Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (28 page)

THAILAND:
Creamed slug on toast.

U.S.A.:
An American specialty, Burgoo is found mostly in Kentucky. It’s a meat and vegetable stew…where the “meat” is often squirrel brains. Some people just scoop the brains out of several squirrel skulls and scramble them with eggs.

*       *       *

“Hope is the feeling you feel when you feel that the feeling you feel isn’t going to be permanent.”

—
Jean Kerr

We thought you’d love some stories about the wild world of medicine.

C
AN’T SAY HE’S HEARTLESS

In August 2006, 55-year-old Louis Selo of London died while on vacation in Ireland. His body was examined at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where it was determined that Selo had died of a massive heart attack. The corpse was sent home to England, where another autopsy was performed (a second autopsy is customarily done when English citizens die out of the country). That operation went a bit differently: When the English doctors opened up Selo’s chest, they discovered an extra heart and two extra lungs in a plastic bag inside him. An inquiry revealed that they were from an organ donor at the Irish hospital. Those organs were returned to the family of the donor, and an investigation to find out how they ended up in Mr. Selo was begun immediately.

Dr. Savely Yurkovsky of Chappaqua, New York, says he knows a cure for the deadly disease SARS. Victims must collect some of their own infected saliva, mucus, and urine, mix it with a little water, and drink it. The potion, Yurkovsky says in his book,
Biological, Chemical and Nuclear Warfare: Protecting Yourself And Your Loved Ones,
will trigger the immune system to go after the disease
.
Other revelations in Yurkovsky’s book: “Poison can be your best friend,” “Carcinogens can protect you against cancer,” and “Toxic chemicals can extend lifespan and enhance immunity.”

In 1996 renowned English heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub operated on two-year-old Hannah Clark of Mountain Ash, Wales. She had cardiomyopathy, which had caused her heart to become badly inflamed, so Yacoub put in a new one. Hannah and her new heart were doing well…until the heart started showing signs of rejection 10 years later. In 2006 Yacoub came out of retirement and operated on Hannah, now 12, again. He reconnected her original heart… which had been left inside her body (surprisingly, not an unusual
practice). It had apparently healed itself while it wasn’t being used and began working immediately when it was reattached. Hannah was back home within five days. It was the first time that such an operation had ever been performed.

A German plastic surgeon cheated out of payments from four women upon whom he had performed breast enhancement surgery took his complaint to police…along with photos of the women’s enhanced breasts. “They registered under fake names,” Dr. Michael Koenig told reporters. “And then after the operations, they just ran away.” Each surgery cost nearly $14,000. Police made posters of the enhanced-breast photos and distributed them to the public; the German newspaper
Bild
even printed one of the shots. “It’s probably the most unusual wanted poster ever,”
Bild
wrote.

A doctor in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was arrested in September 2006 after stealing a hand from a cadaver and giving it to an exotic dancer as a gift. She kept it in a jar of formaldehyde. It was discovered when police were called to the woman’s apartment because of a suicidal roommate. Friends said she had named the hand “Freddy.”

In 2005 Joyce Urch had a heart attack. The 74-year-old was rushed to Walgrave Hospital near her home in Coventry, England, where she underwent surgery and spent the next three days unconscious and near death. She finally woke up—and started shouting “I can see! I can see!” Urch had been blind for 25 years. “Then she leaned forward,” said her husband, Eric, “and she just looked at me and said, ‘Haven’t you got old?’ And I said, ‘Wait ’til you have a look in the mirror.’” Just as doctors were unable to explain why she lost her sight so many years before (they thought it might be a genetic condition), they could give no explanation for its return. But the Urches didn’t care. “When Joyce first went blind,” Eric said, “everything seemed to fall away from us. This has given us both our lives back.”

The odd, the weird, the strange, and the crazy—south of the border.

W
ORMING AROUND

One of the most lucrative products (and exports) in Mexico is mescal
,
a liquor similar to tequila, and most commonly packaged with a worm in every bottle. Legend says that eating the worm triggers powerful hallucinations. In 2005 the Mexican government considered banning worms from mescal. Because of the hallucinations? Nope. The worm is too high in fat, they claim. (The proposal failed; the worm remains.)

In 1993, Gerardo Palomero went on an animal-rights crusade, invading Mexico City slaughterhouses and yelling at meat cutters to treat animals more humanely. While workers respected his message, they found Palomero hard to take seriously because he was dressed in the brightly colored spandex costume of his professional wrestling character, “Super Animal.”

In 2005, women’s groups in Mexico City raised funds to build a home for elderly prostitutes. The city government even donated a building. But it’s not a retirement home—it’s a brothel. Hopeful “resident” Gloria Maria, 74, says she “can’t charge what the young ones do, but I still have two or three clients a day.”

In December 1998, newly elected Mexico City mayor Rosario Robles Berlanga was preparing to give an inauguration speech in which she planned to announce a crackdown on crime. Just hours before Berlanga was to speak, her top aide was mugged in a taxi. The thief stole the briefcase containing the mayor’s tough-on-crime speech.

If you’re the person who lost the bag of human skulls, write to us and get a free Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Skull Bag. Congratulations!

H
E ALMOST CROAKED

In 2004 postman Jason O’Rourke was making his rounds in Stirling, Scotland, when he opened a public mailbox and encountered a strange sight. “I opened the box and 32 eyes were staring back at me,’ he said. “I got the fright of my life, and just slammed the door back shut so they couldn’t escape, whatever they were.” What were they? Frogs. Someone had put 16 of them in the box. O’Rourke immediately contacted the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who were able to transfer the frogs to a nearby pond.

Workers at a sewage treatment facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, called police one day in 2001 to tell them they had found half of a human brain. The half-brain, investigators later said, was “fresh” and had apparently been flushed down a toilet. A DNA search never determined who the organ belonged to. Local coroner Zachary Lysek called the matter “very perplexing.”

In May 2006, workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Fairfield, California, found an “alien” inside a duck. An injured mallard had been sent to the facility with a broken wing, and an X-ray of its abdomen showed what looked like the stereotypical portrayal of an extraterrestrial—with an oval head and big eyes. “It clearly stood out,” said IBRRC director Jay Holcomb. “We were trying to look at its broken wing, but all we could see was the face.” They figured the duck had eaten a doll or something similar, but when it died a short time later and they performed an autopsy, they found…nothing. The group put the X-ray up for auction on eBay to help fund the center. It sold for $9,600.

In April 2003, American and British troops entering Baghdad discovered the palatial house of Uday Hussein, son of Saddam Hussein. Inside they found more than $1 million worth of liquor, drugs, Cuban cigars—and a gym with all the walls covered with photographs of naked women taken from the Internet. It was “the biggest collection of naked women I’d ever seen,” said Army captain Ed Ballanco. Bonus: There were also several photos of President Bush’s twin 21-year-old daughters, Barbara and Jenna. (No, they weren’t naked.)

In September 2006, a man in Germany was looking at images of China on the satellite-imaging Web site Google Earth when he saw something strange. It was an obviously fake model landscape set in the middle of a desert in the country’s northwest region. It had fake snow-capped mountains, fake lakes, and fake river valleys. And it was huge—about 2,000 feet by 3,000 feet—and had straight, walled borders. The man posted news of his find on a Google Earth bulletin board, and someone suggested he look around China’s border regions for any similar terrain. He did, and found something. The terrain in the model almost perfectly matched an area 1,500 miles southeast, on a disputed border area with India. Same mountains, same lakes, same valleys. A reporter for McClatchy Newspapers went to the region…and found it was surrounded by an armored tank base. When asked what the replica was for, a soldier said, “You wouldn’t understand it.”

In 2001 police in Siliguri, West Bengal, India, were called to a bus stop after people reported a strange bag left there—and the bag smelled funny. The officers opened it and found 86 human skulls inside. “All the skulls were neatly sawn off,” police superintendent Sanjay Chander said. “And some had some brain tissues sticking to them.” No explanation for the bag of heads was ever found.

Why did the cat cross the road? To spy on the USSR! If you didn’t laugh, don’t feel bad—the joke doesn’t make any sense. It made even less sense during the Cold War, when the CIA tried to develop a way to get cats to spy on the Soviets. (Ahhhh, our hard-earned tax dollars at work.)

M
ISSION IMPLAUSIBLE

In the 1960s the CIA was looking for a way to spy on Russian diplomats strolling through the park across the street from the Soviet compound in Washington, D.C. With today’s electronics and eavesdropping equipment that might not be too big a challenge, but 40 years ago things were different: Microphones weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are today, and the ones that were small enough to be hidden in a park bench or drilled into the trunk of a tree were especially bad. Unless the diplomats sat or stood right next to the microphone and happened to talk directly into it, the tiny mikes couldn’t filter out nearby noises—children playing, leaves rustling, park benches squeaking—so that their conversations could be clearly understood. And since the diplomats moved all around the park, even if the microphones had been effective there would have had to have been multiple units installed all over the park. How could that be done without attracting the attention of the Soviet compound right across the street? Another way had to be found.

At some point in the 1960s some clever scientist—we’ll probably never know who, since the details of the program are still a closely guarded secret—decided to see if they could wire up common house cats to become mobile electronic listening devices. The project was code-named “Acoustic Kitty.” (No, we’re not kidding.)

CIA veterinarians selected a single test cat and performed extensive surgery on it, inserting a microphone, a transmitter, and batteries underneath its skin, and running a wire antenna down the length of the cat’s tail. Have you ever been able to teach a cat to do a trick? Neither has Uncle John, but somehow the CIA figured
out how to do that, too. They trained Acoustic Kitty to approach selected individuals on command and to listen for and seek out human conversation. The idea was that if the cat got close enough to the diplomats that
it
could hear their conversation clearly, the microphone would pick it up, too. If the suspects moved around the park, the cat could follow without attracting suspicion. Who would guess that the cat was working for the CIA?

The possibilities must have seemed endless. Why stop with one cat in a Washington, D.C. park? It might be just a matter of time before dozens of Acoustic Kitties were perched on windowsills all over Washington—perhaps even in the Kremlin.

The training and testing went well, except for one hitch: When Acoustic Kitty got hungry, it wandered off in search of something to eat. The CIA fixed that problem by implanting a device to suppress the cat’s appetite.

Finally, everything was ready for a trial run: Acoustic Kitty was bundled into a spy van and driven to the park across the street from the Soviet compound. When some Soviet diplomats were spotted heading into the park, the CIA agents let the cat out of the van and…S
PLAT!
Before it could even cross the street, Acoustic Kitty was run over by a taxi and killed.