Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (27 page)

TIMBER WARS

Environmental groups were up in arms. Earth First!, Save the Redwoods League (formed in 1918), the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, EPIC (the Environmental Protection Information Center), and the Sierra Club all joined forces. Thousands attended rallies in San Francisco and across Northern California. They staged sit-ins at the company’s offices and marched through local timber towns protesting P.L.’s clear-cutting practices. But in the end, the demonstrations did little to slow the logging, so the protesters went to the groves and became activists. Some chained themselves to trees (hence the term “tree hugger”), others chained themselves to bulldozers; still others locked their arms together with steel bands to form human walls across access roads to stop the logging trucks.

In September 1987, they added a new tactic to their arsenal: two activists—code-named “Tarzan” and “Jane”—climbed a pair of redwoods that had been marked for destruction…and sat in them. If the loggers felled those trees, they could be charged with murder, so for the time being no one was going to cut them down. It was the first successful tree-sit.

Oldest driver to win a race at Daytona: Actor Paul Newman, in 1995. He was 75
.

ENTER JULIA HILL

Ten years later, in October 1997, Julia Hill wandered into the Earth First! base camp in Stafford, California. The wide-eyed 23-year-old from Arkansas was anxious to do her bit to save the redwoods. In 1996 she’d nearly been killed by a drunk driver, and she spent most of the next 12 months in rehab. “As I recovered,” she later wrote, “I realized my whole life was out of balance.” A road trip out west brought her to the redwoods, where she’d had an almost religious experience while visiting a grove of the silent giants. “My spirit knew it had found what it was searching for,” she said, and she resolved there and then to do whatever she could to save the trees. An activist who went by the name “Almond” sized her up, then said they needed someone to tree-sit “Luna,” a 1,000-year-old redwood that Pacific Lumber had marked for felling with blue paint a few months earlier. So far the activists had prevented Luna’s destruction by rotating tree-sitters in and out of it, but they’d run out of volunteers. Without hesitation, Hill said, “I’ll do it.”

MADAME BUTTERFLY

Over the next few days Hill got a crash course in the art of tree-sitting. Almond told her tree-sitters usually stayed up in the tree for three to seven days at a time, depending on their tolerance for cold, hunger, and threats from loggers. Volunteer ground crews hiked in food, water, and supplies, and packed out trash (including personal waste). Every rotation and every supply delivery required the ground team to sneak past P.L. security guards and Humboldt County deputies in the middle of the night. Almond advised Hill to take a “forest name” to protect her identity. Other tree sitters had names like Cedar, Geronimo, Blue, and Zydeco. What was hers going to be? Hill thought back to when she was seven and hiking in the Pennsylvania mountains. A butterfly had landed on her shoulder and stayed with her for hours. She chose “Butterfly.”

Before she knew what was happening, Julia “Butterfly” Hill found herself standing at the base of the giant redwood, staring up. She’d never even climbed a rock before, much less a 200-foot tree. Now she was being strapped into a climbing harness and, after a quick lesson on how to tie knots, about to scale the equivalent of an 18-story building. She swallowed her fear and began to climb.

For the second part of Hill’s story, go to
page 261
.

If you mail your teddy bear to the Teddy Tour Berlin Co., they’ll give it a tour of Berlin for $150
.

PIZZA HUH?

For years, China has been the world capital of pirated products. Shoppers there can browse through everything from stereos and clothes to office supplies and food—all cheap knockoffs of famous brands, with the names slightly changed. Here are a few of our favorite faux brands
.

• Bucksstar Coffee (Starbucks)

• Cala-Cala (Coca-Cola)

• Chintendo Vii (Nintendo Wii)

• Skerpie (Sharpie)

• Sonia headphones (Sony)

• Penesamig (Panasonic)

• Hetachi TVs (Hitachi)

• Abercrombif & Titch (Abercrombie & Fitch)

• Georgi Amoni (Giorgio Armani)

• Cerono beer (Corona)

• Nire, Ekin, Mike, and IVIKE (all Nike)

• Cnoverse Ball Star (Converse All Star)

• Abcids and Odidoss (Adidas)

• Pantboy (
Playboy
)

• BYD cars (BMW)

• Fuma (Puma shoes.
Fuma
is Spanish for “smoke,” so the Fuma logo is a puma leaping…with a lit cigar in its mouth.)

• Paradi (Prada)

• S&M’s (M&M’s)

• What Friends (Wheat Thins)

• Pizza Huh (Pizza Hut)

• PolyStation (PlayStation)

• Snooby (Snoopy merchandise)

• Sword of the Kings toys (
Lord of the Rings
)

• Ratman (Batman)

• Rock Hero: Jona Brothers (Guitar Hero: Jonas Brothers)

• iPoa (iPod)

• Unbelievable This Is Not Butter (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!)

Odds are at least one molecule of every breath you breathe also passed through the lungs of Socrates
.

SCAMMERS & SCAMMEES

Your phone, your mailbox, your e-mail inbox, your television—tricksters have more ways than ever to con you out of your money
.

M
IXED MESSAGES
Old scams never die. Take Japan’s
ore–ore sagi
(the “it’s me–it’s me” scam). A crook calls a phone number, and if the person who answers sounds elderly or vulnerable, he says, “
Ore, ore!
” If the victim responds with: “Son, what’s wrong? You sound terrible!” the fraudster gives a sob story about how he was robbed or in a car wreck, then asks for money. Today, the
ore-ore
has migrated to cyberspace: A scammer hacks into someone’s Facebook account and sends out a plea for help to his or her contact list. It happened to Jayne Schermann of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in August 2009. She received an urgent Facebook message from her friend Grace, who said she’d been robbed at gunpoint in London and couldn’t make it home. Schermann wired $4,000 to “Grace.” Meanwhile, safe at home, the real Grace discovered that a hacker was impersonating her on Facebook. She sent out warnings to her friends, but it was too late for Schermann to get her money back.

HOW BUFFALO CAN YOU GO?

It’s no fun being in debt, but at least no one threatens to send you to prison…unless they’re scamming you. In 2009 a young Maryland couple who had defaulted on a loan several years earlier started receiving threatening phone calls: “This is the sheriff’s office. If you want to stay out of prison, pay up your old debts now.” But the calls weren’t from the police; they were from Final Claims Asset Locators, a Buffalo, New York, company owned by Tobias Boyland, a career criminal who’d spent 13 years in prison for armed robbery and drug dealing. Posing as cops or debt collectors, Boyland’s employees would phone people at random and tell them that they were investigating an old debt. They’d mention a fake bank, tell the victim the amount of the “debt,” and would offer to settle at a lower rate if the customer would pay up immediately. In June 2009, Boyland received a visit from a
real
cop and was arrested. According to New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, “Boyland’s lies and intimidation caused many innocent people to pay money they didn’t owe just to stop the terrifying calls.” If convicted, Boyland and 12 of his associates face lengthy prison terms.

Virginia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all have statues they claim is the “World’s Largest Loon.” (The “Big Loon” in Vergas, Minnesota, is actually the largest.)

DOUBLE…OR NOTHING

In 2009 two con men swindled three Australian businesses out of a total of $143,000 by convincing them that they could duplicate banknotes. After establishing a friendship with the victims, the scammers would place a $100 bill between two sheets of a “special material” and then pour a “special liquid” over it. When the sheets were opened, presto—there were
two
$100 bills inside instead of one. (Actually, they used simple sleight-of-hand tricks to sneak in a second bill.) The amazed victims gave the men thousands in cash, which the fraudsters took for “processing,” promising to double it. They returned later with a foil-wrapped package, insisting that it shouldn’t be opened for 24 hours while the chemicals finished the duplicating process. When the victims opened the package, there was only blank paper inside. Investigators haven’t caught the pair yet, but they’ve determined that the “special liquid” consists of hair spray, bleach, and baby powder.

WHAT A DRAGASANI

In 2009 a movie enthusiast in Oregon placed a bid on eBay for a rare Marx Brothers movie poster. Someone else outbid him, but soon after, he received an e-mail saying that he could get the same poster at a much lower price through another source. The bidder smelled a rat, did some checking, and found that this was a long-standing scam that originated in the small town of Dragasani, Romania. Fraudsters there (mostly young men with formidable computer skills) have set up thousands of bogus online auctions for everything from memorabilia to electronics to MiG fighter jets, and the “winning” bidders are instructed to pay through unrecoverable methods like Western Union. In 2008 Dragasani’s mayor, Gheorghe Iordache, bragged to London’s
Sunday Times
that the fraudsters have brought a lot of money to the poverty-stricken town. “I’ve heard about local guys who have BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches—and they don’t even work!” The mayor said that the scammers even put Dragasani’s town hall up for auction. And where do most of their “buyers” come from? “They’re mainly Americans because they’re on the Internet most often and they’re naïve.”

THE CRAZY BIZARRE
FILM FESTIVAL

If you want to watch a really weird movie, we’ve searched through our vast video library to find these nine
.

B
RAZIL
(1985) Comedy
Premise:
Terry Gilliam’s vision of a futuristic bureaucracy run amok follows low-level civil servant Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), who gets caught up in intrigue while trying to fix a mistake that sends an innocent man named Buttle to his death while the real terrorist, Tuttle (Robert De Niro), goes free.
Why it’s crazy:
“Lacking unity or coherence,” wrote film critic Emanuel Levy, “the text is largely composed of outlandish sequences and special effects…to paint a chaotic, nasty universe, defined by inventive settings and some indelible images.”

THE MACHINIST
(2004) Thriller