Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (25 page)

•
To cure leprosy
, a sufferer bathed in the blood of a dog.

•
Fractures, abscesses, paralysis, epilepsy, nausea, sore throats
,
and ulcers could be cured
by eating ancient Egyptian mummies—a medical fad of the time. Wealthy Europeans acquired them via a trade route from Egypt. The fad ended when it was discovered the corpses weren’t ancient mummies, but recently murdered slaves.

Have a laugh over some truly weird mistakes.

W
ATCH YOUR STEP

“A Yorkshire Terrier named Minty fled in terror from his owner’s house as a thief broke down the door. (Owner Pauline Webb was out at the time.) Wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, the thief escaped with over $10,000 worth of loot—but stepped in Minty’s excitement-induced mess and left a perfect shoeprint. A week later, when John Conroy was arrested in another break-in, police noticed that his shoes matched the poop-print perfectly. Conroy was jailed for two years.”

—
Fortean Times

“Andres-Francois Raffray, 47, a lawyer from Arles, France, thought he’d made the deal of a lifetime. In 1965 he signed a contract with 90-year-old Jeanne Calment, giving her $500 a month for the rest of her life on the condition that she leave him her condominium when she died. But it didn’t work out as he’d planned: 30 years later, Calment became the world’s oldest known living person. “We all make bad deals in life,” Raffray said on Calment’s 120th birthday, by which time he’d paid $180,000 for the property, which was only worth about $60,000. To make matters worse, Raffray died two years before Calment, and was never able to live in the condo.”

—
Parade

“The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is in hot water after a female agent left top-secret files in her car when she went to a hockey game. They were stolen by drug addicts, who then dumped them into the trash. But she didn’t report the theft in time for the plans to be recovered—they’re now believed to be deep in some trash pile. Worse, the head of the CSIS’s oversight board heard about the security debacle from the newspaper.”

—
This Is True

“An employee of Builders Square in the Cross County Mall poured mineral spirits on the floor and used a cigarette lighter to prove to a fellow employee that mineral spirits don’t burn. The ensuing fire caused $1 million in damages to Builders Square and $2 million to the KMart store next door.”

—West Palm Beach, Florida

“London paramedics thought they were saving a life when they rushed a fetus to the hospital after finding it on a subway platform. …Until they learned that the fetus wasn’t human at all—it was a toy. ‘They had found an alien egg, the latest toy craze to hit the area,’ Reuters reported. ‘It contains what looks like an unborn child curled in a fetal position and suspended in a gooey placenta-like substance.’ According to the London Underground, the mistake was only discovered when the ‘fetus’ was examined in the hospital.”

—
In These Times

“Oh, the difference a consonant makes. In the first seconds of a TV ad for Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Commissioner Mike Dawida, a Democratic candidate for county executive, a woman’s voice says, ‘The public record doesn’t lie.’ But when that slogan appeared on the screen in front of a picture of Dawida’s primary opponent, a critical ‘l’ was missing from the word ‘public,’ leaving a much different word—‘pubic.’

“‘Well, we better get that fixed immediately,’ said Dawida’s campaign manager, Karen Hochberg.”

—
Medford
(Oregon)
Mail Tribune

“John Issa was ordered by a Painesville, Ohio, judge to submit a urine sample for a drug test before his sentencing on a theft conviction. The sample showed no evidence of drugs, but it tested positive for something else: pregnancy. The judge, who had the option of giving him probation on the original conviction, sentenced him to a year in jail instead.”

—
Skeptic

Continuing our weird world tour, we stop in China, home to over a billion people…and a lot of odd news.

M
AN BITES PANDA

After guzzling a six-pack of beer, Beijing resident Zhang Xinyan decided to visit the zoo. Thoroughly drunk, Zhang jumped over a waist-high railing and stumbled into the pen holding Gu Gu, a sleeping male panda. Startled awake, the panda instinctively thought it was being attacked and bit Zhang on the leg. Equally startled by the bite, Zhang bit Gu Gu back. Zhang admitted after the ordeal that he had initially climbed into the pen because he wanted to “cuddle” with Gu Gu.

In 2006 a man stole a pair of pants from a department store in the city of Sanya. Employees noticed the pants were gone, but realized the next day that the pants had reappeared on a rack—and that the same pair of pants in a different size was now missing. Police arrested the shoplifter, who admitted that he had stolen a pair of pants from the store, tried them on at home, and, when they didn’t fit, “exchanged” them for a pair that did.

In the rural area of Jiangsu, there’s an ancient and widely held belief that if a person’s funeral is well attended, the deceased is guaranteed a happy afterlife. Result: Family members will increase attendance at any cost. Police have recently begun to crack down on mourners hiring strippers to get funeral numbers up.

In 2006 a 47-year-old man known as “Nai” walked three feet in a pair of 570-pound shoes. Nai made the shoes himself, out of iron. The former security guard quit his job to focus on his long-term goal: compete for China’s kung fu team in the 2008 Olympics while wearing the shoes.

In the autumn of 2006, the Tongxing Centre Primary School suspended all classes. Local officials had planned to cut the number of teaching jobs, leaving them open only to teachers who were divorced or widowed and had no other means of support. Result: All 40 of the school’s teachers—all married women—filed for divorce…and got to keep their jobs.

During the 1980s, an old tree in the village of Xinfu attracted thousands of visitors a year. Water seemed to magically poured out of the tree’s leaves, and many people were convinced that the liquid had healing powers. Visits to the tree abruptly stopped, however, when it was discovered that the “water” was actually the urine of the millions of insects that lived in the tree.

In 2005, two Chinese men approached the China-Russia border at Slavyanka and attempted to cross into Russia on a lawnmower. Border guards refused to let them pass because they didn’t have the proper documentation. So the men changed their story. Now they said they weren’t trying to sneak into Russia—they claimed they had been “mowing the lawn and got lost.”

A team of scientists in the eastern city of Hefei announced plans in 2006 to build a nuclear fusion device that could produce unlimited clean energy. Free, environmentally safe energy would revolutionize both the world of science and the world economy. How does the team plan to do it? They claim to be building a full-size artificial sun. (Exactly where they’re building it remains a mystery, especially given the fact that the Sun’s diameter is 100 times larger than the Earth’s.)

*       *       *

“Anyone who stares long enough into the distance is bound to be mistaken for a philosopher or mystic in the end.” —
Patrick White

Some people are odd in a
good
way—their oddness changed the world. How did they do it? Scientists think they may have the answer.

T
HE SYNDROME

It’s called Asperger’s Disorder, or “Little Professor Syndrome.” People who have Asperger’s have many of the same traits as autistic people—social withdrawal, prodigious memory, interest in collecting and naming things, prone to outbursts, and an obsession with order. They also display some symptoms that are unique to Asperger’s: higher IQs, and unusual ability in science, complex calculations, and computer programming. They often learn to speak very early, and usually function much better socially than autistic individuals. But it’s the high incidence of
savant
skills—prodigy-like skill in music, art, or computation—among people with Asperger’s that has interested the scientific community.

In 2001, an article in
Wired
magazine noted the unusual coincidence of autism and Asperger’s Disorder in children born in Silicon Valley, California—an area with one of the highest concentrations of smart people in the world. That has led some scientists to wonder if the genetic traits that lead to disorders like Asperger’s, savant syndrome, and autism also contribute to genius. Dr. Hans Asperger, who gave the disorder its name in 1944, states it unequivocally: “For success in science and art—a dash of autism is essential.” Here are a few noted geniuses who fit that model.

Gould was known by friends and family as a control freak. Like many savants, he had perfect pitch and a steel-trap memory. He also tended to sing along with his playing, which drove recording engineers crazy. But his gifted interpretations of Bach are considered some of the finest ever recorded.

The author of the first English dictionary had a tendency to burst out with startling barnyard noises, or bits of the Lord’s Prayer. He
was obsessive about doing things the same way, and would have a tantrum if there were any changes in his daily habits.

The man who discovered hydrogen was one of the first people to accurately calculate the mass of the Earth, as well as the chemical composition of the atmosphere. He rarely left his house and went out of his way to avoid seeing anyone. Many discoveries credited to other scientists were found to have been made by him years earlier when his papers, which he never published, were examined after his death.

Another strange scientist who changed the world with his genius, Newton gave us his Laws of Motion, the binomial theorem, and calculus. Reclusive, quirky, mindless of his personal cleanliness, he seldom spoke and was so obsessed with his work that he would forget to eat. At Cambridge, Newton was known for giving lectures… even if no one showed up to hear them.

Known as the high priest of bebop, this pianist and composer revolutionized jazz with his original compositions. He also had a unique performance style—personal tics that included unusual syncopations in his rhythms, as well as a tendency to dance around his piano. He spoke in a bizarre medley of grunts and random philosophical mutterings.

Here are some more famous brains who were never diagnosed with Asperger’s but displayed the symptoms during their lifetimes.

•
Jane Austen

•
Albert Einstein

•
Vincent Van Gogh

•
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

•
Franz Kafka

•
Thomas Jefferson

•
Ludwig van Beethoven

• Nikola Tesla

•
Alexander Graham Bell

•
Emily Dickinson

• Charles Schulz

• Thomas Edison

• Henry Ford

• Jim Henson

How does Uncle John keep busy when he’s not writing great books? He watches bad movies! So many, in fact, that he’s one of the founders of southern Oregon’s Bad Film Society. How bad? Read on…

S
ILVER SCREEN

Here’s a question no one has probably ever asked you: If you had to choose between watching
Citizen Kane
and
Killer Klowns from Outer Space,
which movie would you pick? How about
Gone With the Wind
vs.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
? Or
Casablanca
vs.
The Brain from Planet Arous
? If you picked
Killer Klowns
,
Santa the Conquerer
, and
The Brain
, then you and Uncle John have something in common. He’s had a strange passion for odd and awful films ever since he was a kid.