Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy
Page 51
Don’t miss: The tinfoil-suit fashion show, the “Miss Space Debris” beauty contest, and for the kids, the Alien Autopsy Room.
OCTOBER: Phuket Vegetarian Festival, Thailand
Description: Squeamish? Then stay far, far away from this festival. Every autumn, Chinese and Thai religious devotees called Mah Song parade through Phuket’s streets in trance-like states, their bodies pierced with, among other things, bicycle wheels, saw blades, and metal skewers of varying sizes—all protruding into and out of their arms, legs, noses, lips, ears, and eyebrows. There’s also hot-coal firewalking and a ladder made of sharpened blades. Why? The Mah Song believe that those who are truly devoted feel little, if any, pain, and aren’t left with scars. You don’t have to participate in the self-mutilation, but like the Mah Song, you’re asked to adhere to a vegetarian diet all week. Luckily, that’s not hard because the festival’s food is excellent.
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World’s youngest lion tamer: 8-year-old Jorge Elich, of the Circus Paris. He works unassisted.
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History: In the 1820s, when Phuket tin miners and their families were suffering from a malaria epidemic, a traveling opera company from China came to the area. The singers also caught malaria, but for 10 days, they ate nothing but vegetables and performed religious ceremonies. To the surprise of the miners, the performers recovered from the illness much more quickly than the locals did. The opera singers taught the rituals to the townspeople, and within a year the malaria epidemic had ceased. The festival keeps the tradition alive today, though it’s unclear how the self-mutilation became part of the festivities.
Don’t miss: The ear-plug vendors. In addition to being one of the world’s most unusual festivals, it’s also one of the loudest. Drums and firecrackers are sounded all week long to scare away evil spirits.
NOVEMBER: The Quiet Festival, New Jersey
Description: One of the activities at this low-key festival in Ocean City: hearing a pin drop. You can also try your hand at a group whispering session, enter a yawn-off, and take as many naps as you like. It’s one of the smallest and most obscure festivals in the world (only a few dozen people participated in 2009), and also offers silent movies, a sign-language choir, and mimes.
History: “I’ve been tired for about 40 years now,” says Mark Soifer, 72, who organized the first Quiet Festival for stressed-out people in 1989. “I feel uniquely qualified to represent the millions of tired folks in this nation and the world.” By day, Soifer works as Ocean City’s publicist, but he’s also the president of the National Association of Tired People (NAP), which sponsors the event.
Don’t miss: The “windchime symphony.”
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Oxford scientists have discovered a way to implant artificial memories in the brains of fruitflies.
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DECEMBER: Night of the Radishes, Mexico
Description: Each December 23rd, this pre-Christmas celebration features the most elaborate radish sculptures in the world. Skilled artisans gather in Oaxaca City for La Noche de Rábanos to show off their pink-and-white sculptures of saints, Nativity scenes, conquistadors, and animals. And these are no ordinary radishes, but giant ones, some measuring 1½ feet long and weighing seven pounds. The festival lasts only one night because after that, the artwork starts to rot.
History: Spanish monks brought radishes to Mexico in the 16th century and encouraged the locals to grow them—and also to carve them. The elaborate veggie sculptures have been a tradition ever since. The Night of the Radishes officially began in 1897, thanks to Oaxaca’s mayor, Francisco Vasconcelos Flores, who wanted to preserve this unique cultural heritage (and sell more radishes to tourists).
Don’t miss: After the judging has ended and a champion radishartist has been named, fireworks light up the sky.
WELCOME HOME!
Congratulations! Now that you’ve dodged camel spit in Turkey, splattered your friends with oranges in Italy, devoured fried lamb testicles in New Zealand, danced around the Maypole in Scotland, run around like a chicken with your head cut off in Colorado, wrestled toe to toe in England, frolicked in the mud in South Korea, sailed on a ship through the Nevada desert, performed an alien autopsy in Wisconsin, traversed hot coals in Thailand, made windchime music in New Jersey, and sculpted a radish saint in Mexico, you can take a month or two off.
Or…you could catch a quick flight to Russia and participate in a truly surreal New Year’s party: At Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, a hole is cut into the ice and divers haul the New Year Tree more than 100 feet below the surface. After you get your picture taken with Russian folk heroes Father Frost and the Ice Maiden, you plunge into the depths where you’ll celebrate the night SCUBA-dancing among the sparkling lights of the New Year Tree.
Then you can dry off, warm up, fly home…and take that well-deserved sabbatical.
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Michael Jackson & Raquel Welch had something in common: Both reportedly bathed in bottled water.
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ODDS AND ENDS
With the emphasis on “odd.”
• In September 2008, Santiago Cabrera woke up in his Fresno, California, home when he “felt something hit him in the face,” according to the subsequent police report. He looked up to see “an unknown male bent over him. The male continued to strike him in the face and head area with a sausage.” The assailant—who really was hitting Cabrera with a sausage—then took off his pants and ran out of the house. Police found the man’s identification in the pants he’d left behind, and Antonio Vasquez Jr., 21, was arrested a short time later. “I tell you,” said Fresno police officer Ian Burrimond, “this was one weird case.” (The sausage couldn’t be used as evidence; amid the confusion, Cabrera’s dog ate it.)
• Prena Thomas of Lakeland, Florida, has something unusual in her freezer: a 33-year-old snowball. She made it in 1977 during a rare Florida snowstorm and kept it as a memento. “It’s just like a little pet,” she says, and she occasionally takes it out of the freezer to look at it.
• British television personality Myleene Klass, 31, was appearing on the reality show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! in Costa Rica in 2009 when she had to call for help one night from her hotel room. The problem? She’d sprayed herself with insect repellent, which had reacted with the varnish on the bed’s wooden frame—and one of her hands had gotten stuck to the wood. Staff had to slowly peel Klass off the frame to free her (which was, many agreed, more entertaining than the reality show).
• Jonathon Guabello, 29, of Fort Myers, Florida, and his girlfriend came home from a bar one night in October 2008. Guabello wanted to have sex, but his girlfriend wasn’t in the mood…so Guabello shot himself in the arm twice, then tripped over the oven door, hit his head, and passed out. His girlfriend called the police; Guabello was arrested for threatening violence and firing a weapon in an occupied dwelling, and faces several years in prison.
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In 2007 Gibson Guitar launched a Les Paul Robot Guitar that can tune itself.
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Two men burst into a home in Plant City, Florida, late one night in December 2008. One of the men held a knife to the throat of the homeowner…and demanded an eggbeater. The homeowner found an eggbeater and gave it to him. Robert Eugene Thompson and Taurus Deshane Morris were arrested a short time later on burglary and aggravated assault charges. The eggbeater was found in Thompson’s back pocket and returned to the victim.
In January 2010, police arrested Carlos Laurel, 31, and Andre Hardy, 39, on drug charges in Kingston, Pennsylvania. Police reports noted dryly that Laurel and Hardy had 50 bags of crack cocaine in their possession.
Adeel Ayub, 30, a stocker at a supermarket in Preston, England, was arrested in 2009 for, among other things, licking a raw chicken in the store. A coworker filmed the chicken-licking, the video ended up on YouTube, and Ayub was arrested. He was later sentenced to two months in prison.
A farmer named Luis Alfonso Sanchez was treated at a C
olombian hospital in December 2009—after he castrated himself so that he wouldn’t cheat on his wife. She had refused to have sex with him, he told doctors. “When I saw that I could no longer count on her,” he said, “I made the decision to cut my testicles off because I am a Christian and did not want to go look for another.” He also said that, as a farmer, he had castrated many animals, so he thought it was no big deal. “He’s been looked at by the urology department,” a hospital spokesman said, “and they found a complete absence of the testicles.” They added, however, that his wounds had become infected.
In January 2010, lawyer Jeffrey Denner stood up in court in Woburn, Massachusetts, and told the judge that his client, Eben Howard, on trial for assault, was mentally competent to stand trial. His client suddenly jumped out of his seat, accused Denner of putting poison in his cranberry juice, and attacked him. Courtroom security had to restrain him. “Perhaps,” Denner said later, “I spoke too hastily.” The trial continued at a later date.
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The total number of counterfeit U.S. $50 and $100 notes passed and seized in 1990: 1,240,840.
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IT’S TOO LATE…
…to contemplate. The world’s already gone crazy.
“The weird and the stupid are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein
“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
—Pablo Picasso
“The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”
—Arnold J. Toynbee
“Perhaps in time, the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”
—Georg Lichtenberg
“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools, and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”
—Thornton Wilder
“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”
—Henry Miller
“Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.”
—Aldous Huxley
“You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.”
—Art Buchwald
“It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”
—Pierre Trudeau
“I think the people you should worry about are the ones who say, ‘Everything is fine.’”
—Parker Posey
“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone.”
—Joseph Heller
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.”
—James Branch Cabell
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
—Johann von Goethe
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In 2009, the Maldives govt. held a meeting underwater to highlight the threat of global warming.
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A WORLD GONE…SANE?
Maybe Earth isn’t quite as cracked up as it’s cracked up to be.
EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSES
“We are living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on Earth,” according to Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Using models based on modern hunter-gatherer societies, Pinker theorizes that if we all lived like our pre-agrarian tribal ancestors, death rates from violence would be around 2,000 percent higher. During the 20th century alone (which included two world wars), instead of the 100 million lives lost due to conflict, the number would have been closer to two billion. In short, people just aren’t killing each other the way they used to.
The rate of state-based conflicts (wars) worldwide has declined since the end of World War II and has dropped 40 percent since 1992. On February 15, 2003, in 800 cities around the world, 20 million people protested against the impending invasion of Iraq. Although the protests didn’t stop the war, Guinness World Records lists it as “the largest anti-war demonstration in history.”
On a smaller scale, says Pinker, cruelty-as-entertainment is almost gone. Our ancestors flocked to see convicted criminals hanged, beheaded, or burned at the stake. The Romans routinely threw Christians to the lions before thousands of cheering spectators. But public executions rarely occur today, and when they do, they’re condemned by the world community.
NEW AGE THINKING
So when did humanity start evolving into a softer, gentler race? Pinker points to the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th century. One of the by-products of the newfound reasoning in which superstition gave way to science was that people began to develop more empathy for each other. In today’s “Age of Information,” it’s easier than ever before to know about people on the other side of the world, which also leads to increased empathy. Western-style democracies, which rely on cooperation rather than conflict, have also contributed significantly to the sharp decline in violence. There were 20 democratic governments worldwide in 1946; in 2005 there were 88.
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The 1-inch-long vampire moth feeds on the blood of elephants.
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EVEN MORE POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
According to the Millennium Project, an international think tank, there could be even more reason to be hopeful about the future:
• Thanks in large part to emerging technologies, global literacy rates are way up and are expected to rise. In 1970, just 63 percent of people over the age of 15 were literate, compared to 82 percent today. One billion people now have access to information technology and that number is expected to rise, too.
• Population growth, which is currently putting a strain on the world’s resources, will begin declining by 2050. By 2100, there will be one billion fewer people than there are today. The alternative forms of energy that are starting to be implemented on a wide scale should provide more than enough power for them to thrive.
LOOK ON THE SUNNY SIDE
So if the world is actually becoming safer, smarter, and nicer, what accounts for all the gloom and doom on the news? “Better reporting,” says Pinker. He calls it a cognitive illusion: “The easier it is for us to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability we will assign to it.” In other words, when we see violence and political discord all over television, we assume it’s happening everywhere. To combat it, says Pinker, adopt a glass-half-full attitude: “We tend to view things by how low our behavior can sink as opposed to how high our standards have risen.”
So maybe all the crazy stuff in this book is the exception, not the norm. But to be honest, we hope the world doesn’t go completely sane—because it just wouldn’t be as much fun to write about.
PERHAPS YOU SHOULD DISREGARD THE ABOVE
In 2007 a 21-year-old Seattle woman was arrested for assaulting a man in a karaoke bar after his rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” A witness reported that the woman shouted, “Not that song, I hate that song,” before telling the victim that his “singing sucked” and then running up and punching him twice in the face. After she was arrested, the woman head-butted a police officer several times before she was finally subdued and handcuffed.
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After Japan’s biggest bank heist ($5.4 million), the bank got a thank-you note from the robbers.
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UNCLE JOHN’S BATHROOM READER CLASSIC SERIES
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