NASDAQ was totally disabled in December 1987 when a squirrel bit through a phone line.
WEIRD EUROPE
We cover some of the individual European countries elsewhere in this book, but here’s a roundup for the rest of the Continent. No one is spared the odd-o-scope.
STRIPPING IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
In 1989, officials from the new democratic Czechoslovakian government planned a striptease show for visiting foreign dignitaries. It soon discovered that the previous (Communist) government had authorized only two women in the country to be strippers. Only one could be located, but she was out of practice and got too tired to continue after just a few minutes of dancing.
ROBBERS IN FRANCE
In 1990, a man tried to rob a café in Montpelier, France. He almost got away with it, too…until the the café owner realized that the revolver pointed at him was a fake gun—made out of candy. The police came, but by then the burglar had destroyed most of the evidence by eating his weapon. (He was arrested anyway.)
EL NUDE-O
In 2006 a 26-year-old lawyer and swimming champion named Albert Rivera ran for president of Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain. His main campaign strategy: plastering the area’s major cities with 10,000 posters of himself naked, with the caption “We don’t care where you were born. We don’t care which language you speak. We don’t care what kind of clothes you wear. We care about you.” Rivera, an admitted longshot, said he did it to get young people talking about politics. (He did…and he lost.)
SLIPPERY SWEDE
An inmate escaped Hall Prison outside Stockholm, Sweden, without stealing a key or filing bars. He had saved all the margarine from all of his meals for over a year. When he had enough, he covered himself with it and slipped between the bars of his cell.
First novel sold in a vending machine (at the Paris Metro): Murder on the Orient Express.
INVINCIBLE BULGARIANS
Elena Marinova of Bulgaria was in a severe head-on car accident in 2006 but was saved from multiple injuries—including fractured ribs, punctured organs, and collapsed lungs—by her breast implants. Doctors say the size 40DD implants acted like airbags and absorbed the impact.
SOUPED-UP ITALIAN COWS
Organized crime is still rampant in Italy, but it’s not as glamorous as it’s depicted in the movies. In 2006 Italian police busted a Mafia-connected ring in Naples that was feeding steroids to buffalo and cows to produce more milk for making mozzarella cheese. In 2005 police cracked a similar ring that was drugging race horses with Viagra, which apparently makes them run faster.
SMURF SNUFF FILM
In 2005 UNICEF aired a bizarre public service announcement in Belgium, birthplace of the Smurfs, in which the entire Smurf village was eradicated by warplanes. It ended with a single live Smurf, a baby, crying, and the tagline “Don’t let war affect the lives of children.”
DEAD DRUNK
In 2006, police in Vilnius, Lithuania, pulled over a truck driver who was driving right down the middle of a two-lane highway. They suspected the man was drunk, and they were right—a Breathalyzer test revealed the man had 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood—18 times the legal limit…and twice the level that’s usually fatal.
EXPLODING ITALIAN VEGETABLES
An Italian woman was peeling an artichoke in 2003 when it suddenly gave off a spark, then gave off a small flame, and then exploded in a fiery cloud. Police rushed to the scene, assuming the explodi-choke was the work of an Italian terrorist known to plant explosives in produce in Italian supermarkets. Testing, however, showed no signs of explosives, making it a naturally occurring exploding artichoke.
You may be allergic to one cat, but not allergic to another.
SWEDES ON THE MOON
Little red country cottages are a common sight in Sweden. Now the country wants to put one on the Moon. The Swedish Space Corporation has conducted a study and determined that it is possible to put such a structure on the Moon, at an estimated cost of 500 million kronor ($73 million), by 2011. A nationwide contest is under way for children to design the cottage, which is required to be incredibly small—it can be no more than eight square meters and weigh no more than 10 pounds.
ROELEVELD’S ARK
Police in Eerbeek, The Netherlands, found more than 250,000 dead, stuffed, and preserved animals in three bomb shelters in the backyard of 72-year-old John Roeleveld. The man claimed that God had told him to take two of every species of animal and keep them for the upcoming end of the world. (God also told him He’d resurrect the animals even if they were dead.) The collection included an elephant, a camel, a bear, apes, panthers, kangaroos, ostriches, and crocodiles.
WILL THEY STAND FOR IT?
In 2006, principal Anne Lise Gjul of the Dvergsnes School in Kristiansand, Norway, instituted a new bathroom rule: Boys have to sit down to pee. It was done, she said, because the boys have “bad aim” and the same bathrooms have to be used by boys and girls. The rule caused political turmoil. “When boys are not allowed to pee in the natural way, the way boys have done for generations, it is meddling with God’s work,” Vidar Kleppe, head of the national Democratic party, said. “It’s a human right not to have to sit down like a girl.”
I PREDICT I WON’T BE ON THE JURY
Here’s a story for anyone who’s ever tried to get out of jury duty. A woman in Oslo, Norway, got out of it in 2002 by saying that she was psychic. She told the judge that she couldn’t be impartial because she already knew what verdict would be reached. She also claimed she had seen the crime committed in her crystal ball.
What’s a quidnunc? Huh? Huh? It’s someone who asks too many questions.
THUMB SALAD
Real-life restaurant horror stories from the BRI Ultra-Gross file.
MENU ITEM: Chicken wings
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: A chicken head
HORROR STORY: Katherine Ortega brought chicken wings home from a McDonald’s in Newport News, Virginia, in November 2000. To her family’s surprise, along with the wings they got a deep-fried chicken head, complete with beak, comb, and even some feathers. “I screamed,” Ortega later said. When she got through screaming she called the manager, who offered to replace the wings (she declined) and asked her to bring the head back. She told him he could see it on TV—she was going to tell the local news about it. “I wanted consumers to know what they’re eating.”
MENU ITEM: Salad
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: A piece of a thumb
HORROR STORY: In March, 2004, a 22-year-old woman ordered a salad at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers in Canton, Ohio. She had eaten most of it when she bit into what she thought was a piece of gristle—except it had part of a fingernail on it. The previous day an employee had severed his thumb-tip while cutting lettuce…and they had been unable to find it. The lettuce was used in the salad the next day. The woman, who remained anonymous, was described by a Red Robin spokesman as “pretty upset.”
MENU ITEM: Beer
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: A diaphragm
HORROR STORY: In 1997 a man in Zimbabwe was drinking a bottle of beer when he noticed that it smelled funny. Then he noticed something odd in the bottle. It turned out to be a female contraceptive device. The man suffered “a nervous shock of very serious degree and severe gastroenteritis,” his lawyer said. The man sued Zimbabwe’s National Brewery for the “shock, depression, and anxiety” the diaphragm-spiked beer caused. He was awarded the equivalent of about $400 in damages.
The Baltimore Ravens have three mascots: Edgar, Allan, and Poe.
MENU ITEM: Big Mac
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: A rat head
HORROR STORY: In June 1999, nine-year-old Ayan Abdi Jama was eating with her parents at a McDonald’s in Toronto, Canada. She started eating her Big Mac, then pulled the head of a rat—complete with eyes, teeth, nose and whiskers—out of the sandwich. The girl’s parent’s reported that “the rat and the Big Mac were partially ingested by Ayan.” They also claimed that the restaurant’s assistant manager tr
ied to confiscate the sandwich. The girl’s mother kept it and took it to a lab for study. Result: It was a rat’s head alright, and it was raw, meaning that it had been placed in the sandwich after the burgers were cooked. Note: The family filed a $11.2 million lawsuit in 2001. As of 2006, the case still hadn’t been settled.
MENU ITEM: Salad
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: A frog
HORROR STORY: In February 2004, a woman on a Qantas Airline flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Wellington, New Zealand, opened her in-flight salad…and found a live frog looking at her. The one-and-a-half-inch whistling tree frog was sitting on a slice of cucumber. The passenger quickly closed the lid and hailed a flight attendant, who quietly took the salad away. After landing, the frog, though a protected species in New Zealand, was taken by quarantine officials and “euthanized” in a freezer. The airline said it changed lettuce suppliers after the incident.
MENU ITEM: A hot dog
SURPRISE INGREDIENT: Bullets
HORROR STORY: In May 2004, 31-year-old Olivia Chanes bought a hotdog at a stand in Irvine, California. She took a bite, swallowed it, and then bit again—right into a 9-mm bullet. When she got home later she started having stomach pains. She went to the emergency room—where x-rays showed that she hadn’t just bit into a bullet, she had also swallowed one. Police checked all the other dogs at the stand, found nothing, and said they would continue to investigate. Chanes had a good (and odd) attitude: “If a bullet’s going to be in your stomach, at least it didn’t pierce the skin to get there,” she said. Doctors told her it would be best to let the bullet exit her body “naturally.” (When it did, she gave it to the police.)
In the late 1960s, Pez tried to market flower-flavored candies.
WEIRD CRIME NEWS
Here’s a look at some of the stranger people and events that have been in the news recently.
NEVER TOO LATE
In August 2003, a man later identified as J.L. “Red” Rountree walked into a branch of the First American Bank in Abilene, Texas, handed a large envelope marked “robbery” to a teller, and told her to fill it with money. Moments later Red sped off in his 1996 Buick Regal with $2,000 in small bills. He didn’t get far: A witness took down his license number and called the police; 30 minutes later police arrested Rountree and recovered the money. So what makes this story so odd? Rountree is 91 years old—probably the oldest bank robber in U.S. history. The First American job was his third heist in five years. Why rob banks? Red blames it on a bad experience with his own bank. “They forced me into bankruptcy,” he says. “I haven’t liked banks since.”
TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME
On Thanksgiving day 2001, police were called to the Ohio home of Nandor Santho, 46. While searching the premises they found 150 marijuana plants growing in the basement. Who called the cops? Santho’s dog Willie—the pointer apparently stepped on his master’s cell phone in such a way that it auto-dialed 911—twice. Dispatchers mistook Willie’s whimpering for a female in distress; which is why they sent the police to the home.
PIG-HEADED
In August 2003 a burglar broke into Richard Morrison’s apartment in Liverpool, England, and began ransacking it. But when he saw the big jar with the human head floating in it, he went straight to the police, turned himself in, and told them what he found. Police sped over to the apartment, kicked down the door and discovered…that Morrison is an artist, not a psycho—the object in the jar was a mask he’d made from strips of bacon. The police apologized for the mix-up and promised to fix the door. Morrison says he’s not mad. “It is a pretty macabre piece of work,” he admits.
In Massachusetts, it is illegal for a mourner at a funeral to eat more than three sandwiches.
WELCOME TO COLLEGE!
(NOW GET UNDRESSED)
If you thought college rituals involving nudity were strictly the province of drunken fraternities and secret societies like Skull and Bones, think again…
STUDENT BODIES
If you went to college, you probably have vivid memories of those first weeks away from home: moving into the dorms or into your first apartment, registering for classes, buying books, attending your first lecture, stripping naked to pose for “posture photographs”…
Huh?
Believe it or not, posing nude for posture photographs was a common part of the college freshman experience for several generations. The practice dates back to the 19th century, when schools felt they had a responsibility to educate the body as well as the mind. Harvard University started photographing its students in the buff in the 1880s, and by the 1930s the practice was widespread, not just at Ivy League schools but in colleges and universities across the country. Many schools, especially women’s colleges, made proper posture a requirement for graduation and assigned incoming students with especially poor carriage to remedial classes. They had to demonstrate marked improvement by the time they collected their diplomas.
BARE NECESSITY
College life may have been different in those days, but it wasn’t that different: Stripping naked so that a stranger could take your picture seemed weird even then. Yet the students meekly did as they were told, encouraged along by school officials who explained that everyone had to do it, and that everyone had been doing it for as long as anyone could remember. How many nervous freshman would have been willing to be the first to say no? Apparently, none.
The discomfort of the photo-taking experience manifested itself in the form of urban legends that swirled around more than a few college campuses: Chilling tales of break-ins at the photo labs and naked pictures for sale on the bad side of town probably kept plenty of co-eds up at night over the years.
Batman and Robin once traveled through time to save Marco Polo.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
As generation after generation of students graduated and moved on with their lives, many would look back 20, 30, or 40 years later and wonder, whatever happened to that nude picture they took of me in college? Where is it now? Will it ever come back to haunt me?
The fear must have been particularly acute for those alumni who went on to become famous: Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, George Bush, Sr., and Hillary Clinton, to name just a few, all attended colleges where freshman nude photos were taken; presumably, all of them submitted to the ritual. Even Judith Martin, better known as the newspaper columnist Miss Manners, posed in the altogether at Wellesley College. Once, when she delivered a speech to an alumni gathering at her alma mater, she brought up the subject of the photographs and offered to sell them back to her former classmates in return for hefty donations to the school. “A lot of people turned pale before they realized it was a joke,” she told the New York Times in 1995.
NOW SHOWING
The fears of countless alumni might have continued forever, simmering but never really materializing, were it not for the fact that when television talk-show host Dick Cavett (Yale ’55) spoke at the graduation of the Yale class of ’84 (which did not have to pose nude), he made an off-color reference to the urban legend. When he was in school, he explained to the crowd, the photos of the Vassar women were stolen and ended up for sale in the red-light district of New Haven, Connecticut. “The photos found no buyers,” Cavett joked.
One of the graduates in the audience was Naomi Wolf, who would go on to become a bestselling author in the early 1990s. She never forgot Cavett’s tasteless joke, and in 1992 she attacked him in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Cavett responded in a letter to the editor, and that in turn prompted a Yale history professor named George Hersey to write to the paper, claiming that the so-called “posture photos” weren’t really taken for that purpose at all, at least not by the 1960s—that was just a cover story for a much more sinister project. Many of the photos, he revealed, were really taken by a quack scientist who wanted to prove that body measurements could be used to predict the subjects’ intelligence, personality traits, and even their likely success in life. What Hersey was saying, in effect, was that colleges al
l over the country had allowed their most vulnerable students to be used as guinea pigs and then had lied about it. And Hersey, it turns out, was correct.
Buenaventura, Colombia, is the wettest inhabited place on Earth, with 267" of rain per year.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
The “quack scientist” was a Columbia University psychologist named William Sheldon. He had once been considered a leader in his field, and that was how he gained access to the students.
Sheldon was best known for his theory that there was an inborn link between body types and personality. He came up with the idea after studying and photographing hundreds of juvenile delinquents at a reform school in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1940. After analyzing the photos, Sheldon concluded that each individual’s physique was a combination of three primary physical body types: mesomorphs (large, muscular features and little or no body fat); ectomorphs (long and thin with linear features), and endomorphs (short and fat with round features).
With some people, one of the three body types was clearly dominant—the person was either very muscular, very thin, or very fat. But many people were more subtle combinations of all three types. Sheldon had devised a three-digit numerical scale for grading a person’s physique. The values ranged from 1 to 7, with each of the three digits referring to a different body type: an extreme or “pure” mesomorph measured 7-1-1 on Sheldon’s scale; a pure ectomorph scored as 1-7-1, and a pure endomorph scored as 1-1-7.
TRUE TO FORM
Sheldon believed that each of the three body types had specific character traits associated with them: mesomorphs were aggressive, self confident, and drawn to physical activity (and were more likely to commit crimes); ectomorphs valued their privacy and led lives of self restraint; and endomorphs were social people who loved food and comfort. Since he presumed a link between body type and character traits, Sheldon was also convinced that by photographing and then measuring the different parts of a person’s body, he could determine what kind of personality that person had and even predict the kind of life he or she would lead in the future.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd Page 10
