The recession may have had other repercussions as well, as many Huntington residents blame the city’s poor health on the faltering economy. “It needs to pick up first so people can afford to get healthy,” 67-year-old Ronnie Adkins told a reporter…as he sat on the smoking porch of Huntington’s Jolly Pirate Donut shop.
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Some users of prescription sleep aids report making phone calls, having sex, and driving in their sleep.
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REALITY SHOWS, PART II
More stories of behind-the-scenes betrayal, corruption, and cheating on America’s favorite reality shows.
THE BIGGEST LOSER (NBC, 2004–present)
Premise: Obese people compete to lose the highest percentage of body weight. The winner takes home $250,000.
Story: First-season winner Ryan C. Benson claimed producers left him out of a reunion special because he publicly admitted that he fasted and dehydrated himself for the show until he was urinating blood. Another contestant confessed to self-induced dehydration, and two others were taken to the hospital after collapsing from heat stroke during a one-mile race. Kai Hibbard, runner-up in Season 3, said she and other contestants would drink as little water as possible the day before a weigh-in and, when the cameras were off, would work out in heavy clothing to sweat off the pounds. Health experts say that these are unhealthy ways to lose weight.
SURVIVOR (CBS, 2000–present)
Premise: A group of strangers are marooned at a remote location. They must form “tribes” in order to survive and compete in various challenges. The winner receives $1 million.
Story: Although the producers claim they try to find “regular people” to compete, Survivor’s casting director, Lynne Spillman, says that out of the thousands of applications they receive, very few meet their two main requirements: good looks (like models) and the ability to perform in front of a camera (like actors). So Spillman often hires model/actors—or, as she calls them, “mactors.” She admits that of the 19 contestants who competed in 2007’s Survivor: Fiji, 18 were recruited from talent agencies.
EXTREME MAKEOVER (ABC, 2002–07)
Premise: “Ugly ducklings” are transformed into “beautiful swans” via changes in wardrobe, makeup, exercise…and plastic surgery.
Story: In 2005 contestant Deleese Williams filed a lawsuit against Extreme Makeover. According to Williams, the producers forced her sister to make false and cruel on-air remarks about Deleese’s appearance…something that made her sister feel so guilty that she later committed suicide. After a year of negotiations, Williams and the show’s producers settled for an undisclosed amount.
* * *
Among Lady Gaga’s backstage requirements: one plate of “non-smelly, non-sweaty cheese.”
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EXTREME MAKEOVER: HOME EDITION (ABC, 2003–present)
Premise: A down-on-their-luck family gets a free new house.
Story #1: Knowing that more people tune in when the family’s plight is very sad, producers circulated an internal e-mail (which was later leaked to the press) instructing casting agents to look for “skin cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and muscular dystrophy.” If a family had more than one child with Down syndrome, they were prime picking, as were those with a child who’d been killed by a drunk driver. The biggest find: a family with a kid suffering from Progeria, the “little old man disease.”
Story #2: Five African-American kids—Charles, Michael, Charis, Joshua, and Jeremiah Higgins—were left orphans when their parents died in 2004. They were taken in by two Caucasian members of their church, Firipeli and Lokilani Leomiti. But the boys discovered later that it was all a ploy by the Leomitis to get on the show and win a free addition to their house. After the episode aired in 2005, the couple allegedly kicked the boys out. The siblings sued ABC and the Leomitis for fraud and emotional distress. The kids lost the case after ABC’s lawyers argued that the five boys were only contracted to be “guests” in the Leomitis’ home (which doesn’t explain why, on the show, five bedrooms were added to the house).
THE BACHELOR (ABC, 2002–present)
Premise: Twenty-five women compete for the affections of a handsome, rich bachelor, who proposes marriage to the winner.
Story: According to contestant Jeannette Pawula, “The producers know that alcohol ignites emotions, and you get better responses for TV.” Before the cameras rolled, she said, the women were given several glasses of wine. Then, if the sparks didn’t fly, the cameras shut off and trays of shots were carted out. “If you combine no sleep and no food with lots of alcohol,” said contestant Erica Rose, “emotions are going to run high and people are going to act crazy.”
* * *
The hairy frog breaks its own bones and pokes the ends through its skin to create defensive claws.
* * *
I WAS BLIND,
BUT NOW I SEE
The lesson here: Never give up hope (and get a second opinion).
IWAS (NEARLY) BLIND…In 1941, when Malcolm Darby of Rutland, England, was two years old, he contracted measles and was left with extremely poor eyesight. Throughout his life, he had to wear thick eyeglasses and could barely see. Then, when Darby was 70, he suffered a stroke. A blood clot lodged in his brain and required surgery.
BUT NOW I SEE. When Darby woke up after the operation, he couldn’t speak, but he could see a nurse in his room carrying a newspaper under her arm. And he saw not only the nurse, but the words printed in the newspaper, clear as day…without his glasses on. Doctors said that it’s not uncommon for patients to lose their eyesight after a stroke, but it’s extremely rare for anyone’s eyesight to improve. Darby has since recovered and is enjoying his new lease on life…except for one thing: “Before the stroke, I could speak French, and now I just can’t get a word of it out.”
I WAS DEAF…Emma Hassell was perfectly healthy—until she had a miscarriage in 2002 and was told that she may never be able to conceive another child. Then, two years later, the 21-year-old British woman got engaged. While getting ready for her engagement dinner, Hassell went upstairs to take a shower when she noticed that her hearing was “muffled.” She heard a loud pop—and then couldn’t hear anything at all. “I remember shouting down to my mum that I was deaf,” she said, “but I don’t know how it happened.” Doctors didn’t, either. They found nothing physically wrong with her ears. Their conclusion: It was psychosomatic. Hassell tried hypnotherapy, counseling, and acupuncture, but she remained completely deaf. For the next six months, she and her fiancé struggled to adjust to her handicap. A week before Christmas, Hassell visited her doctor, who had great news for her: She was pregnant!
BUT NOW I HEAR: That evening, Hassell was home alone watching Will & Grace on television. As she was reading the closed-captioned subtitles, it seemed like she could actually hear the words. She thought her mind was playing tricks on her. Then she started banging on a table and realized she could hear. Elated, she phoned her fiancé: “I can hear! I can hear!” He remained silent. “Now is not the time to be speechless,” she said. Doctors are still at a loss to explain how Hassell lost her hearing…and how she got it back. “I’d been dreading Christmas,” she said, “but not anymore!”
* * *
“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I or are the others crazy?”—Albert Einstein
* * *
I WAS (HALF) BLIND…While Don Karkos was serving on a Navy tanker in World War II, an explosion sent shrapnel flying into his face. When he woke up in the hospital, he was told that his right eye was permanently blind. Doctors offered to remove it, but Karkos said they might as well keep it in there “for looks.” He returned to his home in Maine and started a family. Having one functioning eye was difficult (he often bumped into walls and other people), but Karkos managed. By the time he was in his 80s, he was still working, tending horses at Monticello Raceway in New York. One day in 2006, he was in the stable adjusting some equipment on a horse named My Buddy Chimo. “I reached underneath his chest,” he recall
ed. “And when I did, my head was right next to his. All of a sudden, Chimo turned and he whacked me one on the head, and that was it.” It was the hardest that Karkos had been hit since the explosion in 1942.
BUT NOW I SEE. Karkos spent the rest of the day in a haze; nothing seemed “right.” And that night, as he was walking down his hallway, he realized why. He put his hand over his good eye…and he could still see. “Holy s***!” was all he managed to say. The incident became known as the “Monticello Miracle,” and My Buddy Chimo has become a star—people come to the track just to touch him. “I’m getting him a big bag of carrots for Christmas,” Karkos said. “Do you know what a doctor would have charged for this?”
I WAS DEAD…In January 2008, doctors told the family of 65-year-old Raleane “Rae” Kupferschmidt that she was brain-dead. It had been three weeks since she’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and her vegetative state showed no signs of improving. In keeping with her wishes, a feeding tube was removed and life support was turned off. Given only hours to live, Kupferschmidt was taken to her Lake Elmo, Minnesota, home to die. She lay in her bed while her family gathered and made funeral arrangements.
* * *
Many nursing homes and physical therapy centers use the Nintendo Wii for “Wii-habilitation.”
* * *
BUT NOW I LIVE: To keep her mother hydrated, Kupferschmidt’s daughter, Lisa Sturm, wet her lips with an ice cube…and the old woman started sucking on it. “I knew suckling is a very basic brain-stem function,” said Sturm, “so I didn’t get real excited. But when I did it again, she just about sucked the ice cube out of my hand. So I leaned down and asked, ‘Mom, are you in there?’” Her mother quietly replied, “Yes.” Sturm nearly fell over in shock. Kupferschmidt was rushed back to the hospital, where doctors drained blood from her skull to relieve pressure on her brain. Within a few weeks, Kupferschmidt was walking on her own and living a normal life again. She remembers almost nothing about her coma, except for: “Angels. They were here to help me, to help me get over this.”
I WAS PARALYZED…In 1988 David Blancarte of Manteca, California, wrecked his motorcycle and ended up in a wheelchair. The former boxer and dancer went into a deep depression, but still managed to move on with life, eventually marrying and having a family. Then, 21 years after his accident, Blancarte, 48, was reportedly bitten by a poisonous brown recluse spider in his California home.
BUT NOW I WALK. The bite sent Blancarte to a hospital, where a nurse noticed his legs twitching. After he was treated for the bite, the nurse enrolled Blancarte in a physical therapy program…and he slowly learned to walk again. A local TV station latched onto the story and within weeks, headlines all over the world read: “SPIDER BITE HEALS PARAPLEGIC!” News anchors hailed it as a “medical miracle” that “offers a ray of hope to others who are paralyzed.”
ACTUALLY…The spider bite (which was never even confirmed—brown recluses don’t live in California) had little to do with Blancarte’s recovery except to get him to the hospital, where the astute nurse noticed that the nerves in his legs were still working. And, adding insult to recovery, the media frenzy attracted the attention of police—who arrested Blancarte on an outstanding warrant for domestic abuse. But at least he learned to walk again, which is nice.
* * *
A computer program designed to grade school essays gave Ernest Hemingway a failing grade.
* * *
WEIRD, WITH A
SIDE OF ANIMALS
Some real-life news stories—of the odd variety—with some animals thrown in (sometimes literally).
VERY JACKIE CHAN
Verity Beman and her husband, Beat Ettlin, were sleeping peacefully in their home in Canberra, Australia, one night in March 2009 when a six-foot-tall kangaroo crashed through their bedroom window and landed on their bed. “It leaped in, this martial-arts kind of figure,” Beman told reporters the next day. “It was very Jackie Chan.” The kangaroo began thrashing around the house. Ettlin, in a frantic effort to get it outside, grabbed the animal in a headlock, dragged it to the front door, and threw it out. Beman said it was a good thing her husband was from Switzerland, because an Aussie would have never attempted to get a kangaroo in a headlock. “They would be fully aware of the risk,” she said. She added that she was very proud of her husband’s brave actions. “I called him my hero,” she said. “My hero in undies.”
DOES THIS FISH TASTE CORPSEY?
A newspaper reporter in the city of Agartala in northeastern India decided to go undercover in 2009 to investigate a rumor about the city’s trade in hilsa fish, a local delicacy. The reporter pretended to be a fish trader who needed space to store a load of hilsa he’d just bought in neighboring Bangladesh. He received an offer from one of the city’s hospitals, where employees said they could sell him space to store the fish in the morgue…in cooling boxes…alongside human cadavers. Other traders had been storing fish with dead bodies for years, they told him, before the fish were delivered to the city’s many street markets. They insisted that it was much cheaper than conventional storage methods, which saved the fish traders money, and it also brought in some extra cash for the hospital’s employees. The reporter’s exposé caused an outcry. “It is absolutely disgusting,” state Health Minister Tapan Chakrabarty said, promising that an investigation into the morgue-stored fish would begin immediately.
* * *
Is this some kind of stunt? Jackie Chan flushes the toilet only once a day.
* * *
RABBITS: THE HORROR
In October 2009, Swedish newspapers reported that several thousand rabbits were shot every year in parks in the capital city of Stockholm. That’s not uncommon for large cities with rabbit overpopulation problems, but they also reported something that most of Stockholm’s citizens were unaware of: Once they were killed, the rabbits’ carcasses were frozen, shipped to the city of Karlskoga in central Sweden…and incinerated as fuel in the city’s heating plant. The heat generated by the thousands of dead rabbits helps to heat homes in the area. Animal rights groups, the reports said, were calling for an end to the bunny-burning.
RABBITS: THE HORROR RETURNS
On the South Island of New Zealand, the town of Waiau (population 400) has a different way of dealing with its dead rabbits: a throwing contest. Kicking off the town’s three-day pig-hunting festival every October is the “dead rabbit throw,” in which local children compete to see who can throw a dead rabbit the farthest. The town banned the contest in 2009 after receiving complaints from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. One angry resident defended the rabbit toss, claiming that the ban was “political correctness gone mad.” An SPCA representative disagreed, saying the event sent the message to kids that dead bodies were a “form of entertainment.” The ASPCA person asked, “Do you throw your dead grandmother around for a joke at her funeral?”
CHRISTIANIDDLY-DIDDLIANITY
According to Christianity Today, the name that most U.S. college students associate with Christianity is Jesus Christ. Who’s second? Is it Mother Theresa? Billy Graham? The Pope? Nope. It’s Ned Flanders, Homer’s church-lovin’ neighbor on The Simpsons.
* * *
In Australia, wearing hot pink pants on Sunday afternoon is illegal.
* * *
QUICK FIXES
Bob Dylan sang, “There’s a brand-new gimmick every day, just to try and take somebody’s money away.” (And that was before informercials.)
COMPLAINT: “I can’t stop eating these tasty, fatty treats!”
SOLUTION: Aroma-Trim
EXPLANATION: To curb your appetite, just hold the plastic Aroma-Trim whiffer under your nose. It smells just like human vomit, instantly turning that sweet treat into an object of disgust. As one satisfied infomercial participant exclaimed: “Now I don’t even want to finish that donut!” Price: $49.95 (instruction booklet and VHS tape included).
COMPLAINT: “My eyelashes are thinning out!”
SOLUTION: Latisse
> EXPLANATION: Designed to combat the effects of eyelash hypotrichosis, a condition characterized by thin or inadequate eyelashes, Latisse is a prescription-only chemical solution. Just use the applicator to dab some Latisse onto your thinning lashes, and you’ll be rewarded with a miraculous burst of new eyelash growth. But be careful: If your aim is off, small hairs may start growing from the inside of your eye, or from your forehead, your cheek, your chin, your elbow, or any other part of your skin touched by…Latisse. Price: $150 for 1 bottle and 60 applicators.
COMPLAINT: “My bust is so large that my car’s seat belt cuts into me!”
SOLUTION: Tiddy Bear
EXPLANATION: The Tiddy Bear is a small stuffed animal that looks like a spread-eagle Beanie Baby. You attach it to your car’s shoulder belt via a strap on its back, then slide the Tiddy Bear until its face rests between your breasts. According to the manufacturer, it relieves pressure on the bust and shoulder. Price: $14.95.
COMPLAINT: “I need a tan for my hot date tonight, but I don’t have time to go to a tanning salon!”
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 41