Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (16 page)

Some historians question whether Reed was really a Marxist-minded revolutionary, or just a fame-hungry, mildly talented musician who just went along with the Communist propaganda because it made him famous
somewhere
. Reed insisted he was sincere…but he never defected to the Soviet Union, never joined the Communist Party, and kept his money in a West German bank.

By 1981 Reed was 43; Eastern European audiences were moving on to newer, fresher music. No longer an icon in the Soviet Union, Reed began to speak openly about wanting to return to Colorado. In an effort to rehabilitate his reputation in the U.S., he attended the 1985 Denver premiere of
American Rebel
, a documentary about his life. He even wrote a song for the film, titled “Nobody Knows Me Back In My Hometown.” He gave radio interviews and was profiled nationally on
60 Minutes
. The campaign backfired—Reed received hate mail and death threats, and fled back to East Berlin.

A few months later, on June 17, 1986, Dean Reed’s body was found in a lake near his East German home. The police called it an accidental drowning, but rumors quickly began to circulate. Was it really suicide? Reed had been known to suffer from bouts of depression and had cut his own arm with a machete a few months earlier. Or was it murder? Had the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police, exterminated a traitor? There was even speculation that Reed was actually a CIA mole deep undercover for over 20 years; he’d been an American patriot all along. Most historians agree with the official report: Reed committed suicide, a victim of depression and loneliness…but the real story may never be known.

Other cultures’ sports and games may seem weird, but keep in mind that those same people might find the idea of a warlike game where 300-pound athletes crash into each other to move an oblong ball a few inches just as absurd.

B
UZKASHI

Popular in the central Asian countries of Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, buzkashi is similar to polo: Teams of men on horseback have to move an object past a goal line to score. But instead of a ball, buzkashi is played with a headless, limbless, sand-weighted goat carcass, which players must toss over the goal line. To steal the carcass from the other team, players are permitted to trip horses or whip their opponents.

British colonists created this game in Malaysia in the 1930s, and it’s still played by locals. Hashing involves a lot of running, but it’s not really a race. Participants start the event drunk, and then run through a five-mile maze. Every quarter mile there’s a checkpoint where more booze is consumed and the course branches out into three or four possible routes, with only one being correct. It doesn’t even matter who wins—just who is able to finish and tell his story after the race, which traditionally takes place at a bar.

A complicated version of soccer played by three teams on a triangular field. (It was invented by Green Party chairman Steve Kramer.)

Inspired by a Serbian comic book, chessboxing is now played by small groups across Europe. It’s exactly what the name implies: chess
and
boxing. Opponents box for one round, then sit at a table adjacent to the ring and play a four-minute round of chess. Then they go back to the boxing, then the chess, until a winner is determined in either one event or the other.

This Japanese game is not what you think. Inspired by a game played by Winnie the Pooh in A.A. Milne’s classic books, pooh stick racing involves finding sticks, dropping them into a river, and seeing which stick floats across the finish line first.

An instant sensation in Spain where it was created in 2006, bossaball combines volleyball…and bouncy castles. The net is very high; the field of play is one of those inflatable castles you see at kids’ parties. Players can touch the ball with their hands or feet, but to make the game harder, the castle is set on top of large, bouncy, unstable, inflatable tubes. And to make it even
harder,
a “joker” from each team bounces on a trampoline next to the castle, trying to sabotage the other team by knocking the ball away.

This sport is popular in Venezuela. Four men on horseback chase a bull down a narrow pen, trying to pull its tail to make it fall over. Each successful tipping earns a point. After the bull falls over, the game must continue, so the men try to get the bull back on its feet by twisting or biting its tail or shocking it with an electric prod.

Known as “feather bowling” in English, this sport originated in Belgium. Wooden balls shaped like large wheels of cheese are rolled down a dirt alley in the direction of a feather sticking out of the ground. The goal is to get the “ball” close to the feather without running over it. Each team gets 12 attempts; the side with the most balls closest to the feather wins.

Since 1974, fans have flocked to the English village of Lyme Regis to watch two nine-man teams try to knock each off of a wooden platform…by swinging five-foot dead eels at each other. (A conger is a type of eel.) In 2006 the contest was almost cancelled when animal-rights activists protested the event because “it’s disgraceful to the memory of the eel.” The contest was held—with rubber boat fenders instead of dead eels.

You know, the place Meryl Streep got out of. Where Toto blessed the rains.

P
OWER TO THE PEOPLE

In order to increase membership—and gain media attention—in 2003 the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Cape Town, South Africa, voted 19–2 to change its name to “The Death Penalty Party of South Africa.”

In 2006 gangs of large baboons began terrorizing Cape Town suburbs. They break into houses, eat all the food in refrigerators, and defecate everywhere before leaving. Witnesses say the baboons travel in groups of 30, forming an impenetrable front line that’s several baboons wide.

At the beginning of the Iraq War, Phesheya Dube, a reporter for Swaziland’s state radio station, went to Baghdad to file reports. It turns out he was actually broadcasting from a closet in Mbabne, the capital city of Swaziland. He was exposed when he was spotted trying to get an interview outside of Swaziland’s parliament.

An X-ray revealed metal in the stomach of Gezahenge Debebe, a 40-year-old woman from Ethiopia. In 2001 doctors operated for over an hour to remove the contents of Debebe’s stomach, which included 222 rusty nails, 26 ounces of coins, and several keys. Debebe admitted to eating the metal over the previous 20 years.

In 2006, Kenyan Youth Affairs minister Muhammad Kuti proposed changing the legal definition of the word “youth” to include people aged 31 to 50. Reason: He wants to give more people access a $14 million “youth fund.” If the plan goes through, 50-year-old Kenyan “youths” will have only five years until the legal retirement age, which is 55.

From the dustbin of history, here are the stories of some of the past’s strangest people and events.

T
HE FLEA KILLER

Queen Christina ruled Sweden from 1632 to 1654. What did she consider the biggest threat to her kingdom? Fleas. The Queen hated them and wanted each and every one she found in her palace killed…individually. To accomplish this feat (this was long before the invention of chemical insect repellents), she commissioned the construction of a tiny, one-inch-long cannon, that was packed with tiny flea-sized cannonballs. Whenever she spotted one, she fired the tiny cannon at it and occasionally made a killshot.

When Germany conquered Tanganyika (a region of eastern Africa) in 1898, Chief Mkwawa, the leader of the Wahehe tribe, was killed. The Germans then sent Mkwawa’s head to Germany, where it was displayed in a museum in Bremen. During World War I, the British kicked the Germans out of Africa, aided by the Wahehe. H.A. Byatt, the British administrator now overseeing the former German-controlled area, lobbied the British government for the return of Mkwawa’s skull in appreciation for the Wahehes’ war effort. The return of the skull was even stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 agreement outlining terms of Germany’s surrender. But Germany denied taking Mkwawa’s head and the British government didn’t push the issue, accepting the German explanation that the skull was lost. In 1953 Sir Edward Twining, the British governor of Tanganyika, vowed to track down the skull… and found it in the Bremen Museum among a collection of dozens of skulls taken in the 1890s. Mkwawa’s skull was finally returned to the Wahehe in July 1954 and now resides in a museum there.

In 1900, a 20-year-old bullfighter known only as “La Raverte” debuted in the Madrid bullring. What’s odd about that? La Raverte was a female bullfighter. She remained a crowd favorite
for seven years until 1908, when the Spanish government decided it was immoral for women to fight bulls, and La Raverte was banned from the ring. But La Raverte wasn’t worried. Why?
She
was really a
he
. At the conclusion of one of her final bullfights, La Raverte took off her wig and fake breasts, revealing she wasn’t a woman, but a man named Agustin Rodriguez. Did La Raverte resume a bullfighting career as a man? Nope. Bullfighting fans instantly turned on him, angered by the fraud. Within the year, Rodriguez fled Madrid and retired quietly in Majorca.

In 1996, German systems analyst Heribert Illig introduced a theory he called “phantom time hypothesis.” Illig believes that the Early Middle Ages—the years 614 to 911—never actually happened and that all evidence of the 300-year period is faked. He says that in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar (which we still use) in order to correct a ten-day error, he actually added 300 years. Among the historical evidence that Illig uses to support his claim are “fraudulent” records of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, whom Illig says is actually a fictional character.

On May 9, 1962, a Guernsey cow in Iowa named Fawn was picked up by a tornado and flew through the air for a few minutes before landing softly and safely at a nearby farm a half mile away. The flight is believed to be the longest (but not the first) unassisted solo cow flight in recorded history. Fawn safely landed in the pen of a Holstein bull at a neighboring farm before she successfully wandered home. (The brief encounter resulted in a calf.) Amazingly, Fawn had a chance to beat her own record. In 1967, she was out grazing on a country road and was caught up in
another
tornado. She flew over a busload of gawking tourists and landed safely on the other side of the road. From then on, Fawn’s owner locked her up whenever there was a storm warning.

*       *       *

Odd Job:
Before his acting career blossomed, Johnny Depp supported himself by selling ballpoint pens door to door.

Wow! We had a page called “Amazing Coincidences” in our last book!

N
OT SO “LUCKY”

In October 2006, a small plane crashed into a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan, killing pilot Tyler Stanger and his passenger, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle.
Not
on the flight were Bob Cartwright and Robert Wadkins, both of whom had been invited by Lidle to attend a Yankees playoff game. But both had declined the invitation. Their “good luck” and the bad news hit both of them hard. A month later, Cartwright invited Wadkins to join him on a trip from their home in Big Bear, California, to Las Vegas. Wadkins couldn’t go—and for the second time he avoided disaster as the small plane crashed shortly after takeoff. Cartwright, the pilot, and another passenger were killed.

In November 2006, a 65-year-old woman in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, was visiting her husband’s gravesite. After his death a year earlier, the woman began to plan her own funeral very carefully, right down to selecting what music she wanted played and having her name inscribed on the family headstone. While standing at the gravesite, the woman suffered a heart attack and died. (And police found her will in her handbag.)

On June 28, 2000, the Washington newspaper
The Columbian
printed the results of Oregon Pick 4 lottery numbers—before the Oregon Lottery had announced the winning numbers. Lottery officials notified the Oregon State Police and a detective was sent to investigate. He was informed that the paper’s computer had crashed that day and a page of the newspaper had been lost—the one with lottery results. As they scrambled to reconstruct the page, a staffer was told to get Oregon’s Pick 4 numbers off the news wires. The staffer found the “Pick 4” results—6-8-5-5—and they were printed. The only problem was that the staffer had
grabbed the numbers for the state of
Virginia’s
Pick 4…and they were the exact same numbers as the ones that were later picked in Oregon. “The odds of hitting the Pick 4 are about 10,000 to 1,” lottery spokesman David Hooper said. “The odds of a newspaper pulling the Virginia lottery numbers by mistake and having those numbers be the same numbers drawn in Oregon the next day? A gazillion to one.”