Fact. This is not a sports bra that you should wear while jogging.
The company behind the product, Cooler Fun, also makes the Beer Belly–a refillable plastic beverage-holder that men can conceal under their shirts. The website suggests that you wear either product to “the movies, concerts, ball games, even PTA meetings.”
Bullsh*t! The Vapor sports bra uses Cocona fabric, which is made from coconuts, and has several desirable qualities: evaporative cooling, odor absorption, and UV protection.
Of course, if I told you women were beginning to exercise in coconut bras, you’d picture something else entirely.
THE CLEVELAND INDIANS!
The Cleveland Indians were established in 1901 as one of the first American League teams. The Indians have won the World Series twice, in 1920 and 1948. The Indians have gone the longest without a championship than any other team in the American League.
Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was the only man in Major League Baseball history to be killed by a pitch.
In the late nineteenth century, Cleveland was home to three major league teams at once: the Cleveland Reds, the Cleveland Scorpions, and the Cleveland Billies.
Fact. The only team to go longer is the Chicago Cubs of the National League, who haven’t won a world series since 1908.
Fact. Chapman was struck in the head by a pitch from Yankee Carl Mays in an afternoon game on August 16, 1920. He died twelve hours later in the hospital.
Mays’ pitch was a spitball, and the Chapman incident led to the designation of the spitball as illegal.
Bullsh*t! It is true that even before the establishment of the American League and the Cleveland Indians in 1901, Cleveland was a major baseball city, and was home to multiple professional baseball teams. But, Cleveland has never had three major league baseball teams at once.
Today, there are no Cleveland teams in the National League. But in the late nineteenth century, there were two: the Cleveland Blues (1879–1884) and the Cleveland Spiders (1887–1899). In 1890, a new league was formed called the Players’ League, which only lasted for a year. The Cleveland team was called, believe it or not, the Cleveland Infants. Therefore, in 1890, Cleveland had two major league teams at once: the Spiders and the Infants. (The Players’ League was not technically a major league at the time, but was declared one retroactively.)
PING-PONG!
(a.k.a. table tennis)
Table tennis was first invented in Chicago in the 1850s. In those early days, the ball was made of tin, but when that proved too soft, it was replaced by a bronze alloy.
According to the International Table Tennis Federation, a regulation ball must be 2.7 grams in weight and 40 millimeters in diameter. The ball can only be white or orange, with a matte finish. Official competition balls are stored for three days at 73.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and then rigorously tested for bounce, veer, and hardness.
Unlike their finicky rules regarding the ball, the ITTF doesn’t care what the table is made out of, as long as the ball bounces to a certain height when dropped on it.
Bullsh*t! The first “table tennis” patent was issued to David Foster in England, in 1890. The sport had been played casually in England with improvised equipment during the decade before. Foster’s version used a cloth-covered rubber ball and actual strung rackets!
Fact. The federation is very serious about ball suitability. There is an equipment committee, with a doctor in charge of it, and they use all kinds of electrical, computer, and machine equipment to test ping-pong balls.
Fact. The federation says that the playing surface can be made of any material as long as a ball (which meets their exacting standards) dropped from a height of 30 centimeters (not quite 12 inches) bounces about 23 centimeters (a little over 9 inches).
WEIGHTLIFTING!
The word “dumbbell” comes from eighteenth-century England, when athletes would remove the clappers from church bells and exercise with them. The earliest-known versions of the dumbbell were rounded stones with handles called halteres, which were used for athletic training in ancient Greece.
The current all-time records for heaviest bench press and heaviest squat-lift both belong to Konstantynów Szczytniki, who lifted 1,350 pounds and 1,790 pounds in each category in 2010, beating previous records by more than a hundred pounds in both cases.
In 1990, hoping to capitalize on and repeat his success with the World Wrestling Federation, Vince McMahon launched the World Bodybuilding Federation. In the organization, bodybuilders (called BodyStars) were given colorful personalities and backstories similar to professional wrestlers.
Fact. A bell without its clapper would be mute, or “dumb” (which means mute but is now politically incorrect to use in the context of a person), hence the name “dumbbell.” When actual dumbbells began to be made, the name stuck.
The halteres began as weights to help long-jumpers train and eventually came to be used in the same manner as we use dumbbells today.
At least 2,000 years ago, villagers in India began using club-shaped weights called nals for training.
Bullsh*t! No man walks the earth who is that great. Yet.
Konstantynów and Szczytniki are both places in Poland.
The all-time heaviest bench press record belongs to Ryan Kennelly, who lifted 1,075 pounds, and the all-time heaviest squat-lift record belongs to Vladislav Alhazov, who lifted 1,250 pounds, both in 2008.
Fact. Unfortunately, the WBF was a dismal failure and was disbanded in 1992.
PILLOW FIGHTING!
The Toronto-based Pillow Fight League is a semiprofessional sports league of scantily clad female competitors. Its regular events draw huge crowds and have been featured on national television. Popular fighters include Apocalipstick, Bobbi Pinn, and Olivia Neutron-Bomb.
On April 3, 2009, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama posed in a mock pillow-fight photo op on the South Lawn of the White House. The first family armed themselves with pillows to be photographed with fourteen-year-old Holly Bingham-Greene, who was being honored for saving her father’s life.
A 1905 New York Times headline read, “Ziegler Heir Recovers: Wealthy Boy Received His Injuries in a Pillow Fight.”
Fact. The organization sprang up out of organized pillow-fighting nights at a goth club in Toronto. It has grown steadily and even recently sold television producing rights to its events. Official rules include “Female fighters only. No exceptions” and “Pillow fighters must practice good sportswomanship. No rude, lewd, or suggestive behavior.”
Bullsh*t! There’s not a single piece of truth in that statement at all. It’s a total fabrication.
Fact. William Ziegler Jr. received his injuries playing with two schoolmates, and he recovered in “splendid condition,” according to his physician.
STRANGE SPORTS!
A popular sport in Finland, wife carrying is now earning devotees in the United States. In the event, a man carries a woman through several hundred yards of an obstacle course to win a prize, often the wife’s weight in beer. The most popular method employed is the Estonian carry, in which the woman hangs upside-down with her legs around the man’s head.
The annual cheese-rolling competition in the Cotswolds region of England has been going on for more than two centuries. In the event, competitors chase a 7-to-8-pound double Gloucester cheese wheel down a steep hill. The person first to either catch it or cross the finish line wins the cheese after which they so valiantly chased.
Provided you’re willing to travel, and perhaps risk life and limb, you could compete this year in any of the following sports: horizontal hurdles, baby-saving, kite-burping, cat lacrosse, lake checkers, face-wrestling, finger karate, and limousine-rolling.
Fact. The sport, called eukonkanto in Finland, is gaining popularity worldwide. These days, you can find major wife-carrying competitions in Finland, Estonia, India, Ireland, and the United States. The winner of the annual North American Wife Carrying Competition typically wins airfare for two to compete at
the international championships in Finland.
Dennis Rodman attended the 2005 wife-carrying championship in Finland, but declined to participate because of health problems.
Fact. The event attracts hundreds of spectators and tourists a year. In theory, the competitors are attempting to catch the cheese, but with a one-second head start and rolling speeds as high as 70 miles per hour, nobody has ever caught an actively rolling cheese in the event. The competition happens at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester, a hill so steep that major injuries are common.
In the early ’40s, thanks to food rationing, wooden cheese wheels were used, with tiny bits of cheese placed inside.
Bullsh*t! Those are all things I think should be sports.
But you could compete in these: the vertical marathon, coffin racing, nettle eating, dog surfing, swamp football, chess boxing, toe wrestling, and dead goat polo.
CHAPTER 7
Florilegium,
Omnium-Gatherum,
and
Gallimaufry
“Florilegium,” “omnium-gatherum,” and “gallimaufry” are all, in essence, fancy ways of saying “miscellaneous stuff.” It’s like that junk drawer every house seems to have. When I was a kid, I would go to that drawer when I was bored. There was always something to entertain me, whether it was a comically oversized rubber band, a broken compass, or a bouncy ball with a chunk mysteriously missing. Of course, with my overactive imagination, I believed the contents of the drawer were truly miscellaneous: I half-expected to find a magic charm, a secret map, an Indian arrowhead, or a tiny alien. It would be nice to have a drawer with those capabilities, a drawer that, like this chapter, could be opened to reveal anything.
Can one be an expert at all things miscellaneous? Perhaps they should offer PhDs in miscellany–then you’d leave grad school prepared to be a doctor or a dominatrix. Or both. If you’re an expert in miscellany, then you’re really saying you’re an expert in everything, and if you’re an expert in everything, well, you should spot all the forthcoming bullshit with nary a problem at all.
Good luck!
THE TOOTHBRUSH!
The first mass-produced toothbrush was invented in 1780 in England. Before then, Europeans often used rags doused in soot and salt to clean their teeth. Sometimes the rag was attached to a stick to reach the back of the mouth.
In the nineteenth century, toothbrushes were often made of bone, and the bristles were actual animal hair. Horsehair, badger hair, and pig hair were all commonly used.
A toothbrush may seem like small potatoes when you throw it away, but environmental groups estimate 1 million pounds of plastic toothbrushes wind up in U.S. landfills in a given year. Laid end to end, that’s enough toothbrushes to stretch from Chicago to Moscow.
Fact. To this day, there are people who advocate using soot as a (very abrasive) way to whiten teeth!
Fact. The most expensive bristles were made from badger hair, while horse and pig hair were also common. Synthetic bristles did not become standard until the 1940s.
Bullsh*t! Believe it or not, the actual estimate is 50 million pounds of toothbrushes per year. While 10 million pounds of toothbrushes end to end would easily circumnavigate the globe, 50 million pounds is enough to circle the planet five and three-quarters times. Two years’ worth of discarded toothbrushes, end to end, could reach the moon.
BANK ROBBERY!
In the U.S., a bank is robbed during business hours every twenty-five minutes. The perpetrators are caught, on average, between 40 and 50 percent of the time. The most popular time of day to rob a bank is during opening hours.
In 2008, a woman broke into a Somerset County, New Jersey, bank after closing. The police and a SWAT team surrounded the bank and engaged in a three-hour standoff with the woman, whom they could see silhouetted inside behind drawn shades. When the SWAT team finally broke in, they found a fully dressed mannequin. The woman had made her escape long before with over $8,000 in cash.
The biggest bank heist of all time was committed in 2003 at the Central Bank of Iraq, just hours before the U.S. bombing began. The robber, who made off with just under $1 billion, was none other than Qusay Hussein–Saddam’s son.
Fact. The FBI keeps meticulous statistics on bank robberies. There are between 5,000 and 7,000 bank robberies each year, and the number seems to be slowly but steadily decreasing.
Each year, bank robbers make off with around $60 million.
Bullsh*t! That would make a good movie, though!
In truth, the police and the SWAT team did engage in a three-hour standoff with a fake woman, but she was a promotional cardboard cutout. The embarrassing incident did, in fact, end when the SWAT team broke in and found the cardboard lady and realized there had been no break-in or theft at all.
Police are still scratching their heads about what set off the alarm in the first place.
Fact. It took Qusay and his accomplices, as well as bank personnel, several hours to load the $950 million–plus into three trucks. Qusay bore a signed letter from his father himself, ordering the transaction, with the idea to keep the money out of American hands.
While the $650 million found inside the walls of one of Saddam’s palaces is presumed to be part of the hoard, it has never been definitively linked to the bank. None of the stolen billion has been officially accounted for.
TOILET PAPER!
In the U.S., a household of four will, on average, use two trees’ worth of toilet paper per year.
The first documented use of toilet paper in human history was in China in the sixth century A.D. By the ninth century A.D., using toilet paper was common in China (which is where paper was invented).
The inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the U.S. was an entrepreneur named Henry Joy. Joy’s Therapeutic Paper was introduced in 1740, and was rolled up on thin wooden rods in packages of three.
Fact. The average American uses about 50 pounds of toilet and tissue paper per year. An average-sized tree will produce around 100 pounds of toilet paper. The math checks out.
If every household in the U.S. traded out one roll of virgin toilet paper for recycled, we would, according to some experts, save 470,000 trees.
Fact. In 851 A.D., a traveler to China observed, “They [the Chinese] are not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper.”
The ancient Egyptians were the first to use papyrus (around 3500 B.C.), but the Chinese were the first to make paper (105 A.D.). Papermaking did not become common practice in Europe until around 1400 A.D.
Bullsh*t! Commercially packed toilet paper in the U.S. did not arrive until 1857, courtesy of Joseph Gayetty. It was called Gayetty’s Medicated Paper and sold in stacks of flat sheets, each one watermarked with Gayetty’s name.
The first rolled paper was produced by the Scott Paper Company in 1879.
STONEHENGE!
Several of the monuments that comprise Stonehenge are tripetroids, or combinations of three stones, two standing upright, with a third lying flat on top of them. The fact they remain in place after thousands of years, with the stones lying loosely on top, is an architectural marvel.
A henge is a Neolithic piece of earthwork consisting of a man-made circular or oval-shaped bank, with a corresponding ditch running inside it. Stonehenge would be by far the world’s most famous henge, except that its name is a misnomer: It is not a true henge at all.
In 1905, the Ancient Order of Druids held a massive ceremony at Stonehenge, initiating over 250 new members, much to the consternation of locals. The “druids” dressed the part: They wore long white robes and fake beards.
Bullsh*t! It may appear that each flat stone, or lintel, is just laying freely on top, but it is actually connected to the two uprights, or posts, with complex jointing. The lintels at Stonehenge are connected to the posts with mortise-and-tenon joints, which are basically knobs sticking up from the posts that fit into holes in the
lintels. In the outer ring, the lintels are even joined, with tongue-and-groove joints.
The freestanding structures of two posts and one lintel are called trilithons. “Tripetroids” is a totally made-up word.
Fact. Stonehenge does have a raised bank and a ditch, but the ditch runs outside of the bank, which means it is not actually a henge.
Stone monuments are not required for something to be a henge, either. There are true henges with and without stones.
It is totally silly that Stonehenge is not classified as a henge, because the word itself is derived from the name “Stonehenge.”
Fact. The Ancient Order of Druids is a London fraternal organization that was founded in 1781 (not particularly ancient, after all) and still operates today. The society is an example of neo-druidism.
The press ridiculed the 1905 gathering, particularly the costumes, and huge crowds of onlookers cheered and poked fun at the earnest disciples. Many locals were vexed by the unholy ceremony.
VALENTINE’S DAY!
The Greeting Card Association estimates that 160 million valentines are sent each year. If you count children’s packaged valentines, the number approaches 1 billion. Valentine’s Day is the second-most-popular card-sending occasion in the United States, after Christmas.
In Saudi Arabia and Iran, Valentine’s Day is the only Western holiday that it is legally permissible to celebrate. Conservative Islamic leaders forbid the practice of most Western-originated traditions, but make an exception for Valentine’s Day based on the message. As Sheikh Ali Qarni of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Public Relations put it: “We join the world on this. We want to show that Muslims are people of love.”
Fact. Fact. Bullsh*t! Page 17