Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (10 page)

LOCATION:
Nordkap, Finland

DESCRIPTION:
Guests get to sleep in real igloos made of ice and snow blocks. They are completely dark and the only source of heat are the down sleeping bags. (The less adventurous can sleep in heated glass igloos.) Facilities also include an ice-cold swimming pool, the world’s largest smoke sauna, and the world’s largest restaurant made of snow, which has to be rebuilt every winter.

When we’re done with the comics, the obituaries, the advice columns, the horoscopes, and the puzzles, sometimes we actually read the news. Well, maybe not all of it…

B
ACKGROUND

A
lede
(pronounced “leed”) is the first sentence of a news story that gives the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” that will be fleshed out in the article. And as these real news ledes show, sometimes you don’t have to read any further.

“Bogota, Colombia’s chief
prosecutor hired a psychic who hypnotized his staff and performed an exorcism over a voodoo doll in exchange for a government paycheck and use of an armored car.” (
Sun-Sentinel,
South Florida)

“‘E’ is for embarrassed
—like the teacher who inadvertently used a kinky alphabet in a handout to parents.” (
Times Herald-Record
, Middletown, New York)

“Mayor Don Wright
has raised eyebrows in town by allowing the makers of ‘Thong Girl 3’ to film in his office on a Sunday.” (
News Examiner
, Gallatin, Tennessee)

“A 38-year-old Winthrop,
Ark. man was hospitalized after jumping out the passenger window of a vehicle traveling an estimated 55 to 60 m.p.h. to retrieve his cigarette late Saturday, an official said.” (
Texarkana Gazette
)

“The Las Vegas
man whose severed fingertip ended up in a cup of Wendy’s chili gave his mangled digit to a co-worker to settle a $50 debt—but had no idea it would be used in an alleged scheme to swindle the fast-food chain, the man’s mother said Tuesday.” (
San Francisco Chronicle
)

“A U.S. court
has apparently ended the television career of a talking penis.” (ABC News)

“Fortunately for Ezekiel Rubottom,
there’s no law against keeping your severed foot in a bucket on the front porch.” (
Lawrence Journal World
, Kansas)

“Police went to
a home in Texarkana after receiving a report that a man had entered it illegally and later found their suspect running nude through a pasture.” (
Tampabays10.com
)

“Gambling is the
only thing missing from a new Indian casino in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, mistakenly built in an area where gambling is illegal.” (Yahoo! News)

“A Kentucky man
wearing only a thong and carrying a knife is accused of videotaping himself attempting a burglary, then leaving the tape behind, police said.” (
Herald Leader
, Lexington, Kentucky)

“A dispute that
began over the capture of an opossum in a residential neighborhood ended with police shooting a Rottweiler and arresting a man after stunning him with a Taser gun.” (
Independent Record
, Helena, Montana)

“A high school
student convicted of battery for vomiting on his Spanish teacher has been ordered to spend the next four months cleaning up after people who throw up in police cars.” (MSNBC)

“The chairman of
the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has resigned after remarks about bestiality and ruminations about defecation, Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda said on Tuesday.” (Reuters)

“Anti-drug campaigners today
attacked the makers of a soft drink who have called their product ‘Cocaine.’” (
Daily Mail
, London, England)

“Police are investigating
a ‘bizarre’ incident in which a man claiming he was performing a religious ritual kissed a woman’s feet Monday afternoon at the Perry Wal-Mart.” (
Macon Telegraph
, Macon, Georgia)

This country was once considered very exotic, but it’s one of the most quickly modernizing countries in the world. That includes the silly stuff, too.

I
T COSTS AN ARM AND A LEG

In July 2006, India’s Medical Association started investigating three doctors who had appeared in television advertisements to promote voluntary amputation surgery to beggars. In India, street beggars can earn more money by eliciting sympathy for missing appendages. The more missing appendages, the more they earn. The doctors charged fees of about $200 for the “investment” of removing a leg below the knee.

Ram Rati, 80, of Chinar, attributes her longevity and good health to eating sand. Rati estimates she eats about four pounds every day, splitting it among breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea. “When young, I tried it for fun once. Now, I am used to it. My relatives pestered me to quit it, but it was all in vain.”

A man needed to ask his wife to agree to a divorce—he wanted to marry his mistress. The wife consented to end the marriage, but on one condition: that she could beat him up in public. The man agreed and a few days later his wife administered the beating in the middle of town. Satisfied, she signed the divorce papers.

Hritik, a three-year-old German Shepherd from Ranchi, gets plenty of exercise. He doesn’t chase Frisbees or go for walks—he does yoga. Under the supervision of his trainer, Nanda Dulal, he has learned several different yoga positions and exercises. “He was weak when he was born,” says Dulal. “But we took special care of him and he gradually became strong after his yoga lessons.” (According to Dulal, Hritik has also voluntarily become a vegetarian.)

Well, I do. What do you want me to say?

I
n November, 1997, Minneapolis native Tom Tipton, 63, got the thrill of his life when he was invited to sing the national anthem before a Minnesota Vikings football game. Across town, an off-duty sheriff was watching the pregame show—and recognized Tipton’s name. Tipton, it turned out, was wanted on two warrants in Minneapolis. He was arrested during the game.

• In 2006 a man in Mill Valley, California, was arrested after he called a bomb threat into a Walgreen’s pharmacy. The clerk who answered the phone recognized his voice: The man had just been at the counter to get a prescription filled, and had called in the threat because he thought it was taking too long.

• In 2001 Chicago police arrested 19-year-old Marque Love on bank robbery charges. Love had once worked at the bank, and a teller recognized him—by his distinctive blue suede shoes.

• In 2006 Robert Russel Moore of Prince Frederick, Maryland, was arrested and charged with the robbery of an Arby’s restaurant where he was recently employed. At the subsequent trial, four of his former fellow employees testified that, although he was wearing a mask, they recognized Moore in surveillance tapes—especially when he bent over and they recognized his “butt crack” above the top of his pants. A former manager also testified that he had talked to Moore repeatedly about his “butt crack problem.” Moore was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

• In 1999 a man wearing a long dark coat and a mask walked into the Royal Casino in Aberdeen, South Dakota, pointed a gun at the clerk, and demanded money. The next day, local man Jerold Nissen, 44, was arrested for the crime. Nissen was a regular at the casino, and the clerk had recognized the distinctively powerful odor of his cologne. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Here’s the story of how scientists unlocked the secrets of the worst natural disaster in the history of the west African nation of Cameroon …and what they’re doing to try and stop it from happening again.

T
HE DISCOVERY

On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, toward the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead rats, and further on, a dead dog and other dead animals. He wondered if they’d all been killed by a lightning strike—when lightning hits the ground it’s not unusual for animals nearby to be killed by the shock.

Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if anyone there knew what had happened to the animals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bodies strewn everywhere. He didn’t find a single person still alive—everyone in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicycle and ran all the way back to Wum.

By the time the man got back to the village, the first survivors of whatever it was that had struck Nyos and other nearby villages were already stumbling into Wum. Many told tales of hearing an explosion or a rumbling noise in the distance, then smelling strange smells and passing out for as long as 36 hours before waking up to discover that everyone around them was dead.

Wum is in a remote part of Cameroon, so it took two days for a medical team to arrive in the area after local officials called the governor to report the strange occurrence. The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people, plus more than 3,000
cattle and countless wild animals, birds, and insects—in short, every living creature for miles around.

The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. Whatever it was that killed so many people seemed to have disappeared without a trace just as quickly as it had come.

What could have caused so many deaths in such a short span of time? When word of the disaster reached the outside world, scientists from France (Cameroon is a former French colony), the United States, and other countries arrived to help the country’s own scientists figure out what had happened. The remains of the victims offered few clues. There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or “death agony”: The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died.

One of the first important clues was the distribution of the victims across the landscape: The deaths had all occurred within about 12 miles of Lake Nyos, which some local tribes called the “bad lake.” Legend had that that long ago, evil spirits had risen out of the lake and killed all the people living in a village at the water’s edge.

Both the number of victims and the percentage of fatalities increased as the scientists got closer to the lake: In the outlying villages many people, especially those who had remained inside their homes, had survived, while in Nyos, which at less than two miles away was the closest village to the lake, only 6 of more than 800 villagers were still alive.

But it was the lake itself that provided the biggest and strangest clue of all: its normally clear blue waters had turned a deep, murky red. The scientists began to wonder if there was more to the legend of the “bad lake” than anyone had realized.

Lake Nyos is roughly one square mile in surface area and has a
maximum depth of 690 feet. It’s what’s known as a “crater lake”—it formed when the crater of a long-extinct volcano filled with water. But was the volcano really extinct? Maybe an eruption was the culprit: Maybe the volcano beneath the lake had come back to life and in the process suddenly released enough poison gases to kill every living creature over a very wide area.

The theory was compelling but problematic: An eruption capable of releasing enough poison gas to kill that many people over that wide an area would have been very violent and accompanied by plenty of seismic activity. None of the eyewitnesses had mentioned earthquakes, and when the scientists checked with a seismic recording station 140 miles away, it showed no evidence of unusual activity on the evening of August 21. This was backed up by the fact that even in the hardest-hit villages, goods were still piled high on shelves in homes where every member of the household been killed. And the scientists noticed another mysterious clue: The oil lamps in these homes had all been extinguished, even the ones still filled with plenty of oil.

The scientists began to test water samples taken from various depths in the lake. The red on the surface turned out to be dissolved iron—normally found on the bottom of the lake, not the top. Somehow the sediment at the bottom had been stirred up and the iron brought to the surface, where it turned the color of rust after coming into contact with oxygen.