If you were to ask most folks to design a scale describing their poop, they'd probably come up with only two classifications -- "everything's fine, stop asking!" and "oh shit, oh shit, oh goddamit where's the nearest bathroom?!"
Ma'am, if you had to assign a number to your last shit, what would it be?
The average person may not be too discerning about their poop, but healthcare professionals tend to be, by necessity, much more preoccupied with the human body's various excretions, and thus the Bristol Stool Scale was created. You've heard of taking a number 2, but it turns out you can actually take a number 1 through 7.
Designed by the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, it's clear these people spent a serious chunk of time looking at our chunks, as this scale describes such things as consistency, cracks, lumps, ragged edges and fluffiness in gloriously disgusting detail. That said, we say the scale could stand to be even more detailed -- hell, they don't even Taco Bell in Bristol or Scandinavia. Come let America show you what diarrhea is all about.
Life Change Units
Life can be an exciting, unpredictable ride marked by moments of both great happiness and sorrow -- you'd think it'd be impossible, absurd even, to create a scale that measures all the changes a person will go in their life, but don't tell that to Thomas Holmes and Richard Rache.
They created the Holmes and Rache Stress Scale, which lists all the major tragedies and life-altering changes a person might go through in a given year, ranking them according to much stress they would cause. The higher an event ranks on the scale the more "Life Change Units" it's worth.
We wonder what this ranks.
For instance going to jail is 63 Life Change Units, but hey, at least going to prison for murdering your wife spared you a divorce, which would have net you 73 Life Change Units. Your plumbing being on the fritz may actually be a blessing in disguise ("sexual difficulties" is rated at 39 units) since at least you'll be avoiding any pregnancies in the near future (40 units). Whatever the stress or trauma you've experienced, there's a good chance Holmes and Rache have a seemingly arbitrary double-digit number assigned to it.
But what do you get for accumulating these Life Change Units? Death, that's what. According to the Holmes and Rache those who rack up over 300 life change units in a year are at serious risk of illness. That's the kind of high-score you may not want to attach your initials to.
Oh and hey, obsessively compiling your stresses and fearing the icy hand of death isn't just for adults either, there's a version for you youngsters out there too!
Sperm Motility Grade
As we've seen so far researchers love to come up with creative ways to judge every little thing you do -- not even being microscopic will let you hide from their stern judgement.
Judging you on a cellular level.
The Sperm Motility Grade scale not only how rates effective your troops are, but describes in specific detail how they're storming the beaches...
At the top of the class you have the eye-on-the-prize straight-line swimmers, while at the bottom you have the sperm equivalent of you and your buddies in high school -- they'd rather spend their time loitering in an apathetic pack than actually chase after the girls.
Strangely, the according to the Sperm Motility Grade scale the guys on the level second from the bottom may actually move backwards, which we have to say actually sounds worse than the sperm at level one. Your sperm merely being lazy bastards is one thing, but when they're actively running away from the egg it may be time for you and your fellas to have a heart-to-heart.
Nathan Birch writes the off-the-scale great webcomic Zoology. JD Niemand also does a webcomic, Stickman and Cube.
Monday, July 12, 2010
The Show Must Go On: X Roles Played by People (Who Happened to be Dead) The entertainment industry is willing to overlook a lot when it comes to its stars--arrests, adultery, drug abuse, and sometimes even the fact that they're no longer among the living. Here are some of the more awkward examples of stars getting their name on the marquee from beyond the grave...
Bruce Lee in Game of Death
In 1973 Bruce Lee burst onto the scene with "Enter the Dragon" and was on track to become a major star, or at least he would have if he hadn't died three months before the movie's release. The producers of Enter the Dragon weren't about to let the minor issue of Lee's mysterious demise sidetrack a promising young career though.
Before filming Enter the Dragon, Lee had been working on his own film, "The Game of Death", but had only managed to finish filming part of the climatic action scene, which featured him fighting the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar while encased in a yellow track suit that proved his skill at martial arts did not extend to costume design.
We dare say Uma Thurman pulled the look off better.
The director of Enter the Dragon took these fragments and tried to cobble together a finished film using new footage featuring several stand-ins who, aside from also being Asian guys who knew how to kick and punch good, didn't much resemble Bruce Lee. Ah, but the producers of Game of Death had a plan--they had access to footage of Bruce Lee's actual funeral, which they inserted into the movie, explaining that the main character had faked his own death, thus allowing Bruce Lee's fill-ins to spend the rest of the movie wearing fake beards and other wacky disguises. We don't like to judge, but when you're including shots of your star lying in his actual casket in your film, you've officially pole vaulted over the line from inventive, to tragically desperate.
Stay classy Game of Death.
Of course this death fakery plot needed some sort of set-up, so early on in the film they had to shoot around the impostors using shadows, giant sunglasses, incredibly awkward editing and "special effects" that a 15-year-old making videos on YouTube would find embarrassing. No, you're not imagining things, they actually glued a cardboard cutout of Bruce Lee to the mirror to cover the other actor's face in that scene. At least they were still sort of trying at that point though, unlike the end of the movie where they just throw up their hands and don't even make the slightest attempt to disguise the new actor's appearance. The producers of Game of Death weren't content to sew together just one ridiculous mockery of a film out of unused Bruce Lee footage though, they were hoping to make it a full-on franchise, producing Game of Death 2 three years later. Bruce Lee's character is actually killed off early in the 2nd movie, but you sure as hell wouldn't know it from the trailer...
John Candy in Wagons East!
This comedy about a bunch of whiny pioneers (who talk like characters on a C-grade Seinfeld clone) deciding to give up on the West and head back East was pretty much doomed from conception, but the situation was only made worse when star John Candy died during production. The producers swore up and down that Candy had finished all his scenes before he had passed away, but clearly this was a John Candy sized load of bullshit.
Just sayin', he was kinda a big guy.
Even though he was the top billed star, Candy probably ranks third or fourth in terms of total screen time, and the the filmmakers fill the movie with reaction shots of Candy nodding or staring blankly into space just so you won't forget he's there. At one point it's revealed in front of everybody that Candy was, no joke, the wagonmaster for the Donner Party, and so Candy gets sad, rides away and is simply missing for a large chunk of the movie. Nobody seems to care that he's gone, nor are they particularly concerned about his dabblings in cannibalism once he comes back.
"Yeeeeah...I'm blowing this shitty movie guys."
However the most damning evidence that Candy hadn't finished all his scenes before dying was the fact they actually reused certain bits of footage, awkwardly superimposing it over new backgrounds, such as these eerily similar scenes where Candy's character gives up drinking not once, but twice...
Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos
Back in the year 2000 Nancy Marchand, the actress who played Livia Soprano, passed away and the producers of the show decided to use the futuristic 21st century technology now available to them to create one final scene between Tony and his mom using a combination of existing footage and CGI. The results ended up being slightly less convincing than if they'd used a sock puppet or taped a picture of Tony's mom to sack of potatoes.
They taste like spite.
It all comes off as creepy, with Tony's mom looking oddly washed-out and otherworldly, and far from being her usual spunky murder-plotting self she just repeats a handful of tics and mumbles. The effect almost makes it seem as if she's already dead and Tony is yelling at a ghost.
Then in the very next scene we're informed she died off-camera anyways, making one question what the purpose of the scene was, other than to underline for the millionth time what a cock Tony is (which admittedly was kind of the entire point of The Sopranos).
God dammit, you're not supposed to like Tony. If you people don't stop I'm going to write the most anticlimactic series finale ever. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow began life as a teaser trailer produced by two guys in their living room, which impressed movie producers so much they gave them a giant stack of money to make a full film that ended up looking like a blurry Xbox game. Plus it lost like, 80 million dollars.
Oh my God...are those the first weekend receipts?
The movie's plot revolves almost entirely around the question of "who is Dr. Totenkopf?" His name is mentioned literally every 30-seconds, usually in hushed dread-laced tones, until you're sure this dude must be Voldemort, Darth Vader and Sauron all rolled into one. So after over 90 minutes of build, they finally come face to face with Dr. Totenkopf -- and it turns out he's basically Zordon from the Power Rangers as played by old archival footage of Laurence Olivier. The conversation they have with him is stilted, feels out of context and the effect is cheesy (the Wizard of Oz did floating heads better back in 1939). Why'd the filmmakers bother doing something so pointless? We're not sure, but they've had plenty of time to contemplate their mistakes, since Hollywood promptly deposited the guys back into their living room after the failure of Sky Captain and they haven't made another movie since.
Shemp Howard in various lousy Three Stooges shorts from 1959
In 1959 everyone's favorite Stooge, Shemp, sadly passed away from a stroke. Despite the death the Stooges were still under contract to deliver four more shorts featuring Shemp that year, so they cobbled them together using the small amount of footage Shemp had filmed for these final shorts, along with old material. Not the most dignified way to treat a brother or friend, but let's be honest, the remaining Stooges probably would have dug up Shemp and done wacky pratfalls with the corpse if they had to.
Curly's head went on to star in several classic Stooge shorts after his death.
Throughout the shorts remaining Stooges Moe and Larry spend a lot of time scratching their melonheads and wondering aloud where that darn Shemp has got to. When Shemp is seen on screen the difference between old and new footage is blatantly obvious -- Shemp was in a bad way towards the end and so he bounces back and forth between his regular merely hideous appearance and looking like something out of a George Romero movie.
These shorts were particularly infamous for their use of "Fake Shemp" stand-in Joe Palma. For the most part Palma was only shown from the back (and even the back of his skull didn't look much like Shemp's), which came off as jarring in the hijinks heavy Stooge shorts. It's one of those basic rules of cinema -- when a character is the center of attention you show their face, so it came off as particularly odd to have somebody performing wacky physical comedy with their back to the camera. But hey, screw you cinema, the Three Stooges don't play by your rules. Besides, we doubt audiences were really that disappointed to see less of Shemp Howard's face.
Proud winner of the prestigious "Hollywood's Ugliest Man" award from 1950 to 1957.
Beloved celebrities in some pretty awful commercials
Most celebrities today would be willing to take a camera crew to their mother's funeral to film a Pledge Casket Wax commercial, but ironically this very whorishness means folks are more willing to take shopping advice from a guy in military fatigues screaming on a street corner than a celebrity these days. But hey, what if you could resurrect a beloved dead celebrity from an era when stars had integrity? Start the voodoo incantations, we've got steak knives to sell!
One of the earlier examples of advertisers harnessing the power of new-fangled computer effects to reanimate the dead was a 1997 commercial for Dirt Devil in which Fred Astaire has his old dance partner Ginger Rogers replaced with a vacuum cleaner.
Volkswagen wasn't about to be one-upped when it came to defacing the work of a legendary dancer though, unleashing a commercial featuring Gene Kelly breakdancing through his iconic scene from Singin' in the Rain. Kelly's moves are so jerky and unnatural looking you'd swear Skynet accidentally sent a Terminator back to the 50s. Now what if your company made a fortune selling something completely unremarkable, like say popping corn, based entirely on the strength of your spokesperson, and then that person dies? There's only one solution -- ZOMBIE REDENBACHER.
Peter Sellers in Trail of the Pink Panther
Trail of the Pink Panther was the last movie in the long-running series to star Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, which was an impressive feat considering he was over two years dead when the movie came out. While filming earlier movies in the series Sellers had left behind a wealth of outtakes and unused scenes, which the producers of Trail tried to piece together into a "new" film. The result was less than flawless, with characters miraculously changing age from scene to scene, and frequently seen driving cars, using phones and sporting fashions a decade or two out of date.
Hey kids, find the hundred things from this shot that prove it probably wasn't filmed in the mid-80s.
At one point Clouseau has to fly to England for no good reason other than they had an unused scene filmed in England they wanted to use. One problem -- they had no pre-existing footage of Clouseau on a plane. Their solution was almost brilliant in it's sheer stupidity... They had Clouseau wrap himself up in bandages for the plane ride, a move the script makes no effort whatsoever to explain. Apparently by that point the producers of the series thought, "come on guys, Clouseau is a moron, nothing he does actually has to make any sense" was explanation enough. The few glimpses you get of the guy behind the bandages looks more like Saddam Hussein than Peter Sellers, and at the end of the scene his cast and most of his bandages magically vanish as they cut to back to old footage.
After about 45-minutes of this, the editor of the movie apparently shot himself in the head out of embarrassment, and so Clouseau "dies" off screen in a plane crash, and the rest of the movie becomes a straight-up clip show. When not replaying favorite moments from past Pink Panthers, the 2nd half of the movie basically forgets it's supposed to be a comedy, instead revolving around a plucky lady reporter standing up to the mob while trying to locate the missing Clouseau. Unfortunately while she has plenty of pluck, she's also kind of incompetent because after 90 minutes the movie just ends with Clouseau never found. No resolution at all. An entire additional movie, Curse of the Pink Panther, continued the "Search for Clouseau" storyline, and when he's finally found he's played by Roger Moore doing a terrible Sellers impression while sporting a bucket on his head.
Still not as stupid as half his Bond movies.
Sellers' widow actually filed a lawsuit against the film's producers, claiming that the movie was so bad it had sullied her husband's reputation forever, and she won. Trail of the Pink Panther, a film so shitty it's practically illegal.
Nathan Birch also writes the dead celebrity-free webcomic Zoology.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
X Character Flaws That Made Human Beings What They Are Today
Most of us are taught from a young age what it takes to be a good person. Be confident and independent, eat right and wash behind your ears our parents tell us. It’s all fine advice for those living in the modern world, but if our ancient ancestors had followed it we’d probably still be hanging out in the forest munching chiggers off each other’s backs. Turns out in order to become nature’s biggest winners, we first had to act like pretty big losers.
Gluttony
Today’s world is one in which it’s possible to legitimately purchase fried chicken filled donuts, given you accept the fact you’ll likely be stealthily filmed from the neck down when buying one for the local news’ latest “obesity epidemic” cover story. Should we feel guilty about our eating habits, or has humanity actually benefited from our hardwired urge to cover with gravy and devour anything dropped in front of us?
The thing is, there are plenty of animals that eat simple, healthy, plant-based diets, and for the most part, they don’t tend to be particularly bright.
Dumb, yet delicious.
Most of the planet’s sharper animals are, like humans, essentially scavengers, as a certain amount of intelligence and long-term memory is required to remember, for instance, which berries are a tasty treat and which will make you shit your intestines inside-out. Once a species develops this basic intelligence it becomes infinitely more resilient and able to adapt to new ecosystems. Just compare rats, which will be around long after we’ve killed each other off, because they’re willing to eat filth, to those snooty bamboo-munching pandas who probably won’t survive another decade. If you want to make it big as a species, your dignity has to be the first thing to go. Now, let’s piss off some vegetarians…
Best to just skip to the next entry vegetarians.
It wasn’t just ancient man’s willingness to shove just about anything in his mouth that contributed to his intelligence--much of it can be attributed to our ancestors starting to consume large quantities of meat and fat. Our large juicy brains consume a huge amount of energy, the kind of energy that could only be provided by big greasy slabs of animal flesh in those primitive pre-high fructose corn syrup times. The hunting of ancient critters also contributed to the creation of the first tools, and strengthened tribal bonds. So chew that gristle with pride friends, turns out it’s brain food.
Bad Hygiene
Scientists have long questioned why human beings evolved to become one of the few mostly hairless mammals on the planet. One leading theory is that our ancestors were dirty little monkeys who lost their hair as a way of escaping rampant parasites, particularly body lice we picked up from gorillas (don’t judge, the Pleistocene period was a crazy, experimental time man).
But how did losing our body hair help us become what we are today? Well now that we no longer had insulating fur covering us, we had to create clothing, and groups living in different areas produced varying levels of pigmentation to protect their exposed skin from the sun, leading to the development of race. Oh, and the need to keep warm may have also contributed to our ancestors learning one other mildly important skill…
The marshmallow was discovered shortly thereafter.
Give those crazy cavemen credit, they knew how to make the best of a bad situation. Most people who catch gorilla crabs these days just end up with a prescription for special shampoo and a lifetime ban from the zoo.
Gossip
It was long thought that human beings developed language to aid in cooperation during hunting, but a new theory suggests that language may not have developed out in the forest with the men, but back around the campfire amongst the gossiping women. The fact that women may have been responsible for language is easy enough to believe considering even today when guys get together their vocabularies don’t seem to extend far beyond the words needed to describe a pair of tits or their buddies’ total gayness.
Clearly female cavepersons were a lot more advanced.
So, ironically what many consider the lowest use of language may have been what led to its creation in the first place, but did gossip have any other positive ramifications? Yes, gossip was absolutely essential in holding together larger more complex human social groups. Most ape societies max out at around 50 members since the primary method of socializing for them is grooming, and picking all the tasty critters off your neighbour’s backside can be a time consuming process. Gossip on the other hand can help you find out who’s been dragging who by the hair to which cave, or who covets whose pile of shiny rocks, much more efficiently, which allowed early man to hold together larger social groups up to around 150 members (gee, that number seems familiar). But why are these larger groups important? Well…
Social Anxiety and Depression
Our brains are about six times too big for an animal our size. Did mankind develop this massive amount of grey matter to help us in our long-standing mission to make mother nature our bitch? It seems unlikely since even animals that aren’t particularly brainy still make out okay in the wild. It’s more probable that humans managed to get a hang of the nature stuff pretty early on, and the real purpose of our huge leap in intelligence was to help us figure out our increasingly large, complex social groups. In other words, trying to navigate the perils of the lunchroom at school probably stimulates your mind more than any of your classes ever will.
Studying the skulls of our ancestors, scientists have found disproportionate growth in the parts of our brains used to construct mental simulations. Being able to play out different situations in your mind and predict possible outcomes is not just essential to surviving the social jungle, it’s also the basis of all problem solving. Basically every scientific or creative breakthrough in human history can trace its roots to some sweaty palmed caveman sitting alone in his hut fretting about whether the other cavemen think he’s cool, and conjuring up fantasies about what it would be like to finally talk to that cavegirl with the shapely brow ridge.
Depression played it’s part too, as some speculate depression evolved as a way to make people separate themselves from the group in times of stress, so they could try to simulate a solution to their problems in peace. So yeah, if your teenager’s being an angsty little punk, don’t worry, they’re actually contributing the betterment of the human race. Well unless they’re goth—everyone knows Goths are an evolutionary dead end.
Scientists suspect the Homo Gothius subspecies were quickly wedgied out of existence.
Refusing to Grow Up
There are few quicker ways to get under a person’s skin than to call them childish. From a young age we’re pressured to be mature, but as it turns out refusing to grow up is a cornerstone of human evolution, so take that mom and dad.
Human childhoods are unique in that we’re born with a massive brain (just ask any woman who’s had to birth one of ‘em) and wriggling vestigial bodies, that grow slowly and don’t really change significantly until puberty. While most animals put all their energy towards quickly growing adult-like bodies, humans instead spend our early years strengthening the pathways in our brains and absorbing information. Our species’ unique ability to pass information and knowledge from one generation to the next, is due to the fact that humans essentially spend 20-years barfing in their offspring’s mouths before they finally kick them from the nest (and even then the barf keeps coming in the form of college tuition, weddings, and their old room again after the divorce).
Cracked.com--validating man-children using science since 2006.
We're there for ya' man...
Drunkenness
As diverse and sometimes conflicting as the world’s countless cultures can be, there’s at least one thing we share—we all love of getting shitfaced. Scientists suspect humans have been boozehounds since our very earliest days when we looked like something you’d hire an exterminator to chase out of your attic. Hell, our bodies are specially designed for alcohol consumption, with portions of our livers specifically designated for metabolizing alcohol. So human beings have been getting tanked for ages, but aside from helping ugly cavemen hook up, has it had any major effect on human progress?
Surprisingly it has. Human beings only truly started to thrive once we developed agriculture, as it allowed us to settle down, found cities and start multiplying like catholic bunnies. Generally it’s been assumed we began farming to provide ourselves with a food source and that brewing alcohol from these plants came later, but some scientists have begun to question whether we might have the timeline backwards. They think we liked getting snookered so much we established agriculture in order to give us plants to brew, and that the whole growing food to feed our children thing was just a happy side effect.
So our entire modern society was founded on getting plastered. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nathan Birch contributes to the development of the human culture with his webcomic Zoology.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
7 Amazing Houses (Built by Equally Amazing People)
The world is home to pretty much every shape, size and bizarre form of house you can possibly imagine, but as amazing as these houses are, the stories of the people who built them are often even more fantastic. A house says a lot about a person, and these houses tell the world that its owner isn’t about to conform to it’s rules (or maybe that they just forgot to take their medication).
The Toilet House
No need for a lengthy description here—it’s a house designed to look like a giant toilet. We realize housing markets are in the can and all, but we’re not sure we needed a house that illustrated it quite so literally.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
Sim Jae-Duck was born in a washroom. Usually this is the kind of personal trivia you try to keep to yourself, but Sim Jae-Duck isn’t merely unashamed of the fact that the first thing he saw in this world was that the tub could really use a de-grouting, he’s downright proud of it. It was no mere coincidence that his mother gave birth there either, as Sim’s grandmother told his mom tthat babies born in bathrooms were destined to live long successful lives. Normally that kind of advice would be cause to ship grandma off to the nursing home, but it turns out that she may have been on to something as Sim Jae-Duck went on to become the Mayor of the South Korean city of Suweon.
During his term Sim was given the nickname “Mayor Toilet”, and while this is hardly the first time people have referred to politicians and toilets in the same sentence, Sim truly earned his moniker by being completely obsessed by the things. Sim believes bathrooms should be “clean and beautiful resting places imbued with culture” and hopes to transform them into something closer to a garden or art gallery (if those things were filled with the smell of poop).
Yeah yeah, toilets are great. Enough already.
In 1999 Sim Jae-Duck launched his World Toilet Association, and to celebrate unveiled his glass walled toilet house, which features two bedrooms, guestrooms and of course three luxurious state-of-the-art washrooms. Feeling disappointed that you can’t literally live your life in the crapper? Well if you have 50 thousand dollars laying about you too can spend a night in Sim’s toilet house. Just remember to bring some good reading material.
The Scrap Wood Skyscraper
Believe it or not, this thing that looks like some sort of haunted scrap heap is in fact an inhabitable house.
Located in the Siberian town of Arkhangelsk, it’s believed to be the tallest wooden dwelling in the world, towering 13-stories and seemingly defying several laws of physics by not toppling over every time a slight breeze hits it.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
Nikolai Sutyagin built the entire house himself by hand mostly from scrap lumber. According to its creator the house was originally intended to only be 2-stories, but looked “ungainly”, so he just kept building, which we’re pretty sure isn’t a technique recommended by most architectural schools.
Despite the quirkiness of his final product, Nikolai sounds like quite the inspiring figure doesn’t he? The kind of guy you tell your kids about when you want them to get their asses up from in front of the TV. Well until you find out that Nikolai Sutyagin was actually a Russian gangster who built his house to be the Russian equivalent of the Playboy mansion.
You're more likely to get tetanus than in the real Playboy mansion. On the plus side, you're also less likely to have to sleep with Hugh Hefner.
The house contains a garden, ballroom, 5-story bathhouse and numerous rooms where Sutyagins business colleagues could “entertain” various women. Come to think of it, he may inspire us even more now.
Of course he's not wearing a shirt.
The Narrow House
Well, clearly this is just a picture of a house in construction. That white structure is just one of the walls of a full house to be built later, right?
Nope, turns out that’s an entire house, the thinnest one in the world in fact. The house measures only about 3-feet wide at the front, expanding to a roomy 6-feet across at it’s widest point. Despite being narrower than a lot of human beings here in America, this Brazilian house manages to pack in two living rooms, three bedrooms and a kitchen.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
A few years ago, Helenita Queiroz Grave Minho found herself out of a job. While some people might use this as excuse to catch up on their daytime TV while hiding inside to keep the disability checks coming, Helenita decided to be proactive. She wanted to build a house that she could rent out for extra cash, but unfortunately the only land she had to build on was a narrow alleyway. That didn’t stop her.
Helenita's a lady who gets her way.
Helenita went through a lengthy battle with the Mayor’s office before she was allowed to build (during which we imagine the phrase “are you completely insane?” must have been common) but eventually the authorities gave in. Despite having no architectural training, Helenita designed and built the house with her husband, and it’s now become a local tourist attraction, with Helenita planning to build another story on it as well. Hopefully she stops there though, since we’re not sure “world’s narrowest collapsed pile of rubble” will have quite the same draw.
The Coral Castle
On the southernmost tip of Florida, an area not exactly known for it’s high culture, lays the Coral Castle, a structure that has been compared to world wonders like Stonehenge and the great pyramids of Egypt, and it was all built by a single man who, if his neighbours are to be believed, may have had magical powers.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
Latvian immigrant Edward Leedskalnin was dumped by his fiancé on the day before their wedding. After a steel toe to the nuts like that a lot of men might fantasize about building a fortress to shut themselves away from humanity in, but Edward Leedskalnin, being a can-do kind of guy, actually did it. Edward moved to south Florida and began building himself a castle using giant blocks of limestone from the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Everything in the castle, from Edward’s two-story tower living quarters, to the furniture, to the strange sculptures in the courtyard, to his throne (he way have been overcompensating just a tad with that one) were made of these stone slabs, with no mortar or cement to hold them together.
While that’s odd in and of itself, even stranger is the fact that nobody knows how the hell the guy did it all. Leedskalnin went to great lengths to make sure nobody saw him working, and it remains a mystery how he managed to move, cut and precisely assemble these chunks of rock (some of which were up to twice as large as the stones used at Stonehenge) all on his own. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, eventually he decided the location he’d chosen for his project wasn’t quite right, so he moved the whole thing 10-miles down the road. Think changing apartments is tough? Try moving when you have to take over a thousand tons of limestone with you.
See this giant hunk of stone? I totally lifted it, and I'm not going to tell you how.
Over the years people have come up with plenty of interesting theories to explain the creation of the Coral Castle, and by “interesting”, we mostly mean batshit insane. Neighbours say they witnessed Edward placing his hands on the rocks, chanting and causing them to levitate, local teenagers claim to have seen him flying the blocks like hydrogen balloons, and some even believe Edward may have discovered the very key to the universe. Edward himself said his amazing building abilities were due to him discovering the secrets of the pyramids. Gee, thanks for the clarification. Even Spock himself demands an explanation…
The Beer Can House
Somewhere in Houston, Texas lays the Beer Can House, which in a stirring tribute to both recycling and alcoholism, is adorned with over 50-thousand crushed beer cans.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
We know what you’re thinking, and no, the Beer Can House was never a frat house believe it or not. The house was actually created by upholsterer John Milkovisch. The whole project started when Milkovisch decided to replace his lawn with cement slabs which he covered with marbles, metal and all sorts of other random junk, because in his words, he just “got sick of mowing the damn grass.”
With his property now officially an eyesore, he decided to really go for broke. According to friends, Milkovisch lived on the route the beer truck drove to get to the grocery store, and like a middle aged beer bellied kid, he’d run out like he’d seen the ice cream truck and clean it out, stocking eight to ten cases in his garage at all times. Perhaps it was the influence of all those beers that made him think sticking the empties on the walls was a good idea, but it turned out fine for Milkovisch as the house is now considered a beloved local landmark. Basically what we’re saying is that if there’s ever a vote on who the awesomest guy ever was, John Milkovisch ought to at least be on the ballot.
John Milkovisch appreciated the finer things in life.
The House on the Rock
Near the unassuming small town of Spring Green, Wisconsin lays one of the oddest houses in America. For starters it’s perched on top of a 60-foot tall column of sheer rock, and inside you’ll find a seemingly randomly assembled collection of bizarre themed rooms. There’s a room full of strange automated instruments, a recreation of an early 20th century town, a large carousel and more. Basically it’s what Disneyland would have been like if Walt had banged his head a few too many times as a kid and spent most of his life doing shrooms.
Apparently Godzilla lives somewhere in this house.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
The house’s creator, Alex Jordan Jr., was famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s biggest fan. Jordan travelled to meet Wright so he could show him the plans for a building he had designed, hoping to get his idol’s approval, and well, Wright basically straight-up told Jordan he was the shittiest architect in history, dropping the following awesome line on him…
"I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You're not capable." There’s only one thing to say to that. Ouch.
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Don Rickles of the the architecture world.
Well after that Jordan turned in his Frank Lloyd Wright fan club badge, and decided he was going to make Wright eat his words by building a house on top of a rock spire he spotted while driving home in a huff from the fateful meeting. 80-years later Wright is America’s most respected architect and Alex Jordan is one of seven crazy people mentioned in a Cracked article. You sure showed him Alex.
Not even Alex Jordan's hat could compare to FLW.
Le Palais Ideal
Somewhere amongst the French countryside, near the town Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, lays Le Palais Ideal (“The Ideal Palace”), a large incredibly ornate palace built out of small stones, and decorated with imagery from the Bible, India and many other cultures from around the world. It may seem like a monument from some sort of long-lost civilization, but in reality the Palais Ideal is only celebrating it’s 100th birthday this year, and it’s creation was all the result of a man tripping over a stone.
So Who the Hell Built This Thing?
Le Palais Idea was entirely the work of Ferdinand Cheval, a mailman who tripped over a stone one day while on his route. Cheval could have simply tossed the rock aside, or perhaps gone with his mailman instincts and hurled it at somebody’s head, but instead he found himself fascinated by it’s shape and was inspired to create the Palais. From that day on, and for the next 33-years, Ferdinand Cheval would collect stones along his route, at first stuffing them into his pockets, before upgrading to a basket and eventually a wheelbarrow. Fortunately the backhoe wasn’t invented yet because we’re sure Cheval would have taken one on his route if he could.
Clearly not the kind of man you say "no" to when he asks to pick stones off your sidewalk.
After collecting the stones, Cheval would then painstakingly piece together his ideal palace, usually working at night by the light of an oil lamp. Cheval wanted to be buried there, but unfortunately that was against French law. Since Cheval was a mailman, and thus possessed that unique postal worker combination of insanity and love for pointless rules, he decided not to fight it and instead spent the next eight years building a mausoleum using the same techniques he had used for his palace. He made sure the mausoleum didn’t get all musty before he moved in either, promptly dying less than a year after he finished it.
Nathan Birch also writes the solidly constructed webcomic Zoology.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
6 Creepy Urban Legends (That Happen to be True) Part 3!
As we’ve already proventwice that friend of a friend people keep hearing things from may not be as full of shit as you always thought, so get ready as Cracked once again makes you wet yourself with cold hard facts.
The Deadly Elevator
The Legend: The metal doors clamp down on a hapless victim, who can do nothing but scream in terror as the elevator dings and begins to rise, shearing off their head or limbs as it does. We’ve watched scenes like this in enough movies that we all have that twinge of panic as the doors start to close on us as we try to catch an elevator. But surely this kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life. There are safety measures, right? Right?
The Truth: Well yes, there are, but for whatever reason they were of no help to Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh on August 16th, 2003. Why didn’t the elevator open again, or shut down when the doctor became pinned between the doors at the shoulders as he was getting on? To this day nobody’s exactly sure, but inspectors have suggested the tragedy may have been caused by a single out of place wire. Think about that little morsel next time you’re debating whether to take the elevator or the stairs.
As the doors held Dr. Nikaidoh in place like a vice, the elevator began it’s ascent, slicing his head in two at mouth-level, leaving only his left ear and lower jaw attached to his body. Found that a little nauseating to read? Well suck it up, and try to imagine how the nurse who was already in the elevator and had to spend up to an hour in a blood-soaked box with the good doctor’s head felt. We’re surprised they didn’t find her scaling the elevator cables like John McClane in scrubs to get the hell out of there after 5-minutes.
While Dr. Nikaidoh’s story was certainly gruesome, he’s far from the only one to have been done in by an elevator mishap, as around 30-people are killed by elevators each year. Yes, 30 people a year have to die while listening to elevator muzak. If there’s a God out there he’s one cruel bastard.
The Case of the Killer Collar
The Legend: A man shows up at a bank, and informs the tellers that he’s very sorry, but he’s going to have to clean the place out. You see, around his neck is an explosive collar that will deposit his brains all over the walls unless he robs the bank. A film favourite, explosive collars have made appearances in movies like Battle Royale and Transporter 3, but could this kind of Jigsaw killer-esque plot exist in real life?
The Truth: On a day like any other in late August 2003, pizza deliveryman Brian Wells was about to end his shift when a fateful order came in. The directions given to Bryan led him to a winding deserted dirt road that ended at a lonely TV tower. Now most people upon arriving at the spooky deserted road would have just tossed the pizzas in the ditch, but not Brian Wells. He was dedicated to his minimum wage delivery job.
What exactly happened on that dirt road is still subject to debate, but what we do know is that around an hour later he reappeared at a nearby bank, with a strange collar around his neck, a homemade shotgun shaped like a walking cane in his hand, and a note demanding a quarter million dollars in cash. While supposedly all those responsible for putting the collar on Brian Wells have since been caught and charged, the wacky walking cane shotgun leads us to believe that there may have been another perpetrator that hasn’t yet been brought to justice.
Never count out the Penguin.
Unfortunately for Brain he was about as good at robbing banks as he was at avoiding obvious horror movie set-ups, and was apprehended by the police in the parking lot. The cops quickly discovered the collar, but just took it for a stylish ticking fashion accessory, and didn’t bother to call the bomb squad for nearly half an hour. By the time the bomb squad did arrive, the collar had gone off, blowing a “postcard-sized” hole in Wells’ chest.
The police found a list of tasks on Well’s body, each of which were to be completed in a set period of time or the the bomb would go off. Poor Brian was doomed from the start though, as it was later determined it would have been impossible for him to execute all the tasks even if everything had gone according to plan. He simply hadn’t been given enough time. These are the kind of tragedies that happened before the world had Google Maps.
The Body Farm
The Legend: Near where you live there very well may be an isolated patch of land covered with unburied corpses, some of them posed, or even stuffed in car trunks, rotting in the midday sun. Is there a serial killer on the loose? Has the gravediggers’ union gone on strike again? No, in fact what’s going on here is, surprisingly, completely legal.
The Truth: You won’t see much mention of this on CSI since it would take away from the usual 30-minutes devoted to David Caruso putting on and/or removing his sunglasses, but body farms are becoming an increasingly important tool for forensic scientists. These patches of land have bodies scattered over them by scientists so they can study how bodies decay under a variety of conditions.
Think checking out the local body farm sounds like a fun weekend excursion? Well if you live around Knoxville Tennessee, San Marcos Texas or Cullowhee North Carolina, you’re in luck, because that’s where the country’s three body farms are located. The one found in Knoxville is the oldest and most elaborate, covering 2.5 acres and containing 40 to 50 bodies at any one time. If there’s not one near you yet, just wait, as scientists are looking to start new body farms faster than Wal-Mart opens new stores, with some hoping for a future with a body farm in every state. Because apparently the way bodies rot in Nebraska is completely different than in Iowa.
Now, check out this video of a kindly grandfatherly type showing off his collection of molding cadavers and discussing wearing human skin gloves.
The Chainsaw Suicide
The Legend: A man decides to use a chainsaw to end it all in an incredibly gruesome (and honestly kind of awesome) way.
The Truth: So David Phyall, a 50-year old British man, really really didn’t want to leave his apartment block, which was set to be demolished. Alternative accommodation was offered to him 11-times, but David just wasn’t taking. One by one all his neighbours moved out, leaving David the one holdout rattling around in a condemned apartment building all on his own.
David Phyall's aparment block. We're thinking maybe he overreacted a little.
Something had to give and it turned out that something was going to be David’s vertebrae. See David had a plan that was definitely going to cost him his safety deposit, and make a hell of a chore for the cleaning staff. David tied a chainsaw to the leg of a table, laid down with his neck against it, set the saw on a 15-minute timer, then took a stiff drink. David’s plan, and head, went off without a hitch.
A superior asked the police Sergeant that found Phyall if discovering the body was a shock to him.
He was promptly fined by the British police for being too bloody excitable and not showing proper stiff upper-lippishness in the line of duty.
The Call from Beyond the Grave
The Legend: People receive numerous calls from a loved one, only finding out later that the person calling them has been pushing up daisies for hours. Believe it or not, it’s actually happened (texting from beyond the grave on the other hand has yet to be verified).
The Truth: On September 12th, 2008, a California commuter train ran through a red warning light, crashing into a freight train, killing 25 people. The family of Charles Peck, knowing he was on the train, watched the news with dread waiting for news of his fate—and then they got a call. Then another, and another, all from Charles’ cellphone. One family member after another was called, with Charles’ cellphone sending out 35 calls in total, at which point, ghost calls or not, we’re sure they just started letting the things go to voicemail.
The police managed to find Charles’ body among the wreckage by tracking his cellphone signal, but it was not a happy reunion. Brian was dead, and to this day how those calls were sent remains a mystery. Now, how about some irony with your creepy? Guess what the train’s engineer was distracted by when he ran past that red light? Yup, in a twist that would be cut from a Twilight Zone episode for being too cheesy, it was his cellphone. God’s not only a cruel bastard, but a hack horror writer as well apparently.
Qualified to be a train engineer apparently.
Shrunken Heads
The Legend: Head shrinking has been the subject of legend, jokes and old Looney Tunes sight gags for ages, but the practice couldn’t actually be real, could it? It’s just one more bit of bullshit white people made up about folks a shade darker than them, right? Well…
The Truth: Head shrinking was in fact a real thing, practiced mainly by tribes located around the Amazon River basin. For those looking to throw the perfect head shrinking party, here’s the recipe:
Make a cut on the back of the head, then painstaking peel all the skin and flesh from the skull. Sew the eyes and mouth shut, then boil the flesh up good, dry it with hot rocks, then mold it back into a head-like shape. Viola! A handy miniature version of the guy you nailed with that arrow last week!
While head shrinking was real, it was quite rare even amongst the tribes that practiced it, that is until collecting shrunken heads became the Pogs of the late 19th century. The shrunken head trade actually became big business, with numerous South American and Polynesian tribes (most of whom never shrunk heads in the first place) going to war with one another just to collect heads. In a tactic that was amazingly dickish even by white people’s extraordinarily low standards when it came to dealing with natives, traders would give the tribes guns in exchange for the shrunken heads, ensuring a steady supply of new product.
Pictured: A large collection of shrunken heads and one horrible human being.
The sale of shrunken heads continued in the United States for years until it was finally officially outlawed sometime in the 1940s. Yes, as late as the 40s people still thought it was cool to trade human face jerky. By the way, wondering what price was put on a human life back then? How about 25 bucks a pop? Yeah, people paid as much for an actual human head then as a modern day head shrinker charges every half hour to listen to you babble about your childhood while he writes out his shopping list.
Nathan Birch also writes the always disgustingly cute webcomic Zoology.
