MADDEN NFL 2004
The Athlete: Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick
Cursed! Vick broke his leg in a pre-season game. He missed the first eleven games, and the Falcons finished with a record of 3–7.
MADDEN NFL 2005
The Athlete: Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis
Cursed! Lewis—a former Defensive Player of the Year honoree and Super Bowl MVP—had a terrible season. He broke his wrist in the sixth game, and was out for the rest of the season.
MADDEN NFL 2006
The Athlete: Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb
Cursed! In his four previous seasons, McNabb lead his team to four straight NFC Championship games. But in 2006 he tore an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his knee, suffered a sore thumb (devastating for a quarterback) and a hernia, and played in just nine games all season, the fewest of his career.
MADDEN NFL 2007
The Athlete: Seattle running back Shaun Alexander
Cursed! Alexander—the previous season’s NFL MVP—broke his foot and missed six games with the Seahawks. The following season he broke his wrist, the year after that he was traded, and in 2008 he quit the game for good.
Crayola produces crayons in 23 shades of red, the most of any color.
MADDEN NFL 2008
The Athlete: Tennessee Titans quarterback Vince Young
Cursed! Young was injured during the fifth game of the year, and missed the sixth game, marking the first time in his career—including middle school, high school, college, and the NFL—that he’d missed a game due to injury. He still led the team to a playoff game, but they didn’t even score a touchdown, and lost 17–6. The next season Young blew out his knee in the season’s first game, and was replaced by quarterback Kerry Collins for the entire year.
MADDEN NFL 2009
The Athlete: Quarterback Brett Favre
Cursed! In early 2008 Favre announced his retirement from the only team he’d ever played with, the Green Bay Packers. But then he changed his mind and signed up with the New York Jets for the 2008–09 season—and made the Madden NFL cover, too. He started out great, leading the Jets to an 8–3 record…then injured his throwing shoulder. The team lost four of the last five games, during which Favre threw eight interceptions and just two touchdowns, and the Jets missed the playoffs.
MADDEN NFL 2010
The Athletes (there were two that year): Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu and Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald
Cursed! Polamalu and Fitzgerald had faced each other in the previous season’s Super Bowl. This year: Polamalu sprained a knee ligament in the first game of the season and missed four games, and later strained a knee muscle. He played in just five games all season and had the worst year of his career. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, played all year, had a great season, scored the most touchdowns of his career, and was selected for the Pro Bowl team. (So maybe the curse only works on one player at a time.)
Women who have morning sickness typically have healthier pregnancies.
UNLIKELY INVENTORS
None of these guys were doctors but all of them made real contributions to the field of medicine, simply because when they saw a problem, they fixed it.
ROALD DAHL
Main Claim to Fame: The British author of several classic children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and James and the Giant Peach
Big Idea: In 1960 Dahl’s four-month-old son, Theo, was struck by a car. The baby suffered head trauma, resulting in hydrocephalus, a buildup of spinal fluid in the brain that can lead to brain damage and death. Surgeons installed a brain shunt, a device that drains fluid and transfers it via a tube to a different part of the body, often the abdomen. Such devices have one-way valves to prevent fluid from leaking back into the brain. Unfortunately for Theo, he had blood in his brain as well as spinal fluid, and the blood was clogging the valve. Finally, after eight emergency surgeries to replace the shunt, Dahl decided his son needed better technology. He put Theo under the care of Dr. Kenneth Till, a neurosurgeon in London, and called Stanley Wade, a hydraulic engineer he’d met through their shared passion for flying model airplanes. Working together, the three designed a new type of one-way shunt valve that was more resistant to blockages. Ironically, Dahl’s son made a full recovery before they were finished, so he never used it. But the WDT (Wade-Dahl-Till) valve, as it became known, was used by thousands of others until it was made obsolete by newer technology. As for Dahl and his fellow inventors, they agreed to never make any money from the device.
ROBERT GOLDMAN
Main Claim to Fame: A software engineer and one of the pioneers in the digital music movement
Big Idea: In the late 1990s, Goldman found out that his sister, Amy, had been diagnosed with cancer. Goldman decided to change careers, and dedicated his life to helping his sister. In 2002 he started a company, Vascular Designs, hoping to develop tumor treatment technologies. Amy died in 2003, but Goldman pressed on. In 2009, after seven years of work, he released the IsoFlo Infusion Catheter. Here’s how it works: A very thin catheter tube is threaded through the veins right to the location of a tumor. There the catheter’s special design allows it to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly into the tumor. This is a huge advantage over normal chemotherapy treatment, in which the drugs are simply injected into the body and have to find their way to a tumor. The device has been called a “revolution” in cancer treatment, and has been hailed in medical journals all over the world. “I’ve found my agenda in life,” Goldman said, “and it’s about helping people.”
Roald Dahl created the word “gremlin” during World War II.
PAUL WINCHELL
Main Claim to Fame: For 30 years Winchell was the voice of Tigger in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh as well as other cartoon characters such as Dick Dastardly in Dastardly and Muttly in their Flying Machines, Gargamel in The Smurfs, and Boomer in The Fox and the Hound. He was also a ventriloquist, a TV host, an author, an acupuncturist, the owner of a shirt factory and a fish farm, and an inventor with more than 30 patents to his name.
Big Idea: Winchell often observed surgeries performed by his friend, Dr. Henry Heimlich (yes, the guy who invented the famous maneuver). When Winchell saw how difficult it was for surgeons to keep a patient’s heart pumping during heart surgery, he got the idea of inventing a mechanical heart that would do the heart’s work. In 1961, with Heimlich as his adviser, Winchell designed and built a prototype for the first artificial heart in history. “Odd as it may seem, the heart wasn’t that different from building a dummy,” Winchell later wrote in his autobiography. “The valves and chambers were not unlike the moving eyes and closing mouth of a puppet.” Winchell received a patent for his artificial heart in 1963, and later donated the blueprints and model to the University of Utah Medical School. His model is considered by many experts to be the prototype for the Jarvik-7 designed by University of Utah medical researcher Dr. Robert K. Jarvik—the first artificial heart successfully implanted in a human, Barney Clark, on December 2, 1982.
The villains in Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Psycho were all based on a real-life serial killer named Ed Gein.
ODD SPORTS
Just when you think all the sports and games that could ever be invented already have been, someone comes up with a weird new one. (Is freezetagbasketball really any weirder than hitting a little white ball with a stick?)
QUIDDITCH
Quidditch is a fabrication of author J.K. Rowling—a sport played by wizards and witches in the Harry Potter books and movies. Rules: The players fly through the air on broomsticks, trying to throw a ball through a goal. Meanwhile, one player on each team is dedicated to pursuing another ball, called a “golden snitch,” which is fist-sized, yellow, and sentient. Flying broomsticks and balls that go where they want to go would seem to make real-life quidditch impossible, but in 2005 a group of students at Middlebury College in Vermont modified the game so it can be p
layed by the non-magical. Rules: Players run down the field (a soccer field or a football field) with broomsticks between their legs as they throw foam balls (called “bludgers”) into the goal. The golden snitch is portrayed by a person dressed head to toe in yellow spandex who runs around the field erratically. More than 150 colleges now boast quidditch teams (it’s a club or intramural sport, so it’s not technically sanctioned by the NCAA), including Yale, Vassar, Tulane, Oberlin, and Boston University. Players are not required to wear flowing wizard robes and pointy wizard hats… but most do anyway.
FREEZETAGBASKETBALL
According to their website, childhood friends Phil Anker and Dave Fisher invented this game “last weekend.” A 50/50 combination of basketball and the playground game of freeze tag, the game starts off like a standard basketball game, with one major difference: One player on each team is “It.” When a team has possession of the ball and is attempting to score a basket, the team on defense has to both prevent the offense from scoring and run away from It, who may tag opposing players, “freezing” them until either a basket is scored or they are “unfrozen” by the It on their own team. Anker and Fisher aren’t sure how many people are playing freeze tag basketball (probably not many), but they give away the rules for free to encourage its growth.
BEEP BASEBALL
The American Association of Adapted Sports Programs developed this sport in the early 1970s as a way for blind people to play baseball, which would otherwise be impossible for them. It’s the same game, with a few necessary changes. Giant softballs (16 inches in diameter) are embedded with electronic beeping devices that help players determine where the ball is. Instead of bases, beep baseball uses four-foot-tall foam-rubber columns, each with a location-by-sound buzzer inside. For an added challenge, after the batter hits the ball, he or she runs to either first or third base—whichever base has been remotely activated by an off-field operator and is “buzzing.” (The few seconds it takes for the batter to determine which way to run also allows extra time for fielders to locate the ball.) While a handful of sighted individuals play beep baseball, the sport is played primarily by the blind subculture, where it is very popular. There are 200 amateur teams across the United States playing in the National Beep Baseball Association, dozens of regional tournaments, invitationals, and prize matches, and even an annual World Series.
SPELLBOUND
“A council spelled its own name and that of several villages wrongly in a leaflet promoting cycling. Kirklees Council had 7,000 leaflets printed but they repeatedly spell Kirklees as Kirtles, Cleckheaton became Czechisation, Birstall ended up as Bistable and Kirkburton as Kirkpatrick. Even more bizarrely, an e-mail address for British Waterways was given as: enquiries.manic-depressive@brutalisation’s.co.uk. A spokesman for the council said the errors were the result of graphic design software used by an external printer. The leaflets have been reprinted and the £1,000 cost was reimbursed.”
—Yorkshire Post (U.K.), August 2010
What do Jesse Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor & Billy Joel have in common? They’re all asthmatic.
MYTH-CONCEPTIONS
“Common knowledge” is frequently wrong. Here are some examples of things that many people believe, but according to our sources, just aren’t true.
Myth: If a bear is chasing you, head toward lower ground because bears can’t run as fast downhill.
Fact: Bears can run about twice as fast as humans—uphill or down. Plus they’re excellent climbers. And they can jump. So should you stay where you are and simply play dead? If it’s a mother guarding her cubs, then yes—she just wants to protect them and will likely leave you alone. If it’s a hungry, predatory bear, it will catch you if it’s close enough; your best bet: Yell…and if necessary, fight back.
Myth: Air is mostly oxygen.
Fact: The air we breathe is about 21% oxygen. The rest: 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, trace amounts of other gases, and 78% nitrogen.
Myth: Evolution means species evolve into more complex forms.
Fact: Evolution can just as easily lead to genetically simpler forms. For example, fish species that inhabit dark caves may lose their eyes over time. Though some people refer to this as “devolution,” biologists say it’s a misnomer and prefer the term degeneration.
Myth: In Islam, a fatwa is a death sentence proclaimed against anyone who is deemed an infidel or a blasphemer.
Fact: A fatwa is simply a religious opinion rendered by an Islamic scholar, based on Islamic law. Rarely does that opinion conclude with a call for capital punishment. The source of this myth is probably the world’s best-known fatwa, which occurred when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for the death of author Salman Rushdie in response to his 1988 book The Satanic Verses.
Myth: The best time to learn a second language is during early childhood.
Fact: It’s long been thought that kids’ brains have more plasticity, meaning they can absorb more new information than adults can. But recent studies have found what language professors suspected all along: Plasticity remains into old age. In fact, people who have already mastered their native language are better suited to learning new ones.
What do Warsaw and Budapest have in common? Both have Winnie-the-Pooh Streets.
Myth: People who get head lice have bad hygiene.
Fact: Clean hair is actually easier for head lice to cling to.
Myth: According to the Bible, three Wise Men, or “Magi,” riding camels from the east, brought gifts to baby Jesus on the night he was born.
Fact: Nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three of them or how they got there—only that they brought three gifts. The plural use of “Magi” means that there could have been two or even ten. The names attributed to the Magi—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar—did not appear until 500 A.D. in Greek writings.
Myth: Vikings wore helmets with horns on them.
Fact: Vikings were buried with their helmets…and their drinking horns. When Victorians dug them up, they assumed the horns had fallen off the helmets.
Myth: Fossils are the preserved remains of animals or plants.
Fact: Very few fossils are the actual remains (such as an insect trapped in amber). Most are actually trace fossils: When the dead plant or animal was covered by sediment, the organic matter decayed and was slowly replaced by minerals in the groundwater. Over time, very little (if any) of the original living thing was left, except for its cast, or shape. Now it’s basically a rock.
Myth: If you want a flat stomach, just do sit-ups or use an exercise machine that works your abdomen.
Fact: Don’t let the infomercials fool you. This form of weight loss—called “spot reduction”—is impossible. Although you can build specific muscle groups via exercise, exactly where your body will burn off fat is determined by genetics.
“Myths which are believed in tend to come true.” —George Orwell
Estimate: About 90% of the Tiffany & Co. products listed on eBay are counterfeit.
JUST PLANE WEIRD
If you’re reading this book on a plane, you might want to skip this chapter until your flight is over and you’re safely on the ground.
NOT A VERY FUN GUY
The passengers on board a Ryanair flight from Budapest to Dublin in 2008 nearly panicked when a strange liquid began oozing from an overhead compartment. It landed on a man (not named in press reports), whose neck began to swell up. He could barely breathe. The plane made an emergency landing in Frankfurt, Germany, where medics boarded and determined that the liquid was not dangerous. The man was treated, and after a two-hour delay, the flight took off again. A Ryanair official reassured the public that it wasn’t a chemical attack and that there was no “burning substance.” Apparently, the man—who is allergic to mushrooms—just happened to be sitting underneath an overhead compartment where another passenger had stored a jar of mushroom soup, which had leaked out during the flight.
B.O. AIR
The moment that an unidentified U.S. man boarded a
n Air Canada Jazz flight in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in 2010 the entire plane was assaulted by his stench. “It was brutal,” said one passenger. The smell was so bad that people started complaining to the flight attendants, but they didn’t have to—the flight crew couldn’t take the smell, either. The man, described as “unkempt,” was escorted off the plane. According to reports, he found a place to take a shower and then flew out on a later flight.
FIRE IN THE HEAD!
Pandemonium broke out on a Compass Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Regina, Saskatchewan, in May 2008 when smoke started pouring into the rear of the main cabin. There was a fire in the lavatory. The pilot took the plane from 30,000 feet to a runway in Fargo, North Dakota, in less than eight minutes and all 72 passengers made it off safely thanks to the crew’s fast action—including that of 19-year-old flight attendant Eder Rojas, who put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. Back on the ground, federal investigators discovered that the fire had been deliberately set… by Eder Rojas. Why? He was angry that he had to work that particular route. Rojas was arrested and faces up to 20 years in prison, but disappeared before his trial began. At last report, his whereabouts were still unknown.
Crosby, Stills & Nash had played only one gig together before Woodstock.
COWBOYS & ALIENS
During a 2010 SkyWest Airlines flight from Montana to Utah with 50 people aboard, a man ran up to the cockpit door and started banging on it. “I’m a space alien!” he shouted. “And I demand to fly this human aircraft!” The plane’s lone flight attendant couldn’t remove the 32-year-old man, so he asked the passengers for a little help. That’s when Clay Cooper, a cowboy (really), got up and forced the “alien” back into his seat. “Stay there!” said Cooper as he clicked the man’s seat belt. A few minutes later, the plane made an emergency landing in Idaho Falls; the man kicked and yelled at the police officers who escorted him away. He was charged with disturbing the peace and assaulting an officer. Apparently his friend—who’d slept through most of the ruckus—was taking him home to Las Vegas because he was “acting weird.”
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