•In 1631 the hair of the Mughal emperor of northern India, Shah Jahan, turned white from grief after his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died in his arms. (He built the Taj Mahal to house her tomb.)
•In 1851 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published a report of a gambler whose hair turned completely white overnight after he staked his entire fortune on a single card in a poker game. (He must have lost.)
•In 1975 a college student loaned her Toyota Corona to two friends so they could move their belongings to a new apartment in New Jersey. A day later, she got a call that her car had been found upside down in a stream near the Raritan River. Her friends, unable to open the doors or break the glass, drowned. When the car’s owner went to identify their bodies, the hair of both victims had turned white.
•An article in the 2013 International Journal of Trichology (a peer-reviewed medical journal in India) reported that researchers identified 196 cases of sudden whitening of the hair that involved not only scalp hair but also beards, eyelashes, and other body hair.
•In 1902 the British Medical Journal reported the case of a 22-year-old girl who witnessed a woman’s throat being cut. Following this ghastly fright, the pubic hair on only the right side of her body turned white.
•Anne Jolis, reporter for the Atlantic, published a personal account in 2016 about hearing a series of prolonged gunshots outside her hotel window in Dagestan. Terrified, she hid under her bed for 15 minutes…until she finally realized it wasn’t a gun battle, it was a wedding celebration. But the damage was done. The next morning when the 30-year-old Jolis looked in the mirror, she discovered that the dark “mustache” hairs on her upper lip—which had been the bane of her existence—had all turned white.
•In 1882 two doctors actually observed a 38-year-old woman suffering from violent neuralgia to the scalp transform from a brunette to a platinum blonde over the course of five hours.
…who was fired by ABC for spending $13 million to make the first episode of Lost.
THE WHITE HOUSE
It’s often been noted that the graying of a U.S. president’s hair is directly related to the amount of stress he faces. Barack Obama took office months after the 2008 financial meltdown, which is why on March 4, 2009, the New York Times wrote: “Well that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job and President Obama is going gray.” Barbara Bush, wife of President George H. W. Bush, was as well known for her bright white hair. It wasn’t a fashion choice—when Mrs. Bush was just 28, the couple lost their three-year-old daughter, Robin, to leukemia. The future First Lady’s reddish-brown hair turned white practically overnight.
Southjaws: Left-handers also chew their food on the left side of their mouths.
THE FUNGUS AMONG US
If you buy mushrooms at the supermarket, you’re probably familiar with button mushrooms, portabellos, maybe even oyster, shiitake, or porcinis. But there are hundreds of varieties of mushrooms—some edible, some poisonous…and almost all weird. Here’s a sampling.
Fungus: Indigo milk cap
Found In: North America and East Asia
Details: Also called the blue milk, it’s one of the few naturally occurring blue objects in nature. It’s found in the wettest parts of forests and looks like a standard and familiar white mushroom… except for a slight blue tint. Turn it upside down and the underside of the cap is covered in thick, deep-blue gills.
Edible? Yes.
Fungus: Brain mushroom
Found In: Eastern Europe
Details: Usually found under coniferous trees. Along with a nondescript light brown stem, it’s got a cap that’s large, reddish-brown, and wrinkled. In other words, it looks just like a tiny little brain growing on the forest floor.
Edible? It’s lightly poisonous—if you eat it raw, you’ll get sick, but some people say it’s fine, even a delicacy, if it’s cooked properly. (Nevertheless, it’s banned from sale in Spain.)
Fungus: Lobster mushroom
Found in: North America
Details: It’s not exactly a mushroom—it’s a parasitic fungus that grows on certain edible mushroom species. It completely overtakes them, turning the host mushroom a reddish-orange color that’s the exact same shade as a cooked lobster.
Edible? Yes and, oddly, lobster mushrooms have a taste that’s similar to lobster.
Fungus: Bleeding tooth
Found In: North America, Europe, Iran, and Korea
Details: It’s a mushroom that’s bright white with a funnel shape that resembles a human tooth. That’s not all—it’s covered in pores, and when the mushroom is young, a red fluid oozes out. It looks like, well, a bleeding tooth.
Edible? No. It’s not toxic, but it tastes terrible.
Fungus: Texas star
Found In: Texas and Japan
Details: It’s not a star at first. As it grows, it takes on the shape of a cigar—a cylindrical capsule with a rounded end, colored brown. But when it’s time to reproduce, the “cigar” splits open into a six-sided, orange-colored star, sending its spores into the air. And when it does burst open, it whistles.
Edible? Unknown—probably not.
At any given moment, there are an average of 9,728 planes up in the air.
Fungus: Mycena chlorophos
Found In: Japan and Polynesia
Details: In the daylight, these look like a lot of other fungi. They’ve got inch-wide caps that are brownish-gray and sticky to the touch. But when the sun goes down, something magical happens: They glow in the dark, emitting a peculiar shade of lime green. In Japan, they are called yakoh-take, or “night-light mushroom.”
Edible? No, but they’re bioluminescent!
Fungus: Puffballs
Found In: North America
Details: Imagine a balloon made out of mushrooms. It’s a very thin-skinned ball found in fields and meadows. They’re usually only an inch or two wide, but some as large as five feet across have been found.
Edible? Most are, but some varieties closely resemble toxic mushrooms such as death caps, so experienced mushroom hunters cut them lengthwise and examine them carefully to determine whether the interiors have white flesh (good) or gills (bad).
Fungus: Basket stinkhorn
Found In: Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America
Details: As the name suggests, this globe-shaped mushroom grows in a lattice pattern that looks like a wicker basket or a cage; the interior is hollow. Found on decaying trees, the basket stinkhorn looks like a bunch of Cheetos melted together. Like the anemone fungus, it smells like rotting meat.
Edible? No.
Fungus: Lion’s mane
Found In: Asia, Europe, and North America
Details: Also called the bearded tooth, satyr’s beard, or the pom-pom mushroom, the meaty part of this ’shroom is covered in long, thick tendrils that make it look like a wizard just left his beard on the side of a log. It grows on the sides of hardwood trees.
Edible? Yes. Reportedly, it tastes a lot like fried shrimp.
Fungus: Anemone fungus
Found In: Australia and New Zealand
Details: Sea anemones live in shallow ocean water, and look like starfish, but with stubbier appendages and a bigger hole in the middle. The anemone fungus is bright red and looks like somebody dropped a sea amemone onto a grassy area or a pile of garden mulch, which is where they usually grow. It’s covered in brown slime, which attracts flies. The flies then pick up the mushroom’s spores and spread them. Another attractant for flies: the anemone fungus’s distinctive odor of rotting carrion, which also accounts for its other name: anemone stinkhorn.
Edible? No.
Paul McCartney’s middle name: Paul. (His first name is James.)
STRANGE TALES OF
SLEEPWALKING
Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is a fascinating phenomenon. While the body is for all intents and purposes asleep, the brain tells it to get up, walk around, and do things. That can get an unconscious person into an awful lot of trouble.
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PUT YOUR MIND AT ZZZZZZZS
The British Royal Navy is one of the oldest and most prestigious military operations in the world, which apparently means there’s no place on board its many ships for sailors who wander around in their sleep. In 2015 five different men were given medical discharges after each was found to be sleepwalking. Among the possible dangers: hitting their heads, trying to fire weapons, or falling overboard. The UK Ministry of Defence would not reveal how the five sailors were discovered sleepwalking, but it updated its official policy—anyone with a diagnosis of sleepwalking can no longer join the Royal Navy.
GATOR AID
James Curren of Palm Harbor, Florida, had a long history of sleepwalking, but he’d never experienced anything like this. In November 1998, the 77-year-old got up in the middle of the night and walked into a pond near his home. When he came to, he found himself standing in three feet of water, stuck in the thick mud…and surrounded by alligators. But Curren walks with the use of a cane, which he’d somehow managed to grab as he sleepwalked out of his home. He used the cane to fend off the gators while he yelled to his neighbors for help.
A woman on Ambien awoke outside of her house with a brush in her hand, and discovered she’d just painted her front door.
MIDNIGHT DELIGHT
The drug zolpidem—sold under the brand name Ambien—is one of the most commonly prescribed sleep aids on the market. Because it so thoroughly shuts down an awake brain, it stands to reason the drug would be linked with a number of sleep disorders, including sleepwalking. Among the adverse reactions noted by the UK’s federal drug regulation agency: A woman on Ambien awoke outside of her house with a brush in her hand, and discovered she’d just painted her front door. Another woman gained 50 pounds over the seven months she was taking the drug, which she couldn’t explain until she woke up in the middle of the night eating food while standing in front of her open refrigerator.
In Greece, children leave teeth for the “tooth fairy” by throwing them onto the roof.
OPEN ALL NIGHT
In March 2017, police in Aberdeen, Scotland, responded to a call from a local ASDA supermarket at 2:30 a.m. regarding a barefoot woman acting strangely. Clad only in a nightgown, the woman was trying to buy a watermelon. Police woke up the 23-year-old, who, amazingly, had walked a mile and a half from her home to the all-night grocery store, all while her brain kept sleeping. “Thanks to the very kind ASDA staff who warmed me up and gave me shoes, socks and a cup of tea,” the woman told reporters, “and to the lovely police officers who deposited my very confused self back in bed.”
DID YOU KNOW?
What do sleepwalkers look like? Sleepwalkers don’t look the way they do in cartoons, with their arms extended out in front of them like zombies. They move and act completely normally—a sleepwalker may even have their eyes open.
THE BEST DEFENSE
In 2003 a sleepwalking woman in Colorado managed to drink half a bottle of wine and take her car out for a spin, dressed in only a nightshirt to help brave the 20-degree temperature. Not surprisingly, she crashed her car…and then got out and relieved herself on the road. Police officers immediately spotted her and tried to arrest the woman, who resisted by punching and kicking. Citing the “sleepwalking defense” (which is apparently a real thing), the woman pled guilty to a single charge of reckless driving. Because she wasn’t awake for all of her misdeeds—driving while intoxicated and public urination—the court agreed that she couldn’t be held fully accountable for them.
SLEEPWALK CHECKLIST
At about 6:00 a.m. one morning in 2015, the parents of 19-year-old Taylor Gammel of Arvada, Colorado, reported their daughter missing. Local police used bloodhounds to try to track her down in the area surrounding her house, but to no avail. Then, a couple of hours later, the Gammels received a call—it was Taylor. She was at her uncle’s house…nine miles away. Gammel says she woke up while walking. “It took me a minute to realize I wasn’t dreaming, but that I was actually walking.” She recognized the area as her uncle’s neighborhood and went to his house to let her parents know she was all right. Clad only in pajamas and socks, Gammel said she noticed soon after waking up that her feet and legs were sore. That makes sense, considering that she walked nine miles. “It’s a shock to me that I made it that far,” she told a reporter.
Bobby Leach is the second person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel…
ALL IN THE FAMILY
What’s the most influential TV show of all time? Star Trek? Seinfeld? The Twilight Zone? The Sopranos? They’re all great shows, but don’t forget this one. It made us laugh…and it brought something new to prime-time television: relevance.
PICTURE THIS. Picture the United States in 1970: In the thick of the Vietnam War, President Nixon secretly invades Cambodia, setting off massive protests on college campuses across America. Four protesting students at Kent State University are shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard. The Chicago Seven are found guilty of inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Now picture the landscape of American television at this moment: an array of mindless sitcoms like Bewitched (a suburban man marries a witch), The Beverly Hillbillies (bumpkins strike oil and move to Beverly Hills), I Dream of Jeannie (an astronaut finds a sexy genie in a bottle), and Hogan’s Heroes (wisecracking Allied prisoners help win World War II while held in a German POW camp). Enter All in the Family, an intelligent series that combined comedy with real-life issues—bigotry, gay rights, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation.
ARCHIE MEETS WORLD. All in the Family’s storylines centered on the daily lives of the Bunker family of Queens, New York.
•Archie, the patriarch played by Carroll O’Connor, was a loading-dock worker who raged about the changes that were happening in America, at work, and in his own home. He had a derogatory name for everyone, especially those who he felt were directly responsible for keeping hardworking white guys like him down: “spades,” “spics,” and “Heebs.”
•Archie’s flighty wife, Edith (“the dingbat”), played by Jean Stapleton.
Gloria Stivic: “Hi Dad, where’s Ma?”
Archie Bunker: “I don’t know, she flew out of here like a dingbat outta hell.”
•Their daughter, Gloria, played by Sally Struthers, and her college student husband, Mike Stivic (“Meathead”), played by Rob Reiner, lived with them, much to Archie’s dismay. Mike was as liberal a ‘do-gooder’ as Archie Bunker was prejudiced and closed-minded. Their heated arguments fueled much of the comedy in the series, allowing Archie to pontificate on “the women’s lubrication movement,” the “infernal revenue,” and “pinko commies making suppository remarks about our country.”
IN THE BEGINNING. In the late 1960s, veteran TV writer/producer Norman Lear and director/producer Alan “Bud” Yorkin had the idea to buy the rights to the BBC hit series Till Death Us Do Part. The show featured a middle-aged, working-class man named Alf Garnett, who lived with his family in London’s East End. Alf spouted racist, antisocialist views at his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, reminding Lear of his own father, who his family called “King Lear” because of the way he ruled their roost.
…years later, he died of injuries sustained from slipping on an orange peel.
Lear pitched an American version of the comedy to Mickey Rooney, hoping he could entice him to play the lead role. But when Rooney heard that the main guy was a bigot who used words like “spade” and “fairy,” Rooney immediately turned it down, saying, “Norm, they’re going to kill you, shoot you dead in the streets.”
IT’S CHEMISTRY, STUPID. Directors often say “Casting is everything,” and All in the Family proved that to be true. Carroll O’Connor was invited to read for the role of Archie because Lear liked the way he’d played the outrageous but likable General Max Bolt in the 1966 movie What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? And, as Lear later reported, “Carroll had the role by the third page.” Jean Stapleton, who had recently appeared on Broadway in the musicals Damn Yankees and Fun
ny Girl, instantly won the role of Edith. The problem was finding the right actors to play Gloria and Mike (who was originally named Dickie). They shot two pilots for ABC, each with different actors in those roles. The first program was called Justice for All, a reference to the family’s original surname, Justice. The second was called Those Were The Days. ABC wasn’t interested because there was no chemistry between the kids and the parents. The determined producers, Lear and Yorkin, then went to CBS with a third pilot, this time with Struthers and Reiner as Gloria and Mike. It worked. CBS, anxious to shake up their lineup of “rural comedies,” as they called shows like Mayberry R.F.D., Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, decided to take a risk and give All in the Family a try.
ON THE AIR AT LAST. The show premiered on January 12, 1971. CBS was so worried that All in the Family might upset TV audiences, it hired telephone operators to field calls from angry viewers. They even posted this disclaimer before the first episode:
“The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.”
But very few calls came in. And each week, as All in the Family shone a light on so many subjects that were previously taboo, the audience got bigger and bigger.
GAME CHANGER. In the first season alone:
•Archie is outraged to hear a black family is moving into his neighborhood and leads a protest, only to discover it’s the family of his friend Lionel Jefferson.
•Mike and Archie send dueling letters to President Nixon about his leadership and the Vietnam War.
•Gloria moves out, demanding that Mike stop being a chauvinist and treat her as an equal.
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