Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (31 page)

Warning label on a child’s stroller: “Remove Child Before Folding.”

HIGH NOON

Two other scientists say the end is coming not at midnight, but at high noon. That’s the end of
world
itself. However, the end of all life on Earth will occur much sooner—at 5:00 a.m.…and it’s already 4:30. Fortunately, say astrophysicist Donald Brownlee and paleontologist Peter Ward in their book
The Life and Death of Planet Earth
, each hour lasts a billion years—so we still have 500 million years, give or take. Calculating Earth’s total life span at 12 billion years (and starting their clock at midnight), they say that life can be sustained for only one billion of those years—and we’re already halfway through that period. The best-case scenario is that Earth will hang around long enough to be consumed by an expanding sun. On the other hand, they warn, we could be pummeled by an asteroid or taken out by a nearby exploding star any second now. Not very comforting, but then, said Brownee, “Mother Nature wasn’t designed to make us happy.”

OOPS!…HE DID IT AGAIN

In September 2007 Chris Crocker, 19, from eastern Tennessee, achieved Internet fame for his tearful YouTube rant urging the press to stop making fun of Britney Spears after she performed poorly at the MTV Music Video Awards. More that 29 million viewed the video. Two years later, Spears was caught lip-synching on her 2009 Circus tour, once again receiving a drubbing in the press. But Crocker, then 21, announced (in dramatic fashion) that he wouldn’t be defending her this time. In a follow-up video, he screamed at Spears and tore her poster off his wall. “A lot of people may call me a traitor,” he cried, “but I never got a phone call, not a thank you, not nothing from Britney’s team! Not a single, solitary anything! Not even a lousy fruit basket!”

Mattel’s 2010 Collector Barbie release: Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken
.

TURKEY TIME

The crazy things we do for a taste of turkey
.

O
NLINE TURKEY
. Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant where you got to pick out the exact lobster you wanted to eat? In 2009 a large English farm called Farm, Park & Wild introduced an online service where, via a webcam, customers can spy on turkeys as they plump up each day. When it comes time to order a bird for Christmas dinner, customers can select which turkey they’ve had their eye on.

“WILD” TURKEY
. Do you love turkey but wish it could get you drunk too? In the fall of 2009, Paul Hurley, owner of O’Casey’s, a New York City tavern, began serving turkey infused with vodka. For three days, Hurley soaks each bird in a blend of strong, fruit-flavored vodka. The turkey is then cooked and served with gravy (which also has a lot of vodka in it).

TURKEY SODA
. Nearly every year, Jones Soda, makers of organic soda pop, releases a set of strangely flavored sodas for the holiday season. Past offerings have included Ham, Turkey and Gravy, Latkes, Smoked Salmon Paté, Brussels Sprouts with Prosciutto, Broccoli Casserole, Wild Herb Stuffing, Sweet Potato, Green Pea, Dinner Roll, and Antacid. In 2009 Jones introduced Tofurkey-flavored soda, which tastes like the tofu-based imitation turkey product…which, most consumers agree, doesn’t really taste like turkey in the first place. But Tofurkey soda does taste like “real” Tofurkey, Jones promises.

TOO MUCH TURKEY
. You may have heard of
turducken
—a chicken stuffed inside of a duck, which is then stuffed inside of a turkey. A company called Heal Farm has gone way past the three-bird level to create the 12 Bird True Love Roast—a Christmas treat of 12 birds, all stuffed inside each other (each layer represents one of the 12 days of Christmas). The dish is made up of a turkey, stuffed with meat from a goose, chicken, pheasant, partridge, squab, quail, poussin fowl, guinea fowl, and three kinds of duck. The 12 Bird True Love Roast weighs 55 pounds, can feed up to 125 people, and costs $1,039.

The original Australian 50¢ piece contained about $2 worth of silver
.

IT’S A GROSS JOB…

…but somebody’s got to do it (we guess)
.

HAZARDOUS MATERIALS DIVER
. Who does the Environmental Protection Agency call when they find leaky barrels of toxic waste at the bottom of a lake? Who does the municipal dump call when the pumping system under the garbage sludge needs to be repaired? They call in a HAZMAT diver—a scuba diver with specialized training…and an extra-thick wetsuit.

HOT-ZONE SUPERINTENDENT
. When there’s an outbreak of a lethal, airborne disease with no known cure, scientists travel to the site of the epidemic to isolate and study the pathogen inside a mobile laboratory. And then they need somebody to keep the equipment running, ensure that doors and windows are airtight, change pathogen-loaded air filters, and keep the lab clean. The “hot-zone superintendent,” who spends a large percentage of his or her time getting into and out of protective clothing, is actually exposed to more deadly pathogens than the scientists studying them are.

BIOLOGY SUPPLY PREPARER
. Remember those frogs you dissected in junior high? Somebody had the job of killing and preserving them. At companies like Ward’s Natural Science in New York, workers process insects, pigeons, and frogs that are later sent to biology classes. The company buys them from breeders, euthanizes them, and preserves them in embalming fluid before they’re packed into 55-gallon drums of formaldehyde.

FERTILITY CRYOBIOLOGISTS
are employed by sperm banks and fertility clinics to process “donations.” They first conduct an analysis of donated semen under a microscope to determine sperm count, then place it in a centrifuge, which separates the sperm from the other seminal fluids. They then add preservatives and freeze the sperm. Advances in this technology have helped infertile women bear children and have even led to HIV-positive parents being able to conceive healthy babies.

Street sign stolen more than 350 times in Eugene, Oregon: High Street
.

I FOUND A _______
IN MY ________

If you were thinking “fly in my soup” or “$10 bill in my glove compartment,” think a little weirder
.

I
FOUND A…
naked “friend of President Obama”
IN MY…
shower
HUH?
Two children went into their house in Crestview, Florida, in November 2009 and heard someone taking a shower. They thought it was just their father…until a strange, naked man walked out of the bathroom. The naked man said that “President Obama let him in the house” and told them to go away. The kids ran next door and called the police. When officers arrived, Donald Leon May, 48, was still in the house, although by then he’d wrapped a towel around himself. He was arrested on charges of felony burglary and petty theft. (And it turned out that he was not a friend of President Obama.)

I FOUND A…
cat

IN MY…
new couch

HUH?
Vickie Mendenhall of Spokane, Washington, bought a used couch from a thrift store for $27 in March 2009. Then the noises began: For several days, she heard strange sounds in the house, but couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Finally, Mendenhall’s boyfriend was sitting on the couch one day watching television when he felt something underneath him. He lifted the couch up—and found a cat stuck inside it. The cat was in bad shape, so Mendenhall took it to the animal shelter where she worked and began nursing it back to health. She contacted the thrift store, but they had no record of who had donated it. So she put notices in a few local papers—and soon Bob Killion, also of Spokane, contacted her. He’d donated the couch to the store on February 19, he said, and his nine-year-old cat, Callie, had disappeared around the same time. Callie had survived being stuck in the couch for an amazing 18 days. Killion was shocked—and very happy to have his cat back.

In 2009 Italian cops pulled over a car and found 1,700 small animals crammed into the trunk
.

I FOUND A…
liquored-up mail carrier
ON MY…
kitchen floor, eating my noodles

HUH?
Marie O’Kelly, 95, of Marion, Iowa, was watching television in her home one day in November 2009 when she heard a noise in the kitchen. She thought her daughter had come to see her, but when nobody came into the living room, she went to check—and found a woman in a mail carrier’s uniform sitting on her kitchen floor. The woman was obviously drunk, and she was eating leftover noodles from O’Kelly’s refrigerator—with her hands. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and she didn’t answer me,” O’Kelly told a local newspaper. “She just kept eating those noodles.” O’Kelly called police, and 46-year-old Kristine A. Pflughaupt, a 17-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service—who was on the job at the time of the incident—was arrested for public intoxication. Pflughaupt was placed on unpaid leave and an investigation was ordered.

I FOUND A…
gecko

IN MY…
chicken egg

HUH?
One evening in May 2008, Peter Beaumont of Darwin, Australia, was making eggs for dinner. “I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy,” he said. “I looked at the shell and saw a tiny dead gecko.” Beaumont, who is a doctor and the president of the Australian Medical Association, said the egg was intact before he cracked it, so the gecko could not have entered it from outside. How did it get in there? Beaumont has a theory: He thinks the tiny lizard crawled up inside a chicken’s butt, possibly to feed on an embryo. Then it died and ended up being trapped inside a forming egg. Beaumont believes it was the first reported case of a gecko entering a chicken’s butt to look for food. And, even more strange, the discovery might lead to a medical breakthrough: It may explain how salmonella bacteria enter chicken eggs, something that is not well understood. (Beaumont thinks that geckos may carry the germs to eggs via chicken butts.) The theory is now being studied by scientists.