Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (23 page)

A 41-year-old Toronto engineer who goes only by his internet alias, “Witesock,” has been secretly collecting professional athletic socks for 20 years, most of them used. He says that he bought his first pair at the age of 10. “Nothing else about the uniforms impressed me,” he told Toronto’s
National Post
. “Just the socks.” He now has more than 800 pairs from pro sports teams from around the world, ranging from football to rugby, hockey, and soccer (but not baseball—he doesn’t like baseball socks). Most of them come through dealings on the internet, and that, Witesock says, makes it weird sometimes. “One of the most interesting requests I’ve had came from a guy in Australia. He offered to send me five pairs of Australian rugby socks if I would take pictures of myself wearing the socks, while at the same time throwing a pie in my own face.” If that wasn’t weird enough, he did it. “It was kind of fun,” he said. He added that his wife (yes, he’s married) doesn’t know about his sock obsession.

What are the oddest creatures on the planet? (Besides Uncle John’s cousins in Pittsburgh, that is?) Insects. There are far more of them than there are of us, and we thought you should know something about their very weird mouths.

M
AN!-DIBLE

Chewers, Spongers, and Suckers isn’t the name of Uncle John’s latest rock band—they’re different types of insect
mouthparts
. There are more, but to become familiar with them, it helps to know that all of the eating, chewing, grabbing, and biting devices on all the millions of insect species in the world fall into two main categories:
mandibulate
, or chewing, mouthparts, which are the most primitive; and
haustellate
mouthparts, like
piercing-sucking blood feeders
and
siphoners
. (Yum!)

Mandibulate
mouths are found on ants, caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers, and cockroaches. These mouths all consist of four main features:

• Labrum:
a single, plate-like “upper lip” that is usually moveable and helps put food in the mouth.

• Mandibles:
the first pair of mouthparts, “jaws” that are used to cut, tear, grasp, fight, and chew, among other things.

• Maxillae:
the second pair of mouthparts, which sit below the mandibles and are used to sense, taste, and handle food.

• Labium:
a third pair of mouthparts that basically make up the “lower lip.” They’re used to close the insect’s mouth.

These parts can vary slightly or greatly depending on the type of insect, their diet, and other needs. Example: ants’
labrums
are hard plates that are extensions of the head and move up and down to help manipulate the food. The
mandibles
are like a pair of horizontal left and right pincers that meet in a vertical line at the front of the head; they have teeth or serrated ends where they meet, and are used for carrying food, digging, nest building, cutting, and
fighting, and biting you, among many other things. The
maxillae
are an adapted pair of limbs, used as lower jaws; located between the mandibles and labium (the lower lip), they help handle and taste the food, and extract liquids from it. Ants also have a
hypopharynx
—a tongue—for sucking up liquid.

Nearly all the insects in this category have the same four parts that the chewers do, but they have evolved over eons into very different devices like
stylets
and
proboscises.
The haustellate insects are broken down into seven main groups:

Piercing-sucking plant feeders:
This includes bugs like aphids, leafhoppers, lacebugs, aphids, and spider mites. Their mouths have changed into a hypodermic needlelike structure, used to pierce plant membranes and suck fluids out of them. Example: On the cicada, the labium has become a tubular beak called a
proboscis;
the mandibles are sharp
stylets
inside the tube that cut into the plant tissue; the maxillae are now two tubes—one to send in salivary secretions that keep the other tube flowing—and one that sucks the liquid out of the plant. The labrum serves basically to stabilize the whole tube structure.

Siphoners:
Butterflies and some moths fall in this category. They don’t need stylets because they don’t have to pierce anything; they drink from puddles of water or plant nectar. If you look closely at a moth or butterfly you’ll see a long, curled-up tube. That’s the proboscis, which they can extend straight into a flower or drinking water.

Sponger:
Houseflies have this configuration. These bugs have basically lost their mandibles and maxillae. The labium is modified into a bendable proboscis that is lowered onto a food source. On the bottom are spongelike organs called
labella
. They basically vomit salivary secretions onto the food source, be it feces or steak, that causes the food to liquefy. The labella then soak up the liquid. (Yum! Yum!)

Piercing-sucking blood feeders:
You know these—fleas and mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites you, a pair of pointed, barbed maxillary stylets emerge from the sheathlike labium and stick into your skin. These are used to anchor the bug and provide leverage for the
insertion of the remaining parts. Once anchored, the labium slides back and the two mandibular stylets pierce through your skin into a vein. The mosquito then injects anticoagulant saliva into your tissue, and the labrum is used like a tongue to lap up your blood.

Rasping-sucking mouthparts:
Of the more than one million species of insects known on Earth today, only thrips have these
asymmetrical
mouthparts, and they are weird. The left mandible and the two maxillae have been modified into a piercing stylet, and the right one is nonexistent. Thrips are tiny—only 1.5 to 3 millimeters long—and they use their stylets to scrape or rasp at the surface of plants, fungi, and sometimes animals, then drink the fluids within.

Chewing-lapping:
Only honeybees use this system, which is basically a combination of chewing and sucking. They have the same flaplike mandibles that ants and other chewers do, but they also have specialized mouthparts adapted perfectly to their diet. They need to chew—they use the mandibles for things like gnawing holes in your porch for nests, manipulating wax, and biting—and they need to be able to consume fluids such as water, nectar, and honey. For that, the labium has evolved into a long tonguelike proboscis that can reach into flowers.

*       *       *

Do you taste words? Some people do—people with
Lexical-gustatory synesthesia
, which was first recorded in 1907. When hearing certain words, people with this rare disorder get an acute sense of tasting something that goes along with the word. Neuropsychologist Julia Simner of the University of Edinburgh, in a study called “The Taste of Words on the Tip of the Tongue,” said that only 10 people in all of Europe and the U.S. have the condition. One of the subjects she studied, upon hearing the word “castanets,” suddenly tasted tuna fish. Another only experienced tastes when hearing people’s names: “John” tasted like cornbread; “William” like potatoes. The cause of the condition is still unknown.

Time travel has fascinated scientists and writers for centuries. While the mainstream scientific community continues to research it, some already claim to have done it. Are they brilliant visionaries, or just lunatics?

T
IME TRAVELER:
Father Pellegrino Ernetti

BACKGROUND:
In 2002, Francois Brune, a French priest, wrote
The Vatican’s New Mystery
, a book about how his friend, Ernetti, an Italian priest, invented a machine he called the
chronovisor
in 1952. Housed in a small cabinet (like a TV set) it displayed events from anytime in history on a screen (like a TV set). The user selected where and to what year they wanted to “travel” with a series of dials (like a TV set). Ernetti said it worked by picking up, decoding, and displaying “radiation” left behind by the passage of time. He claims he was helped on the project by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and Nazi rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun. Ernetti said he used the chronovisor to visit ancient Rome to view and produce an English translation of
Thyestes
, a Latin play thought to be lost. He also heard Napoleon give a speech in Italy in 1804 and saw Christ dying on the cross. So what happened to the chronovisor? Brune says the Catholic Church forced Ernetti to disassemble the machine because of its potential for espionage.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Scientists have never found any evidence that the passage of time leaves a trail of radiation. And the existence of the chronovisor has never been confirmed.

TIME TRAVELER:
John Titor

BACKGROUND:
In 2000, Titor posted messages on Internet paranormal discussion boards claiming he was a soldier from the year 2036 sent back in time to retrieve a computer to fix software bugs on machines of the future. He made more posts, offered pictures of his time machine and its instructional manual, and gave incredibly detailed accounts of world events between 2000 and 2036. For instance, Titor claimed an escalating global war ends in 2015 when Russia drops nuclear bombs on the United States, China, and Europe, instantly dismantling all governments and
killing three billion people. (Millions more die of mad cow disease.) Survivors group into agricultural communes. Despite the bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, technology is well advanced, with wireless Internet providing all phone service, television, and music. Titor achieved a huge following on paranormal websites and talk radio. Many thought he really could be a bona fide time traveler. But a few months later (in March 2001), Titor announced that he had found the computer he needed and he “returned” to the future. He was never heard from again.

WHAT HAPPENED:
“Titor” contradicted himself all over the place, claiming that World War III had destroyed all governments, but also that the U.S. government sent him back in time. Other “predictions” just didn’t pan out. He said a second American civil war would take place from 2004 to 2008, and that the 2004 Olympics were the last ones ever held. Also, when asked how his time machine (a modified 1967 Chevrolet, which somehow survived nuclear annihilation) worked, Titor claimed ignorance, calling himself a hired hand, not an engineer. So who was Titor? Some speculate it was a hoax concocted by author Michael Crichton.

TIME TRAVELER:
Darren Daulton

BACKGROUND:
Daulton was an all-star catcher for the Philadelphia Phillies and Florida Marlins during the 1980s and ’90s. But he’s also an amateur metaphysicist. He claims that a little-known dimension causes all objects on Earth to vibrate slightly, and that only a handful of people, Daulton included, can detect it, and use this ability to manipulate objects, the weather…and time. Daulton says that instead of dreaming, he leaves his body every night and travels into the future (but not the past). One event he’s witnessed: the end of the world, which he says will occur on December 21, 2012. However, Daulton has also been arrested several times for drunk driving, charges he says he’s innocent of. “I’ve been thrown in jail five or six times,” he says. “My wife blames everything on drinking. But I’m not a drunk. Nicole just doesn’t understand metaphysics.”

WHAT HAPPENED:
Daulton was a career .245 hitter. If he could manipulate time and objects, one would think he’d be able to give himself a better batting average.

The BRI’s crack team of researchers has uncovered the hidden—and dangerous—link between drugs and alligators. Who knew? Nobody…until now.

A
LLIGATOR CASE

Border agents in Yuma, Arizona, arrested a California man in December 2006 when their drug-sniffing dog went on alert near his vehicle. A search of the car turned up 13 grams of marijuana. And an alligator. The four-foot-long cayman was inside a suitcase. The alligator was taken to an animal refuge in Phoenix; the man was taken to jail.

In 2006 a man walked into a home in Frederic, Michigan, with a sawed-off shotgun and demanded the thousands of dollars the homeowner owed a crack-cocaine dealer. When the homeowner said he didn’t have the money, the man confiscated his 18-inch alligator instead. “I think he was planning to hold it for ransom, or something,” Sheriff Kirk Wakefield said. “It’s really weird.”

Sheriffs in Aransas County, Texas, received an anonymous tip in December, 2006, that someone had illegally shot a white tailed deer. They went to check it out…and found a dead alligator instead. And 15 grams of methamphetamines. Corey Flowers was arrested for drug and alligator possession. (Really.)

Los Angeles police were trying for months to find out who released a seven-foot-long alligator in the Harbor City community’s Lake Machado when they finally got a reliable tip in December, 2005. Based on that information, they searched the home of former police officer Todd Natow, 42, and discovered three alligators, four piranhas, three desert tortoises, a scorpion…and 10 pounds of marijuana. Natow was the one who’d released the alligator, nicknamed “Reggie,” into the lake because it had gotten too big for
him to take care of. (As of December, 2006, the city had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in attempts to catch Reggie the gator. He’s still free.)