Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (77 page)

Now motorists were really confused: What cow was okay? Was this some kind of spiritual message, or news of some event they hadn’t heard about? Those were just a few of the questions the Highway Patrol received over the next few hours. And as more and more drivers slowed down to look for the nonexistent cow, a second, larger traffic jam ensued. Officers eventually went back out and removed the sign.

UDDER CHAOS

In December 2009, an Englishwoman arrived home in Blagdon, Somerset, to discover smashed roof tiles in her yard and serious damage to the top of her house. Fearing that someone had tried to break in, she called the police, who assessed the damage and started knocking on neighbors’ doors to inquire if they had seen anyone suspicious. William de Cothi, a teenager who lived next door, had seen the whole thing. He’d looked out his second-story window, he said, and a cow was standing on top of the woman’s slanted roof. The sight was so odd that he’d even taken a photo. Police determined that the cow must have jumped onto the roof at its lowest point—an impressive six feet off the ground—then walked around for a few minutes, broke a few tiles, and jumped off again.

Australia, Bermuda, Romania, and Vietnam all use plastic money
.

A MOO-MOO HERE AND A ROAR-ROAR THERE

Jack McDonald’s landlady had a cow. Her name was Apple (because she liked to eat apples off a tree on the property). One day in 2008, a black bear wandered into Apple’s field in Hygiene, Colorado, and climbed up Apple’s apple tree. Apple ran to the tree and mooed sternly at the bear. It climbed back to the ground and the two animals stared each other down—and even touched noses for a brief moment. Then Apple mooed loudly and chased the bear away. McDonald described the confrontation as “hilarious.”

FIRE IN THE HOLE

A Dutch veterinarian was fined 600 guilders (about $240) for starting a fire that destroyed a farm near the town of Lichtenvoorde. The vet had been trying to demonstrate to a farmer that his cows were passing too much gas and, to make his point, he used a lighter to set fire to one of the cow’s farts. The cow became, according to newspaper reports, a “four-legged flamethrower,” and ran around frantically, setting hay bales on fire. The flaming cow (which, amazingly, was unharmed) caused more than $80,000 in damage.

COWLICKS

Jerry Lynn Davis’s house must taste very good. In 2009 one of his neighbor’s cows stuck her head through a fence next to Davis’s residence in Rogersville, Tennessee, and started licking the house. It licked the paint off the walls, ripped off a screen, broke a window, and tore down a rain gutter, all by licking. The cow’s owner agreed to move the fence back a few feet, and Davis tried to get his insurance company to pay for the damages (which exceeded $100), but was informed that his policy did not cover “acts of cow.”

Cowboy proverb:
Always drink upstream from the herd.

Studies show: Cows that have names produce more milk than cows that don’t
.

THE RICKROLL

Internet fads come and go, but this is the only one we know of that breathed new life into a nearly forgotten pop star’s career. Have you ever been “Rickrolled”?

B
ACKGROUND
In May 2007, a user on the Internet forum 4chan posted what he claimed to be a link to the trailer for the new video game
Grand Theft Auto IV
. But the link didn’t take users to
Grand Theft Auto
; it took them, inexplicably, to a YouTube video of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the 1987 hit by British pop singer Rick Astley.

Over the next year, the prank began popping up all over the Internet—people would send their friends (or post on Web sites) links to news stories, videos, or anything interesting that someone might want to see. But, of course, the link always went to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Perhaps you were one of the 30 million people who got “Rickrolled.”

ROLLING ON

Rickrolling was one of the most talked-about items on the Internet in 2008 and ’09.

• As an April Fool’s Day prank in 2008, YouTube replaced all of its videos—more than 100 million of them—with “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

• In June 2008, political Web sites and blogs reported the uncovering of an amateur video secretly shot of future First Lady Michelle Obama delivering a bitter, antiwhite racist rant. When the video was finally presented it was…“Never Gonna Give You Up.”

• Shortly after the House of Representatives convened in January 2009, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi placed a video on Congress’s official YouTube page, promising a look at the day-to-day proceedings in her office. It was no such thing—Pelosi “catrolled” the world, and the link led to a video of a few cats playing in her Washington office. Then Pelosi Rickrolled the catroll when, halfway through the cat video, the footage abruptly changed to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Malaysian ants, when threatened, internally combust, causing their bodies to explode
.

ASTLEY’S COMET

But then the Rickroll jumped from viral Internet videos into the real world.

• In September 2009, pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to scale MIT’s Great Dome and surround it with white scaffolding. Then they hung up seven giant musical notes—the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

• The Cartoon Network enters a float in each year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2008, at the height of the Rickrolling fad, their float featured people dressed as characters from the show
Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends
. The characters danced and sang to the theme song from
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
(“People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend”) until a door on the float suddenly burst open and Rick Astley emerged. As the monsters continued to dance, he performed “Never Gonna Give You Up” live, bewildering spectators and the TV crew covering the event.

• The Ikee worm, an aggressive computer virus, affected thousands of iPhones in Australia. It replaced the device’s wallpaper image…with one of Rick Astley.

• In the spring of 2008, the New York Mets held an online poll to pick a rallying song to play at home games. The Mets Web site was flooded with five million write-in votes for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” (The Mets decided not to use the song.)

BUTTERFLY.NET

Here’s another crazy Internet fad: “The Exploding Penguin.” It began as a five-second video clip of a penguin spontaneously combusting at a South Korean zoo, but in 2007, it started to appear on Internet message boards. People posted it when they wanted to express that something they read or saw was “mind-blowing,” or when they wanted to make fun of other message board-users for getting into a silly but “explosive” debate. Want to see the original footage of the exploding Korean penguin? (Warning: It’s graphic.) Go to
http://tinyurl.com/2g9mqh
.

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes

FROG SUCK, WYOMING

…and other U.S. towns with crazy names.

Greasy, Oklahoma

Big Rock Candy Mountain, Vermont

Chocolate Bayou, Texas

Spuds, Florida

Ham Lake, Minnesota

Toast, North Carolina

Two Egg, Florida

Goodfood, Mississippi

Eek, Alaska

Frankenstein, Missouri

Embarrass, Wisconsin

Gripe, Arizona

Lame Deer, Montana

Goat Town, Georgia

Candy Town, Ohio

Yeehaw Junction, Florida

Index, Washington

Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky

Lorida, Florida

Bumblebee, Arizona

Shake Rag, Georgia

Cow Island, Louisiana

Bob Acres, Louisiana

Assawoman Bay, Maryland

Frog Suck, Wyoming

Mary’s Igloo, Alaska

Buddha, Indiana

Camel Hump, Wyoming

Buttzville, Pennsylvania

Whiskey Dick Mountain, Washington

Disappointment, Kentucky

Weiner, Arkansas

Goobertown, Arizona

Wimp, California

Beans Corner Bingo, Maine

Zap, North Dakota

Static, Tennessee

It, Mississippi

Eternity, a morgue-themed restaurant in the Ukraine, is shaped like a giant coffin
.

“ALCOHOL WAS
A FACTOR”

“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!” —William Shakespeare
, Othello

D
EPARTMENT STORE COWBOYS
Clinton Evers and John Carelock decided to go shopping at the El Dorado, Arkansas, Walmart one day in 2009—on horseback. Sheriff’s deputies tried to stop them after they rode into the parking lot, but the pair went inside the store—still on their horses—as the cops gave chase. The horses galloped through the food aisles, forcing customers to scatter. Police quickly reined in Carelock, but Evers galloped out of the Walmart and into the woods before he was finally caught. According to police, “Alcohol was a factor.”