Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (51 page)

Ever seen Esref Armagan’s paintings? Neither has he
.

T
HE MIND’S EYE
If you looked at Turkish painter Esref Armagan’s portraits of trees, skies, a fish playing a cello, or even former U.S. President Bill Clinton, you would never guess that the painter was born without eyes—meaning he’s not simply blind, he
has no eyes
.

Born in Istanbul in 1953, Armagan grew up in an impoverished family and never went to school. But for as long as he can remember, he loved to draw, and he’s developed his talent over the years. So how does he create his paintings?

• First, Armagan learns as much as he can about his subject. He touches it (if possible), reads up on it, asks his friends to describe the colors and the shading, and, in some cases, he draws a rough portrait of the subject.

• Then, with a picture firmly in place in his imagination, he draws a raised “map” of the subject on a piece of paper using a Braille stylus, a type of pen with a sharp point used for etching.

• When Armagan is ready to begin painting, he uses the fingers of his left hand to “read” the map, and dips the fingers of his right into quick-drying oil-based paints that are always arranged in the same order on his palette. Throughout the process, he keeps one hand on the map and one hand on the canvas until he knows the piece is complete. On some paintings, he forgoes the 3-D map altogether and just paints from “memory.”

Armagan’s works have garnered praise in galleries across Europe and in New York, and not just because they were painted by a blind person, but because they’re actually
good
. (According to many art critics, he’s better at some techniques, including using perspective, than most sighted painters.) “No one can call me blind,” he says. “I can see more with my fingers than sighted people can see with their eyes.”

BRAIN POWER

Art critics aren’t the only ones interested in Armagan’s unique talents; neuroscientists are studying his visual cortex, the part of the brain that makes sense of the information streaming in from the eyes. Why study Armagan’s visual cortex when he can’t see? Because of a phenomenon known as
neural plasticity
—the brain’s ability to adapt to its own unique limitations.

In 2008 a Canadian man wedged his head in a sewer while trying to retrieve his wallet and died
.

For example, when a sighted person tries to remember the image of something he’s already seen, he uses his visual cortex, but to a lesser degree than when he’s actually looking at something. Scans of Armagan’s brain, however, reveal that when he paints, his visual cortex is extremely active. If you were to put a scan of a sighted person who is
looking
at an object next to a scan of Armagan’s brain while he’s
painting
an object, they would look very similar. Only a trained neuroscientist would be able to spot the clues signaling that Armagan never actually looked at the image.

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

According to Professor John M. Kennedy, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Toronto at Scarborough: “Mr. Armagan is an important figure in the history of picture-making, and in the history of knowledge. His work is remarkable. I was struck by the drawings he has made as much as by his work with paint. He has demonstrated for the first time that a blind person can develop on his or her own pictorial skills the equal of most depictions by the sighted. This has not happened before in the history of picture-making.”

Kennedy is one of several neuroscientists who believe that their studies of Armagan will change what we know about how sight works, and may one day be used to help blind people learn to “see” the world just as well as Armagan does.

WORST APP EVER

There are thousands of “apps” for Apple’s iPhone, but none drew more complaints than the “Baby Shaker”: a video game in which the player shakes the iPhone until a virtual baby stops crying (then two red X’s appear over its eyes). The app was only available for download for two days in 2009 before Apple removed it. The company explained that it should have been rejected before it was added, but someone must have “missed it.” Alex Talbot, the app’s designer, admitted, “Yes, the Baby Shaker was a bad idea.”

Hollywood’s Museum of Death displays the actual head of French serial killer Henri Landru
.

YOU’RE SUING ME
FOR
WHAT?

Please don’t sue us, no matter how much pain and suffering you may endure while reading about the crazy reasons people come up with to sue each other
.

B
ERRY, BERRY ODD
After eating Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries for four years, in 2009 Janine Sugawara of California finally came to the realization that there aren’t any real berries in Crunch Berries. So she sued the cereal manufacturer for false advertising. The case was quickly dismissed: “This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a ‘crunchberry.’” The judge also noted that the same attorneys lost a previous lawsuit complaining that Froot Loops didn’t contain real fruit.

THAT’S A LOT OF ZEROS

Dalton Chisolm was bouncing checks. And he didn’t know why. Angry, he called Bank of America to get answers. Not satisfied by their “insufficient funds” excuse, Chisolm sued B of A for “1,784 billion, trillion dollars”—more than the entire world’s gross domestic product of $60 trillion. Sylvain Cappell, a math professor at New York University, said, “If he thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense.” The case was dismissed.

FALLEN FROM GRACE

Shin Lim Kim was injured in 2008 while serving as a “catcher” at the Portland Onnuri Church in Beaverton, Oregon. What does a catcher do? He or she stands behind a parishioner who is about to be touched by a pastor, and catches the parishioner if they fall to the floor in a fit of religious ecstasy (or, as it’s called, is “slain in the spirit”). Kim, a small woman, was asked to catch Hyun Joo Yoon, a larger woman who, according to Kim’s lawyer, “began flailing, falling on, and injuring the plaintiff.” Kim claimed that no one warned her of the dangers of catching a person or provided her with any training. She also argued that Yoon was negligent for failing to control her body once the pastor laid his hands on her. According to the lawsuit, Kim suffered a painful injury to her spine that made her “sick, sore, nervous, and distressed.” She’s suing both the church and Yoon for $125,000.

Big spender, even now: Michael Jackson’s grave site costs his estate $5,000 per month
.

OY VEY!

In her routines, comedian Sunda Croonquist often talks about her mixed heritage: Her mother’s African American, her father’s Swedish, she was raised Catholic, and she married into a Jewish family. “I’m a black woman with a Jewish mother-in-law,” goes one of her jokes. “The only thing we have in common is that we don’t want to get our hair wet!” Not laughing: Croonquist’s Jewish mother-in-law, Ruth Zafrin. In 2009 she sued the comedian for “spreading false, defamatory, and racist lies.” Croonquist agreed to stop telling mother-in-law jokes and to take any information pertaining to her family off her Web site, but she refused to pay monetary damages. The case is still pending.

WHICH PART OF THE NAME DIDN’T HE GET?

In 2005 Anthony Beninati was attending the Burning Man festival in Nevada, a weeklong event that features a lot of stuff getting burned (see
page 422
). One night, Beninati walked too close to a bonfire, fell down, and burned his hand. He sued Burning Man organizers for not warning him that he might get burned (even though he’d attended the festival twice before). In his deposition, Beninati admitted that he knew “fire is dangerous and causes burns.” Case dismissed.

THAT’S COLD-BLOODED

In 2000 a lawyer named Linda Ross sued a California phone company, GTE, for $100,000 because they mistakenly put her Yellow Pages listing under the category “Reptiles.” (Ross’s phone number had once belonged to a business called the Reptile Show, but GTE failed to update its records when she acquired the number.) Ross claimed that the listing caused her public humiliation: She received dozens of prank calls; people hissed at her when she walked by them; Jay Leno even made fun of her on
The Tonight Show
. There were no follow-up news reports about the lawsuit, so we’re guessing it was ssssssettled out of court.

According to British researchers, terrorists and extremists almost never buy life insurance
.

WHAT COMES
AFTER WEIRD?

Is there a word for something that’s so weird that the word “weird” can’t begin to describe it? If so, please use it for these stories
.

T
HERE’S A SUIT IN MY BUCKET
In October 2009, Alicja Tomankiewicz of Mikowice, Poland, sued her neighbor Waldemar Wilk…for kicking and damaging a $4.50 plastic bucket that she kept in her front yard. The case went to court, where Wilk pleaded not guilty. He even brought a video to the courtroom showing footage of Tomankiewicz using the bucket and argued that it proved that since the bucket wasn’t damaged, he couldn’t have kicked it. The judge said Wilk couldn’t prove that the video had been taken
after
he had allegedly kicked the bucket, and the footage was therefore inadmissible as evidence. Then the judge ordered that an expert be brought in to determine whether kicking a bucket could actually damage it. It could, the expert testified, and Wilk was found guilty. He appealed the case, and after 18 months of litigation, the lawsuit was dropped.

TAKE IT
ALL
OFF