Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (11 page)

SETUP:
In September 2009, Mike Cunning and his five-year-old daughter, Caleigh, were fishing from a dock in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cunning was cleaning fish; Caleigh was sitting on the edge of the dock a short distance away, when…
AHHHH!
…a seal jumped out of the water, grabbed Caleigh’s hand in its mouth, and pulled her into the water. Cunning only heard the splash and looked over to see that his daughter was gone. Caleigh popped up out of the water a few seconds later, screaming “Daddy! The seal! The seal!” Cunning scooped up the girl, who was bleeding profusely, and rushed her to an emergency room. She was treated for four deep puncture wounds to her hand. Caleigh asked her father why the seal would do such a thing. Cunning answered that maybe the seal wanted to go swimming with her. “She thought about that for a second,” he later told reporters, “and said, ‘Well, I think the seal was rude for not asking first.’”

SETUP:
On the afternoon of November 9, 2009, eight-year-old Brianna Adams of New Market, Maryland, came home from school and told her mother that there was something in her eye. Her mother told her it was probably just an eyelash, but a short time later, Brianna complained again. Her mom agreed to have a look. She gently pulled Brianna’s upper eyelid open and…
AHHHH!
…saw a tick in her daughter’s eye. “When I opened up her eye and saw a tick and all the legs were moving,” mom Christina Beachner said, “I almost fell on the floor.” It was stuck tight, so she rushed Brianna to the hospital, where doctors—who said they had never seen or even heard of such a thing before—put some ointment in the eye and covered it with a patch, hoping the tick would back itself out. (It was actually embedded in the
fornix
, a thin membrane between the eye and eyelid.) By the next day, the tick hadn’t moved, so the medical team had to anesthetize Brianna’s eye, pry the eyelid open, grab the tiny creature with forceps, and pull it out. Brianna’s eye was fine—and she even asked to keep the tick to show her classmates. (She named it Hurt because “it hurt my eye.”)

Odds of finding a 4-leaf clover on the first try: 10,000 to 1. Winning the NY lotto: 45 million to 1
.

SETUP:
A pilot for the Silver Falcons, an aerobatic-flying group affiliated with the South African Air Force, was giving a civilian friend a ride in one of the group’s two-seater jets. During a tricky and stomach-turning maneuver, the friend, apparently trying to steady himself, accidentally pulled a lever near his feet and.
AHHHH!
…found out that it was the emergency ejection lever when he was instantly blasted out of the jet’s canopy and shot into the sky. After he and the rocket-propelled seat had flown about 300 feet, a parachute deployed, and the man floated unharmed (if embarrassed) down to the ground. Air Force officials reprimanded the pilot for taking a civilian on one of their planes, and they’d make whatever changes were necessary to the ejection system to ensure that such accidents would not happen in the future.

***

“I feel pretty lucky. Thousands of people die every single day, and it’s not me.”

—Sarah Silverman

Scientists have created a genetically modified mouse that can run nonstop for five hours
.

AWWW…

By which we mean “awww” with a side of “huh?”

S
ETUP:
A 21-year-old college student and Army reservist was walking home from work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late one night in 2009 when four men confronted him. They dragged him into an alley, held a gun to his head, forced him to lie facedown on the pavement, and took his cell phone, wallet, keys, and $16 in cash. But then…

AWWW:
…as the muggers were about to leave, one of them ordered the others to stop—and told them to give the young man his belongings back. And the robber apologized. Why the change of heart? While he was going through the wallet, the mugger had seen his victim’s Army ID. He said he would never rob a soldier, and the other muggers thanked their would-be victim for his service and walked away—and one of them even gave him a fist bump. (The soldier’s name was not released; the robbers still had his keys, which he hoped to get back.)

SETUP:
A cat named Arthur, owned by Robert and Mavis Bell of Wigan, England, passed away one day in January 2008. The couple’s 18-month-old dog, a Lancashire Heeler named Oscar, whom they described as Arthur’s “best friend.”
AWWW:
The day after Arthur died, the Bells woke up to find the deceased cat lying in Oscar’s basket at the dog’s side. The dog had snuck out through the cat door during the night and dug up Arthur from his backyard grave. Oscar had then dragged him back inside and cleaned him up. “Arthur’s coat was gleaming white,” Robert Bell said. “Oscar had obviously licked him clean. It must have taken him nearly all night.” The Bells got Oscar a new friend—a kitten named Limpet—and reburied Arthur in what they said was a much more secure grave.

SETUP:
In 1944 British soldiers participating in the invasion of Normandy, France, found a 20-year-old German soldier hiding in a foxhole. Heinrich Steinmeyer, a member of the notorious Nazi combat force Waffen-SS, was sent to a maximum-security POW camp in Perthshire County, Scotland, where only the most dangerous Nazis were imprisoned. At the end of the war, Steinmeyer was released, but decided to stay in Scotland and ended up living in the village of Comrie, not far from the site of the camp, for seven years before returning to Germany.

World’s oldest bank robber: J.L. Rountree, 92. In 2003 he robbed a Texas bank of $2,000
.

AWWW:
In 2009, 65 years after he was captured by the British, the ex-Nazi notified Comrie officials that he was planning to leave his fortune, about $670,000, to the little Scottish village. He said he wanted the money to be used to assist the town’s elderly residents. “I always wanted to pay something back,” Steinmeyer said. “The people were very kind to us German POWs. They did not treat us as the enemy.” Steinmeyer also left instructions that when he dies, he wants his ashes scattered in the hills around the site of the former Scottish war prison.

SETUP:
In March 2009, 55-year-old woman named Montse Ventura boarded the Number 64 bus in Barcelona, Spain. A woman seated across from her looked at her for a few minutes, then leaned forward and told Ventura that she’d better get to a doctor. She needed to be tested for a condition called
acromegaly
, the woman said, which causes an excess in growth hormone due to a tumor on the pituitary gland. “She wrote something down and said, ‘Have the analysis done as soon as possible,’” Ventura later told a Spanish newspaper, “because if you wait until you feel the need to the consult your doctor, you may already be in a very bad state.’”

AWWW:
Ventura showed her doctor the note and asked for the tests that the stranger had recommended. The results came back abnormal…and further testing found a tiny tumor on her pituitary gland. It was successfully removed.

FOLLOW-UP:
A media campaign to find the woman Ventura called her “guardian angel” followed, and several months later, a 60-year-old endocrinologist named Maria Gloria Prat finally came forward. She said she had made the bus-seat diagnosis based on the shape of Ventura’s hands. “The hands gave me a lot of clues,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether to say anything—but I am a very spontaneous person.” The paper said that the two women would meet after the media hype had died down.

Top Web searches of 2008: 1) Britney Spears. 2) World Wrestling Entertainment. 3) Barack Obama
.

ODD THEME PARKS

You could go to Disneyland and have fun…or you could go to one of these perplexing places
.

B
ON BON LAND
Bon Bon is a Danish company that makes candy with a toilet-humor theme (its most popular product is something called “Dog Fart”). Bon Bon Land, the fourth-largest amusement park in Denmark, takes all of Bon Bon’s cartoon-animal mascots and turns them into rides and attractions. The signature ride is the Dog Fart roller coaster, which winds around giant mounds of dog doo, pooping dogs, and giant speakers that play fart noises. Other attractions include a roller coaster through a sewer filled with (fake) feces and vomiting rats, and statues of buxom cows and dogs lifting their legs.

DICKENS WORLD

Almost all of Charles Dickens’s literature takes place in a grimy, drab 19th-century England plagued by disease, starvation, and dirty orphans. And at Dickens World in Chatham, England, you can relive that horrible era. In addition to rides based on bleak Dickens books such as
Oliver Twist
, there’s a
Great Expectations
boat ride, the Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge, a pawnshop, and a debtor’s prison. Throughout the park, hired actors pose as hungry, filthy street urchins.

LOVE LAND

The claim to fame of this park, located on Jeju Island in South Korea, is its 140 giant, sexually explicit sculptures. It’s designed to be educational; neither South Korea’s schools nor its popular culture offer much in the way of sex education, and arranged marriages are still commonplace. So this park was opened by the art department of Hongik University as a honeymoon destination. Theoretically, newlyweds are supposed to study and learn from the imposing white sculptures of giant reproductive organs and people engaged in various sexual positions. No kiddie rides here; you must be 18 or older to enter.

World’s stinkiest bird: the Hoatzin, from Colombia. They smell like cow manure
.

SPACE JUNK

Imagine a shiny screw—just a screw—tumbling through space. Ahead is a man, oblivious, protected only by his spacesuit. He takes a break from his work to admire the view of the blue-green Earth hanging in the blackness of…WHAM!—the screw pierces the man’s leg and shoots out the other side! He screams as the oxygen is sucked from his lungs…and the blood-red screw continues on its way
.

O
UT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
A vast junkyard of potentially lethal projectiles surrounds our planet, and it’s been accumulating since the 1950s. For decades, space programs in the United States, the U.S.S.R., and other nations followed a similar process: Build a satellite, attach it to a rocket, and blast it into space. Once out of Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite separated from the rocket and went into its planned orbit. But what happened to the rocket? No one gave it too much thought; after all, space is big, and rockets are tiny in comparison. And so, too, are the satellites, which had only limited battery life to begin with. So all that equipment floated in space, and there was no plan in place to dispose of it. Occasionally, leftover fuel would build up pressure in an unventilated tank and cause an explosion. When that happened, what was once a rocket transformed into a cloud of floating debris. And as more countries joined the space race, even more rockets and satellites were launched into orbit.