Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (44 page)

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Baby Boomer
(1989) To prevent a baby from crawling near perilous pitfalls such as bottomless pits or hungry falcons, the player must shoot and kill things before they can harm the infant.

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Elf Bowling
(2005) In this Christmas-themed bowling game, the player knocks over Santa’s elves instead of pins.

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Shaq Fu
(1994) NBA star Shaquille O’Neal travels to another dimension and uses martial arts to rescue a kidnapped boy.

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Journey Escape
(1982) The player guides the rock band Journey as they try to escape mobs of lusty groupies. The game was the first to feature photo-realistic images, with the faces of the band members plastered onto tiny, pixilated bodies.

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Bible Adventures
(1991) Three Old Testament-themed games in one package:
Noah’s Ark
(knock out animals and put them on the boat),
Baby Moses
(help Moses avoid the Pharaoh’s decree to kill all male babies), and
David and Goliath
(slingshot warfare).

We love to write about criminals in
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Over the years, we’ve covered dumb crooks, nice crooks, and even clever crooks. But sometimes criminals do things that make no sense whatsoever.

W
HEN ART REALLY BOMBS

In 2002, Luke Helder, a University of Wisconsin art student, was arrested for planting 18 pipe bombs in mailboxes in half a dozen states. It was all part of a bizarre “art” project: When plotted on a map, the bomb sites formed a “smiley face,” with the “eyes” in Nebraska and Iowa and the left side of the “mouth” in Colorado and Texas. The right side remained unfinished because police caught Helder after his father turned him in. (Nobody died.)

Two women approached a man in a park in Sibu, Romania, and struck up a friendly conversation with him. In the course of conversation they asked him to let them hypnotize him. The man agreed, thinking it might be fun. A half hour later the man woke up from his trance. The women were gone, and so was his wallet.

Simon Andrews of Osbaldwick, England, was sentenced to six months house arrest in 2003. The crime: Andrews had attacked four random men on the street, wrestling them to the ground and taking off—but not stealing—their shoes and socks. Why’d he do it? Andrews, an accountant, says he was “stressed out.”

Dusco Stuppar, 32, of France was able to con an old childhood friend, known only as “Christophe H.” into giving him 650,000 francs (about $62,000) to help fund the construction of a city to be built under a secret river on the planet Mars. Stuppar told Christophe that he was part of a secret society of ultra-intelligent people who had the technology possible to make the underwater
space city possible. Even more bizarre: Stuppar claimed his evil clone (also part of the Mars project) had injected him with explosives. If Christophe didn’t hand over the money, he said, the clone would blow up Stuppar. Christophe later told the story to a psychiatrist, leading to Stuppar’s arrest and an 18-month jail term.

A couple living in Dorset, England, called the police in 2001 when they realized their home had been broken into while they were out. An investigation revealed that the thief hadn’t actually stolen anything, but had left behind a new television and an unopened bottle of Zima.

A biological terror alert went out in January 2003 when Dr. Thomas Butler, an infectious disease researcher at Texas Tech University, informed police that 30 vials of bubonic plague were missing from his lab. Police feared the vials were stolen by terrorists who could convert the samples into a chemical weapon. Even President Bush was briefed about the incident. A day later, Dr. Butler was arrested when it was discovered he’d accidentally destroyed the plague vials himself, and had lied to cover up the error.

In fall 2005, a strange crime wave hit Baltimore: Over the course of six weeks, 130 light poles were stolen. Each pole measured 30 feet tall, weighed 250 pounds, and cost $1,200. There were no witnesses and police were baffled. More baffling is why the thieves were so neat—when they stole the poles, they left all the high voltage wiring cleanly wrapped in black electric tape.

In 2003, a 23-year-old woman from Tyrol, Austria, went to a police station to report that her expensive pair of ski pants had been stolen. Officers quickly solved the case—they pointed out to the woman that she was
wearing
the pants. “I was so nervous that I forgot to take them off,” she said.

These people cheated death. Not with brains, not with brawn—but with pure, dumb luck.

B
ATHROOM BREAK

After an evening of heavy drinking, a 47-year-old man was stumbling through the streets of Fischbachtal, Germany, in a heavy downpour. While looking for a dry place to take refuge, he found a dumpster in an alley, climbed inside, and passed out.

An hour or so later, a garbage truck entered the alley, scooped up the dumpster with its metal claws, and dropped the contents into the truck. The driver then pressed a button that activated the hydraulic mechanism designed to crush the contents of the container into a tiny cube. Normally, the driver would have remained in the truck until the crushing was completed, but on this particular occasion, he had to pee. So he got out and walked behind the truck to do his business. That’s when he heard the muffled screams and swear words coming from his container. He immediately cut the power, then ran back and opened the back of the truck. There he found a very upset man (who had probably sobered up pretty quickly), and helped him get out. Thanks to the driver’s pee break, the drunk man suffered only minor injuries.

On the outside lane of a roundabout in Lancaster, England, a man was driving a BMW. On the inside lane was a 44-ton tanker truck…which tipped over and fell right on top of the BMW. To make matters worse, powder started pouring out of a hole in the tanker and filling up what little room was left in the crushed car. Rescuers furiously tried to get to the car so that they could free the driver, but they couldn’t budge the truck. A crane was called in, and after several long minutes it finally lifted the truck off the car. Expecting the worst, the rescuers and onlookers couldn’t believe their eyes: The man was crouched into the only uncrushed and unpowdered section of his little car. The door was removed,
and the dazed driver got out and walked over to the ambulance where he was treated for minor scratches. The tanker driver wasn’t quite as lucky—he broke his arm.

While gazing at a beautiful vista in the French Alps, a 45-year-old woman fell from a precipice that jutted out hundreds of feet above a canyon floor. Her fall came to an abrupt halt, however, when her foot got caught in a tree root sticking out from a cliff. There she dangled for more than two hours while waiting for a rescue team to free her. They did, and she walked away unhurt.

A man got caught in the spinning blades of a plane’s propeller… and lived. It happened in the small town of Kleefield, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The owner of a small Cessna aircraft had to move it from a local church parking lot to a hangar on his property, and decided to get it there by taxiing it down a town road. He had a friend walk alongside the plane to help redirect traffic along the way. When the plane approached an intersection, the 50-year-old friend ran around to the front of the plane to check for oncoming cars. That’s when he ran right into the path of the spinning propeller and suffered major lacerations along his right side, then was thrown into the air, and then landed hard on the pavement, dislocating his shoulder. After a lengthy stay in the hospital, the man is expected to fully recover. “This gentleman is extremely fortunate,” an RCMP spokesman told reporters. “The chances of surviving impact with a propeller on any aircraft is remote.”

*       *       *

In July 2006, former Israeli army colonel Reuven Zelinkovsky suggested a new way to protect the country from long-range missiles: Station a battalion of “yogic flyers” around the country to create a “shield of invincibility.” Yogic flyers are adherents of Transcendental Meditation who are allegedly able to fly while sitting cross-legged.

Love is all you need…to do really strange things.

B
ACKGROUND:
In 2002 Jian Feng, of Hegang, China, got married. Two years later his wife had a baby.

LOVE IS STRANGE:
Jian accused his wife of having an affair—because she was so beautiful and the baby was “so ugly.” His wife finally confessed: She hadn’t had an affair—she’d had plastic surgery before they met. She showed him a pre-surgery photograph of herself to prove it. Jian immediately filed for divorce and sued for deceit.

OUTCOME:
He won the divorce case, and got $99,700 for his wife’s ugly past.

BACKGROUND:
Romanian Nicolae Popa said he couldn’t take his wife Maria’s nagging when he got home from work. “My business is going well but it takes all my energy,” he said. “So when I get home in the evening I am so tired I just want to go to bed.”

LOVE IS STRANGE:
Popa made a deal with his wife: He paid her to be quiet. “I pay her $500 a month as long as she doesn’t nag me,” he said.

OUTCOME:
Maria agreed to the deal, and the couple are even planning to have a child. But Mrs. Popa said that her husband will have to double her salary to keep the child quiet.

BACKGROUND:
In 2003 German singer Werner Boehm, 62, made a music video which happened to feature a female baboon.

LOVE IS STRANGE:
Boehm brought the animal home and, “It was love at first sight,” he said. “We’re on the same wavelength.” Boehm’s wife Susanne, 31, wasn’t amused. In 2004 she left the singer, telling reporters, “I gave him the choice: the monkey or me. He chose the monkey.”

OUTCOME:
After complaints from animal-rights groups, police removed the baboon from Boehm’s home and put it in a zoo. Then he asked his wife to come back. “I didn’t want to,” said Susanne, “but Werner assured me I feel much nicer in bed than the monkey did.”

Strange things abound in the world around us. Most of them we never even see. Here are a few examples, which give new meaning to the term “bug Juice.”

T
HE ANT, THE WASP, AND THE BUTTERFLY

The dark blue, female
Maculinea
butterfly lays her eggs on plants; the newly-hatched larvae feed on the plant for about two weeks. Then they fall to the ground, where they are found by foraging
Myrmica
ants. Do they get eaten? No. The young caterpillars secrete chemicals that have a biological “mothering” effect on the ants. They are carried back to the nest, where they are given their own chambers. The ants treat them like royalty—even feeding them their own eggs. After about 10 months the caterpillars leave the ant colony, form their cocoons, become butterflies, and fly off…if they’re lucky.

If the
Ichneumon eumerus
wasp happens by the ant hill and detects a caterpillar inside, it has another trick to fool the already-fooled ants. It secretes a concoction of six different pheromones that first attracts the ants, then drives them into a fighting frenzy. The wasp can then safely make its way deep into the nest to the caterpillar’s chamber, where it lays its eggs inside the caterpillar while the ants are busy killing each other. The wasp then exits, leaving the eggs to develop, and eat the caterpillar from the inside out. When they finally emerge, the young wasps find themselves surrounded by hungry ants. Do they get eaten? No. The wasps release the magic potion that sends the ants into their civil war, and make their way out of the nest.

Scientists are studying the chemicals produced by the wasps—four of which were previously unknown—in hopes of producing a poison free ant repellent. The chemicals are so strong that the ants can still be fighting 50 days later.

Spiders make their silk by secreting a liquid protein through movable nozzles called
spinnerets
. The liquid hardens on contact with air and the spider manipulates it with its legs to create a super-strong
elastic thread. How strong? Engineers have determined that if you had a cord of spider’s silk as thick as a pencil—it could stop a jet airliner in flight! It’s also waterproof, and can stay flexible at temperatures as low as -40° C. There are seven different silk-spinning glands for making seven different types of silk, but no spider has all seven. There’s non-sticky silk for web frames and support lines, special silk for wrapping prey, another for wrapping eggs, and a fluffy, slightly sticky one for catching hairy-legged flying insects.