s poodle. After a brief struggle, the officer was able to wrench the man’s missing member from the dog’s mouth. Sadly, it was too damaged to reattach, but the cop was given a citation for service “above and beyond the call of duty.”
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In 2008 a man who claimed the drug Mirapex caused his gambling habit won an $8 million lawsuit.
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MMMM…CHEMICALS
Boy, this food tastes good! Uh-oh. Taste isn’t everything. Turns out food manufacturers use more than 3,000 chemicals to make their products look better and last longer. Here are a few.
A CESULFAME-POTASSIUM
Found in: Baked goods, chewing gum, pudding, gelatin, diet soda, chewable medications
The Dangers: It’s also called acesulfame-K, or ace-K (K is the chemical symbol for potassium). Never heard of it? It’s an artificial sweetener roughly 200 times sweeter than sugar. The U.S Food and Drug Administration allowed this chemical to be added to diet soft drinks in 1988. Animal testing by the German company Hoechst suggests that the additive may cause cancer. Large doses of acetoacetamide, a byproduct of the sweetener, were also shown to affect the thyroid in rats, rabbits, and dogs. According to the nonprofit Institute of Food Technology, adequate human trials have not yet been conducted.
FD&C RED #40
Found in: Sodas, candy, toaster pastries, cheese-flavored chips, and children’s vitamins
The Dangers: The most widely used food dye, Red #40, was originally manufactured from coal tar; now it’s mostly made from petroleum. A 2007 study found that it causes increased levels of hyperactivity, aggressive behavior, attention deficit disorder, and lower IQs in children. The British Food Standards Agency has also linked i
t to migraines in adults. Red #40 is banned in Denmark, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Sweden but is widely used in the United States.
2-PHENYLPHENOL
Found in: Citrus fruits
The Dangers: 2-phenylphenol is a preservative marketed under the trade names Dowicide, Torsite, Preventol, Nipacide, and many others. Its primary use is as an agricultural fungicide, applied to most commercially available oranges, limes, lemons, and grapefruits, after the fruit has been picked. Eye contact can cause severe irritation and burns, with possible eye damage. A 2002 study in Holland has linked 2-phenylphenol to hyperactivity in kids.
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In 2003 biologist K.W. Moeliker published a study on the existence of homosexual necrophiliac ducks.
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SODIUM BENZOATE
Found in: Fruit juice, carbonated drinks, pickles
The Dangers: Manufacturers have used sodium benzoate (and benzoic acid) for a century to prevent the growth of microorganisms in acidic foods. They seem to be safe, though they can cause allergic reactions in some people. The problem: When sodium benzoate is mixed with ascorbic acid (vitamin C), the combination can form benzene, a chemical known to cause leukemia and other cancers. In the 1990s, the FDA asked companies not to use benzoate in products that contained ascorbic acid. Even so, many still do.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 39