The 5 Wimpiest Pro Sports Injuries of All-Time

For most guys, the closest you get to a sports injury is breaking your ankle while drunkenly jumping around in a Space Walk on your 27th birthday. The great thing about being “most guys” is that you get to revise those injuries to “coming down awkwardly after dunking on a big black guy” without getting called on your bullshit.

Unfortunately for professional athletes, their contracts say they have to tell the truth about why they’re not working today. And hence we get honest accounts of wimpdom such as:

Ken Griffey Jr. pinches a testicle with his own cup.

Getting smacked in the balls during a game is probably the manliest injury you can sustain on the sports field short of taking a puck to the face or being mauled by a lion in the Roman Coliseum. Sure, it makes you jump around like a five-year-old girl who has to pee, but it’s the only injury that offers definitive proof of your manhood. But when you administer the punishment yourself, you destroy the magic, wonder and sheer hypnotic rhythm of the nut shot, and go from “wounded soldier every man feels for” to “episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

Griffey is a Hall of Famer when it comes to pussified injuries. He fell into a big slump starting in the 2000 season thanks to a list of bizarre injuries that would make the mother of a redneck backyard wrestler feel grateful. By 2006, he had been held out of play by eight unrelated injuries, the second most embarrassing being a broken throwing hand sustained while wrestling with his son on his yacht in the Bahamas. For his son, who presumably started going by Bone Crusher and wearing a cape to school, this had to have been awesome. For Griffey Jr., who has a reputation of being overpaid and injury prone, the yacht/kid combo probably wasn’t so good.

But the pinched testicle injury managed to top it. Having your balls crushed, like we said is one thing, but there’s just something inherently unmanly about the word “pinch.” It’s something sisters do to each other, or overly dramatic people do to themselves when something good happens. It’s not something you should be doing to your own sack. And by doing it with the device that is supposed to protect your manhood, you’re just adding a layer of Mr. Bean-like slapstick futility that makes people want to buy you an ice cream cone and chuck your chin more than watch you play baseball.

Could it have been worse?
He could have ripped his testicle clean out of the socket while getting it waxed.

Wimp-o-Meter
5–Wedgie Magnet

Cardinals’ kicker Bill Gramatica tears his ACL celebrating a field goal…in the first quarter

Prior to Bill and his brother Martin entering the NFL, it was hard to imagine a field goal kicker sustaining any kind of injury. They’re on the field for an average of 10 plays for the whole game and there’s actually a penalty that says other players aren’t allowed to touch them when they’re kicking.

However, the Gramatica’s hail from Argentina, where people who kick things for a living are allowed to use the same bathrooms as the rest of the population and are in some cases even looked up to. Upon entering the NFL, and apparently having never seen an NFL game before, the Gramatica’s proceeded to celebrate wildly after every made field goal.

Football fans knew it was only a matter of time until a linebacker would say fuck it and deliver a hit that would take that Argentinian joi de vivre down a notch. The only question was whether it was going to be an opponent or a player on their own team. What no one could have anticipated was that, while Gramatica’s shunning of field goal kicker etiquette most certainly angered the other players on the field, it angered God even more.

He scored a field goal against the New York Giants in 2001 that gave his team the first kill on the scoreboard. Ignoring the fact that it was the first half and the field goal was all but meaningless, Gramatica jumped up in celebration and came crashing down on his leg and tore his ACL. It was like a Greek tragedy, and Gramatica’s spastic celebration the very retarded tragic flaw that brought him crashing to earth. This would all be funny if the injury hadn’t transformed Gramatica into the Job of field goal kickers. After recovering, he played two more seasons with the Cardinals, got cut and joined the Miami Dolphins, who also cut him after only one game when he missed his first attempt at an NFL extra point in a game his team lost by one.

He is now the very shaky kicker for the Arena Football League’s Tampa Bay Storm, a team that most people probably assume is a member of the WNBA when he tries to use it to pick up chicks at the bar.

 

Could it have been worse?
He could still be playing for the Arizona Cardinals.

Wimp-o-Meter
6–Noogie noggin

San Francisco Giants’ Manager Roger Craig cuts his hand on a bra.

Most baseball careers see their share of highs and lows, but few have seen as many highs and lows hit at the exact same moment as Roger Craig’s oddly symmetrical career. For every positive accomplishment, there was always a shattering negative aspect to the accomplishment to counterbalance it. As a pitcher and a master of the split finger fastball, he was best known for his bean-hurling days with the New York Mets where he won 15 of the 27 games he pitched in 1963. Of course this was the early ’60s, when the Mets were famous for things like losing 18 straight games in a season, so his accomplishment is about as impressive as being the top sprinter in the remedial PE class that includes the kid who carries his asthma inhaler in a holster.

As a manager, Craig helped turn the San Francisco Giants into a power house in the 1980s. His first five seasons ended with winning records and he helped them pick up a National League Pennant, sending them to their first World Series in more than 25 years. That World Series just happened to be the one in 1989 that was interrupted by an earthquake. If Craig ever threatens to actually win a World Series, you’ll be able to find us in our bunker preparing for a Biblical apocalypse.

So, it’s only appropriate that in the early ’90s Craig took the bench despite seriously cutting his hand on a bra strap. Even though not much is known about this injury, ESPN Page 2 confirmed it and Denver Post columnist Jim Armstrong said Craig admitted it and didn’t even try to concoct a story to cover it up. Apparently, by that point in his career Craig had apparently resigned himself to a life of being close to doing something awesome and instead having something laughably terrible hurled back in his face.

Could it have been worse?
He could have cut his hand trying to undo his own bra strap.

Wimp-o-Meter
9–Third degree Indian burn

Professional disc golfer Ron Russell swung his hand into a tree during a throw at the 2000 PDGA tournament.

Disc golf is not a sport you’d expect to be riddled with hotheaded, short-tempered John McEnroe types. In fact, many of you thought we’d end that sentence after the first six words.

You would be wrong on both counts. Meet Ron Russell. He forged a road to the 2000 Professional Disc Golf Association tournament made of anger, seething rage and flying spittle. If he could have Bob Knighted a folding chair across the course, he probably would have. Of course, the only things to throw on a disc golf course are Frisbees and hippies, and hippies make your hands smell all weird when you pick them up. So Russell used his puzzling rage to propel himself to disc golf “greatness.”

Then fate bitchslapped him. On top of already giving him a gift as pointless as being good at throwing a Frisbee in the woods. For on the fifth hole of one of the gnarliest disc gold courses in America, Russell teed off into a gaggle of pesky trees and had to line up a particularly difficult shot to get out of the rough. Instead he unfortunately lined his hand up with a tree. A PDGA official was a few yards away and described the sound of the tree “rejecting” Russell’s shot as the sound of a small gun being fired, probably wishful thinking since a small gun being fired would be the most manly thing to ever happen on a disc golf course.

As it is, Russell’s getting his ass handed to him by a spruce is the manliest thing to ever happen on a disc golf course, but unfortunately one of the least manliest injuries to ever happen in professional sports.

Could it have been worse?
He could have been playing a real sport, and thus suffered his injury in front of non-hippie spectators.

Wimp-o-Meter
8–Next in line for a swirlee

Manchester City’s David Seaman broke a bone reaching for the TV remote.

Manchester City’s star goalkeeper has had his fair share of injuries on and off the field. Of course, you’re going to get a few boo-boos when you’re constantly in the sights of a world’s greatest forwards whose only job is to get the ball in the net, even if that means kicking it clean through your abdomen. What puzzles us is how such a tough guy can have so many sub-standard injuries off the field. Seaman’s injury record ranks right up there with the all-time greatest English mysteries, right alongside the identity of Shakespeare and the fact that any man, let alone the most powerful man in Wales, would find Camilla Parker Bowles remotely attractive.

Seaman had a stellar soccer career with the Arsenal Football Club, helping them achieve some of their brightest days. In his first season, he allowed just 18 goals, led Arsenal to retain their league title, and set a club record five years later when he allowed 17 goals in all 38 games. Then the injuries began piling up like he was a one man emergency room following a bloody hooligan soccer riot.

First, he pulled a Larry Walker when he ripped out his shoulder trying to reel in a big carp on a fishing trip. But at least fishing is active. He was probably bragging about the fishing injury like it was a bullet he took for the Queen after he broke a bone while reaching for a television remote. We could speculate as to what terrifying booby trap he used to protect his remote control, or when the BBC started airing Mind of Mencia, the only show capable of making people reach for a remote quickly enough to break a bone, but instead we’ll just wonder why the hell he didn’t lie.

Yes, you’re contractually obligated to tell people how you broke your hand, but there are about a million things you could have been reaching for that sound better than a remote and would look no different on an X-Ray. Say you were reaching for a chain saw. Say your hand was hurrying to adjust your immense package out of the way of oncoming traffic when it collided with your balls of steal. Say you were fending off a fucking kitten. This is an injury that you could and should lie about to the person in the next room from you, because they would never know any better.

“Ouch!”
“What?”
“Ummm, nothing. I just punched the wall. Because I’m angry about stuff.”

 

There, was that so hard?

Could it have been worse?
He could have injured himself trying to use The Clapper.

Wimp-o-Meter
10–Pantsed during gym class

The 7 Ballsiest Sports Cheats Ever

You might think that sportsmanship is dead, what with the steroids and signal-stealing cameras in the headlines. And you’d be right.

But what you may not realize is that sportsmanship died long, long ago. In fact, these modern performance enhancers can’t hold a candle to some of the ballsiest and outright insane cheats throughout sporting history.

The Spanish Rig the Paralympics

One thing people would never sully with deception is the Paralympics (which is like the Special Olympics, where people with disabilities compete). Right? Who would stoop as low as that?

The short answer: the Spanish. In an act of desperation so pathetic it inspires pity, some of the players on the Spaniards’ gold medal-winning Paralympic basketball team turned out not be disabled at all. Yes, that South Park episode and that Johnny Knoxville movie both turned out to be based on a true story.

Undercover journalist, Carlos Ribagorda, blew the lid off the scandal. You may assume that only one or two of the overall squad was ineligible, but that would be underestimating the desperation of the Spanish. A whopping 10 of the 12 members of the basketball squad had no mental difficulty. They were just athletes that sucked enough to not make it into the Olympic team.

Based on actual events

Did it work?
The Spaniards were disqualified from the basketball competition and stripped of their title. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing in other Paralympic events, and we’re going to accept that the rest of them were disabled. The alternative, which is that most of their athletes were normal and yet only finished third overall, is too sad to contemplate.

Liston Burns the Gloves

According to Sun Tzu, war is not won by superior might, but by subversion, deceit and trickery. In 1964, when heavyweight champ Sonny Liston went to war with Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) so many of those tactics were used that somewhere in the afterlife, Sun Tzu must be sporting a raging erection.

Sonny Liston was the Tyson of his day (In that he spent most of his time in prison or punching peoples faces off) and the experienced fighter was the massive favorite ahead of the 22-year-old Ali, who was coming off a pair of bad fights against mediocre fighters.

However, after three rounds, Ali wasn’t just winning, he was dancing around and making the champ look like a drunk playing Whack-A-Mole. At the end of the third round, Liston allegedly told his corner to “burn the gloves”, which meant smear them with the ointment they use to close cuts (you don’t want to get that goop in your eyes).

The next round comes and, after a few blows to the face, Ali goes back to the corner and tells them he’s been blinded.

Did it work?
Ali supposedly told his corner he didn’t want to continue, but they shoved him out and he stumbled around, blind, while Liston hammered him. Ali survived the round and won the fight in the seventh, partly because he had engaged in some shenanigans of his own.

From the moment the contract was signed several months before the bout, Ali began his campaign to destroy Liston’s sanity. Ali started showing up to sparring sessions to taunt Liston. He followed Liston to a casino and mocked him for losing, an act that nearly resulted in a fight on the casino floor. He was waiting at a Miami airport, to ambush Liston with rhyming annoyance.

Ali showed up at Liston’s training headquarters with a bus full of girls. He even turned up at Liston’s house in the middle of the night, taking the harassment into stalker territory. When it came time for the actual fight, an unbalanced Liston fell behind early and, despite the poison glove trick, never recovered.

Sun Tzu would have been proud.

Jockey Turns On the Fog Cheat Code

In 1990, jockey Sylvester ‘Sly’ Carmouche lived up to his name and showed how a gentleman woos mother nature. On a bitterly cold day in December, Sly was the shock winner at Delta Downs in Louisiana (the odds against him were 23-1). How’d he pull it off?

Taking advantage of the fog, Sly waited for the race to begin, then let the rest of the pack to run off into the fog. He stopped, then just waited for the other racers to come around the track behind him. At that point he sped up and and left the other racers in his dust.

Did it work?
As with most cheats, it was Sly’s greed that brought him down. People were willing to accept this outside bet winning–anything can happen. However the margin of his victory began to raise a few eyebrows. Even in the tricky conditions, Sly managed to win by an immense 24 lengths (about 200 feet) and only missed the record set on that course by 1.2 seconds.

Soon Jockeys began coming forward saying that they’d never actually seen Sly go past them, something that most people would probably have been slightly suspicious of much earlier, since that pretty much narrows the possibilities to a flying horse or teleportation.

Eventually Sly got a 10-year ban but was reinstated after 8, probably because he found a way to cheat time somehow.

Boris and His Magical Blade

In 1976, the Soviets and the west were in a race to see who could perfect cheating technology first. During the 1976 Olympic games pentathlon, it became clear who had the edge.

 

After the first event the Soviets found themselves in fourth place, right behind the British. During the next event, fencing, Boris Onishchenko made quick work of his first British opponent. Boris was considered the best fencer in the competition, so that wouldn’t have raised all that many British eyebrows.

 

What did raise suspicions was when, during his match, the British captain Jim Fox leaned all the way back and saw Boris’ sword come up a foot short, and yet the buzzer still sounded and the point was awarded. This is basically the equivalent of Shaq stepping up for a free throw, tossing up an air ball and still getting the point.

At this point the British squad called shenanigans and the sword was confiscated. In those events, there is an electronic sensor in the sword that determines when a point had been struck.

It turned out Boris had tampered with the circuit system, allowing him to award himself points at will.

Did it work?
After he was caught, the entire pentathlon team was disqualified and the British won the gold.

As if being caught performing a fairly obvious attempt at cheating, the story still manages to get more embarrassing as, after the confiscation of the sword, the bout continued and Boris ran away as a convincing winner. So the Soviets were from the New England Patriots school of cheating, which says that even if you’re vastly superior to your opponent, you cheat anyway. Just for the pure hell of it.

Dude(?) Looks Like a Lady

Here at Cracked, we’re are all about equality and accurate representation of the facts, so far be it from us to make any unverified accusations. However, if the Press “sisters” weren’t men, then they did a damn good job of acting like they had penises. Are we saying that there are some things that men are just naturally better at? The answer is yes, if we’re talking about having to throw a heavy metal ball really far.

Tamara Press, the eldest of the two sisters, was a leading figure in the shot put and discus from 1958 until she left the sport. Irina Press was a track and field expert. During their reign of dominance, the Press sisters won five Olympic gold medals, a single silver and several more medals in other competitions. They also set 26 world records.

Sure, that kind of record from just two appearances in Olympic games could raise eyebrows, but hey, would you say Ben Johnson was a cheat based solely on his setting an unthinkable world record? Well, maybe that’s not the best example.

People were already questioning the Press sisters, specifically whether or not they were really the Press brothers (yes, people actually started derisively calling them that). Theories ranged from the pair being hermaphrodites (though the rarity of that condition means the odds against both sisters having it are astronomical) to accusations they were injecting male hormones.

This suspicion escalated further when it was announced that gender testing would be implemented for the games … at which point both Press sisters abruptly retired.

Did it work?
The sisters were never formally accused and lived the rest of their lives as heroes in Russia. Many people who support the Press sisters insist that their leaving the sport right when proof was demanded was just unfortunate timing. We’ll let you be the judge.

 

Hitching a Ride at the Tour de France

While simply catching a ride from a car is an undeniably effective way to win a bicycle race, its lack of deniability and general dumb shit blatancy severely detract from this being a usable method of cheating. Or so you’d think.

In 1904, during only the second ever Tour de France, Hippolyte Acouturier thought he had found a foolproof way to sidestep those meddlesome rules that were impeding his chances of winning with little or no effort.

This is Hippolyte. Seriously.

You can’t blame him, back then the Tour de France was mostly shenanigans, with some bike racing in between (for instance, Acouturier had lost the first Tour de France when someone spiked his water bottle).

In fact, accounts of the first races say competitors used everything from nails and broken glass on the road, to itching powder in the opposing riders’ shorts to get an edge. At one point an angry mob randomly attacked some riders and had to be driven away with gunfire. Yes, bicycle racing was about a thousand times more awesome back then.

Being a man of at least some moral fiber, Hippo decided against crippling the performance of his opponents and instead came up with an awe-inspiring method of cheating that would leave other, lesser geniuses, scratching their head in wonder.

He didn’t simply grab hold of the bumper of some car and hold on for dear life, as a lesser man would have. No, he attached a wire to the bumper of the car, and on the other end of the wire was a hunk of cork that he would hold onto.

With his teeth.

While this plan has its merits, we can’t help but think that a slip knot tied to his handlebars would have worked just as well. Only, you know, without the probable need for radical reconstructive dental surgery.

Did it work?
Hippolyte won four of the six stages, but lost the race to another guy who, as it turns out, was also cheating using some other method out of the Wile E. Coyote playbook. Organizers actually wound up disqualifying the top four finishers and awarded the race to fifth-place finisher Henri Cornet, who apparently was the only one who found a way to cheat that wasn’t obvious from a half-mile away.

Harding Goes For the Knees

We couldn’t leave this one off the list, being the most famous, and least subtle, example of cheating in sports history.

What gets forgotten in the story that dominated headlines in the mid-’90s, is that Tonya Harding was, at one time, really freaking good. She was the first American woman to complete a triple-axel jump, or at least the first to do it while somebody was watching. In 1991 she placed second in the World Figure Skating Championships.

But then, around 1993, things started to get weird. She sat out a competition after somebody called in a bomb threat against her … and some claim that Harding called it in herself. She had wandered off from the medal ceremony at a US Championship, which was a problem because she was one of the people getting a medal.

Then, at the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships, Harding took drastic action (and by drastic we mean “OH MY GOD SOMEBODY CALL AN AMBULANCE”).

After a practice session Shane Stant, hired in part by Hardings ex-husband, decided to show mobsters everywhere how it’s done by kneecapping favorite Nancy Kerrigan using a metal baton.

Did it work?
Harding did go on to win the event after Kerrigan was forced to pull out. But after the inevitable arrest of Stant (kind of hard to get away with assaulting someone in front of reporters) the other conspirators were also arrested and Harding was prosecuted. Harding only avoided jail time after pleading guilty, and was sentenced to 500 hours of community service and a $160,000 fine.

This was also backed up by stripping Harding of her title and banning her from all future sanctioned events. In probably the biggest understatement in recorded history, attempting to cripple an opponent was referred to as showing “a clear disregard for fairness, good sportsmanship and ethical behavior.”

Things managed to get more embarrassing for Harding as during the winter Olympics just a month after the attack (several months before Harding’s ban started) Kerrigan went on to finish an impressive second. Six places ahead of Harding.

Though perhaps Harding got the last laugh, as she went on to have a successful career in amateur porn and female boxing.

OK, maybe not.

Melting Causes Lake in Chile to Empty

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Melting ice in southern Chile caused a glacial lake to swell and then empty suddenly, sending a “tsunami” rolling through a river, a scientist said Thursday. No one was injured in the remote region.

Glacier scientist Gino Casassa said the melting of the Colonia glacier, which he blamed on rising world temperatures, filled the Cachet Lake and increased pressure on the ice sheet.

The water bored a 5-mile tunnel through the glacier and finally emptied into the Baker River on April 6.

“The remarkable thing is that the mass of water moved against the current of the river,” Casassa told The Associated Press by telephone from the Center for Scientific Studies in the southern city of Valdivia. “It was a real river tsunami.”

The lake was nearly full again by late Wednesday, he said.

Casassa said temperatures were unusually high during the recent Southern Hemisphere summer.

“This is a phenomenon that occurs periodically during the summer season, caused by the melting of large masses of ice that swell some lakes,” he said. “The basic cause is global warming.”

The Tempano lake in Chile’s Bernardo O’Higgins National Park abruptly disappeared last year, and has since recovered just some of its former volume.

The 5 Biggest Badass Popes

It used to be that to become pope, you had to sit pantsless in a horseshoe-shaped chair and let a couple of cardinals see if you had the goods. If you passed, they’d yell “Testiculos habet et bene pendentes!” (He has testicles, and they hang well!) It’s true, in those days it took balls to become pope.

Back then, the Papacy was reserved for the hardasses, guys you wouldn’t mess with–the gangsters, the demon-summoners, the corpse-digger-uppers. Here are the ones we consider the biggest badasses. And, no, we didn’t make any of this up.

Alexander VI (1492-1503)

Alexander VI blazed the trail for Biggie Smalls, Kingpin and Jabba the Hutt as obese badasses who didn’t let their man-boobs and tendency to sweat while they ate stop them from amassing a huge fortune, slaughtering their enemies, and getting sweatily busy with the ladies.

Any story you’ve ever heard about crooked popes started with this guy. He bought the papacy with four mule loads of silver. He nailed Rome’s most eligible bachelorettes. He made his 17-year-old bastard son an archbishop. He started wars, poisoned cardinals and took their money, and probably ate live frogs while feeding people to the Rancor.

His greatest accomplishment–as a host if not as a pope–was the Banquet of Chestnuts held in 1501. This sounds nice enough until you learn that the chestnuts were merely a pretext to have a pack of naked hookers crawling around the ground collecting them. But that wasn’t the evening’s only nut-related activity. Trained observers were present to keep track of the total number and quality of the party-goers’ ejaculations. That’s exactly the kind of information you need when a bishopric comes open.

Alexander’s death was followed by further hijinks. His ham-stuffed corpse couldn’t fit in the coffin and began belching sulfur. His successor forbade anyone from saying prayers for his lardy soul. Finally, almost 400 years later, he was reborn as Aleister Crowley (at least that’s what he said), who shocked the world by … taking a lot of drugs and drawing naked pictures of himself.

Pius II (1458-1464)

Pius II proves that appearances can be deceiving. At first glance, he’d seem to be in the running for biggest fancy lad in the history of the Papacy. He was a “humanist,” which means that he read every bit of fruity Latin poetry he could get his hands on and then made ever-so-clever jokes about it with his similarly overeducated friends. Oh, how they giggled!

He seems like the kind of guy whose head you’d like to flush in a toilet, doesn’t he? Well, it’s a damn good thing you didn’t try it, because Pius had a very powerful, very spooky man who was willing to do whatever the pope told him: fucking Dracula. Seriously.

You see, Pius had Turk problems. The Ottoman Empire was invading various European countries, taking Christian children from their families and subjecting them to strict training in order to create an army of super-soldiers (yes, really). Drastic action was called for.

Pius wrote a letter to Vlad III Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad fucking Dracula, a guy so bloodthirsty his name became synonymous with “vampire.”

Hey, did we mention Vlad impaled about 30,000 people on huge-ass spikes? When Pope Pius took “drastic” action, he didn’t fuck around.

In spite of the overwhelming odds–thousands of fanatical super-soldiers versus whatever mustached Wallachian turnip-farmers Vlad hadn’t gotten around to impaling yet– Vlad took on the Turks and even sort of won.

Whatever quality Pius had that caused Vlad the Impaler to put his own Transylvanian ass on the line to do his bidding, it makes him one of history’s best-disguised badasses. The lesson: Resist the urge to assault the next tweedy little sissy you see reciting something in elegiac couplet, because it’s quite possible that he has an undead bloodsucking fiend watching his back.

Honorius III (1216-1227)

Honorius III would seem to be one of hundreds of relatively uninteresting popes who fill in the years between the badass ones. But, like a furry with an erotic squirrel costume so convincing that against all odds it gives you an erection, Honorius was one of those guys who was so good at something lame that it actually made him a badass.

In this case, Honorius was so pious that the temptations of this world were too easy for him, so he routinely summoned demons just to challenge himself. He even wrote a book about it so that your local parish priest could test himself against the denizens of the netherworld by opening some kind of flaming portal to hell.

After a hard day of “reforming the clergy” (i.e., forcing them to be as unlike Alexander VI as possible), the meek and saintly old man retired to his chambers. His lackeys no doubt thought he was busily devising new ways to bore the hell out of them. Actually, he was drawing pentagrams on the floor and interrupting the slumber of various imps, cacodemons and even the final boss of his spiritual exercises, the terrifying spider mastermind.

What could be more frustrating for the demons? When one of these monstrosities is forcibly brought to the earthly realm, at least it usually gets to disembowel someone; depending on the skill of summoner, either the wizard’s enemies or the wizard himself.

How do you think they felt when they came face to face with a bossy and spiritually invincible pope? “God be with you, my cacodemon. Now, do my dishes. After you’re done, you can help yourself to a hard candy from the dish and then go back to hell.”

Stephen VI (896-897)

Once he was ensconced on the throne (the nut-check apparently went smoothly), Pope Stephen VI decided to right some old wrongs. A previous Pope, Formosus, had committed some technical infractions, the kinds of minor crimes a less scrupulous Pope would have let slide, especially considering the man was dead. But not Stephen.

Consumed with an unquenchable thirst for justice, he had Formosus dug up, dressed in his papal vestments, and seated on a throne, ready to face the music in a formal trial.

It was like one of those Law & Order scenes where Jack McCoy starts yelling at a defendant, his eyebrows flying around like pissed off weightless caterpillars while the guilty bastard sits on the witness stand stunned into silence. Being as he was without an attorney and dead, all Formosus could do was sit there in his finery, perhaps letting a chunk of himself fall to the floor in silent protest.

Formosus was found guilty on all charges, of course, though the trial practically screamed for an appeal. The late pontiff’s only defense was mounted by a cleric kneeling behind his throne, who answered Stephen’s seemingly rhetorical questions (“Why did you usurp the papacy?!”) for Formosus by explaining, “Because I was evil!” Historians do not relate whether the cleric set up a pulley device to make Formosus’ jaw move up and down while he spoke for him, so we must assume that he did.

The death penalty was ruled out, since applying it to a corpse might have made Formosus a brain-eating zombie. Stephen played it safe: he chopped off the three fingers Formosus used for blessing and tossed his cadaver in the river. The lesson was inescapable. If the Pope was going to come down this hard on a guy who had violated an obscure Vatican by-law and died a year before, you didn’t even want to know what kind of crazy shit he’d do to someone who really fucked up.

It’s a testament to our lax and dissolute times that Stephen is now considered the bad guy in this story.

Sergius III (897, 904-911)

Take Stephen VI and put about ten extra inches of penis on him, and you get Sergius III. The only man badass enough to be forcibly removed from the office and to take it back, his seven-year reign left the landscape littered with corpses and papal bastards.

Stephen was first elected in 897, but Rome clearly wasn’t ready. Perhaps the nut-check chair’s hole was too small. Whatever the reason, he was expelled by force and excommunicated by various factions of player-hater. While Sergius sat at home and stewed, the papacy was fought over by some guys who were actually pretty badass in their own right.

Realizing that what was needed was stability through the accumulation of dead bodies, the gangstas running things in Rome invited Sergius back to his rightful throne. The new and former pope embarked on a program of governance that combined the best aspects of the first 100 days Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the end of The Godfather. Sergius:

 

1. Had his predecessor, the Antipope Christopher, strangled in prison.
2. Had his predecessor’s predecessor, Leo V, strangled in prison.
3. Set about impregnating a prominent Roman noblewoman with the future Pope John XI.
4. Completed the legacy of his mentor Stephen VI by re-digging up poor old Formosus, trying his dead ass again, and beheading him.

 

A warning to aspiring young mediums: do not invite Sergius III to a séance. There is no doubt that his spirit will snap your neck like a stalk of celery and then proceed to make time with your lady. Just don’t do it.

The 5 Creepiest Urban Legends (That Happen to be True)

The best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, “…And it’s all true, because I have the damned documentation here to prove it!”

In that spirit, we’ve tracked down five of the creepiest tales and urban legends that really happened to real people, proving once and for all that nothing is more terrifying than everyday life.

The Dead Body Under Your Freaking Matress

The Legend:
A couple checks into a hotel and have to put up with a foul odor in their room all night. They call the staff to complain and somebody figures out the stench is coming from the bed.

Now, there’s no way that scenario is going to have a good ending. You’re almost hoping at that point that it’ll turn out the last guest just got drunk and pooped behind the headboard. But, no, the staff take off the matress and discover the couple has been sleeping over the rotting body of a dead girl who had been stuffed in the box spring.

The Truth:
This actually happened, in Las Vegas. Also, Kansas City, MO and Atlantic City, NJ and several times in Florida and California and, well, let’s just say that in or under the bed in a hotel room seems to be a fairly popular destination for the recently deceased.

It makes sense if you think about it. The closet and under the bed are the two most popular places to hide just about anything, so it’s not surprising a hell of a lot of corpses end up there as well. In fact, the odds are pretty good that at least once a guy has killed a prostitute, tried to stuff her under the bed, only to find there was already a body there.

The strangest part isn’t that the bodies wind up in such a terrible hiding place (killers often aren’t the type to plan ahead). No, the strange thing is that in almost every story people will sleep part of, or in many cases, the entire night, on top of the corpse before reporting it.

Most people we know will complain if they detect that someone might have smoked a cigarette in their room four months ago. Not these people, they slept inches above an oozing heap of rotting human flesh rather than inconvenience the hotel management by asking for a new room.

Or, at least we hope sleeping is all they did on that bed. Oh, man, can you imagine dying and then the first thing that happens is some middle age couple starts porking over you? Ew.

Hopefully they at least got a free continental breakfast out of the ordeal.

The Funhouse Mummy

The Myth:
A prop at a carnival was discovered not to be made of the usual combination of papier mache and carni spit, but human skin and bone. All the little kiddies at the haunted house had been poking and giggling at a real, mummified dead body.

The Truth:
Apparently the smell wasn’t just coming from the convict manning the corndog stand. Back in 1976, a camera crew filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man began to set up in the haunted house at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, Calif.

As they were moving aside a “hanging man” prop, they accidentally knocked off its arm and discovered human bones inside. Bionic, this poor sap wasn’t.

The story gets stranger. The body was actually that of criminal mastermind Elmer McCurdy, who was killed in a shootout after robbing a train in 1911. The princely sum old Elmer got killed for? $46 (and two jugs of whiskey).

 

McCurdy was embalmed by the local undertaker, and apparently the guy was so darn pleased with his work that he propped up the corpse in the funeral home as evidence of his skills. People were charged 5 cents to see the corpse, which they paid by dropping a nickel in the cadaver’s mouth. Remember that little bit of history the next time somebody turns their nose up at you for liking Hostel 2.

 

Think it can’t get any stranger? Oh, you naïve fool. After several years of raking in the nickels (how exactly these coins were retrieved after being dropped into the corpse’s mouth is something probably best left to the imagination) our enterprising undertaker’s scheme was ruined when McCurdy’s brothers showed up to claim him. Of course, these guys weren’t his brothers at all, but wily carnival promoters. From that point on, McCurdy’s mummy went on a morbid mystery tour all around America, popping up at carnivals all over the country before finally coming to rest in Long Beach.

McCurdy is now buried in Oklahoma. Because McCurdy apparently had the most entertaining corpse in history, they prevented anyone else from taking him on tour by dumping concrete on top of the casket. No, really.

The Curiously Realistic Decoration

The Legend:
What was thought to be your typically charming Halloween decoration depicting a lynched woman hanging from a tree, turns out to be a genuine suicide.

The Truth:
In the town of Frederica, Delaware, a 42-year-old woman, perhaps distraught by the fact that she lived in Delaware, hung herself from a tree near a busy road on a Tuesday night. The body managed to hang there until the next day and was viewed by many unwitting (or perhaps retarded) spectators before somebody realized it wasn’t a decoration and finally called the police.

Once again it’s the lack of complaints from passers-by that amaze us. Even if the hanging thing wasn’t a body, it was something that looked exactly like one and would be considered an extremely distasteful Halloween decoration (unless she put on a wacky witch’s costume before doing the deed).

With the political correctness these days, you’d have expected two special city council meetings and 30 letters to the editor within the first ten minutes of someone seeing it.

We can’t help but wonder, if the person who eventually called the police hadn’t bothered, how much longer would the body have hung there? This happened five days before Halloween. Add five days of decomposition to the equation and suddenly you have something a whole lot more terrifying.

Also, did the woman plan this? She knew what time of year it was, and intentionally hung herself in a public place. Did she want her corpse to blend in with the bed sheet ghosts and stuffed witches around the neighborhood? If so, it sounds like she may have been a fascinating person.

A Halloween Stunt Goes Wrong in the Least Surprising Way Possible

The Legend:
A teenager manages to provide the Halloween show he’s in with the ultimate finale when, while pretending to hang himself in front of the audience, he actually hangs himself.

The Truth:
While the fine citizens of Frederica we discussed were perhaps a bit slow on the uptake, the people involved in this hanging-related legend are on the dipshit honor roll. Mainly because it’s happened more than once.

Yes, people have repeatedly tried to pull off an imitation hanging for a Halloween show, forgot to include the “imitation” part and went ahead and accidentally killed themselves. Yes, they were pretty much all teenage males.

In one instance, an entire working gallows was built for a show, with the “victim” secured by a harness so that he’d stop just short of actually being hung (take a wild guess how that turned out). Now we’re just thinking aloud here, but if we were standing on a gallows, fake or not, with a rope around our necks, we’d want to take a few precautions. For example, and again just blue-skying, maybe don’t use a real rope that is tied into a real noose that is wrapped around your real neck in a way that could really kill you.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the story was how completely unnecessary the whole thing was. Here’s a tip for anyone trying to thrill kids on Halloween in the future: You don’t need to hang yourself. Just give out full-sized chocolate bars instead of those not-so-fun “fun-sized” ones. We can guarantee the tykes will be talking about the house that gave out full-sized Snickers bars long after some life-risking stunt was forgotten.

Buried Alive

The Legend:
Some poor schmuck is committed to his or her eternal resting place, even though they aren’t quite ready to take that final dirt nap. Scratch marks are later found on the coffin lid along with other desperate signs of escape.

The Truth:
This not only happened, but back in the day it happened with alarming regularity. In the late 19th century, William Tebb tried to compile all the instances of premature burial from medical sources of the day. He managed to collect 219 cases of near-premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial and a dozen cases where dissection or embalming had begun on a not-yet-deceased body.

Now, this may seem ridiculous, but keep in mind this was an era before doctors such as the esteemed Dr. Gregory House gained the ability to solve any ailment within 42 minutes. If you went to the doctor with the flu in those days, he’d likely cover you in leeches and prescribe you heroin to suppress your cough. Their only method for determining if a person had died was to lean over their face and scream “WAKE UP” over and over again. If you didn’t react, they buried you.

The concern over being buried alive back then was so real that the must-have hot-ticket item for the wealthy and paranoid were “safety coffins” that allowed those inside to signal to the outside world (usually by ringing a bell or raising some type of flag) should they awake 6-feet under. Though, answering that bell sounds like a good way to get ambushed by a zombie if you ask us.

Unfortunately safety coffins aren’t in vogue anymore, so if you’re at the cemetery and hear a muffled voice calling out “OK guys, joke’s over. Let me out!” it might be a good idea to inform someone with a shovel quickly.

Of course, that last sentence was merely facetious, there’s no way something like this could still happen today. Uh, well, except for this story about a Venezuelan man waking up during his autopsy. On second thought, you might want to consider adding a line in your will that states you’re to be buried with a gas-powered auger in your casket when you go.

The Ten Minute Suicide Guide

So you’re thinking about committing suicide.

That is, I figure you probably are if you’re reading this, judging by the e-mail I get every day.

I obviously can’t change your mind about this and I don’t particularly see the need to. BUT, a person can screw up a suicide just like anything else and so I offer this guide on how to do it right. Yes, it does matter. This is the act that everyone will remember about you forever and ever. So, before you go rushing into it…

The following is a true story. I knew a girl in High School named Skyler. One day, not long after her 17th birthday, she got fed up with life and swallowed a whole bottle of pills. I would go into why, but we never knew why. All she left behind was a squiggly suicide note, scrawled in a tearful rage on the back of an Arby’s receipt.

To make things worse, the devastating last line of her note, “I’M FINISHED WITH YOUR SHIT” was put down so sloppily that her family read it as, “I’M FAMISHED FOR MORE SHIT.”

The family thus were led to believe that Skyler suffered from Coprophilia, or a fetish for eating human feces. And since death is no time to judge a person, Skyler’s mother and father and three brothers openly embraced what they believed to be their beloved’s love affair with poo. Who knows, maybe it was her shame over this unusual habit that pushed her over the edge. So they went public with the note, outing their poop-loving daughter to the community as to shed light on those still persecuted.

Skyler’s classmates rallied around her memory, condemning the fecalphobes who they figured had taunted her as she took repeated trips to life’s turd buffet. A memorial service was held in our school gym two days later and first up to the podium was little Kim Wittaker (a teammate on Skyler’s dance team), who read this poem dedicated to her memory:

Skyler,
with your newfound wings,
you can fly high-ler
you’ll have the poop pile of kings
and a golden poop piler
wherever you’re at,
you have phat scat sat near the fat scat vat
we miss you

At this point, Principal Clark unveiled an airbrush painting by award-winning art student Cody Gunderson, which would honor Skyler’s memory by forever hanging in the main entranceway of the school.

Do you get the point? Skyler didn’t plan to fail. She just failed to plan. So before you get down to business, here’s three things you need to think through. It won’t take long:

1. Where Do You Go From Here?

I had a friend who worked as a cook at Denny’s and hated it. On his feet and tossing salads all day. So he decides to rob the place, figuring he can take the money and start a new life. Instead he gets caught and goes to prison, where he winds up doing kitchen duty all day and tossing salads all night.

What I’m trying to say is that depending on where you end up, you could find yourself in the exact same bullshit you’re in now. Most of us sit around the campfire late at night and talk about the afterlife as a distant, vague thing but you, if you do the suicide you’re actually going to be there in a few minutes. So we have to stop talking about the afterworld as a shadowy hypothetical and start talking in terms of an actual place where you’ll actually be before your next Birthday.

There are really only two popular views on the afterlife, the religious view and the nonreligious one. Now I don’t know what you believe and I don’t particularly care, so we’ll just examine each possibility equally.

Afterlife Possibility A: Hell or something like it

If Christians are right, you can expect Hell. The best picture of Hell we have is from Italian author Dante Alighieri, who 700 years ago took a trip through Hell and then wrote an unreadable book about it.

His picture of Hell is about what you’d expect, in that there are different levels of hellness depending on what kind of an asshole you were. If you’re surprised that suicides wind up in Hell at all, you have to understand that the bitch about suicide is that under the Christian scheme, it qualifies as murder. Dante’s Hell has the suicide cases living in a suburb of murdererville.

This may sound unfair, but remember that murder isn’t a horrible crime because of what it does to the murdered. That person is gone, what do they care? No, the crime is against the murdered person’s Mom and brother and sister and best friend and all their coworkers and the people he or she owed money to. All of the people who depended on that person or would have depended on them in the future had they been allowed to live, all of the people who will feel the crushing waves of misery and loneliness due to their abrupt absence, they’re the victims.

And since suicide creates the same real and emotional devastation as homocide, the two are treated as the same crime. I know, it sucks. But remember you’re not being punished for what you did to yourself, but what you did to those around you when you pulled the trigger. That’s the thing, suicide has a way of only hurting the people who liked you. The people who hated you will forget your name in a month and, in fact, the evil bastards who tormented you and drove you to this will actually be a little happier with you gone. Suicide is like a bunch of your friends saving up money to buy you a car and then you taking the car and running them over with it.

Dante’s Hell

So under this plan you would get the murderer’s punishment, which is to be plunged into a river of boiling blood, continually bitten by ravenous eels that secrete fire as venom whilst flying badgers swarm on those who try to swim out. This goes on for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times infinity and the whole time, this video plays continuously in the background.

There are differing thoughts on the actual torture, of course. Some don’t believe in the boiling blood thing and say it is merely a “boiling” pool of carnivorous maggots or a simple boiling sea of shit. But most do think that the suicide cases are continually attacked and tortured by the murderers they’re imprisoned with in Hell, because to them you’re such an incompetent murderer that the only victim you could find who wouldn’t overpower or outwit you was yourself. Thus, suicide is considered to be the same embarrassing insult to murderdom that Uwe Boll is to the world of film.

I’m not saying their harrassment will be worse than what you currently suffer at school or at work or at home, you know your situation better than I do. I’m just saying that they’re murderers and there are millions of them and some of them have had several thousand years to be driven insane with rage. They have eternity to work you over and that there are no laws to stop them. Remember that in Hell, the only punishable crime is failing to torture the nearest person weaker than you.

Again, I doubt you think you deserve all that, but you probably don’t think you deserve what you got in this life, either, and that certainly didn’t change anything. All I can really say in response is that it’s difficult to find anyone who was ever punished for anything who actually felt like they deserved it. Also note that Christianity is not a religion for pussies.

You may also point out that your life was your own and it should be a lesser crime to destroy something that belongs to you. But the Christians reasonably point out that you didn’t buy or earn or plan or construct your own birth. It happened totally without your knowledge and the subsequent life could have ended at any second if your heart had decided to stop beating (which also happens without your knowledge) or if some heavy object had fallen on you in your sleep. So they say that it’s really God who owned your life and for you to claim ownership of it is like saying you own the sunlight that beats down on your face on a hot summer day.

Of course, you can take comfort in knowing that lots of smart people disagree with the above picture of Hell. Many say, for instance, that it’s unjust to punish the kind, devout Buddhist right alongside the con artist who steals the life savings from an old woman, leaving her to eat dog food on the street so that he can buy a ticket on a naked pedophile cruise to Bangkok.

Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, though, also believe in an afterlife where some kind justice is carried out, be it through reincarnation or time spent in a spiritual obstacle course. What you learn in each life develops the soul and eventually you graduate. Your problem there is that suicides tend to come back as suicides. They live a couple of decades and then BLAM, they hit the reset switch and start over. So they never progress because they never give themselves a chance to learn or experience anything. If these religions are right then you’ve probably committed suicide before, in another life. And another, and another. And you’ll do the same in the next one.

An example of the reincarnation process

So be prepared. If whatever afterlife is coming involves justice of some kind, you’ll still have to answer for the fact that you ended this life by emotionally devastating all of the people who have helped you up until now, while simultaneously having bailed out on all of the people you were supposed to have helped in your remaining decades of life. From the friend who would have needed you to talk them through a tough time a month from now to the sweet girl who you were supposed to marry six years from now, all will be waiting to kick your ass in the afterworld. And even if you survive that ass-kicking gauntlet, at the end you’ll have to look this baby in the eye. He was born with a rare skin-eating disease that makes his flesh harden and tear off in chunks…

…but you’ll have time before that happens because that baby is still living, 18 years later, bearing the pain and smearing lotion on his skin every hour to keep it intact and hooking himself to an IV every night so he can survive another 24 hours. Oh, and…

…he competes in triathlons.

But I digress.

Now, if you look around long enough I’m sure you can find a religion where everyone goes to a paradise of some kind after death. The obvious problem with that is that not only will Hitler be there, along with the aforementioned thieving child rapist, but all of the people making your current life a living hell will also be there with you. Forever. And for a personality prone to suicide, the sheer fact that you can’t escape this time (you can’t kill yourself when you’re already dead) turns even this universal Heaven into a kind of Hell – unless you somehow find a way to live with those people.

And if you’re figuring that, yes, you can man up and face whatever challenges the next life presents, then you might as well do that now, in this life, and skip the extra step. It’s just more efficient that way.

Afterlife Possibility B: The Atheists are right

Nothing. All of us wind up in the same cold, black, non-living state. Sinner, saint, serial killer, your best friend, your worst enemy, your Mom, Osama Bin Laden, Jesus, Jeffrey Dahmer, George W. Bush, Michael Moore, Mel Gibson, child molestors, child molestor victims, all wind up in the same spiritual Terri Schiavo state of mindless vegetation.

Of course there are some scientists who say that consciousness is preserved outside of the body in a sort of Quantum energy state so that the mind can live on. These energies, they speculate, congregate with other energies and, like on Earth, the bad apples are shuttled off to be quarantined in some place where they can’t do harm to the good ones.

We can’t know what this is like for a suicide such as yourself, but one experimental attempt to communicate with this plane of existence was able to detect the faint sounds of screaming, badgers, and this song playing over and over again. We have no way of knowing the significance of this.

2. Suicide Methods: How are you going to do it?

Consider this one carefully.

There’s a Catch-22 here, in that the methods that leave you unconscious (taking pills or sucking car exhaust) also leaves the possibility that someone will find you and rush you to the hospital.

But the methods that leave you wide awake also leave you to experience the last few seconds of absolute bodily terror that comes with the realization that the thing you feared your whole life – death – is upon you, real and ugly and big as balls. Did you see that movie The Ring? Why were you scared of that little girl? What’s the worst thing she could do?

Kill you, that’s what. This thing, death, this is what had you jumping in your seat at sudden noises in the dark. Fear that something would lunge out and take your life.

I turned on the TV just now, flipped around. Three cop shows, heroes catching murderers so they can’t kill again. Jaws playing on TNT. What are those characters desperately running and swimming away from? Death, by shark.

It’s embedded in your psyche. So at that final, suicidal moment your body will realize via the full force of all of its adrenaline and nerve impulses that now every fear has suddenly come true right in front of your eyes. The rotted little girl from the well, the guy in the hockey mask with a chainsaw, the childhood shadowy monster from under the bed, all of them are now silly caricatures compared to the actual, real, black thing facing you at the moment you pull the razor. Endless, faceless death.

It’s no surprise that roof-jumpers change their minds half way down (and that people avoid jumping as a method for that reason). That is, unless you enjoy mind-blowing terror and the feeling of shitting in your pants in midair like that pooping bungee jumper guy.

So here’s some other common suicide methods, with the drawbacks of each:

A. Slitting your wrists

This one simply doesn’t work. I’ve never, ever heard of a person successfully killing himself this way. It’s extremely painful and by the time you get to doing the second cut the sight of your own blood spurting everywhere sends up such alarm bells that you find yourself desperately dailing 911 while splattering plasma all over the phone. It’s the ultimate in self-aware suicide in that not only can you see yourself dying in vivid splashes of red, but you can feel it. Not recommended.

B. Shooting yourself

Contrary to popular belief, shooting yourself – even with a shotgun – is not a surefire way to die. More than half of the attempted gun suicides wake up in the hospital, missing a chunk of their brain and usually mute and wheelchair-bound for the rest of their lives. Kurt Cobain could just as easily have wound up blowing off the lower half of his face, laying there on the floor sputtering for thirty hours before the mailman came by and called the cops, Kurt living on as a deformed and inarticulate mask of horror for the rest of his days. I wouldn’t go this route.

C. Overdose

People think one is the most painless, taking dozens of pain pills or whatever, but your body tends to wait until you’re unconscious and then vomits them back up. This leaves you alive, sleeping in a puddle of puke, next to your suicide note which, absent a corresponding suicide, will just sound gay. Obviously not the direction you wanted to go.

D. Hanging

When the Old West used hanging as a method of capital punishment, they had actual experts to do the rig. It’s not easy to hang a person quickly and painlessly. What often happens is the neck is broken and you’re left to dangle for 30 minutes, twitching and clawing at the rope. Or, the noose breaks and you plunge to the floor, often with a severed upper spinal cord that leaves you a Christopher Reeve paraplegic. This is the last way I would ever try to do it.

E. Throwing yourself in front of a speeding train or car

Obviously this is the worst possible method, as it forces someone else to commit murder against their will. You know that horror movie Saw? That’s what the bad guy in that movie did, forced other people to commit murder. So they actually make horror movies about what you’d be doing here, forcing someone else to live with that horrific memory. No, this one doesn’t even deserve discussion.

3. Is the timing right?

This is the final question you have to ask yourself. You might feel like a fool if you commited suicide only to find out you had the winning lottery ticket in your pocket (or rather, never find out).

You have to use your own judgement. I can say that I knew a kid named Brad back when I was in school, an aspiring actor. So at one point Brad sells everything he owns so he can move to Los Angeles to find his fame and fortune.

He gets door after door slammed in his face, until, desperate for money, he takes what I consider to be the worst possible job on Earth. He wore a chicken costume to stand on the sidewalk and advertise for a restaurant called El Pollo Loco. Picture it. You had these dreams in your head of hitting it big and being on movie sets and making out with starlets, and there you are, baking in the California sun in this stifling costume that smells like sweat and farts. Eight hours a day. People making snide comments as they pass. Feeling sorry for you. The humiliation must have burned like snake venom.

Sure, he found some success later. But you have to ask yourself, would any success make up for that? Or for what you’re going through now? I know Brad asked himself that very thing.

Now obviously there are things you just can’t overcome; some of what you hate will be with you forever. I knew a guy who was the shortest kid in his school – just five feet, two inches tall – and he never got taller. He was a black kid in a white town. And to top it all off, he had this very high, womanly voice and these effeminate gestures that just screamed “gay” every time he walked into a room, blared it like an air raid siren. And he wasn’t even gay.

When I point out that he lived in the frozen wasteland of rural Minnesota, you can picture how often this guy got the crap kicked out of him by the racists and the homophobes and pretty much everybody else.

Should he have considered suicide? After all, he was already at an age when he knew he wasn’t going to get any taller or whiter and his voice wasn’t going to get any manlier. The kid wound up buying a guitar and, after some practice, recorded an album called Ode To My Pecker, which the record company insisted be changed to…

…Purple Rain.

Life is a tricky thing to predict, that’s the problem. Even if you don’t have any kind of special talent, you don’t know where the ride will to take you. I had an uncle named Jeff, who lived up in the mountains in the Northwest. He was so poor he could barely feed his family. But one day he was out hunting for some food and when he fired his rifle… something black bubbled up from the ground.

It was oil. Black gold. Texas tea. Well, the next thing you know, old Jeff’s a millionaire. He moved away so I don’t know what came of him after that, but you get the idea.

Not to say that promises of financial riches are the only thing to keep a man going. A wealthy man once came up to me and offered me $100 million dollars, and said all I had to do was let him chop off my legs and, once a day, ram a lit blowtorch up my ass.

I said no, realizing for the first time that, while I didn’t have $100 million, I did have something worth more than $100 million to me. Specifically, my legs and an unburnt anus. So if I already own something worth more than $100 million it’s silly to worry about the bill collector at the door demanding his few thousand. That’s a true story, by the way.

The 50% Rule

This is a good standard to follow. The average person lives to be about 75 years old. So if you’re less than 38 and have more than half of your life left, the odds are that, for instance, the funniest joke you’ll ever hear in your life is one you haven’t heard yet. It’s just statistics. Odds are you also haven’t yet…

…met the girl you’ll love the most;

…met your best friend;

…heard your favorite album;

…started the best job you’ll ever have;

…read the best book;

…seen the best movie or played the coolest video game;

…found the hobby you’re most interested in;

…had the best sex;

…had the most original, mind-blowing idea;

…met the dumbest person you’ll ever meet;

…or seen the stupidest haircut.

You can make your own list. Look around your room, look around your life. If you’re less than 38, the sheer odds are that the future holds a more awesome version of everything you see. You’ve got to weigh all of that shit. You’re not really even conscious of your life until age 7 or 8, so to decide it’s all bullshit after just ten or fifteen more years is like judging a movie by its poster.

Especially if you haven’t had sex yet. I want to make a special point of that one. If you’re at an age that you haven’t had the sex, you definitely want to put off the suicide thing at least until after that. And if you’re some kid with bad skin and are scoffing at me, thinking that the pretty girls don’t even look at you, I’m going to let you in on one of society’s biggest secrets:

Girls who look like models are never very good in bed. Don’t take my word for it. Ask around.

Or, maybe you’ll find out for yourself.

REVISE YOUR SUICIDE NOTE FIRST.

Remember Skyler (or “Scatler” as people came to know her afterwards). Don’t do this without a note, one that’s clear as to exactly who wronged you and why you felt suicide was the only choice and why your loved ones shouldn’t feel guilty for it.

Now, obviously you can’t judge what you’ve scrawled while still in a state of suicidal depression. What seems witty and biting will come off bitchy and trite. What seems deep and darkly eloquent will come of as merely goth.

Run your note by a friend first. Read it to them over the phone, get feedback. Give them a chance to suggest revisions. The best suicide notes I’ve read were created by inviting all of the friends over and reading it to them as a group.

If you don’t have friends or at least any with writing talent, you can call a Suicide Hotline at 1-800-784-2433 and read it to them. They deal with dozens of suicides every day and they know a good note when they hear one. They’ll shoot you straight.

Take the extra step, it’s worth it. You know what you risk otherwise…

The Top 25 Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

Take a man. Add eye work (unisex glasses if eye wear is needed)and Botox. Mix in a bad haircut or unfashionably long hair–if possible a dye job. A little doughy-ness doesn’t hurt, either. Have a weakness for turtlenecks and by all means fight aging like it’s a battle you can win if you try just a little harder, and there you have it: The winning formula to become a man who looks like an old lesbian.

We asked Keith Mays, author of the blog that started a phenomenon and pioneer in the field of men who look like old lesbians, to run down the 25 best examples of this confounding phenomenon and he happily obliged, including a handful of newly discovered men who look like old lesbians.

#25.

Chuck Klosterman

He Is:

A Pop-culture obsessed and farm-raised hipster who writes for GQ and ESPN.

Looks Like:

Someone who has penned 14 books on the spiritual nature of the vulva.

#24.

Al Franken

He Is:

Writer. Possible candidate. Rush Limbaugh tormentor.

Looks Like:

The art director of Lands’ End catalog.

#23.

Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora

They Are:

Founding members of Bon Jovi.

They Look Like:

They found a career resurgence as Le Tigre.

#22.

Robert Redford

He Is:

Actor. Director.

Looks Like:

The head of Women’s Studies at Community College of Denver.

#21.

Don Imus

He Is:

The Disc jockey and humorist whose comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team in 2007 led to the name “Imus” being mentioned on a college campus for the first time in 35 years.

Looks Like:

Someone who has lived with the same woman of color she met while working at San Mateo Y in 1962.

#20.

Warren Beatty

He Is:

Actor. Director. Former BFF of Carly Simon.

Looks Like:

The famed foe of Bobby Riggs.

#19.

Roger Ebert

He Is:

Pulitzer prize-winning columnist and film critic. Screenwriter whose films include Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Looks Like:

A late 1950s feminist who currently designs non-gender specific lingerie and underwear.

#18.

Kyle MacLachlan

He Is:

Actor known for his work with David Lynch and Elizabeth Berkley.

Looks Like:

A manager of a website about two pet dogs.

#17.

Masi Oka

He is:

Actor. Time Magazine whiz kid. Reported I.Q. of 180 (same as cast of Carpoolers).

Looks Like:

An author of a paper stating sex with a man is, by definition, a hate crime.

#16.

Mo Rocca

He Is:

We’re not really sure what he actually does.

Looks Like:

A time-traveling lesbian from the future.

#15.

John Denver

He Was:

Singer. Country boy. Aviator.

Looks Like:

The founder of Colorado’s first Lesbian Games, a non-competitive Olympics guaranteeing “participation trophies” for all entrants.

#14.

Peter Criss

He Is:

Musician. Drummer in bottom-feeding glam rock group.

Looks Like:

A collector of cat memorabilia.

#13.

Lance Burton

He Is:

Creepy Las Vegas-based magician.

Looks Like:

A K.D. Lang stand in.

#12.

Gary LeVox

He Is:

Lead singer of Rascal Flatts.

Looks Like:

A stage security at the Lilith Fair.

#11.

Richard Butler

He Is:

The Molly-Ringwald-serenading lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs.

Looks Like:

The co-founder of online erotic products store exclusively for lesbians, “Toys for Twats.”

#10.

Dana Carvey

He Is:

Comic. Actor. Drummer. Impersonator of the President Bush with more successful foreign policy. In 1990s, he partnered with fellow SNL alum and man who looks like an old (or middle-aged) lesbian, Mike Myers, in a series of successful films about life in the suburbs.

Looks Like:

The runner of a rescue service for emotionally abused cats.

#9.

Rick James

He Was:

Musician. Famously sampled funk legend. Freak with supposed super abilities. Fan of hair extensions. Troubled individual.

Looks Like:

A person who reportedly married lesbian comic who goes by the single name “Margaret.”

#8.

Simon Le Bon and other members of Duran Duran

They Are:

Musicians. Video stars. Inventors of the 1980s. Minstrels for Princess Diana.

They Look Like:

Financiers of such lesbian-themed films as The Secret That is My Garden and Rocky V.

#7.

Tim Robbins

He Is:

Actor. Writer. Tall person. Compulsive do-gooder in a less crazy than Sean Penn way.

Looks Like:

Winner of 12 straight division wins as coach of Florida Gators women’s volleyball team in the late 1970s and early 80s.

#6.

Mike Nichols

He Is:

Writer. Director. Comic. Long-time partner to morning news show anchor Diane Sawyer. Directed Angels in America and Catch-22.

Looks Like:

Director of four episodes of The L Word.

#5.

Morten Anderson

He Is:

Football player. Ageless place kicker.

Looks Like:

A guard in women’s prison.

#4.

Mike Myers

He Is:

Comic actor. Writer. Scatalogical-minded, sequel-happy entertainer at both Scottish and English accents who, in past films, has pointed out shortcomings in U.K.’s dental hygiene.

Looks Like:

An activist, promoting causes of transgender animated characters and company logos.

#3.

Ricky Gervais

He Is:

Comic. Writer. Actor. Creator of the hugely popular The Office and the somewhat less popular Extras.

Looks Like:

Someone who moved to Aleutian Islands with social worker partner and is studying to be a priest in the Anglican Church.

#2.

Kim Jong-il

He Is:

Leader of North Korea.

Looks Like:

A Lea-DeLaria-impersonating soccer mom.

#1.

Bruce Jenner

He Is:

An old lesbian.

Looks Like:

An old lesbian.

In some cases, it has to be just the right photo …

 

 

 

… In other cases, it is, I admit, a little unfair … the result of an unfortunate hairstyle or fashion of a certain era …

 

 

 

 

… other times, it may be that it’s a conscious effort by the person to look androgynous or just plain weird …

 

 

 

 

… or it could even be a role the person is playing that I’m unaware of …

 

 

 

 

… then there’s Bruce Jenner. In photo after photo, pose after pose

… with family … in a role … giving a speech … dressed for a night out at My Sister’s Room in Atlanta … he never fails to deliver …

 

 

Bruce Jenner. A man who truly looks like an old lesbian.

Fun Size Countries: The Insane Histories of the World’s 6 Tiniest Nations

Do you ever get the urge to just start your own country, with your own damned rules?

Well, some people actually do it. All it takes is a small, uninhabited piece of land you can claim (though it helps to also be completely insane, or to have balls the size of watermelons).

Sealand

Location:
This little country is located in an abandoned World War II sea fort, called Fort Roughs. It’s six miles off the coast of Suffolk, England. The habitable area is just what you see in the picture, but they claim 12 sea miles around the place.

 

Population:
Supposedly, 27. We can’t see how they’d fit, though.

 

Official site:
SealandGov.org

The country:
Paddy Roy Bates was a man with a dream. His dream did not involve a naked Evangeline Lily and the Swedish chef from The Muppets, as ours do, but instead involved having his own pirate radio station. So, he took over Rough Towers, an abandoned fort which is beyond UK territorial waters. Then he forgot all about pirate radios and declared the place to be his own country.

Roy, his family, and his helicopter of doom.

Shortly after Roy moved in, Ronan O’Rahilly, who had claimed Rough Towers before Roy, sent his men on a boat to kick Roy out. Roy, a firm believer of “Finders Keepers,” managed to defend his little kingdom with, according to Wikipedia, petrol bombs, gunfire and something scientists call “lunatic strength.”

In 1968, the Royal Navy entered Sealand’s waters to fix a navigational buoy. Roy was going to have none of that shit. Michael, Roy’s son, fired warning shots at the workmen. Here’s our dramatic reenactment:

Workman 1: “Fancy a beer after fixing this buoy?”
Workman 2: “There is some bloke in that abandoned sea fort, look!”
Workman 1: “I wonder what he is doing up there. Is that a bloody gun?”
*BANG * BANG * BANG*
Workman2: “That cunt is mental, run!”

Understandably, Roy’s royal presence was summoned to court in England to figure out what the hell that was all about. The courts ruled that Sealand was not part of England and Roy could do whatever he wanted there. Mighty England had been defeated by a man and his dream. And his petrol bombs and lunatic strength.

At this point you have to think only a unique type of moron would dare to mess with Roy. Meet Alexander G. Achenbach, prime minister of Sealand, who revolted and took Michael as his hostage. Oh, shit! Suffice to say, Alexander’s coup ended with Roy coming back in his helicopter with a crack team of mercenaries. He took over the island and kicked all the idiots out. There is not much information about Roy’s mercenaries, but we like to think they were Vietnam veterans on the run from the law for a crime they didn’t commit.

Fun Fact:
Alexander Achenbach and his exiled government has this website where they complain about it and presumably await the day they can seize power once again.

The Kingdom of Redonda

Location:
A tiny island southwest of Antigua, only one square mile in size.

 

Population:
Zero–even the kings (yes, four of them) of Redonda prefer to live elsewhere. The only beings of notice on the island are seagulls and a feral flock of goats; and the goats only stay because they can’t build boats to escape.

Official site:
As a part of the power struggle over this tiny piece of worthless land, the four “kings” have each made their own site:

The Redonda Foundation — operated by King Leo I.
Kingdom of Redonda — operated by King Robert aka “Bob the Bald”.
Javier Marias’ site–operated by King Javier.

Actually, the other self-proclaimed king, Max Legget, has not bothered to make his own website yet, which probably disqualifies him for the throne.

The country:
Christopher Columbus discovered the island in 1493 and named it Santa Maria la Redonda (meaning “Saint Mary the round”) and that’s all we know before the history of this proud uninhabited nation turns into legend, fiction and drunken lies. Back in Queen Victoria’s days, a guy named Matthew Dowdy Shiell claimed himself as king. Over the generations the kingship was given away and sold several times to people who loved the idea of putting “King” on their business card.

Right now, four men claim to be the rightful king of this shitty island.

King Bob the Bald, and his bald spot

You may think we say “shitty” as an insult, in which case you are half right, because it is also an accurate description. It’s biggest export is shit (Guano, to be exact). Over 7,000 tons of shit came out of Redonda every year until operations ended in World War I.

 

Fun Fact:
For 35 US dollars you can join King Robert’s navy and help him defend the island and its shit from evil invaders. It’s up to you if you want to give the guy $35 for the honor of deterring imaginary threats to an island of shit. You must provide your own boat.

Recently, the Wellington Arms Pub in Southampton, England, attempted to declare themselves an embassy of the Kingdom of Redonda, in order to gain diplomatic immunity from a nation wide ban on smoking. Sadly, they did not get this status. Prime Minister Goat declared “Baaaaaaaah” when reached for comments and tried to eat the microphone (source: Wikipedia).

Freetown Christiania

Location:
About 85 acres somewhere in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Population:
850

Official site:
Christiania.org

The country:
Christiania was founded in 1971 when five people took over an abandoned military installation as a form of protest against the Danish government, which was blamed for the lack of affordable housing at the time. While we were not there, we can calculate that at least four of them thought of using the phrase “Killing two birds with one stone,” while discussing the idea (or as they say in Denmark, “Killing two birds with one stone.” Only they in Danish).

Since then, more people have moved in and the place has been going by its own rules under the principles of anarchy, communism and the hippie movement–except for the time when Denmark decided to use their rules on them. On those occasions, they live under the principles of being hit in the head with a big stick by a policeman. The national pastime is yoga, although we hear the second most popular pastime, checking out movies that are more fun to watch while stoned, is quickly gaining popularity.

The primary export is drugs, making Christiania a fun-sized version of Colombia but without the perpetual state of civil war… unless you count the Danish police doing raids once in a while, or the occasional drug-related murder. OK, so it’s very much like Colombia. The drug of choice is pot, though, and hard drugs like heroin and cocaine are illegal, because drug overdose was their version of the black plague for a while there.

Uncountable police raids and street gangs trying to take over the pot market have plagued Christiania since its beginnings, but nothing can compare to the riots that occurred in 2007 when the police demolished a building in Christiania. Christianites, fearing the police might like it too much and decide to go knocking down buildings like a drunken Godzilla, counterattacked with fireworks, Molotov cocktails and a bucket full of piss and feces that ended up on the head of the police commander.

Fun Fact:
Christiania does have a flag, but it doesn’t have a coat of arms, so we hope they like the one we made up for them up there. The yellow represents the piss in the bucket, the pot represents the pot, and the light blue looked pretty, so we put it there.

Sark

Location:
It’s a group of small islands in the English Channel, about three miles long and a half-mile wide.

Population:
600ish, give or take.

Official site:
Sark.gov

The country:
Imagine one day that your dog returns home with a cat on a leash, and the cat has a little mouse on a leash too. Let’s all imagine that, because it’s really, really cute when you think about it. Oh, before we forget, Sark is the mouse. Sark is a dependency of the Bailiwick of Guernsey (another place you know nothing about), which in turn is a dependency of England (which you might have heard of), which in turn is part of the United Kingdom (you might know it as UK), even though Guernsey and Sark are not part of the UK and we have no clue how that works.

Sark has been many things since the 13th century: a haven for pirates, a monastic community, and then a haven for pirates again. Now that we think about it, that’s not many things. Anyway, Queen Elizabeth I, tired of pirates, allowed 40 families to move onto the islands on the condition that they would stab any idiot in the balls who uttered “YARRRR!” even if he was just doing it ironically.

Sark and the rest of Guernsey did not do very well in WWII, when the Germans took over the whole place. Although, the ruler of Sark at the time demanded the Germans to sign in as visitors and they did. But, the people of Sark showed their bravery in 1991 when the French attacked them. And by “the French” we mean unemployed French nuclear physicist Andre Gardes, who tried to take over the island by himself with an automatic weapon. The invasion ended when the local constable approached him and asked him how his awesome gun worked. Andre began to show him and that’s when the fire brigade jumped from behind (source: Wikipedia).

Fun Fact:
Sark is one of the last feudal countries in Europe, and some of its laws seem to come from the medieval guide to complete nuttery. For instance: only the Seigneur of Sark is allowed to keep pigeons or an unspayed bitch, newcomers to the island cannot live in houses built before 1976 and divorce is illegal. Although, there have been some advances. The people no longer need the seigneur’s permission to get married, the annual payment of a live chicken to the seigneur is now optional yet still delicious, and women can inherit land since 1999.

Michael Beaumont, the Seigneur of Sark. Not pictured: unspayed bitch.

The Aerican Empire

Location:
Here, there and everywhere. The Aerican Empire claims the following territories:

 

*A house in Montreal that doubles as the empire’s capital and embassy to the rest of the world.
*A square kilometer of Australia called Chompsville and an adjacent territory called Psyche.
*An island in New Zealand called Retsaot.
*One square mile of the surface of planet Mars.
*The northern half of ex-planet Pluto.
*A cow pasture in the American Midwest that’s location nobody seems quite sure of.
*The planet Verden, which doesn’t exist.

Population:
Around 120 citizens.

 

Official site:
AericanEmpire.com

The country:
You may think this entire empire is just a joke or started as one, and that’s because you did not kill your brain by drinking lead paint when you were a baby (congratulations, by the way). The empire was founded in 1987 by the current Emperor, Eric Lis, and some of his pals who were all five-years-old at the time. In its humble, intergalactic beginnings the empire was just a joke between friends but, in our globalized, internet-connected world, crazy people inspire other people and that’s how thing like the furries and bukkake got rolling. An older Emperor Eric learned about micronations like Sealand and Christiania and said “Hey! I can do that too, and without leaving home or getting my own land!” One website later, citizens began to join the made up interplanetary empire.

Emperor Eric Lis, who couldn’t find a friend who had a camera with a flash.

Fun Fact:
The national religion is Silinism, the worship of the Great Penguin, where humor is considered sacred. And may the Great Penguin help us, it actually has serious practitioners.

The Republic of Molossia

Location:
Somewhere around Dayton, Nevada. It also has a colony in Southern California and a protectorate in the north east of the US, about 14 acres total.

Population:
Four.

Official site:
Molossia.org

The country:
According to them, they are a nation as recognized in the Montevideo convention. According to the state of Nevada, “No, no you’re not.”

Molossia began as the Grand Republic of Vuldstein, back in 1977. James Spielman was crowned King and Kevin Baugh was declared Prime Minister. Back then Molossia didn’t have any territory or much to do so the King got bored and probably decided to go for saner hobbies than starting his own nation. Prime Minister Baugh, on the other hand, carried on. In 1998 land was purchased in Nevada and finally Molossia had some territory to call its own. Kevin Baugh then declared himself dictator and rules over his family with an iron fist; so he is like your dad, but with a fancy uniform.

President Kevin Baugh and his fancy uniform

Molossia has its own online store. We have no clue if the Authentic Molossian Pedigreed Pet Rocks are their biggest seller, but if they are, they should be ashamed of themselves. You can also purchase Molossian money, called Valora, which is linked in value to Pillsbury cookie dough. The coins look like repainted poker chips, so if you want to waste your money, Molossia is the place!

The Molossian homepage has a very detailed account of the mock war they had with the neighbor micronation of Mustachistan, but intentionally stupid wars are no fun, so we are going to talk about the Dead Dog War.

In 1999, some people, unaware of what they were getting into, buried their dead dog in Molossian territory. Baugh quickly mobilized his army (his thirteen-year-old son), who annoyed the intruders until they removed their dead dog and buried it elsewhere. And they should consider themselves lucky. If they had tried to give the dog a Viking funeral near Sealand, Roy would have mobilized General Pain and Major Trouble, which is what he calls his fists, right into their faces and buried the dog, Viking ship and all, up their asses, because that’s how Roy rolls.

Fun Fact:
Molossia has a space program, and by that we mean they have a store-bought telescope and some toy rockets with a camera attached to them. We have to admit that looks like fun.

Your Mom Lied: 5 Common Body Myths Debunked

Part of growing up is realizing almost everything your mom said was wrong. This is especially true when it comes to the human body (how many of you grew up with the “masturbation will make hair grow on your palms” thing?) where, as you’ll see, mom often failed to do her research.

“If you shave, your facial hair will grow back thicker!”

The Lie:
Fellas, do you remember when you first started getting those wispy specks of hair on your chin? They were patchy and thin, but dammit you loved them, and you knew that it was merely a matter of months before you looked like those guys from ZZ Top. Do you remember what your mom told you? “If you shave your beard/moustache/muttonchops off it will grow back thicker and look much nicer.” So you continued shaving it until, sure enough, five years later you had a perfectly serviceable moustache.

The Truth:
Actually, the only reason you ever managed to grow those whiskers was simply time. Renowned (read: gets the most tail) dermatologist Dr. Jerri Hoskyn M.D., says here that, “Shaving is just a method of cutting the hair at the skin surface and has no effect on the part of the hair … where growth and pigmentation occur.” Who’s to argue with a man who had to go through eight years of medical school to cure pimples?

So why do moms perpetuate this one? Most likely out of the embarrassment most mothers of pubescent boys feel. It seems you didn’t have the good fortune to hit the ground running with puberty like we Cracked staffers did, and it took you a few years to start looking and sounding like Powers Boothe. Consequently you had a fuzzy neck beard, and your parents didn’t want to be seen in public with you until you shaved it.

So instead of telling you straight up that you were a repulsive pock-marked abomination and having to hear you whine in your broken girly voice, they simply lied and told you shearing hair makes it stronger and thicker, knowing you would do it–and keep doing it–in a futile attempt look like Grizzly Adams.

“You can’t have anymore sugar, you’ll be bouncing off the walls!”

The Lie:
All you wanted was another scoop of pure cane sugar in your cherry Kool-Aid, and your mom refused. What the hell! Of course her reasoning is “No, if you have anymore sugar you’ll be bouncing off the walls.” While we now know she was just telling us she didn’t want us getting all hyperactive, you know, running around the house, screaming “child abuse” out of the windows at passers-by, setting the guinea pig on fire and tying our siblings to chairs, it was pretty much the worst thing she could have told us. Instantly our little minds were suddenly filled with visions of being able to defy gravity and ricochet about the house without ever having to touch the floors. In short, your mom told you that you could be fucking Spider-Man if you had more sugar, so you ate the entire bag of sugar.

The Truth:
Unfortunately after eating a bag of sugar you didn’t become Spider-Man. In fact, the only superhero you became that day was Vomit-His-Stomach-And-Hallucinate-Man. Hell, it didn’t even make you hyper.

Your mom was wrong on two counts: first off, gravity is unaffected by sugar. Secondly, hyperactivity is unaffected by sugar. Or at least, that’s what dashing professor of neonatology and general pediatrics at UAMS Medical center, Dr. Bryan Burk says here. “No evidence exists that feeding children a high-sugar diet will induce hyperactivity, despite the common belief that it does.”

It seems that you need to consume something more along the lines of caffeine, dopamine or crack to achieve any hyperactivity. In fact for some children, sugar may very well have an opiate affect on their brain. In case you didn’t know, morphine and heroin are opiates, so when your mom gave you sugar, it may have been like shooting you up with tiny little amounts of smack, and smack addicts are not known as the most active of people.

Of course, the part about sugar destroying your teeth and turning you into a fatass are both still true, so in the end mom was right.

“Turn on a light! Reading in the dark will ruin your eyes”

The Lie:
Who doesn’t remember being nine, sitting in the warming glow of the artificial fire, reading The Brothers Karamazov,and having their mom force them to turn on a lamp to spare their eyes? We all grumbled and groaned and switched on the lights and squinted as the glare from the pages blinded our eyes, and later Uncle Paul would take us to the ice cream shop and let us stick our fingers in the blender. Who can forget that? That did happen to everyone, right?

The Truth:
It seems that, not only did your mom lie about your Uncle Paul’s stay in “con college,” she also lied to you about your eyes as well. Of course we all know this has become a non-issue since we have it on good faith that only doctors, fat people and nerds read anything anymore.

The truth is, due to the amazing resilience of the human eye, reading in dim light doesn’t hurt our eyes. Dr. Katrina Schmidt, who is both a doctor and a woman, says here that, “Reading in dim light is not in itself going to ruin your eyes.”

However she does note that our eyes work a little harder in dim light, so if we keep moving the book to try and focus on it, it will tax our poor retinas to the point where they may well just leap off of our eyeballs and walk out the door. According to Wikipedia there have been five cases of this exact thing [citation needed].

“Don’t swallow that gum! It takes seven years to pass through your digestive system!”

The Lie:
So there you are chewing gum and playing hopscotch while jumping rope on a roller coaster. You desperately try and keep that delicious resin-based goop in your mouth while enjoying your favorite activities, so one moment you’re chewing on it, and then the next moment it feels as if a slug is climbing down your throat. It’s then that your mother’s words echo in your head, “Never swallow your gum, it’ll take seven years before you crap it out.” You suddenly picture years worth of gum accumulating in your stomach into a hardening clump that will, of course, kill you.

The Truth:
We would think you’d learn not to listen to your mother by this point, and that the only true thing she ever told you in your life was that you’re adopted. The truth (as presented by Cracked.com and your friends at Hubba Bubba) is that you could swallow a whole thing of bubble tape and you’d get to see it come out the other end in a matter of days.

 

According to those killjoys over at Snopes, the reason your mom lied to you is because she was confused about the term “indigestible,” which actually just means your stomach acids are unable to break down the components of gum. While this may sound unpleasant, note that no one ever accuses corn of ruining your digestive system, and it’s just as hard to digest.

So the only thing this means is that your gum will appear intact upon exiting your body, which leaves it open to any number of workplace pranking opportunities, Cracked is not responsible for any injuries or firings resulting from that idea, but will gladly own up to any resulting hilarity.

“Put a jacket on! You’ll catch a cold!”

The Lie:
We all heard this one while storming out the door in our pajamas in a desperate quest to bury ourselves in the field of fresh snow just outside the threshold of our homes. “Put a jacket on! You’ll catch your death out there!” she’d scream, especially if this was all taking place in the 1950s. That’s just like your mom to “kill your buzz” and “cramp your style” when all you wanted to do was skinny dip down in the ol’ (half-frozen) fishing pond. So against your will you ended up waddling out the door bundled in seven layers of clothing, all due to your mother’s half-cocked misconceptions about colds.

The Truth:
In your mother’s defense, there’s a definite causality between cold weather and colds, but we’ll get to that in a moment, after explaining why she’s so horribly, horribly wrong. You see, the “common cold” is caused by the rhinovirus, this friendly fellow:

An actual photo of the rhinovirus, from GiantMicrobes.com

What your mom misunderstood about our friend the rhinovirus is that he is just that, a virus. Viruses are pure undead malevolence encoded into genetic material and wrapped up in a creepy protein shell. They aren’t even technically alive, so temperature has no affect on them. They’re just tiny zombies that you can’t even shoot in their microscopic zombie heads.

So why do people get a cold when it’s cold out? It depends on who you ask, but if you ask Robert Bradsher M.D. you’ll learn that “cold weather usually makes people stay indoors, which might increase the person-to-person transmission of respiratory viruses.” Really, if your mother was smart and well informed she would have kicked your ass outside so she could enjoy her Southern Comfort, childless home and germ-free air.

It should also be noted that when you did finally catch that cold, your mom starving your cold and forcing orange juice down your throat did absolutely jack-all for curing you.

7 Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened

People love a good conspiracy theory. The JFK assassination plot, aliens crash landing at Roswell, the 9/11 truth movement and charges of government surveillance are all an indelible part of our pop culture landscape and are by and large, total bullshit.

So where does your average conspiracy buff go to learn about shadowy plots that aren’t pure tinfoil hattery?

Look no further.

#7.

The Business Plot

The Plan:
In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.

Prescott Bush

How did that work out?
A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.

Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.

Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America’s entry into World War II. But at least the United States never ended up becoming a fascist dictatorship (unless you ask Ron Paul supporters).

The lesson here? Fascist or not, you don’t fuck around with guys named Smedley or Dickstein.

#6.

The July 20 Plot

The Plan:
Near the end of WWII, things were rapidly going south for Germany and the time seemed ripe for guilt-ridden Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Colonel Henning von Tresckow recruited Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to join the conspiracy in 1944.

The plot to take out Hitler and then all of his loyal officers was called Operation Valkyrie, based on the belief that no plan can fail if it has a cool enough name.

How did that work out?
In July 1944, Stauffenberg was promoted so that he could now start attending military strategy meetings with Hitler himself. On more than one occasion Stauffenberg planned to kill Hitler at such a meeting with a briefcase bomb, but he always held off because he also wanted to take out Hitler’s two right-hand men, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. On July 20, he went for it anyway and exploded a bomb inside Hitler’s conference room with a remote detonator.

Hitler, who as a level-20 dark wizard had extraordinary damage absorption abilities, survived with only minor injuries.

Photos taken after the attempt depict Hitler’s health at 100 percent.

Stauffenberg fled when he found out his assassination attempt had failed and that the Fuhrer was explosion-proof. When the other conspirators found out that Hitler was still alive, they lost their nerve and Operation Valkyrie never went into effect. After the coup never got off the ground, several conspirators committed suicide, and Fromm turned in the rest to save his own skin. Unfortunately for him, Hitler wasn’t nearly as forgiving as his fiery public speeches and penchant for genocide would lead you to believe, and Fromm was executed along with the remaining conspirators.

The good news for the legacy of Claus von Stauffenberg is that he’s become something of a folk hero in Germany, a symbol of conscientious resistance to the Nazi regime. They’re even making a movie about him, called Valkyrie. The bad news for his legacy …

… is that he’s going to be played by Tom Cruise. Hey, do you think Scientology will get a mention in this article? Stay tuned!

#5.

Operation Ajax

The Plan:
For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic. When Britain tried to regain control of the AIOC, he gave them the finger. Tea was spilled, crumpets were dropped and monocles everywhere popped out in shock.

Britain

You can guess what happened next. Jolly old England went to its ally, the United States, and convinced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to help overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran and install a pro-West monarchy. Together the CIA and British intelligence services funneled guerrilla troops, anti-Mossadegh propaganda and tons of bribes into Iran.

How did that work out?
In the short term? Great! The mostly ceremonial position of Shah (king) of Iran was restored to its former imperial glory, but this time as a puppet of the West. The White House and Tehran became BFFs, and as long as the US government overlooked the numerous human rights abuses happening in Iran, all was well.

Until 1979, that is, when a pissed off Iranian populace finally revolted and replaced the monarchy with an anti-West Islamic Republic. One messy hostage crisis later, and Iran and the US were no longer BFFs. But hey, at least the US learned a very important lesson about overthrowing the governments of unfriendly Middle Eastern countries.

#4.

The Gunpowder Plot

The Plan:
A group of conspirators (including Guy Fawkes, Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving) decided to blow the fuck out of the British House of Parliament, thus killing pretty much all of the aristocracy, as well as King James I.

In May of 1604, a group of Britons who were fed up with King James’s rule met with Robert Catesby. As Catholics, they were tired of the Protestant government. In accordance with the teachings of their faith, they apparently decided that the best way to solve their problems was to kill everyone.

The conspirators were taking up residence across the street from The House of Lords, the building the upper house of parliament met in. Their original plan was to burrow their way to the underground foundation of The House of Lords, and lay their explosives there. When that proved to be more difficult than they had originally planned, they decided to just rent a room in the cellar of building. The explosives were quickly moved into place, and all that was left was to wait for the annual Opening of Parliament.

How did that work out?
While they were waiting, one of the conspirators sent a letter to Lord Monteagle, a high ranking Catholic, which basically said, “Hypothetically, we could blow up Parliament on the day it opens this year. So don’t go, hypothetically speaking.” This proved to be their undoing, as Lord Monteagle immediately passed the news on to the Secretary of State. The House of Lords was searched, and Guy Fawkes, the man left in charge of watching the explosives, was found and arrested.

Lord Monteagle

None of the protestant politicians were killed, but the plan wasn’t a complete failure. King James admitted in a speech that not all Catholics were as crazy as the ones arrested in connection with the plot, which is good, because a lot of historians have suggested that if the plot succeeded, there would have been a very violent backlash against Catholic communities. Plus, England now celebrates Guy Fawkes night every November 5th.

Apparently the conspirators had also planned to kidnap the royal children, as well as incite a revolt. However, they never made it to this part of their plan due to the fact that they had been hung and eviscerated.

#3.

The Tuskegee Experiment

The Plan:
Sometimes referred to as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the idea was that the United States government was going to monitor the effects of syphilis and perform experiments on those who had a developed form of the disease. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well you’re a terrible person for thinking that, because the experiments were exclusively performed without consent, and on the very poor, mostly illiterate black males.

These men weren’t told that they had syphilis and were denied proper treatment for their disease. Because that would have skewed the results, you see. But hey, at least the government promised free burials to those who died.

How did that work out?
The study (started in 1932 in Tuskegee, Alabama) eventually rounded up 400 black men in a move that would inspire Rage Against the Machine-esque lyrics for years to come. But, contrary to conspiracy enthusiasts, they did not actually give people syphilis, they just examined the symptoms of people who already had the disease. Then, things got out of hand:

Doctor 1: “Darn. I’m afraid that we might not get the numbers we want for the next part of this study.”

Doctor 2: “Why is that?”

Doctor 1: “Because it involves administering a painful and dangerous spinal tap for no medical reason.”

Doctor 2: “Hmm … Well, why don’t we just underline the word “Free” and tell them that it’s a special treatment for their symptoms.”

Doctor 1: “But, wouldn’t that be a horrible lie?”

Doctor 2: “A horrible what?”

When there was a national campaign to use penicillin to stamp out the disease, those in the study were denied access. If they complained loudly enough, they were given a placebo and then sent back home to die. But not before scientists poked and prodded them for the remaining years of their life.

It took until 1972 for someone to blow the whistle on all of this. That’s 40 years. And that’s after Peter Buxtun, the whistle blower, went to the Center for Disease Control, which told him that they would absolutely end this barbaric experiment, just as soon as they completed the last stage of the study. That stage involved studying the corpses of the subjects, and of course they couldn’t do that quite yet because some were stubbornly still alive.

Buxtun then found a more receptive audience:

As a result, in 1974 they passed the National Research Act, which finally closed the apparent loophole in American law that said it was OK for mad scientists to kill people in their experiments.

#2.

Operation Snow White

The Plan:
Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they’d had enough. Their religion about magic space aliens in a volcano wasn’t getting the same respect as the religion about the magic bearded man whose dad made us all out of mud 6,000 years ago. Instead of converting to a slightly less silly religion, they did what any of us would have done and decided to destroy every single document that made their religion look bad, presumably including a trip into the future to destroy every copy of Battlefield Earth.

How did that work out?
Disturbingly well, at least for a little while. Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever. With all the people who have wanted to get their dirty little hands on incriminating records, the United States of America was finally duped by the people who came up with Dianetics. So those billions of dollars we put into national security annually are clearly well spent.

Anyway, somewhere around 5,000 of Scientology’s crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.

When all of this hit the fan, the Church naturally denied it. Then they kidnapped one of the operatives arrested for stealing documents and prevented him from testifying. These days, the Church of Scientology generally refuses to talk about Operation Snow White, except to say that they “purged” those who were involved. They won’t say what the guilty parties were involved in, and those who were purged still hold high ranking offices in the Church, but goddamn it, they were purged for their involvement.

#1.

Project MKULTRA

The Plan:
Don’t be fooled. Project MKULTRA isn’t the misspelled secret recipe to McDonald’s newest hamburger. It was actually a series of CIA experiments in which they tried to figure out how to control your mind. Over a hundred sub-projects were authorized under the MKULTRA heading, though the documents on many of those have been destroyed.

How did that work out?
If you listen to late night talk radio, then you’ve probably already heard of Project MKULTRA. Paranoid schizophrenics from coast to coast like to call in to recount their harrowing tales of psychic violation at the hands of the CIA. Turns out the schizophrenics got something right though, because Project MKULTRA was an actual series of experiments started on April 13, 1953.

You can decide for yourself whether or not the late-night radio callers are actually victims of these experiments, though we would like to suggest that if they are all telling the truth, it’s strange that the CIA would only experiment on nocturnal conspiracy-nuts.

The project started out as a response to rumors of Communist mind control being used on American prisoners from the Korean War. Afraid of being left in the enemy’s pseudo-scientific dust, the CIA quickly jumped on the mind control bandwagon. However, they got their procedures wrong in one crucial aspect; instead of experimenting on enemy prisoners that the national media wouldn’t miss, they decided to go ahead and start jamming probes and shooting drugs into unwitting United States citizens.

Did we mention that these experiments resulted in at least one death? Or that experiments done on people seeking treatment for minor psychological issues (such as anxiety) often caused them to suffer permanent comas and/or incontinence? Or that the CIA themselves admitted that the experiments made no scientific sense?

The project was eventually found out, and the CIA was given a stern talking to.

As far as anyone can tell, they were unable to succeed in finding a way to control the way people act or think. Though we’d probably say the same thing if they had succeeded.