Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (34 page)

—
Jay Newman

•
He couldn’t sleep
so he did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep—he thought about riding a unicorn, like the one he’d dreamt about as a child, the dream which he wasn’t totally convinced was a dream, but in actuality was a reality—then he awoke and realized he wasn’t really sleeping, but was dreaming about wanting to sleep; he thought it all terribly ironic, until, he noticed, there at the foot of his bed, was the ghost of John Quincy Adams.

—
Brian Boone

•
Staring intently across the office
through the bleak October twilight, Matt eyed the empty orange-juice container that he’d “decorated” with a Sharpie to look like a jack-o-lantern face, silently hating the fact that his lame co-workers had actually entered it in the demeaning office pumpkin-decorating contest, but also secretly p*ssed off that they hadn’t won and hadn’t even gotten honorable mention for “Most Economical.”

—G. Javna

•
Though it sickened her
to think that, once again, the old men would ogle her generous hips under the voluminous corduroy skirt, and desire her supple skin, aromatic with Yardley oatmeal soap that you could only find at a Rexall pharmacy, she steeled herself, tightening her moist lips like two tiles in a badly built shower, and pushed through the door of the stamp-collectors’ shop.

—Amy Miller

What will the bug-eyed monsters and little green men of science fiction
really
look like when we meet them? According to BRI stalwart Bruce Carlson, you might want to watch where you step.

W
HO’S OUT THERE?

Most scientists believe that there is, in fact, life beyond Earth. But they wonder whether we’ll even recognize it if—or when—we first bump into it.

Will alien life be the cute, big-eyed, long-armed aliens in
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
? Or the people-eating, egg-laying monsters in
Alien
? Perhaps they’ll be the big, hairy Wookies or overweight, oversexed Jabba the Hutt types from
Star Wars
. Or maybe they’re already here—the “grays” who occasionally kidnap people and take them away inside brightly lit UFOs, like the ones in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
or
The X-Files
.

The list of imaginary aliens goes on and on, but if you ask scientists what a being from another planet might actually look like, they’ll tell you that it probably isn’t going to look even remotely like anything portrayed in sci-fi movies or anything we’ve seen before. This raises questions about what life actually is, and how we’ll know it if we see it. Anna Lee Strachan of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute points out that a being with, say, “a dark matter quantum-like existence, blinking in and out of time and space, without any need for a home planet, water, or energy,” would probably be unrecognizable to us as “life.”

Extraterrestrials may not have backbones (or any bones at all). They may not have just one brain, or viscera packaged inside skin. They won’t necessarily be
bilaterally symmetrical
—having one side the same as the other—as most Earth life is. Most movie aliens have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose, and a mouth that’s located in the front of the head. But there’s no good reason, other than movie budgets, that this should be the case.

While many scientists believe quite firmly that life does exist Out There, they say that what it looks like would depend on where it comes from. Life anywhere evolves to prosper in the environment it lives in. For example, astronomer Carl Sagan and Cornell University scientist E. E. Salpeter imagined the possibility of miles-in-diameter hydrogen balloon–type life forms floating high in the atmosphere of a giant gas planet like Jupiter and feeding on organic molecules that fall from the skies, sort of like fish food. They could just float along, controlling their buoyancy so as not to sink too low and get crushed by the gravitational pressure close to the planet’s surface.

Life coming from a smaller, rockier planet with higher gravity would be profoundly different. Any creatures there would have to be small and extraordinarily tough, like the life forms science fiction writer Hal Clement created in his stories about a planet he called Mesklin. Unlike Sagan and Salpeter’s gossamer floaters, Clement’s Mesklinites are insectlike creatures with exoskeletons, built close to the ground, with many legs for support and powerful circulatory systems, well adapted to the strong gravitational pull.

When imagining life elsewhere, scientists have to make some assumptions. They assume, for instance, that any living thing will have senses of some kind to react to its environment—it’s just that those senses might not be anything recognizable to humans. Carl Sagan once said, “The number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere else in the universe.” Aliens might “see” via radio waves or “hear” via X-rays. As physicist Philip Morrison points out, they may just be “blue spheres with 12 tentacles.”

Life forms from elsewhere may not be carbon-based, as life on Earth is. Many scientists assume they will be, however, because carbon is very good at knitting together chemical chains—acting as a sort of glue for the pieces of life’s complex molecules. But still, there are other chemicals that can do that, too. Silicon is often mentioned as a possible base for alien life, because it’s a versatile element that combines readily with chemical chains. And
depending on the organic groups attached, the result can be solid, fluid, or resinous.

So, too, might be the aliens.

There may even be extraterrestrial life within our own solar system. Most astrobiologists are of the opinion that, if there is, it won’t be the monstrous, mechanized Martians of
War of the Worlds
. Instead it will be tiny microbes. And if Jupiter’s moon Europa does have oceans of liquid beneath its icy surface, as some scientists believe, then that’s one place to look. While some experts hold out hope for something as sophisticated as a worm—there are worms, for example, at the cold, dark bottom of the Pacific Ocean—most put their money on some sort of floating blob of goo. No brains, no arms or legs, no spaceships, no communicators, no phaser guns…just microscopic slime that spends its time eating, excreting, and reproducing.

In December 1984, ALH84001, a Martian meteorite, was discovered in Antarctica. Scientists thought it contained evidence of extraterrestrial life, including organic chemicals and “bacterium-shaped objects.” Later studies showed that much of the evidence might well have come from what are called “nonbiological processes,” which diminished the excitement a bit. But scientists are still studying it…and who knows what they’ll find?

So the next time you watch a science-fiction movie or TV show, keep in mind that real aliens will most likely look less like ETs and more like…well, like nothing we’ve ever seen. The best way to consider what extraterrestrials will look like is to do what astrobiologists do: Get your facts straight. Then stretch your imagination.

*       *       *

Over the past 20 years, several Brazilians have claimed that their bodies are inhabited by the soul of “Dr. Fritz,” a German doctor who served and died in World War I. Today, Dr. Fritz is said to live inside a man named Rubens Faria, Jr. Every day, more than 800 people wait in line for a 30-second healing session with Faria/Fritz.

We couldn’t do a world tour of the odd without a stop up north, eh.

K
IM CAMPBELL MEETS SIMON COWELL

In 1995, Canada started a national essay-writing scholarship contest called “As Prime Minister.” In 2006, it became a reality TV show called
The Next Great Prime Minister
. For the 2007 installment, the finalists will be judged by a panel of former prime ministers: Brian Mulroney, John Turner, Joe Clark, and Kim Campbell. (Interestingly, the winner doesn’t get to be prime minister—they get $44,000 and a government internship.)

Roxanne Toussaint, a single mother of three, felt unappreciated for the hard work she does cooking, cleaning, and raising her kids. So in 2006, she went on strike. She moved into a tent on her front lawn and spends the day holding up a sign that reads “Mom on Strike.” Toussaint’s demands: that her kids sign a pledge to clean up their rooms, contribute to the housework, and be quieter.

Aaron Helferty, 31, was drinking in an Edmonton bar when a group of men he didn’t know began berating him. He ignored it…until one man approached him, silently stared at him, then suddenly lunged forward and started chewing on his nose. Two bar employees broke up the fight and threw out the attacker, who’d managed to bite off (and swallow) part of Helferty’s nose. Helferty plans to get reconstructive surgery; police can’t find the attacker.

Canadians have a reputation for being extremely polite, saying “I’m sorry” even when they don’t really have to. In 2006, the provincial governments of British Columbia and Saskatchewan passed legislation to make saying “I’m sorry” in court not a legal admission of guilt. It allows for defendants to politely acknowledge wrongdoing with a public apology without having to worry about the legal ramifications.

Now join host Marlin Perky for another episode of
Sexy Kingdom.

N
ICE LEGS

In 2005 five giant squids washed ashore in a single week in the Bay of Biscay in Spain, giving marine biologists a chance to study the rarely seen creatures. One thing they discovered is that the sex life of giant squids, who make their homes in the deep, dark depths of the world’s oceans, can be a violent and haphazard affair. Since it has never actually been observed, biologists can only guess as to the exact mating activity of the animals, based on the study of such washed-up specimens. That has led them to believe that the male of the species “injects” sperm through the skin of the arms of a female, who then saves it until she is ready to lay her eggs. Of the two males found in Spain, one had arms that showed that it had been injected by another male, possibly by one who had mistaken it for a female in the murky depths of the sea. The other one had accidentally injected itself.

YES. OUCH.

As a female porcupine approaches the annual 8–12 hour period during which she is receptive to mating, she stops eating, selects a mate, and starts “moping” around him. The male responds by following her around, “singing” in a whiny voice, engaging in vicious fights with other males, and sniffing wherever the female urinates. (The urine acts as an aphrodisiac.) When mating time finally arrives, the male stands on his back legs, approaches the female, and becomes what experts describe as a “urine cannon.” He hoses down the female with a stream of urine that can shoot up to seven feet, covering her from head to toe. The female either emits a high-pitched scream and attacks the male, or she lifts her tail, exposing her unquilled underside, and allows him to gingerly approach—still on his rear legs—and mate with her. When he gets tired out, she makes him do it again…and again…and again. If he won’t do it, she finds another male, until the 8–12 hour “receptive” period is over.

Colonies of the Australian yellow-footed Antechinus—a mousesized marsupial—participate in one of the strangest mating events in the animal kingdom. Biologists believe that the increase in daylight hours in the second half of winter induces the males, all of them about eleven months old, to begin a two-week frenetic spree, going from nest to nest in the colony to breed with every female they can, with each mating session taking from six to twelve hours. The physical stress of the mating frenzy, along with having to fight with other males, and the fact that they don’t eat
at all
during the period, is too much for them. After the two-week mating marathon, every male in the colony dies. The females have their litters a month later…and eleven months after that, it all starts all over again.

*       *       *

In November 2004, Ron Howes, 42, his 15-year-old daughter, and two of her friends were swimming about 100 yards offshore near Whangarei on the North Island of New Zealand. During the swim, Howes later told the Canadian Broadcasting Company, a pod of dolphins “came steaming at us” and “pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us.”

Howes said he tried to leave the circle, but two large dolphins pushed him back—and at that point he saw a great white shark coming toward the group. “I just recoiled,” he said. “It was only about two meters away from me.” He then realized that the dolphins, which kept slapping the water with their tails, were protecting them. The dolphins kept them in the circle for nearly 40 minutes, until the shark left when a rescue boat showed up. And the dolphins stayed close to the rescued swimmers until they made it all the way back to shore. “I came out of that water and I was stunned,” Howe said. “I had no idea how to relay what had happened and how to deal with it.” He didn’t tell the girls about the shark, which never broke the surface, until the next day.