Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (37 page)

Crimp gangs and sea captains weren’t the only ones who benefited from the shanghai system; that was why it lasted as long as it did. Kidnapping waterfront riffraff and sending them off to sea lowered the crime rate (excluding kidnapping, of course). If you had lent someone money and they refused to pay it back, you could arrange to have them shanghaied. Likewise, if
you
owed someone money and didn’t want to pay it back, you could have the lender shanghaied, too. Not many people concerned themselves with the plight of shanghaied sailors or even noticed when they disappeared—most were transients with few ties to the community.

The crimp gangs protected their interests by being active in the political machines that dominated government in cities like Portland and San Francisco. In California, two crimps named Joseph “Frenchy” Franklin and George Lewis even managed to get themselves elected to the state legislature, where they succeeded in blocking laws that attempted to outlaw shanghaiing.

In the end it wasn’t a legal or moral crusade that ended the cruel shanghai system, it was steam: Steamships didn’t have sails, and could get by with less than half the crew of a sailing ship. By the time Max DeVeer and his friend woke up on their sailing ship as it was headed out of the Golden Gate, steamships were already overtaking sailing ships and the age of shanghaiing was drawing to a close.

*       *       *

The age of shanghaiing may be over, but Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels are still there, and parts of them are open for public tours. Look them up online or contact the city’s tourist bureau for more information. Reservations are required, and it’s a good idea to book well in advance—the tours are popular and frequently sell out.

Strange tales of creatures great, small, and stupid.

T
URTLE POWER

A family in Kent, England, accidentally threw out their pet turtle, Murphy, with the trash. Murphy then went through a trash pulverizing machine, was scooped up with a load of garbage by a bulldozer, and processed through a giant, bottle-smashing drum. Somehow, the turtle survived and was discovered alive at the recycling plant.

In March 1993, a cat named Cingene (Turkish for “gypsy”) appeared on a television news show in Turkey and reportedly spoke seven words in clear Turkish. The words:
ver
(give),
demen
(“I don’t say!”),
Nalan
and
Derya
(popular girls’ names),
naynay
(a slang term for music),
nine
(a colloquial word for grandmother), and
babaane
(grandmother).

In 2002 dozens of drivers were injured by rockslides on a mountain road between the Russian resort towns of Adler and Krasnaya Polyana. The reason for the rockslides: malicious bears. Locals say Caucasian bears had taken to killing cows for entertainment by rolling rocks down the mountains onto them. They had since moved on from hitting cows to trying to hit people and their cars.

Katie Perfitt of England wondered why her one-year-old cat Joey’s behavior became erratic at night. Turns out he was sneaking out every night and going to the Teal Arms, the local pub. Patrons routinely fed him rum, beer, and hard cider. “He’d attack the duvet, then jump on my plate while I was eating,” Perfitt said. “The next minute he’d be snoring his head off.” Joey’s bar visits ended when the vet discovered Joey had suffered minor liver damage.

In February and March 2003, nearly 50 bulls in Wisconsin suffered severe groin injuries trying to mate with an unreceptive cow. The “cow” was made of cast iron and had been placed in a field by a farmer to scare off crows. “I’m currently being sued by several dairy farmers for vet bills,” the farmer with the iron cow said.

While playing in a park in Erith, England, 14-year-old Nathan Ferro was suddenly blindsided and knocked to the ground by a Labrador retriever. It didn’t bite the boy, but it pinned him down, stuck its snout in his pocket, grabbed his $130 cellular phone, and ran off with it. “It seemed to know exactly what it was looking for,” Nathan said. The (tooth-marked) phone was later recovered.

A bus in Voi, Kenya, accidentally ran into and killed a three-month-old elephant calf in January 2006. Immediately seeking revenge, eight full-grown, screaming elephants surrounded the bus and tried to tip it over. A 50-car traffic jam ensued as wildlife wardens tried to get the elephants to disperse.

In May 1989, an eight-hour traffic jam was caused on the Isle of Wight when falling seagull droppings hit and jammed the electric eye of a bridge’s traffic light control system. In April 1994, New-bridge, England, experienced a blackout when a bird of prey dropped a lamb on an electricity substation. (The same thing happened a month later in Morongo Basin, California, except that bird dropped a rosy boa snake.)

Eight-year-old Olivia Parkinson of West Midlands, England, wondered why her usually springy springer spaniel puppy Barney was moving so slowly. A visit to the vet revealed that Barney had been eating everything he played “fetch” with. In his stomach were six fist-size rocks, five twigs, and whole apples. “I could never understand why when we played fetch, he would return empty-mouthed,” Olivia said. “Now I know.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t the only time the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war. Here are a few more times that the world nearly plunged into World War III by accident.

C
RISIS BEARLY AVERTED

Late on the night of October 25, 1962, a guard at an Air Force base in Minnesota spotted a dark figure climbing the fence surrounding the base. The guard shot and killed the mysterious figure. The fence was wired to detect intruders, and as the culprit fell, it set off an alarm. But the fence was incorrectly wired, and the alarm set off a second alarm hundreds of miles away at an Air National Guard base in Wisconsin. F-106 fighter jets armed with nuclear missiles immediately prepared to take off toward the Soviet Union in response to the intrusion. But the nuclear strike was quickly called off after an investigation determined the identity of the fence-climbing spy: It was a bear.

In the 1990s, hostilities between India and Pakistan escalated over mutual claims of ownership of the Kashmir region. Both countries conducted nuclear tests in “sabre-rattling” moves. Then, on June 6, 2002, a 32-foot-wide asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking up and exploding in a fiery ball over the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Greece. Just before the explosion—a blast that registered at 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II—the asteroid flew directly over India and Pakistan. Scientists estimate that if it had landed in either country, it would have looked—and felt—exactly like an unprovoked first strike, and may have prompted the other country to attack.

Just before 1:00 a.m. on September 26, 1983, Soviet defense computers received a message that American-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles had been detected in the sky, and were on their way to Moscow. Col. Stanislav Petrov was the officer in
charge at the Serpukhov-15 bunker outside of Moscow, where it was his job to monitor the early-warning satellite network. In case of attack, he would notify his superiors, who would immediately launch a nuclear counterattack on the United States. But the computers registered only
one
missile launched from the U.S. Petrov reasoned that the message was a false alarm—if the Americans were attacking, they’d launch many missiles, not just one. He was right. The “missile plumes” observed by radar turned out to be glare from the Sun. (Despite acting correctly, Petrov was demoted.)

On January 25, 1995, a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a research rocket off the northwest coast of Norway. It contained equipment to collect data on the aurora borealis, or northern lights. The rocket was noticed by radar operators at the Olengorsk early-warning station in Russia, who mistakenly identified the small, unarmed rocket as a submarine-launched nuclear Trident missile headed for Moscow. The news was sent to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who, for a moment, was ready to hit the “launch nukes” button. Fortunately, minutes later, the radar operators noticed that the “missile” was heading away from Russia, and determined that it wasn’t really a threat. The rocket collected its data and landed safely on an Arctic island a half hour later. Ironically, the scientists had notified the Russian government of the rocket launch weeks in advance, but the information had not made its way to the early-warning radar operators or Yeltsin.

On November 9, 1979, computers at three American military control centers (the Pentagon, the Pentagon’s emergency site in Maryland, and the Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado) all displayed the same grim news: Soviet nuclear missiles were on their way. Officers immediately put missile launch sites on alert and ten fighter jets took off to patrol the skies and shoot down anything suspicious. However, before launching a counterstrike, officers at the three bases decided to back up the information they’d received. Satellite data and radar across the country showed no signs of Soviet missiles in the air. It turns out that a training tape of attack scenarios had been placed into the computer running the military’s early-warning system.

Do you believe in reincarnation? According to a recent poll, 25 percent of Americans do. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the spirit of a dead celebrity was inhabiting you?

S
OME LIKE IT NOT

Ever since the age of five, Sherrie Lea Laird says she has endured unwanted and troubling memories—memories that she says aren’t hers. At first, Laird didn’t know who they belonged to, but as the years passed on, they seemed to bear a striking resemblance to those of Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962—just a few months before Laird was born.

Laird grew up to become the lead singer of a popular Canadian rock band called Pandamonia. But the disturbing memories persisted. She claimed to friends that she could feel the sadness Monroe felt when John F. Kennedy ended their relationship, and even experienced the heart palpitations from the accidental drug overdose that killed Monroe (Laird claims her “memory” debunks all theories of murder or suicide). The memories became so unbearable that in 1998 Laird sought professional help. She was pointed in the direction of a Malibu, California, psychiatrist named Adrian Finkelstein. Perhaps he’d have the answers she was looking for.

For nearly 20 years, Finkelstein has been a leading practitioner of “past-life regression” therapy; he hypnotizes his patients to help them channel the souls that inhabit them. Finkelstein took Laird’s case, and over seven years conducted hundreds of hours of hypnosis and interviews. Finkelstein believed Laird, but knew he needed proof before anyone else would, too. So before each session, Finkelstein did exhaustive research about details of Monroe’s life, then quizzed the deeply hypnotized Laird about them. She was spot-on every time, he says. Speaking under hypnosis as “Marilyn,” Laird answered questions that only the real Marilyn would have known, including details of her relationship with JFK. (According to Laird, he told Monroe state secrets about Cuba, and she first had sex with him in a car.) In addition, Finkelstein showed her
photographs of Monroe’s relatives, and Laird was able to identify each one and provide more details than even Finkelstein knew.

Laird believes that her own 21-year-old daughter is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe’s mother, Gladys Baker, who died a few days before Laird’s daughter was born. Finkelstein’s theory: Monroe and Baker are seeking an opportunity to heal their relationship through Laird and her daughter.

Finkelstein released his findings in the May 2005 edition of
Malibu Surfside News
: “I established through research that Sherrie Lea Laird is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” The announcement was big news in both the Hollywood gossip magazines and the spiritual community. Even the
Los Angeles Times
ran a front-page story about it, with the headline, “MARILYN LIVES!”

Skeptics claim that the whole “investigation” is nothing more than a publicity stunt to further the careers of both the psychiatrist and the rock star. If so, it worked. Laird’s story has been told in the press and on television; Finkelstein wrote a book about the case, entitled
Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul
. Both have made the rounds on the talk-show circuit.