Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (44 page)

• Artichoke-growing region Castroville, California, proudly trumpets its “World’s Largest Artichoke.”

• Vegreville, Alberta, is home to the world’s largest egg sculpture, a Ukranian Easter egg that stands 25.7 feet tall.

• The owner of a Magnolia, Arkansas, grill store constructed a working 70-foot “World’s Largest Charcoal Grill.”

• “The World’s Largest Wind Chime” has been removed from Lakeside, California, because locals said it was too loud.

• Though many towns claim they’re home to the “World’s Largest Peanut,” only Ashburn, Georgia, has constructed a towering 10-foot peanut atop a 15-foot brick stack, leaving the lesser peanuts of Pearsall and Floresville, Texas; Durant, Oklahoma; and Dothan, Alabama, behind. Those wishing for an all-peanut day of tourism can see the Ashburn peanut and then check out the nearby bigtoothed 13-foot “Jimmy Carter Peanut” of Plains, Georgia.

The black widow spider’s bite has a 1% fatality rate.

GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL

Four stories of dumb crooks who saved us all a lot of trouble.

S
ELF HELP

“A 22-year-old Green Bay man led police on a chase that moved as slowly as 20 mph and ended in the Brown County Jail’s parking lot. The man parked his pickup in the jail’s lot, smoked a cigarette, got out of the truck, and lay face-down on the ground to be arrested, police said. He told the officers he knew he was drunk and was going to be sent to jail, so he just drove himself there.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS

“Sylvain Boucher of Quebec was spotted by prison guards standing between the prison wall and an outer fence. Assuming he was trying to escape, they grabbed him, but soon discovered he was not an inmate…and he was carrying a large amount of illegal drugs. Boucher was trying to break
in
, thinking the prison would be a good market for his drugs. He’ll get to find out. Before he had the supply, but no market. Now he has the market, but no supply.”

—
Moreland’s Bozo of the Day

IS THIS WHY THEY CALL IT “DOPE”?

“Philomena A. Palestini, 18, of Portland, Maine, walked into Salem District Court to face one criminal charge, but walked out in handcuffs with two. Court Security Officer Ronald Lesperance found a hypodermic needle and two small bags of what police believe is heroin in her purse as she walked through the security checkpoint. ‘This doesn’t happen very often,’ said Lesperance.”

—
Eagle Tribune

THE “IN” CROWD

“A man who tried to break
into
a Rideau correctional center with drugs and tobacco was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday. Shane Walker, 23, was believed to be bringing drugs to a jailed friend last week when he was foiled by corrections workers who heard bolt-cutters snapping the wire fence and apprehended him.”

—
The National Post

Only country in the Middle East without a desert: Lebanon.

MOON SCAM?

Is nothing sacred? Those conspiracy nuts won’t leave anything alone. They attack our most sacred institutions. (On the other hand, they could be right.
)

M
OONSTRUCK

On July 20, 1969, millions of television viewers around the world watched as Neil Armstrong stepped down from a lunar landing module onto the surface of the moon and spoke the now famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

In western Australia a woman named Una Ronald watched. She saw the images of the moon landing in the early hours of the morning. But as the camera showed Armstrong’s fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin demonstrating his moon walk technique, Ronald swears she saw something else. She swears she clearly saw a Coke bottle kicked into the picture from the side. The scene was edited out of later broadcasts, she says.

Was this alleged “blooper” evidence of a giant hoax?

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

If Una Ronald was the first to suspect the moon landing wasn’t quite what it appeared to be, she certainly wasn’t the last. And there was a lot more than just the Coke bottle to excite skeptics.

Ten years before Apollo 11 supposedly went to the moon, Bill Kaysing was head of technical publications at Rocketdyne Systems, a division of Boeing that still makes rocket engines for the space program. In his book
We Never Went to the Moon,
Kaysing says that in 1959 Rocketdyne estimated that there was about a 14% chance we could safely send a man to the moon and back. According to Kaysing, there is no way the space program could have advanced enough in the following 10 years to send the three Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, followed by five more moon landings in the next three years.

NASA experts recently admitted that they currently do not have the capability of sending manned missions to the moon. So how could they have done it more than 30 years ago? Even simulations these days require powerful computers, but the computer onboard the
Columbia
had a capacity smaller than many of today’s handheld calculators.

All the lakes in the world, fresh and saltwater combined equal only .01% of the Earth’s water resources.

Kaysing and others think they know the answer, and cite a number of anomalies that lead them to conclude that the Apollo missions were faked:

The Fluttering Flag:
In 1990 a New Jersey man named Ralph Rene was reviewing old footage of the moon landing. As he watched the American flag fluttering in the airless atmosphere of the moon, it suddenly dawned on him: how can there be a breeze if there is no air?

Rene’s suspicions led him to research inconsistencies in the Moon landing story, and to publish a book called
NASA Mooned America
. The fluttering flag was just the beginning.

Phony Photos:
A close look at the thousands of excellent still photos from the moon landings reveal some very odd features. For one thing, they are a little too good. The astronauts seem to be well lit on all sides, regardless of where the sunlight is coming from, almost as if there were some artificial light source.

• Defenders claim that light was reflected from the lunar surface, bouncing back to light the shadow side of the astronauts. Oddly, that same reflective light does not illuminate the dark side of lunar rocks, which are even closer to the ground.

• Shadows seem to fall in different directions and look to be different lengths even for objects of a similar height, such as the two astronauts. This leads some to conclude that there were multiple light sources—possibly some man-made ones.

• Even when everything else is in shadow, the American flag and the words “United States” are always well lit, and sometimes seem to be in a spotlight. Was someone trying to squeeze extra PR value out of fake photos?

Starlight, Star Bright:
Some skeptics cite the absence of stars in photos of the lunar sky as evidence that they were not taken on the moon. After all, in the dark sky of the moon with no atmosphere, stars should be clearly visible.

• Experts agree—to the naked eye, stars in the sky of the moon
should
be magnificently clear. But, the experts say,
stars
wouldn’t show up on film that was set to expose the much brighter lunar surface.

• On the other hand, why were there no pictures taken of the stars in the lunar sky? Surely how the stars look from the moon would have interested many people. Was it because astronomers could spot the fake photos too easily?

Where’s the Dust?
One of the most memorable images NASA released from Apollo 11 was the imprint of Buzz Aldrin’s boot in the lunar dust. But the lunar landing module apparently had less of an impact on the moon’s surface.

• Moon photos show no visible disturbance from the high-powered thrust engines the
Eagle
landing module used to land, nor is there any dust in the landing pads.

• If the
Eagle
blew away all the dust, as some speculate, how did Aldrin make such a nice footprint?

Deadly Radiation:
In a recent press conference, a NASA spokesman said that radiation is one of the biggest obstacles to space travel. Wouldn’t it have been a problem 30 years ago?

• Two doughnut-shaped rings of charged particles, called the Van Allen Belts, encircle the Earth. To get to the moon, astronauts would have had to pass through the belts, exposing themselves to deadly radiation unless they had a lot more protection than the thin shield the Apollo spacecraft provided.

• Once outside the radiation belts and Earth’s protective atmosphere, astronauts would have been exposed to solar radiation. Expert opinions differ as to whether this exposure would have been life-threatening. But inexplicably,
not one
of the astronauts from the seven lunar missions got cancer, a well-known result of overexposure to radiation.

• Even more sensitive to radiation is photographic film. On all those beautiful moon photos there is absolutely no sign of radiation damage. Why not?