Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (44 page)

MASTER OF CEREMONIES

Von Hagens revels in the controversy. He agrees that people don’t really know how to discuss death, and his aim is to take the awkwardness out of it. For example, in 2002 the professor performed the first public autopsy in the U.K. in 170 years. Despite being threatened with arrest, von Hagens went ahead with the gruesome show. Police, along with 500 spectators, jammed into a London theater to watch him cut into a recently deceased 72-year-old man. Audience members gasped as von Hagens sawed through the cadaver’s skull with a hacksaw and then again when he reached into the body’s torso and pulled out handfuls of organs, declaring, “I have liberated the lungs and heart!” Though the smell was reported to have offended some viewers, the autopsy went off without a hitch, and von Hagens managed to avoid arrest. He was eventually exonerated of any crime, and the autopsy “show” was later broadcast on Channel Four Television.

Riding high on his fame, von Hagens once offered to plastinate Pope John Paul II, who died shortly afterward. The request was denied, but then von Hagens set his sights on an even bigger fish.

THE KING OF PLOP

Someone claiming to be an associate of Michael Jackson contacted von Hagens in March 2009 and told him that the eccentric pop star was fascinated by his body-preserving technology. “He’s definitely up for undergoing the plastination procedure when the time comes,” the representative told him. So von Hagens scheduled a Body Worlds exhibit to coincide with Jackson’s summer 2009 shows in London and made this offer: “I could give Michael the gift of physical immortality—he has already achieved this with his music. As a plastinate, he could continue to have his body shaped and changed as he did when he was alive.”

A Japanese company sells a life-size chest-and-arm-shaped pillow called “My Boyfriend’s Arm.” Another company offers the Lap Pillow, shaped like a woman’s lap.

A few months later, of course, Jackson died amid a firestorm of scandal. Von Hagens acknowledged in a press release that the person who contacted him may not have been a spokesperson for the performer after all. “Without a signed body donation form by Michael Jackson himself or by all of his family members, I will not become active.” But then he made an impassioned plea: “I can offer the family of Michael Jackson a whole-body plastination free of charge. The pose would be a dancing one, to be determined by the family in detail.” There was no response from the Jacksons. Or was there?

DISAPPEARING ACT

Mystery still surrounds Michael Jackson’s interment at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. The funeral, which took place more than two months after Jackson’s death, was shrouded in secrecy and attended by only a few of his close friends and family in a “non-public” area of the cemetery. Forest Lawn officials have since offered this warning to would-be visitors: “Fans who believe they can find Jackson’s above-ground crypt in the expanses of the Great Mausoleum should rethink that,” noting the tight security including several surveillance cameras. All the secrecy is probably due to the family’s wish for privacy and their concern that a public gravesite would be mobbed by well-wishers or damaged by vandals.

But, some have theorized, maybe the King of Pop isn’t interred at Forest Lawn at all. Maybe he’s been plastinated in some laboratory to one day appear in the biggest Body Worlds exhibit of all.

But even if Jackson doesn’t show, there are another 9,000 living people lined up to be plastinated…including the good doctor himself.

WE’RE DOOMED!

Here’s some happy news to brighten up your day. Kidding!

S
HAKY SCI-FI
In December 2009, geologist Markus Haering was put on trial in Switzerland—for causing earthquakes. In 2006 and 2007, Haering was the leader of a team working with Swiss authorities in the city of Basel on the “Deep Heat” project, the first experiment designed to generate electricity by boiling water on naturally heated rocks three miles below Earth’s surface. But the city of Basel lies on an active geological fault line, and, according to geologists, the drilling and pressurized cold water caused a series of earthquakes in the city, one of them reaching 3.4 on the Richter scale—and causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Haering faced up to five years in prison for “intentionally” causing the earthquakes, a charge Haering called ridiculous. He was found not guilty a few weeks later, but his company had to pay for the damage.

Creepy Bonus:
Scientists think that humans may have actually caused several earthquakes in recent decades. One study on the May 2008 quake that hit Yingxiu, China, killing more than 80,000 people, said that the tremors may have been caused by fluctuations in the amount of water contained by nearby Zipingpu Dam. The dam was built less than 600 yards from a fault line, and geologists believe that filling the reservoir behind the dam probably caused—and then intensified—the Yingxiu quake.

SUNSHINE ON MY…YIKES!

In May 2009, a home in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue was severely damaged by a fire. Fire officials investigated and couldn’t find a cause initially. But after further inspection, they said that the only plausible explanation was that the fire was caused by sunlight and water. Sunlight, they said, had been hitting a glass dog bowl filled with water—which had acted like a magnifying glass and had ignited something, probably dry leaves, on the house’s wooden deck. “It’s very unusual,” said Lt. Eric Keenan of the Bellevue Fire Department, “but it’s not unheard of.”

81% of men think that they’re above-average drivers. Only 67% of women do
.

Creepy Bonus:
Later in 2009, biophysicist Gabor Horvath at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary, reported that he had concluded studies on this very phenomenon and found that sunlight magnified through drops of water on leaves, either from rain or dew, could cause leaves or grass to ignite…and could start forest fires.

HERE COME THE MUTANTS

Plum Island, a tiny, government-owned facility off Long Island, New York, has long been a controversial site: Since 1954 the U.S. government has conducted tests on animal diseases—and carried out biological warfare testing—on the island, and an unknown number of vaccines and disease pathogens are still being stored there. In January 2010, a security guard came across what was described as the “mutated” corpse of a white male about six feet tall with a large build…and unnaturally long fingers. Government officials said they would be performing an autopsy on the body…but don’t expect to hear much more from the secretive lab anytime soon.

Creepy Bonus:
Plum Island is the place where Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) offers to let Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) vacation if he helps her catch a serial killer in the
The Silence of the Lambs
.

OOPS

On March 6, 2006, an employee at Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) in Erwin, Tennessee, a private facility that supplies nuclear fuel to the U.S. Navy, noticed a yellow substance oozing under a door and into a hallway. It turned out to be a liquid form of highly enriched uranium—the kind used in nuclear power plants and, if it’s
very
highly enriched, in nuclear weapons. Nine gallons of it had leaked from a transfer pipe and onto the floor, where it came within four feet of falling down a narrow elevator shaft. In a puddle, highly enriched uranium is actually not that dangerous. But if enough of it is allowed to collect and form a spherical shape, which might have happened if it had fallen down the elevator shaft, it can attain “critical mass,” meaning that a nuclear chain reaction could have begun—the kind that fuels a nuclear power plant. The spill was contained and cleaned up, but the accident was severe enough that the plant was closed for the next seven months.

Potato beetle larvae protect themselves from being eaten by covering their bodies in poison poop
.

Creepy Bonus:
That accident occurred in March 2006, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees all activity related to U.S. nuclear energy projects, didn’t tell the public until April 2007. And it was only discovered then because the NRC casually mentioned a uranium leak—without saying where it had happened—in their annual report to Congress.

JUST BEAUTIFUL

In the last few years, demand for the antiwrinkle beauty aid Botox has grown so much that there is now a thriving black market for it—and that makes terrorists happy. The active ingredient in Botox is botulinum toxin, a protein produced by the
Clostridium botulinum
bacteria. It is one of the most toxic substances known to exist: A single gram of the stuff, properly dispersed, could kill thousands of people. In Botox, the toxin is used only in extremely small amounts; it would be virtually useless to a terrorist in that form. But the problem is that because of the black market, there may be a factory somewhere in the world—or perhaps dozens of them—producing unregulated botulinum toxin. Illicit buyers may also be able to get the toxin from legitimate sources and then use it for deadly purposes. In either case, thanks to the worldwide demand for Botox, botulinum toxin is out there, available to the highest bidder—and that means that it may become, or already has become, available to terrorists.

Creepy Bonus:
A strain of bacteria that produces one type of botulinum toxin occurs naturally in spores on the bottoms of lakes and ponds. Under the right conditions, usually after hot summers when water levels drop drastically, the spores can multiply rapidly and produce dangerous levels of the toxin. This botulinum toxin is one of the leading causes of death in waterfowl, especially wild ducks, in the world. A single outbreak can kill more than a million birds in a matter of months. And because outbreaks are linked to warmer temperatures, more and more of them are being reported around the world…and more are expected in the future.

Americans spend about as much on beer each year as the U.S. spends on the occupation of Iraq
.

COPS GONE CRAZY

We respect the police for keeping us somewhat safe in this crazy world. But as these stories prove, cops are only human
.

A
RE Wii HAVING FUN YET?
In September 2009, narcotics investigators in Polk County, Florida, searched the home of a known drug trafficker. While removing weapons, drugs, and stolen goods, several officers passed the time by taking part in a video bowling tournament on the suspect’s Wii video-game system. The cops competed fiercely, stopping their search when their turn came up. Little did they know their activities were being recorded by a wireless security camera that the drug dealer had set up to watch for intruders. A local TV station got hold of the footage and aired clips of the cops giving each other high-fives and distracting their fellow bowlers with lewd gestures. “Obviously, this is not the kind of behavior we condone,” Lakeland Police Chief Roger Boatner said. The impromptu tournament might even jeopardize the case against the career criminal, whose lawyer called the search improper. “Investigations are not for entertainment,” he said.

BETWEEN A GUN AND A HARD PLACE

MRI machines are huge, complex magnets; even the tiniest metal object can severely damage one. In 2009 Joy Smith, an off-duty deputy from Jacksonville, Florida, took her mother to get an MRI…and forgot that she was still carrying her police-issue Glock handgun. Smith walked into the MRI room and her gun was pulled from its holster; she tried to hang onto it, but her hand became stuck between the pistol and the machine—which made a horrible nose before shutting off. Smith sustained only minor injuries. The MRI center didn’t fare as well: Between repairs to the machine and a day’s lost revenue, the cost to the center topped $150,000.

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