Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (49 page)

“Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on Earth, with a top speed of 120 ft/sec, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.”

—Dave Barry

Getting your tongue pierced can sometimes lead to
endocarditis
—inflammation of the heart valves
.

NOT-SO-GOOD
VIBRATIONS

Why does Earth hum? Because it doesn’t know the words
.

W
HAT’S THE BUZZ?
Bob and Leona Ehrfurth of Green Bay, Wisconsin, have a problem: Their house hums. Or sometimes it’s more of a rumble. “It’s like there’s a semitruck parked right outside with the engine running,” said Leona. “It doesn’t matter if the windows are open or closed, you still hear it,” added Bob. “We could move, but why should we have to? We didn’t cause it.”

The question is: What did?

SOUND REASONING

• Local authorities haven’t been able to find the cause. But one possibility is that it’s a phenomenon simply called “the Hum”—the background noise that our planet makes. Instances of the Hum have been reported all over the world as a persistent low-frequency noise that sounds like an idling truck. Individual Hums are so localized they’re often given a specific geographical name—for instance, the “Bristol Hum” or the “Taos Hum.”

• Some speculate that those who report these Hums are simply suffering from a condition called
tinnitus
, where the patient hears sound in the ear, typically ringing, that has no outside source.

• A second possibility:
spontaneous otoacoustic emissions
, or noises that human ears generate all on their own. Most people never notice them, but a small segment of the population does.

• A third possibility is that people are hearing the effects of ocean waves colliding. When waves with similar frequencies traveling in opposite directions collide with each other, they create a pressure wave that carries all the way down to the seafloor. All of those pressure waves pounding the seabed generate a frequency of their own that may be audible on land.

But the true cause of the Hum—and the noise in the Ehrfurths’ house—remains a mystery.

How’s the fish? The Maldives Hilton recently opened the world’s first underwater restaurant
.

THE CURSE OF
CRISTIANO

Take the world’s highest-paid soccer player and the world’s most famous hotel heiress. Add a witch and a sorcerer, and what do you have? A story tailor-made for
The World’s Gone Crazy.

S
OCCERY
European soccer fans take their sport
very
seriously. So sports tabloids and Internet sites were flooded with lurid headlines in 2009 when 25-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, superstar of the fabled team Real Madrid, was sidelined by an injury that refused to heal—and the injury was blamed on a witch. And, as an added bonus, professional celebrity Paris Hilton had managed to work her way into the story.

OCCULT OF PERSONALITY

It began on September 25, 2009, when an anonymous letter showed up in the clubhouse of Real Madrid. It read:

    This is not personal. I have nothing against this great club. I am a professional and someone has paid very well for me using my powers. I have been hired to make Cristiano Ronaldo suffer a serious injury. I can’t promise it will be serious but he’ll certainly be out of action—more than playing!

The letter went on to claim that the curse was already working; it was responsible for breaking Ronaldo’s recent scoring streak. The story was picked up by the tabloids, and everyone got a chuckle out of it…until five days later, when Ronaldo was fouled in a game and went down hard. The diagnosis: “ankle traumatism and Grade-1 ligament sprain.” Bad news.

The letter writer was soon discovered to be a Portuguese “occult practitioner” named Pepe the Witch. And this wasn’t his first tangle with Real Madrid. Since 2003 he’s cursed the club several times, targeting such megastars as David Beckham and Sergio Ramos. Not surprisingly, Pepe also likes to play the media: When asked why he cursed Ronaldo, he cryptically explained he was given 15,000 euros by a “jilted lover” who was a “non-European and a very wealthy heiress from a well-known family.”

The iVoodoo application lets you use your iPhone as a voodoo doll
.

Celebrity-watchers knew that this could only be Paris Hilton. Also known for her media savvy, Hilton let the story simmer for a while before hinting to
Life & Style Magazine
that she may have hired Pepe. Why? She’d had a failed relationship with Ronaldo in June 2009 after meeting him at a Los Angeles nightclub, where, according to reports, the two “lip-wrestled all night and ran up a $20,000 bar tab.” The subsequent fling was short, and, according to inside sources, Ronaldo dumped her. “I can’t stand it when someone is mean,” Hilton later complained. “I want a man anyway, not someone who runs about like a little girl.”

When Pepe was asked to remove the curse, he refused, assuring fans that he would do “everything possible to prevent Cristiano Ronaldo from continuing his career in football.” To make sure, Pepe constructed a voodoo doll of Ronaldo and said he would stab it in the spine “over and over” and wouldn’t stop even if “Ronaldo’s crying mother” knelt before him.

LIMPING ALONG

Although the incident made for some titillating headlines, few people actually took Pepe’s “curse” seriously. But after a few weeks passed by, Ronaldo was still in pain. He persevered and kept playing, but then reinjured the ankle in a game on October 10th. Through early November, he was unable to play or train with the team. His doctor was baffled; the ankle should have been healing, but it wasn’t. Ronaldo was sent to a specialist in the Netherlands, who couldn’t figure it out either. Now some people started seriously wondering: Was the curse real?

To be on the safe side, “a person very close to Ronaldo” (his mother, according to some rumors) decided to get some help—and hired the “Sorcerer of Fafe,” a 46-year-old Portuguese man named Fernando Nogueira, who claimed he could cast a spell to disarm Pepe’s curse and heal the injured ankle. “I have lit candles next to a picture of Cristiano to put the matter to an end,” said Fafe.

Did it work? By late November, Ronaldo’s ankle had healed and he’d returned to the team, where—for a time, anyway—he could get back to the business of being one of the world’s most famous soccer players.

The red part of a turkey’s head is called the
snotter
.

DISTRACTED DRIVERS

Are you driving your vehicle down the road right now? Then don’t forget to look up and check traffic every now and then while you read these fascinating stories
.

C
LEAN GETAWAY
When police noticed water pouring out of the cab of a truck traveling down a road in China in June 2009, they assumed the truck had mechanical problems and pulled it over. Instead of a leaky radiator, the officers found the driver naked and soaking wet from having just taken a shower—behind the wheel. He explained that his air conditioner had broken, and his wife (in the passenger seat) helped him rig up a “sprinkler kettle system” to keep him cool, complete with a bicycle wheel suspended above him to accommodate a shower curtain. To keep the dashboard dry, his wife held a sheet of plastic over it. The man was cited for reckless driving.

DANCIN’ FOOL

Romanian police are searching for a truck driver who posted a video on the Internet of himself dancing: He claps his hands, stands up in his seat, and then jumps
out of
his seat, mugging for the camera with his hand either barely on or not on the steering wheel, while his truck is speeding down the highway. So far, police have been unable to locate the man.

CAP’N CRUNCHED

Concerned drivers in Needham, Massachusetts, called to notify police that a vehicle was driving erratically, crossing double yellow lines, and tailgating other cars. When police caught up to the driver they found him eating a bowl of cereal with milk. His excuse for the reckless driving: “I was hungry.”

NIT-PICKING

In Canada, talking on a cell phone while driving can get you a $500 fine under the “Distracted Driving” laws. But according to Ontario’s transportation minister, Jim Bradley, the law doesn’t go far enough. “There are many other activities occurring during driving that are just as dangerous, if not more so. The other day I was almost side-swiped by a man who was completely distracted while picking his nose. And I don’t mean just a nose scratch—he was in up to his knuckle.” Bradley proposed raising the fine to $850. A rival politician, Randy Hillier, scoffed at the idea: “What’s next? No eating broccoli with dinner due to the possibility of passing gas into the atmosphere thereby increasing global warming?”

Vulcan, a town in Alberta, Canada, has a tourist center that looks like a space station
.

BUS DRIVER MANIAC

In San Antonio, Texas, in 2008, onboard security cameras recorded a bus driver reaching into his shirt pocket, getting his phone, starting to text…and then slamming into a stopped car, causing a massive pileup. The bus was carrying disabled passengers. There were no serious injuries, but the driver was fired.

IF ANYONE SHOULD KNOW BETTER…

In 2009 Amanda Meyer, a police officer in Jacksonville, Florida, was driving her cruiser when she glanced down at her dashboard-mounted computer. When she looked up, there was a tanker truck stopped at a railroad crossing. She swerved…but not in time to avoid the 40-mph collision. Thankfully, the gas tanker was empty, but Meyer, who suffered minor injuries, was cited for reckless driving and fined $149.

IT’S SNOT FAIR

Michael Mancini was stopped in traffic in the town of Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland, in 2010. He took out a tissue and blew his nose. A moment later, a policeman signaled for the 39-year-old furniture restorer to pull over into a nearby parking lot. But it wasn’t just any policemen—it was Officer “Shiny Buttons” (his real name is Stuart Gray), known for his strict adherence to the letter of the law. Officer Buttons witnessed the nose-blowing incident and cited Mancini for distracted driving, which carries a fine of £60 ($93). “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mancini. “My van wasn’t even moving!” Officer Buttons wasn’t kidding. Mancini appealed to police department officials to drop the charges, but they refused, so he had to pay the fine and his license was suspended. “What is the world coming to?” he complained to reporters.