Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (22 page)
55% of Americans believe that they have a guardian angel
.
THIS JUST IN!
“Photos from doomed airliner found in ocean”
THE STORY:
On an evening news broadcast in June 2009, Bolivian television station PAT reported that it had obtained exclusive images of the final moments of Air France Flight 447, which had crashed into the Atlantic just days earlier on its way from Brazil to Paris, killing all 228 people on board. Taken from inside the main cabin, the photos show a passenger hurtling to his death through a gaping hole in the fuselage. The images, explained the newscaster, were recovered from a digital camera that was found among the floating wreckage. By tracing its serial number, PAT had determined that the camera belonged to a children’s author named Paulo G. Muller.
NEVER MIND:
As the story spread to news outlets all over the world, questions began flooding the station: “Why is it daytime in the photos, when the plane crashed at night?” “Who is Paulo G. Muller?” “Why does one woman in the photo look like Kate from Lost?” A brief investigation ensued, and the “photos” were indeed found to be two still shots from the ABC series
Lost
(about the survivors of a plane crash). It wasn’t clear how the photos had made their way onto TV, but the station had unwittingly fallen victim to a hoax—and an old one. Three years earlier, after a midair collision between a Boeing 737 and a business jet over the Amazon, a Brazilian blogger named Carlos Cardoso had posted the pictures along with a story about how the camera’s memory card had been found in the jungle. He’d made it all up, including the bit about the children’s author (who didn’t even exist). Cardoso did it to prove a point: “People don’t apply enough skepticism when it comes to viewing things on the Internet.”
HOW DO YOU SPELL “BANGKOK”?
The proper name of Thailand’s capital city has many variations. This is believed to be the official one, coming in at 163 letters: Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmah
intarayutthayamahadilokphopnopparatrajathaniburi
romudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphimarnavata
rnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit
Nothing special? Between 2000 and 2005, 1,022 American baby girls were named Unique
.
Remember back on January 1, 2000, when a computer programming error turned the world into a backwoods wasteland of financial ruin?
W
E’RE ALL GONNA DIE…EVENTUALLY!
In 1958 a computer programmer named Bob Bemer noticed a potentially catastrophic problem: The punch cards that were currently in use for programming only allotted two digits to represent the year, so it showed up as “58” rather than “1958.” Bemer was concerned that in the year 2000, as the numbers rolled over from “99” to “00,” computers either wouldn’t know how to handle double zeros, or they’d interpret it as the year 1900…and erase all of the data because it “hadn’t happened yet.” Even after Bemer lobbied his fellow programmers, IBM, and the U.S. government, none of them seemed too concerned about it. Surely by the year 2000, they figured, computers would be so advanced that the two-digit system would be replaced, wouldn’t it?
Not really. Saving space in long streams of computing code is important, so the two-digit system remained the standard for the next four decades. In fact, nobody really brought up the looming “millennium bug,” “century date change,” “faulty date logic,” or “Y2K” (short for “year 2000”) until the mid-1980s.
OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS, HAL
In his 1984 book
Computers in Crisis
, Jerome Murray foretold of a world that will come to a screeching halt. Because nearly every aspect of life was computer-controlled, Murray argued, all of those systems would shut down on January 1, 2000. Power grids would fail. Air navigation systems would crash, and so would airplanes. And all digital records—including the world’s most sensitive financial information—would be deleted.
After that, each subsequent year that loomed closer to Y2K brought even more dire predictions and tips to survive. For example,
Y2K Family Survival Guide
was a popular home video hosted by Mr. Spock himself, sci-fi icon Leonard Nimoy. He warned: “Elevators may stop, heat may vanish. Water delivery systems may not deliver water for cooking, drinking, and bathing.” Nimoy also warned that hospitals would be nonoperational, pharmacies would be locked down and unable to distribute vital medications, and nuclear power plants could stop working…or worse. They could all suffer core meltdowns.
Cosmetic damage: Nearly 500,000 car accidents a year are caused by female drivers applying makeup
.
EVERYBODY PANIC!
The worldwide frenzy kicked in full force around mid-1998. Books such as
Time Bomb 2000
and
Deadline Y2K
flew off the shelves while news analysts worried that the world’s governments would enact global martial law in order to stop the anarchy that was sure to commence when the computers all stopped working.
The United States Congress didn’t want it to ever get to that point. “We’re no longer at a place of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions,” said Sen. Chris Dodd, “but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be.” So in late 1998, Congress passed the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, which oversaw both the public and private sectors in getting all the computers to be compliant. Suddenly, millions of programmers got to work updating millions of computer systems. In the U.S. alone, more than $300 billion was spent to add in those precious two digits.
Meanwhile, the Clinton administration conducted preparation drills in 27 major cities for any “national-security special event,” such as a terrorist attack or coup attempt. In fact, a CNN poll revealed that about two-thirds of Americans believed terrorists
would
attack the country on or around New Year’s Eve.
As 1999 scrolled toward its inevitable end, canned foods were purchased by the caseload. Sales of guns, generators, and bottled water spiked. Insurance companies sold millions of “Y2K policies.” All that was left to do was hope for the best…and be prepared for the worst.
THE END OF THE END OF THE WORLD
At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the world waited with bated breath to see what would happen. And as you no doubt remember, nothing much happened. The lights stayed on, planes didn’t fall out of the sky, and bank records stayed intact.
Contestants on Australia’s
I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!
were charged with animal cruelty for killing and eating a rat on the show
.
What’s interesting is that the countries that scrambled to be “Y2K compliant” (primarily the U.S. and Britain) endured about the same amount of glitches as the countries that did next to nothing to update their software, such as Italy and South Korea. And the glitches that did occur were relatively minor:
• Radiation monitoring equipment in Japan briefly failed, setting off an alarm at a nuclear power plant.
• A Japanese telecommunications carrier discovered a few date errors in its network, but services remained online and the problem was fixed in less than three hours.
• Bus ticketing machines stopped working in two Australian states.
• The IRS accidentally sent out a few tax bills for the year 1900.
• Ten percent of computerized cash registers in Greece printed receipts with the year 1900.
• A hydroelectric facility in Kazakhstan had to revert to manual operation for a few days.
• 150 slot machines in Delaware stopped working.
• The U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the clock that keeps the nation’s official time, didn’t have problems. But its Web site did: A programming error resulted in the date being listed as January 1, 19100. The same thing happened to the Web site of France’s weather service and on AT&T’s site.
• A computer registering the first “millennium baby” born in Denmark incorrectly listed the baby as 100 years old.
IT WASN’T A
COMPLETE
WASTE OF TIME
The threat of the world plunging back into a new Dark Ages, and the hysteria that surrounded it, were over. But there was one positive result of what the
Wall Street Journal
called “the hoax of the century.” New York City established redundant, secondary computer networks to ensure that subways, phones, and banks would run in case of a Y2K shutdown. These networks remained online, and during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lower Manhattan’s computer systems—most notably, those belonging to the financial institutions—did not crash, thus preventing what could have been a worldwide financial collapse.
Just a reminder: Think twice before showing off
.
U
RINE TROUBLE NOW
On the way home from a party in April 2009, a 21-year-old Minnesota man needed to relieve himself, so he asked his friend, who was driving, to pull over on a bridge. While the man was on the ledge peeing, he kept pretending to lose his balance. “Oh, no, here I go!” he shouted. And then he fell for real…onto jagged rocks 30 feet below. He was seriously injured, but survived.
KIND OF?
To show off to his friends in September 2007, a man in Portland, Oregon, put his Eastern diamondback rattlesnake’s head into his mouth…and it bit him. He barely survived. “It’s actually kind of my own stupid fault,” he said.
NOT MICHAEL PHELPS
During a summer 2009 flood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a 46-year-old man was standing near a raging culvert of water. Wearing only a pair of shorts, he bet his friends $5 that he could swim across the culvert. No one took the bet. He jumped in anyway. His body was found five days later, a mile and a half away. “It was an ego thing,” said his cousin.
COME ON BABY, LIGHT MY FIRE
In 2008 a 33-year-old Swedish man was at a party and wanted to prove to his girlfriend how tough he was. So he poured gasoline on his arm and lit it on fire. By the time paramedics arrived, the man had severe burns to his upper body and was in a state of shock. In addition to his injuries, he was cited for reckless endangerment. A befuddled police spokesman said, “Don’t ask me what the point of the trick was supposed to be.”
In 2008 French President Nicolas Sarkozy sued the makers of a Sarkozy doll with voodoo pins
.