Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (58 page)

BOOK: Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy

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WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ BADGERS

For two days in 2003, the rural community of Evesham, England, was under siege by a rampaging badger. One of its victims was retired BBC producer Michael Fitzgerald, who was attacked by the animal in his garage. “To hear your husband screaming in such pain,” said his wife, “it was like a horror movie.” Even police officers were no match for the badger, which reportedly weighed 30 pounds—it chased after them, forcing them to take refuge in their patrol car. Authorities called in Michael Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society. “In 24 years of work with badgers,” he said, “I’ve never heard of anything like this.” Weaver eventually trapped the animal under a crate, but not before it bit four more people, including two men who were heading home from a pub and a woman walking her dog. And, to make the story even more bizarre, the townspeople soon found that the badger was an escapee—named Boris—from a nearby wildlife center. Because the animal had lost its fear of humans, it had to be euthanized. “The real tragedy about Boris,” lamented Weaver, “is that it shows that people shouldn’t try to tame wildlife or treat them as pets, because they are not.”

Rain in the brain? One in five Weather Channel viewers watch for at least three hours straight
.

THAT’S NOT THE KOOL-AID MAN

Dozens of students at a Russellville, Alabama, elementary school were sitting in the cafeteria enjoying their lunch when all of a sudden a deer crashed through a plate-glass window and started running around the room. As kids screamed and ran away, cafeteria attendants used tables and chairs to corral the confused doe and then shooed her outside with a broom. Worried that the deer might have been rabid, the school’s principal ordered a massive cleanup: “We Cloroxed everything—tables, walls, floors, sidewalks—you name it, we Cloroxed it.” No evidence of rabies was found.

THE HAIRY EYEBALL

After a man went to a hospital in Leeds, England, complaining of red, watery eyes, doctors discovered “hair-like projections” stuck in the cornea of one of his eyes. How did they get there? Three weeks earlier, the man was cleaning the tank of his pet Chilean Rose tarantula when the spider blasted him in the face with a mist of “barbed hairs,” which tarantulas use as protection against predators. The doctors issued a warning: “We suggest that tarantula keepers be advised to wear eye protection when handling these animals.”

Some NY parents pay $1,000 or more on “coaches” who help their kids pass kindergarten tests
.

I MAY HAVE
OVERREACTED

Maybe. Just a little
.

L
EAP YEAR
A 35-year-old woman in Wuhan, China, climbed to the roof of her seven-story apartment building in January 2010 and threatened to jump. After trying to talk her down for several hours, police finally had to distract the woman, grab her, and pull her to safety. Why was she so distraught? Her husband had left for work, she explained to her rescuers…without wishing her a happy birthday. (After police contacted the husband, he promised to throw her a lavish party that evening.)

YOU GIVE ME FEVER

On New Year’s Eve 2006, more than 100 firemen, EMTs, police officers, and other emergency personnel responded to a call to the family home of Richard Berger in Carmel, New York. Reason for the call: Someone had broken a medical thermometer and spilled a tiny amount of mercury inside the house. Afraid to touch the mercury and not knowing what else to do, the Bergers called 9-1-1. The spill was “contained” by an emergency cleanup crew…in full HAZMAT gear. To nobody’s amazement, there were no injuries.

NOW I
HATE
ALEX

In 2007 Shelby Sendelbach, a sixth-grader at Mayde Creek Junior High in Katy, Texas, confessed to writing “I love Alex” on the wall of the school gym. Shelby was called to the principal’s office, questioned by a police officer, read her rights, and charged with a “level 4 infraction”—the same level applied for gun possession and making terrorist threats. (Only Level 5—for sexual assault and murder—is worse.) And she was sent to a special “disciplinary” school for four months. Officials said they were just following the rules.

Nike employees call themselves “Ekins” (Nike spelled backward), and many have “swoosh” tattoos
.

EARTH’S GONE CRAZY

First the world goes crazy—then Earth does, too. We’re doomed!

A
NEW OCEAN?
In 2005 several earthquakes and a volcanic eruption struck an area known as the Afar Depression in northern Ethiopia. Just days later, geologists discovered a crack in the earth near the volcano. It began to grow, and it’s still growing today—it’s now more than 35 miles long, 25 feet wide, and, in some places, 130 feet deep. Geologists tell us that the quakes, eruption, and crack were all caused by the well-known phenomenon of plate tectonics; two of the Earth’s continental plates, which meet under the region, are drifting away from each other. That’s also the same process that formed the oceans—and, according to scientists, we are witnessing the beginning stages of the formation of a new sea. But it’s happening much faster than anyone ever thought possible. “The ferocity of what we saw during this episode stunned everyone,” says Cindy Ebinger of University of Rochester. The crack, she says, will eventually become enormous, and will fill with water from the nearby Red Sea, cutting off the nations of Djibouti, Eritrea, and part of Ethiopia from the African continent and turning the region into an island. (It will take a few million years, geologists say…but they could be wrong.)

LINES IN THE SAND

Among human populations, there are natural boundaries—mountain ranges or rivers, for example—and political boundaries, which are arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but are unrelated to physical barriers. But a 2009 study at the University of Haifa in Israel found that political boundaries sometimes affect not just people, but also animals. Along the southern section of the Israel-Jordan border, the boundary was drawn over desert. It’s virtually the same on each side, but the Jordanian desert boasts a higher variety of reptile species. And UH scientists also found that Israeli gerbils behave differently—to be exact, they appear to be far more cautious—than Jordanian gerbils. Studies conducted in Europe had similar findings. For instance, many of the red deer who live near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic will not cross from one country into the other. Reason: During the Cold War, an electric fence separated the countries. The fence was torn down in 1989, and even though the deer living there now weren’t even alive 20 years ago, the memory of the boundary has been passed down through the generations.

At New York’s Library of Natural Sounds, you can listen to a recording of ants kicking
.

EXTREME MAKEOVER: BEACH EDITION

Sometime during the night of July 2, 2009, a 1,000-foot-long section of beach below Bluff Point, near Homer, Alaska, rose about 20 feet. What was once a long, flat expanse of sand and gravel suddenly turned into a much higher, boulder-strewn beach. Geologists studied the strange event and finally determined that the bluff, which rises about 460 feet above the beach, had “slumped,” meaning that a large section of its face had slid downward. The massive amount of moving earth drove itself under and into the beach, squeezing and contracting the surface and forcing it upward. The newly risen beach is a geological treasure trove that may offer valuable information about similar processes that have occurred on coastlines around the world. And, added Alaskan geologist Bretwood Higman, “It’s good to have a reminder that the Earth is alive.”

RETURN OF THE BLOB

Giant blobs of bubbling, gelatinous mucus have been spotted—and are growing, in some cases, to several miles wide—on the surface of the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas south of Europe. Technically, they’re called
marine mucilage
, and scientists have been aware of them since 1729. But only in the last few years have the mucus blobs become a problem, possibly due to rising sea temperatures. A mucilage begins as a cluster of microscopic sea creatures, some living and some dead, that becomes a home and feeding ground for other, larger creatures. The trouble with mucilages, according to researchers at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy, is that they become gigantic breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses, including
E. coli
, that could potentially threaten fish, other sea life, and, presumably, anyone who eats them. The largest blobs can also become heavy enough to sink to the ocean floor and smother even more sea life.

Americans consume the most calories, download the most songs, and own the most guns in the world
.

THE HOLE THING

On October 18, 1984, Rick and Pete Timm were rounding up cows on a remote patch of their farm near Grand Coulee, Washington, when they came across a strange sight: a hole in the ground about seven by ten feet wide and two feet deep. It had a flat bottom and straight vertical walls—as though it had been cut out by a cookie cutter, one geologist later said. Even stranger: The Timms found an intact piece of earth about seven by ten feet by two feet deep—the same size and shape as the hole—about 75 feet away. It had obviously come from the hole they’d found, but there was no sign that it had been dragged or rolled, and no tracks from any machinery that might have been used to extract and move it. It was, they said, as if a chunk of earth had been scooped up, carried through the air, and set down. The Timms called a geologist, who couldn’t figure it out—so he called in
more
geologists, none of whom could come up with any plausible explanation for the hole. A similar event occurred three years later in Norway. No explanation for the “cookie-cutter hole” phenomenon has ever been discovered. But, naturally, many people around the Timms’ farm speculate that it was the work of aliens.