IT’S SNOT FAIR
Michael Mancini was stopped in traffic in the town of Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland, in 2010. He took out a tissue and blew his nose. A moment later, a policeman signaled for the 39-year-old furniture restorer to pull over into a nearby parking lot. But it wasn’t just any policemen—it was Officer “Shiny Buttons” (his real name is Stuart Gray), known for his strict adherence to the letter of the law. Officer Buttons witnessed the nose-blowing incident and cited Mancini for distracted driving, which carries a fine of £60 ($93). “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mancini. “My van wasn’t even moving!” Officer Buttons wasn’t kidding. Mancini appealed to police department officials to drop the charges, but they refused, so he had to pay the fine and his license was suspended. “What is the world coming to?” he complained to reporters.
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3M Health Care now offers a Bluetooth stethoscope. It records what your doctor is listening to.
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IMPULSE BUYS FOR
THE RICH & FAMOUS
Poor people are starving and the middle class is a dying breed. Meanwhile, the world’s wealthiest continue to live in the lap of luxury while they lap up ludicrously luxurious stuff like this.
BOTTLED WATER. “Image is everything,” says Kevin G. Boyd, the Hollywood producer who created “Bling H2O” spring water. The frosted-glass bottle comes decorated with handcrafted Swarovski crystals and filled with water “bottled at the source in Dandridge, Tennessee.” Like a fine wine, it must be uncorked to drink. Cost: $38 per bottle.
FLIP-FLOPS. Created in 2004 by Brazilian jewelry designer H. Stern, a “regular” pair of these sandals—encrusted with gems or made of crocodile skin—will run you a few thousand dollars. The top-of-the-line model comes adorned with diamonds and more than 1,500 feathers made of gold. Cost: $17,000.
SUNGLASSES. Billed as the “world’s most expensive sunglasses,” these shades are sold as a high-end luxury accessory by the Italian company Dolce & Gabbana. Features: “A sexy gold rim, and the lenses are a soothing brown in color.” (It also has adjustable nose pads.) Cost: $383,609.
JEANS. Design houses Earnest Sewn and Van Cleef & Arpels collaborated to create a limited run of Alhambra Designer Jeans featuring Van Cleef’s signature Alhambras (four-lobed cross icons based on Moorish architecture). “The stretch denim is finished with a white mother-of-pearl and yellow gold Alhambra button, miniature Alhambra rivets, and a 14-inch Alhambra chain that attaches to a hand-crafted leather wallet.” Cost: $11,300.
POOL CUE. This cue is called “The Intimidator,” but not just because of its price tag. Sold by McDermott Handcrafter Cues, the pool stick features four “bladed wings” on the handle…making it look like a Klingon Bat’leth sword. (So if you’re losing the game, you can simply disembowel your opponent.) Cost: $150,000.
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In 2008 a rare red dairy cow sold at a Connecticut auction for $1 million.
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NAIL POLISH: Four companies, including Allure magazine, collaborated to come up with “I Do”—a nail polish containing powdered platinum. The first batch, which came in a platinum bottle, cost $55,000. Now it’s sold in glass bottles for a mere $250.
A PAIR OF GUITAR PICKS. Sold by Australian company Starpics, these two picks are made from a piece of the four-billion-year-old Gibeon meteorite (chunks of which were discovered in 1836 strewn over a 70-mile-wide area of Namibia, Africa). For the nonmusical, there are also Gibeon meteorite rings, pocket knives, and pens. Cost: $4,764.
PIZZA. The “Louis XIII” gourmet pizza takes three days to prepare, but famed chef Renato Viola of Alerno, Italy, will travel to your house to bake it for you. Toppings include three types of caviar, two types of lobster, and hand-picked pink Australian salt. The final touch: It’s misted with cognac. Cost: $12,000.
ICE CREAM SUNDAE. Created especially for the 50th
anniversary of the Serendipity 3 Café in New York City, the Golden Opulence Sundae includes five scoops of Tahitian ice cream rolled in edible gold leaf, gold-painted truffles, marzipan cherries, and sweetened caviar, all of which is topped by a gilded sugar flower. Cost: $1,000.
TOILET. If you win the lottery, you could be reading this on your new Toto Neorest. Features: hands-free flushing, a lid that automatically opens and closes, a remote control to set the seat temperature—and for emergencies, a powerful “Cyclone® flush” setting. Cost: $5,000.
BURIAL PLOT. Even if you can’t take it with you, at least you can rest easy at the most posh spot in Southern California’s Santa Barbara Cemetery. This plot boasts a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean and has room for two. Cost: $83,000.
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In Mexico in 2009, there were at least 7,700 deaths linked to organized crime.
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A WORD FROM THE
ODD ANIMAL SEX DEPT.
It turns out that there’s a lot more to the birds and bees than pretty wings and cute mating dances. There’s also stabbing, exploding…and a little murder.
CUPID’S SLIMY ARROWS
All land snails are hermaphrodites—they have both male and female sexual organs, all of which are located on their necks. Before they mate, they engage in a courting period that lasts from a few minutes to several hours, during which the snails touch their “feet” together, caress each other’s appendages, and even “kiss” each other’s lips. Then the snails engage in copulation, when each transfers sperm to the other. (The sperm is stored in special sacs and used later.) After the courtship phase and just before the moment of sexual engagement, some snail species attempt to violently pierce each other’s sex organs with what scientists call “love darts”—thin barbs of calcium, about a quarter-inch in length, that are produced near the sex organs. This piercing can continue for several rounds of mating, during which new calcium darts continuously form. A 2006 study determined what the love darts are for: Snails that are successfully speared by the darts are able to store twice as much sperm as snails that aren’t. It turns out that nearly all of the sperm received during mating is digested and killed by enzymes before it can be used for fertilization. The study found that love darts carry a chemical that impedes production of the enzymes, allowing more sperm to make it to the storage sacs. So snail couples that are more successful at piercing each other have a better chance of producing young.
SKYROCKETS IN FLIGHT
In the world of honeybees, male bees, known as drones, have one main purpose: sex. When they’re only a few weeks old, drones leave their hives and gather in “drone congregation areas,” or DCAs, with drones from several other bee colonies. DCA’s hover 30 to 150 feet in the air and sometimes span 100 yards or more, with the drones hanging out like randy teenage boys waiting for girls to come by. The girls—virgin queen bees who have been sheltered in the hive and fed a diet of royal jelly—leave the hive on “mating flights” when they’re just one to two weeks old. Instinctively, they fly into DCAs, and the young drones give chase. Between 10 and 30 will mate with a single queen in flight, a spectacle that has rarely been witnessed. During the midair mating, the genitals of a drone rupture—biologists describe them as “exploding”—which throws the drone off the queen, leaving his sex organs inside her. Then he dies. The queen flies off to establish a new colony, where she will use the sperm from her explosive mates for the rest of her life (up to three years). Drones that aren’t able to find a virgin queen to mate with go back to their hive, where they are so useless that they have to be fed by female workers. When autumn comes, they’re kicked out and eventually starve to death.
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A Pew Research poll reported that 32% of teenagers have been victims of cyber-bullying.
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Extra: Want to know how to tell if a bee is a drone? Look at the eyes: A drone’s are huge—twice as large as those of a worker or queen. Bee experts say drones need the enhanced vision to find the queen during in-flight mating.
LOVE POTION
Male giraffes spend a lot of t
heir time roaming around their home ranges searching for females who are ready to mate. When a female’s in the mood, she rubs her neck on the male’s neck and flanks. The next move is the male’s: He walks behind her and nudges her butt with his nose. This induces her to urinate and, in an activity that’s been witnessed for centuries but never fully understood, the male takes a big mouthful of the urine. A 2006 study finally confirmed why the males do it: A male giraffe can tell by the hormone content in the female’s urine exactly where she is in her reproductive cycle. And he’ll try to mate with her only if she’s in her peak “fertile window,” which occurs every two weeks and lasts just two days. If she isn’t in that window, it isn’t worth the considerable energy it takes to attempt to mate with her. If she is, the male will follow her around, often for many hours, necking with her and generally bothering her until, if she deems him a suitable mate, she finally stops walking. This indicates to the male that he can mate with her. Once he’s mounted, the rest is over in less than a minute.
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When an angry customer wrote “never waste a tree” on an unsolicited credit card application and mailed it back in 2005, the company issued a credit card to “Never Waste Tree.”
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BOYGIRL
If you’re ever in Africa or Asia and you come across a hyena with a large penis, you’ll probably think it’s a male. But there’s a good chance you’d be wrong. While still nursing, all hyena pups receive a large dose of the male hormone androgen via their mothers’ milk. This makes the pups more aggressive, a helpful trait in the hardscrabble life of a hyena pack. But it also has side effects for the females: The hormone produces a pseudopenis, a growth that’s several inches long. The difficult part comes when it’s time for mating: A male has to be able to insert his own actual penis into the female’s pseudopenis—a tricky business—and only the most persistent and patient males are able to do it. Even more bizarre: The hyena birth canal is located in the pseudopenis, meaning that the females also give birth to their babies through it.
THAT’S NO LUMP
The anglerfish lives deep in the world’s oceans and is known for having a long growth that protrudes from the top of its head and ends with a fleshy blob. The blob acts as bait that anglerfish use to “angle” for their food—other fish. But for many years, scientists couldn’t solve a mystery: why the only anglerfish that were ever caught were females. Then someone noticed strange, fleshy growths on the females’ bodies. Further study finally determined what the lumps were: male anglerfish, which are much smaller than females (in some species, of their size), and are born without a functioning digestive system. Upon hatching, the first thing a male does is hunt down a female and bite into her side, back, or belly. Enzymes released from the male’s mouth dissolve the female’s flesh, and he eventually fuses onto her. Their bloodstreams merge, and for the rest of his life, the male lives off of the female like a parasite. Over time, his organs, teeth, bones, and eyes all disappear. All that remains are his testes. When the female is ready to mate, she releases eggs, and what remains of the male releases sperm to fertilize them. Bonus: A large female will often play host to several males, and will live the rest of her life with their manly lumps on her body.
THE BLIND PAINTER
Ever seen Esref Armagan’s paintings? Neither has he.
THE MIND’S EYE
If you looked at Turkish painter Esref Armagan’s portraits of trees, skies, a fish playing a cello, or even former U.S. President Bill Clinton, you would never guess that the painter was born without eyes—meaning he’s not simply blind, he has no eyes.
Born in Istanbul in 1953, Armagan grew up in an impoverished family and never went to school. But for as long as he can remember, he loved to draw, and he’s developed his talent over the years. So how does he create his paintings?
• First, Armagan learns as much as he can about his subject. He touches it (if possible), reads up on it, asks his friends to describe the colors and the shading, and, in some cases, he draws a rough portrait of the subject.
• Then, with a picture firmly in place in his imagination, he draws a raised “map” of the subject on a piece of paper using a Braille stylus, a type of pen with a sharp point used for etching.
• When Armagan is ready to begin painting, he uses the fingers of his left hand to “read” the map, and dips the fingers of his right into quick-drying oil-based paints that are always arranged in the same order on his palette. Throughout the process, he keeps one hand on the map and one hand on the canvas until he knows the piece is complete. On some paintings, he forgoes the 3-D map altogether and just paints from “memory.”
Armagan’s works have garnered praise in galleries across Europe and in New York, and not just because they were painted by a blind person, but because they’re actually good. (According to many art critics, he’s better at some techniques, including using perspective, than most sighted painters.) “No one can call me blind,” he says. “I can see more with my fingers than sighted people can see with their eyes.”
BRAIN POWER
Art critics aren’t the only ones interested in Armagan’s unique talents; neuroscientists are studying his visual cortex, the part of the brain that makes sense of the information streaming in from the eyes. Why study Armagan’s visual cortex when he can’t see? Because of a phenomenon known as neural plasticity—the brain’s ability to adapt to its own unique limitations.
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In 2008 a Canadian man wedged his head in a sewer while trying to retrieve his wallet and died.
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For example, when a sighted person tries to remember the image of something he’s already seen, he uses his visual cortex, but to a lesser degree than when he’s actually looking at something. Scans of Armagan’s brain, however, reveal that when he paints, his visual cortex is extremely active. If you were to put a scan of a sighted person who is looking at an object next to a scan of Armagan’s brain while he’s painting an object, they would look very similar. Only a trained neuroscientist would be able to spot the clues signaling that Armagan never actually looked at the image.
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE
According to Professor John M. Kennedy, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Toronto at Scarborough: “Mr. Armagan is an important figure in the history of picture-making, and in the history of knowledge. His work is remarkable. I was struck by the drawings he has made as much as by his work with paint. He has demonstrated for the first time that a blind person can develop on his or her own pictorial skills the equal of most depictions by the sighted. This has not happened before in the history of picture-making.”
Kennedy is one of several neuroscientists who believe that their studies of Armagan will change what we know about how sight works, and may one day be used to help blind people learn to “see” the world just as well as Armagan does.
WORST APP EVER
There are thousands of “apps” for Apple’s iPhone, but none drew more complaints than the “Baby Shaker”: a video game in which the player shakes the iPhone until a virtual baby stops crying (then two red X’s appear over its eyes). The app was only available for download for two days in 2009 before Apple removed it. The company explained that it should have been rejected before it was added, but someone must have “missed it.” Alex Talbot, the app’s designer, admitted, “Yes, the Baby Shaker was a bad idea.”
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Hollywood’s Museum of Death displays the actual head of French serial killer Henri Landru.
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YOU’RE SUING ME
FOR WHAT?
Please don’t sue us, no matter how much pain and suffering you may endure while reading about the crazy reasons people come up with to sue each other.
BERRY, BERRY ODD
After eating Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries for four years, in 2009 Janine Sugawara of California finally came to the realization that there aren’t any real berries in Crunch Berries. So she sued the cereal manufacturer for f
alse advertising. The case was quickly dismissed: “This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a ‘crunchberry.’” The judge also noted that the same attorneys lost a previous lawsuit complaining that Froot Loops didn’t contain real fruit.
THAT’S A LOT OF ZEROS
Dalton Chisolm was bouncing checks. And he didn’t know why. Angry, he called Bank of America to get answers. Not satisfied by their “insufficient funds” excuse, Chisolm sued B of A for “1,784 billion, trillion dollars”—more than the entire world’s gross domestic product of $60 trillion. Sylvain Cappell, a math professor at New York University, said, “If he thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense.” The case was dismissed.
FALLEN FROM GRACE
Shin Lim Kim was injured in 2008 while serving as a “catcher” at the Portland Onnuri Church in Beaverton, Oregon. What does a catcher do? He or she stands behind a parishioner who is about to be touched by a pastor, and catches the parishioner if they fall to the floor in a fit of religious ecstasy (or, as it’s called, is “slain in the spirit”). Kim, a small woman, was asked to catch Hyun Joo Yoon, a larger woman who, according to Kim’s lawyer, “began flailing, falling on, and injuring the plaintiff.” Kim claimed that no one warned her of the dangers of catching a person or provided her with any training. She also argued that Yoon was negligent for failing to control her body once the pastor laid his hands on her. According to the lawsuit, Kim suffered a painful injury to her spine that made her “sick, sore, nervous, and distressed.” She’s suing both the church and Yoon for $125,000.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 30
