Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (74 page)

H
IGH FLYIN’
The control tower at a small airport in Schoengleida, Germany, received a perplexing call over the radio in September 2009: “Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?” the pilot demanded. When the controller asked the pilot to identify himself, he replied only with, “Come on, I know you’re down there!” It took a few more questions to determine that the 65-year-old Cessna pilot had had several drinks before taking off and was still drinking while he was flying. The controllers dispatched a rescue helicopter to find him and guide him to the runway. During the search, the pilot sang songs, told a mother-in-law joke, and urged them to hurry up because he had a party to go to. The helicopter finally found the inebriated pilot, who sang more songs as he followed it home. He actually made a decent landing, but then stumbled out of his plane and drove away. Airport authorities alerted police, who caught him a few miles later. He’s been banned from driving a car or flying a plane ever again.

FLYING FRACAS

In 2009 a fistfight broke out in the cockpit of an Indian Airlines flight bound for New Delhi and then spilled out into the main cabin. According to witnesses, the male co-pilot, a male purser, and a female flight attendant were “slugging it out” in front of everyone. The purser was apparently defending the honor of the flight attendant, who’d complained that the co-pilot had tried to hold her hand. When she refused, he pushed her into the cockpit door “with such force that she started bleeding.” The purser said that the pilots became abusive when he confronted them. The pilots later blamed the fight on the purser. An airline official called the incident “shocking.”

WOULD
YOU
GET ON BOARD?

“People got off the plane and were kissing the ground and praying. There were little girls sobbing.” That was the scene described by one of the passengers preparing to board a Thomas Cook Airlines plane on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 2009. Making the London-bound passengers even more nervous: the announcement instructing them to disregard their seat assignments and crowd together in the back of the plane. (The jet’s rear loading door was jammed, and their luggage could only be stored in the front cargo bay.) The final straw: As the arriving passengers walked into the airport, several warned, “Don’t get on that plane! It was the worst flight ever!” Not wanting to act as ballast, 71 people refused to board and booked flights on other airlines. The remaining passengers had a rough but otherwise uneventful flight to London.

Scholars are now using plagiarism-detection software to confirm the authors of historic works
.

GROUNDED

A wingless Boeing 737 got stuck in traffic on a crowded street in Mumbai, India, in 2007. How’d it get there? The decommissioned plane was being towed to New Delhi when the truck driver took a wrong turn. A low bridge blocked the way, and the road was too narrow for the truck to turn around. So the driver got out, walked off, and didn’t return. The massive fuselage sat on the busy street for the rest of the day…and the next day, and the day after that. Local business owners complained that the behemoth was blocking access to their shops; others appreciated all of the tourists who came out to gawk at it. A week later, in the middle of the night, it disappeared. There was no official word on who finally took the plane, or where it ended up.

WAKE-UP CALL?

For 79 tense minutes, air traffic controllers couldn’t make contact with a Northwest Airlines jet carrying 144 passengers from San Diego to Minneapolis in 2009. Fearing the worst, the military readied fighter jets to intercept the plane. After the airliner had overshot its destination by 150 miles, the captain finally radioed to traffic controllers that everyone onboard was okay. The tower asked, “Do you have time to give a brief explanation of what happened?” “Just cockpit distractions,” said the pilot. “That’s all I can say.” So what
did
happen up there? After the plane landed safely, the pilots claimed they’d been going over scheduling issues on their laptops and lost track of the time. Aviation experts were skeptical; one said it was “more plausible that the pilots had fallen asleep.”

Bad car-ma: When exposed to traffic noise, zebra finches are more likely to cheat on their mates
.

SCIENCE ON THE EDGE

Bicycles that pedal for you, robot fish, crime-fighting leeches—the world of science has it all
.

T
HIS FISH TASTES FUNNY

In 2009 computer and electronic engineering scientists at the University of Essex in England announced that they’d created a new kind of fish: a
robotic
one. The faux fish are about five feet long and look and swim like real fish—so they won’t scare real fish—and are fitted with complex sensors that detect hazardous pollutants in water, such as oil from a leaking ship or pipeline. They’re set to be released for a test run in 2011 in the port of Gijon, Spain, where they will swim around, gathering information that will be sent to a control station via wi-fi technology. The robots are even programmed to return to “charging areas” every eight hours to get their batteries recharged. If the test run is successful, robo-fish may soon be swimming in rivers, lakes, and oceans all over the world.

THE LEECH OF YOUR WORRIES

In 2001 two men broke into the home of 71-year-old Fay Olsen on the Australian island of Tasmania, tied her to a chair, “poked her with sticks,” and robbed her of $550 ($504 U.S.). Police found no evidence at the scene except for a leech—fully engorged with blood from a recent meal—on the floor. Officers checked the woman and themselves for signs that the leech had been attached to one of them, and determined that it must have fallen off one of the robbers. DNA samples were taken from the blood in the leech. Seven years passed. In 2008 a 56-year-old Tasmanian man was arrested on drug charges and a routine DNA sample was taken from him and cross-checked against a database. It matched the DNA taken from the leech. Peter Alec Cannon eventually confessed to the seven-year-old crime and was sentenced to two years in prison. (His accomplice was never apprehended.) Tasmanian police said that, to their knowledge, it was the first time DNA from a leech had assisted in solving a crime anywhere in the world.

For sale on eBay in 2004: Britney Spears’s chewed gum, used Kleenex, and used bar of soap
.

WHEEL TAKE IT

At the Copenhagen Climate Change conference in December 2009, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the release of their “Copenhagen Wheel”—a bicycle wheel they hope will revolutionize bike riding around the world. Features: When you’re pushing hard on the pedals to go uphill, sensors activate a small, powerful motor in the wheel’s hub to help you along. And the battery that powers the motor is constantly being recharged as you ride. In addition, the wheel communicates, via wireless Bluetooth technology, with an iPhone application on the handlebars to let you know your speed, direction, distance traveled—even traffic and smog conditions. Best of all: You can just buy the wheel—it fits on virtually any bike.

HEADS OR HELMETS

Which is safer: riding a bike with or without a helmet? It might not be as clear as you think. Dr. Ian Walker of England’s University of Bath published the results of a 2007 study in the journal
Accident Analysis & Prevention
. Walker, an avid cyclist, fitted his bicycle with sensors that could detect how close cars came to him as they passed him, then rode through the city for a couple of months—with and without his helmet on. During that time, he was passed by more than 2,300 cars. Result: Overall, cars, trucks, and buses passed his bike at a distance of about four feet. But drivers passed 3.35 inches closer, on average, when he wore his helmet than when he didn’t. “This study shows that when drivers pass a cyclist,” Walker wrote, “the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist’s appearance.” The reason, Walker says, is probably because drivers feel more comfortable when passing a helmeted biker rather than a helmetless one, so they may actually be more dangerous to bikers wearing helmets. (Statistics, it must be noted, still show that non-helmeted bikers are
much
more likely to be seriously injured or killed in an accident.)
Bonus:
Walker occasionally wore no helmet and a long brown wig while biking, giving him the appearance, he said, of a woman. Result: Cars gave him an extra 5.5 inches of room.

“Life is just a bowl of pits.”
—Rodney Dangerfield

Can you? A lab/golden retriever mix named Shadow can water ski, snow ski, and scuba dive
.

WEIRD BRITISH HITS

The English are used to bad weather and eating tomatoes for breakfast. So it sort of makes sense that they’d like these goofy novelty songs
.

A
rtist:
The Outhere Brothers
Song:
“Boom Boom Boom”
Story:
American hip-hop group the Outhere Brothers have had a string of huge hits in England. And almost all of them have related, in some way or another, to butts and bathroom humor—often graphically. For example, their #1 hit “Boom Boom Boom” includes the lyric “put your booty on my face.” Other notable hits include “Gimme My Sh*t,” “Pass the Toilet Paper,” and “Pass the Toilet Paper ’98.”

Artist:
Crazy Frog

Song:
“Axel F”

Story:
In 2005 the cell-phone ringtone producer Jamba! introduced its new advertising mascot, Crazy Frog—a grotesque, bug-eyed cartoon frog with a sinister smile. The character proved so popular that the company released a remix (attributed to Crazy Frog) of the 1984
Beverly Hills Cop
theme song “Axel F.” The song was already a synthesizer-driven instrumental; Crazy Frog’s version sounded like a high-pitched cell-phone ringtone version of it. The song became a smash hit, going to #1 in the U.K. and throughout Europe. It also became one of the bestselling ringtones of all time in England.

Artist:
Rage Against the Machine
Song:
“Killing in the Name”

Story:
In the U.K., watching to see which song will be #1 on Christmas is an annual pop-culture event. From 2005 to 2008, the Christmas #1 was the song performed by the winner of the British talent show
The X Factor
. Tired of the fact that the show had developed such a strong influence over the pop charts, two music fans named Jon and Tracy Morter began a campaign via Facebook in 2009 to steal that year’s Christmas #1 spot. They chose the most inappropriate tune for Christmas that they could think of: “Killing in the Name,” a profanity-laced diatribe against the American government by the leftist rock band Rage Against the Machine. Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, and more than 750,000 Facebook users publicly endorsed the campaign. Christmas came…and Rage Against the Machine had the #1 song in England, bumping
The X Factor
winner Joe McElddery to #2.