…ALLIGATOR
In 2005 rangers in Florida’s Everglades National Park were stunned to find a 6-foot-long alligator protruding from the stomach of a 13-foot-long snake. Both were dead. The Burmese python had swallowed the alligator whole, and the alligator had then apparently tried to claw its way out—its tail and back legs protruded from the snake’s ruptured belly. Burmese pythons thrive in the Everglades, but they aren’t native; they started out as escaped pets. Scientists call the find “an ominous sign” that the non-native snakes could dangerously disrupt the area’s ecosystem by replacing the alligator as the top predator. But maybe not: The python’s head was missing, causing one biologist to surmise that another alligator may have come along and bitten it off.
First state to list its Web site on its license plate: Pennsylvania.
…CAT
Another Burmese python made the news in 2006, when Interlachen, Florida, resident Nicole Salvatore walked into a friend’s house. The friend wasn’t home, but a 12-foot-long python was… and it was eating her friend’s cat. The cat was dead by the time the owner, Dianne Turner, arrived home. Amazingly, Florida Fish and Wildlife officials advised Turner that she was not allowed to kill the snake. “All we could do was stand there and watch that snake eat the cat,” Salvatore said. The python had escaped from its outdoor pen in a neighbor’s yard. (The kitty’s name: Burrito.)
…YES, A PLANE
Pilot Monty Coles of West Virginia was about to land his Piper Cherokee in Ohio in 2006 when a snake stuck its head out of the instrument panel. Coles was 3,000 feet in the air at the time. He swatted at the four-foot-long snake, causing it to drop to the floor near his feet. As it started to slither away, Coles grabbed it behind its head. “It coiled all around my arm,” he said after landing, “and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling.” Coles radioed for permission to make an emergency landing: “They came back and asked what my problem was. I told them I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane.” He added, “Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this.”
* * *
TOUGH GUY
“Valentin Grimaldo, 40, was bitten by a venomous coral snake near Encino, Texas. He survived by biting the snake’s head off, slitting its body lengthwise, and using the skin for a tourniquet until help arrived.”
—News of the Weird
Paul McCartney wrote “When I’m 64” when he was 15.
STRANGE LAWSUITS
Think you can’t sue your neighbor just for being a jerk? These days it seems like people will sue each other over anything. Here are a few real-life examples.
PLAINTIFF: Rena Young
DEFENDANT: Taylor Ostergaard and Lindsey Zilletti, two 18-year-old girls
LAWSUIT: One night in July 2005, Ostergaard and Zilletti baked plates of chocolate chip cookies and handed them out to their neighbors in Durango, Colorado. When they left the plate of cookies on Young’s doorstep and knocked on her door around 10:30 p.m., the woman became so terrified by “the shadowy figures who banged on her door” that she called the police. According to the cops, no crime had been committed, but Young was still agitated. She went to the hospital the next morning with what she thought was a heart attack (doctors said it was an anxiety attack). Ostergaard and Zilletti both wrote letters of apology, but Young sued them, claiming the apologies rang false.
VERDICT: The judge ordered the girls to pay $930 to cover Young’s medical bills. He acknowledged that no crime had been committed, but thought that 10:30 p.m. was too late for the girls to be out.
PLAINTIFF: Austin Aitken
DEFENDANT: NBC
LAWSUIT: Aitken was a regular viewer of NBC’s gross-out game show Fear Factor, which often makes contestants eat disgusting things, such as worms, insects, or animals’ internal organs. Aitken had no problem watching people eat worms and animal parts, but claimed a 2005 episode where contestants ate rats chopped up in a blender made his blood pressure rise, made him dizzy and light-headed, and ultimately, made him vomit. So he sued NBC for $2.5 million. “It’s barbaric, some of the things they ask these individuals to do,” Aitken said.
VERDICT: Thrown out of court.
Spare tire: Earth has expanded at the equator by about 1/8 inch since 1998.
PLAINTIFF: Louise Kelsey of Melbourne, Australia
DEFENDANT: Park Hyatt Hotel
LAWSUIT: In 2005 Kelsey, 58, filed suit against the hotel, where she had earlier worked as a maid. The suit said that in 2001 Kelsey was working in the hotel when a guest, a Uruguayan soccer player in town for a World Cup match, suddenly grabbed her and kissed her. She claimed the kiss led to her suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, which made her legally blind a year later.
VERDICT: At first the Park Hyatt fought the case, bringing in a doctor to testify that it must have been “the most powerful kiss in history,” but later agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
PLAINTIFF: Jirra Collings Ware of Sydney, Australia
DEFENDANT: OAMPS Insurance Brokers
LAWSUIT: Ware was fired in 2005 after repeatedly showing up for work drunk. He sued, claiming that he suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, and his employer should have done more to accommodate the illness.
VERDICT: Ware won the case and was awarded $7,300.
PLAINTIFF: LPGA caddie Gary Robinson
DEFENDANT: LPGA golfer Jackie Gallagher-Smith
LAWSUIT: Robinson sued his boss in 2005, saying that she had tricked him into a sexual relationship just so she could have a child. Shortly after he was hired by Gallagher-Smith, who was married, she began making advances toward him. At first he wrote it off as “innocent playful activity,” but it turned into a physical relationship, he said, and in July she became pregnant…but refuses to acknowledge him as the father. “I hope to get retribution for the emotional pain and suffering,” he says, “and eventually get some rights to the child.” Gallagher-Smith’s lawyer said the case was nothing more than an attempt at extortion.
VERDICT: Case dropped. The suit was filed in the state of Florida, where the law says a child born into a marriage is a product of that marriage. That meant Robinson had no rights and couldn’t demand a DNA test. In 2006 he dropped the case.
Dirty liars? 7% of Americans claim they never bathe.
G.E. COLLEGE BOWL
The G.E. College Bowl was a quiz show that appeared on TV from 1959 to 1970. Teams from colleges all over the country competed for the national title. Are you as smart as the college kids of yesteryear? Test yourself on these sample questions from the show. (Answers are on page 514.)
HOW TO PLAY
The G.E. College Bowl was played by two teams of four college students each, representing two different schools—the University of Minnesota vs. UCLA, for example.
• Each player on each team had a buzzer. When the moderator (originally Allen Ludden, who also hosted Password) read the first question, called the “Tossup” question, the first player to press the buzzer got to try to answer it. Subject categories included General Knowledge, Literature, Science and Mathematics, Geography, and four areas of History: American, European, Ancient, and General.
• If the student gave the correct answer to the Tossup question, their team got five points and a chance to answer a Bonus question on the same subject for additional points.
• If the first team answered the Tossup incorrectly, the other team got a chance to answer it. If their answer was correct, they got to answer the Bonus question.
• Only individuals could answer Tossup questions, but the entire team could confer on Bonus questions.
So, you think you’re ready to give it a try? Below are some questions taken from the original TV show.
LITERATURE
Tossup Question: When the fictional character, Napoleon, and his cohorts win the battle at Manor Farm, they rename the farm. What name do they give it?
Bonus Questions:
1. What English poet wrote, “’Tis better to have
loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.”
2. The author of “Prometheus Unbound” and the author of Frankenstein were related somehow. How?
Ancient ruler: The tape measure was patented in 1868.
3. The old man in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has a name. What is it?
4. Which Beat movement author wrote the following: “We gotta go and never stop going till we get there. Where we going, man? I don’t know, but we gotta go.”
5. William Sydney Porter polished his writing skills while serving a prison sentence for embezzling bank funds. When he got out of the slammer he became better known by what pen name?
SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS
Tossup Question: What does a chronometer measure?
Bonus Questions:
1. Which of the following is moving faster: a ship traveling at 40 knots, or a car traveling 46 miles per hour?
2. What’s the common name for the part of your body where the ulnar nerve rests against the medial condyle of the humerus?
3. If you buy a dog for $40, sell it for $50, buy it back for $60, and sell it again for $70, how much money have you made or lost?
4. Selenography is the name for the scientific study of what?
5. It’s 50° Fahrenheit outside. Within two degrees, what will the reading be on a metric (Celsius) thermometer?
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE
Tossup Question: A pair of aces and a pair of eights are known as the “dead man’s hand” in poker. Who was holding this hand when he died?
Bonus Questions:
1. Where are the Islands of Langerhans located?
2. The wife of a duke is called a duchess. The wife of a count is called a countess. What is the wife of an earl called?
3. An algophobe is afraid of what?
4. Coracles, galleons, caravels, and triremes are all types of what?
5. If you had a Musca domestica in your house, would you 1) eat it, 2) kill it, or 3) tell it to clean your house?
Ready for more? Turn to page 303 for another round of G.E. College Bowl.
A turtle’s shell is sensitive enough to feel a twig brush across it.
LIFE’S A GAMBLE
We’ll give you 5 to 1 odds that even if you’re a regular gambler, you don’t know the origins of these games.
BLACKJACK
Description: Players add up the numbers on the cards they are dealt and try to get as close to 21 points without going over. Face cards count as 10; aces count as 11 or 1.
History: Originally called vingt-et-un, or “twenty-one,” blackjack is believed to have been invented in France in the early 1700s. Today it’s one of the most popular casino card games in the world, but it took a while to catch on. A casino in Evansville, Indiana, introduced it to the United States in 1910. The only way gambling houses could get poker players to give the game a try was by awarding bonus payouts for valuable hands. The biggest payout of all, $10 for every $1 bet, went to the player who held the ace of spades and either of the black jacks. The name that resulted—blackjack—lasted a lot longer than the bonus payouts did.
KENO
Description: A game similar to Bingo, except that players get to pick their own numbers instead of being stuck with the ones printed on their bingo card. After a player picks several numbers, the house randomly picks 20 numbers between 1 and 80; if the house picks most or all of the player’s numbers, the player wins a payout. Many state lotteries operate along similar lines.
History: This game was invented in China during the Han Dynasty (202 B.C. to 220 A.D.), reportedly when a city came under siege and had to raise money for the army to defend it. Why burden people with an extra tax when you can get them to contribute voluntarily? So officials devised a lottery system instead, one in which 20 out of a possible 120 Chinese characters were chosen at random. Players selected 10 characters of their own, and prizes went to anyone who had at least 5 matching characters. The game saved the city and became popular over so large an area that homing pigeons were used to send messages to people telling them whether they’d won or lost. That’s how the Chinese version of the game became known as Pok Kop Piu, or “White Pigeon Ticket.”
America’s oldest candy brand:
The American version of the game dates back to 1928, when some Chinese men asked a Butte, Montana, bar owner named Joseph Lyden to organize a game of White Pigeon Ticket for them. Lyden dropped the Chinese characters in favor of numbers and renamed the game Keno (from a French game called quine, which means “five winning numbers”). He’s also the guy who brought the game to Las Vegas after casino gambling was legalized in 1931.
SLOT MACHINES
Description: You don’t know what a slot machine is?
History: Mechanical poker machines were popular in taverns as far back as the 1880s: the player put in a nickel and pulled a lever, which caused five rotating reels with playing cards painted on them to spin and deal a poker hand. These machines didn’t give direct cash payouts—there are too many different winning combinations in poker for the machine to be able to pay them all. Instead, when you got a winning hand you showed it to the bartender. He poured you a free drink, made you a sandwich, or gave you whatever other prize was listed next to the machine.
Then in 1887, a man named Charles Fey built a much simpler machine called the Liberty Bell. It had only three reels and only five possible symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts, and bells. The simpler design made automated payouts possible: when a player got three bells, they won the highest jackpot of all—ten whole nickels! Mobster Bugsy Siegel was the first in Las Vegas to put slot machines in his casino, the Flamingo Hotel, in 1947. At the time they were little more than novelty items designed to keep wives and girlfriends busy while the men played poker or blackjack or shot craps. Today they’re computerized, and they bring in between 60% and 80% of a typical casino’s total profits.
VIDEO POKER
Description: Just like it sounds—a video-game version of poker. You put in your money, the machine deals your “cards” onto a video screen, and you play poker as if you were sitting at a poker table.
NECCO wafers, sold since 1847.
History: Another descendant of the early mechanical poker machine, video poker was invented after slot machine manufacturer Si Redd saw the Pong video game in the early 1970s. “We just copied it,” he told an interviewer in 2001. Redd started out making both blackjack and poker machines, but dropped blackjack after gamblers realized that their money lasted a lot longer in the poker machines.
As with slot machines when they were first introduced, Redd thought video poker was little more than a novelty; he figured people entering the casino would play a few games before getting down to more serious gambling. Wrong again—gamblers too intimidated to play at the poker tables made video poker machines a mainstay.
THE BIG SIX WHEEL/WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Description: If you’re familiar with TV’s Wheel of Fortune, you already know how this game works. The only differences are that in casinos the wheel is mounted vertically, not horizontally the way it is on TV, and the dealer spins it instead of the players. Pegs divide the wheel into 54 different sections that offer different payouts according to how many times they appear on the wheel. Sections that pay $1 for every dollar wagered are scattered all over the wheel, but there may be only one or two sections that pay $20. When the wheel is spun, the pegs rub against an arrow pointer that slows the wheel down; the winning section is the one the arrow is pointing at when the wheel stops spinning.
History: The wheel of fortune is so old that nobody knows for sure how it originated. One story, most likely apocryphal, is that Roman soldiers invented the game as a means of divvying up the battlefield spoils of defeated enemies. Rather than fight over who got what, each soldier inscribed a mark in a section of the wheel of an overturned chariot. A spear was stuck into the ground next to the wheel to serve as a marker, and then the wheel was spun. The booty in question went to the person whose mark was cl
osest to the spear when the wheel stopped spinning. From there the game is said to have spread to harvest festivals and other public gatherings, where the large wheel made it possible for crowds of people to follow the action. Roulette, which means “small wheel” in French, may have started out as a more portable version of the same game.
Heinz sells more than 50% of all the ketchup in the world.
UNCLE JOHN’S STALL OF FAME
Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the creative ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, etc. That’s why he created the “Stall of Fame.”
Honoree: Patricia Bernard, a game show contestant
Notable Achievement: Making game show history…in the ladies’ room
True Story: In 1976 Bernard was an audience member on the game show The Price Is Right. And she knew her chances of getting on the show were slim—out of 350 hopefuls, only 9 are chosen to play. So she thought she could safely sneak away for a bathroom break. You can probably guess what happened next: “Patricia Bernard! Come on down!” The camera panned the audience looking for her…to no avail. Her stunned husband, who’d been sitting next to her, jumped up and yelled, “Hold on, I’ll go get her!” and ran out of the studio. Amused, host Bob Barker said into his microphone, “It had to happen some time, folks. She’s in the little girls’ room. Well, if she can’t come to us, let’s all go to her.” Then Barker started walking down the aisle, followed by several contestants. Thankfully, before they reached the bathroom, the Bernards ran back into the studio to the cheers of the audience. (No word on how she did on the show.)
Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Page 7