Mental_floss - November 2013

FEEL SMART AGAIN

®

2 5 M O S T P O W E R F U L W E B S I T E S

WHORULESTHE WEB?

It’s NOT Google!

Throw a Successful

Séance!P. 32

+ Revolutionary

Fall Cocktails

+ Our 2013 Internet Cat Power Ranking

GET RICH IN YOUR

SLEEP4 EASY WAYS!

The Show That Made

Breaking Bad Possible

P. 27

P. 54

P. 37

NOVEMBER 2013

VOLUME 12, ISSUE 7

MENTALFLOSS.COM

Pre-OrderPre-Order

a study Of first-wOrld PrOblems

that’s nOt really true, but it might make yOu feel better!

a study Of first-wOrld PrOblems

that’s nOt really true, but it might make yOu feel better!

available at &

What’s better than being rich?

Making fun of Whiney rich people.

What’s better than being rich?

Making fun of Whiney rich people.

WorldMags.netWorldMags.net

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http://worldmags.net/


NOVEMBER 2013 • VOL. 12 ISSUE 7

The IndexThe Index

+ Which Internet cat

takes the mouse?

p. 45

ON OUR

COVER:

Illustration by Nicole McEvoy

The 25 Most Powerful

Websites of All Time!

37

48 54

The Secret Lives

of Sumo WrestlersSilicone implants, fraternity hazing, and

way too many naps

S C AT T E R B R A I N

11 Hair: making a fortune with a comb-over,

the ultimate showdown between blondes

and brunettes, and why hair goes great

with pizza

B E A M A Z I N G

20 A skimmable history of milk

21 A.J. Jacobs endorses angry Yelp-ing

22 Drink brandy! It’s your patriotic duty.

23 How to get 50,000 people dancing

24 Why Earth revolves around Stockholm

R I G H T B R A I N / L E F T B R A I N

27 What the heck is with Twin Peaks?

30 The Miss Cleo of Nintendo gamers

32 Houdini: not a fan of séances

35 Paramedics for whales

G O M E N TA L

60 A real live pilgrim!

61 Write better with the help of a bugle

63 Armloads of octopus knowledge

64 The mental_floss quiz

65 Which failed American colony are you?

In Your DreamsWhat is your brain doing

while you’re asleep? These

scientists know!

C O V E R S T O R Y

F E A T U R E S

D E P A R T M E N T S


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How a dumpy diner saved

network television

p. 27

The face of a digital power-

broker

p. 45

She still misses her

mullet?

p. 13

The face of a

Meet the Whale Whisperer.

p. 35

SCOOP!

The conjurer who almost

fooled Houdini

p. 32

Six Flags is the best

medicine.

p. 19

Nutritious and delicious. No,

wait. Just nutritious.

p. 20

Is he history’s greatest math

savant?

p. 63

p. 19

More Index!More Index!

A

Applejack 22

Asthma, cures for 19

B

Beard tax 13

Bikes, sturdy 52

Black, Michael Ian 41

Blonde Witch of Lime Street 33

Brandy 22

C

Castration, strategic 15

Cat,

Boxing 62

Edgar Allan Poe’s 61

From planet Bub Ub Bub 45

Grumpy 45

Keyboard 45

Cat’s Cradle 25

Comb-over, merits of 12

Cyberchondria 39

D

Dodger Stadium 23

Dreams, science of 54

Dwarves, dancing 28

E

Ectoplasm 33

Edison, Thomas 62

Evil spirits 53

F

Flowbee 15

G

Gallbladder, pigeons 15

H

Hair

As baked good 17

Beehive 16

Chonmage 51

’90s 28

“Rachel, the” 13

Hampster Dance 45

Houdini, Harry 32

I

Implants, scalp 51

Index cards, fancy 61

K

King, Stephen, nightmares of 57

Korean politics 43

L

LiveJournal, as political tool 40

Log Lady 29

M

Marriage, online 46

Math, in The Simpsons 63

Moose milk 20

Mouse, Mighty 64

N

Nap, reasons to 52, 56

Nintendo, and moral support 30

O

Octopuses 63

Organist, tips from 23

P

Pilgrim, professional 60

Pirate Party 44

Presidential cow 20

Protein, sources of 17, 51

R

Rather, Dan 46

Ross, Bob 13

S

Scientific American 15, 33

Séances 33

Sex lives

Fruit 22

Octopus 63

Sock puppet 41

Space, haircuts in 15

Sweden 24, 44

T

Twerking 42

Twin Peaks 27

V

Video games

Insomnia caused by 56

Strategies for 30

Vomitorium 60

Vonnegut, Kurt 25

W

Webcam, steamy 38

Weddings 46

Whales, clumsy 35

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IF IDIOMS ARE TO BE TRUSTED, there are two kinds of optimists.

There’s the kind that can see the worth in what they’re given. Like

if someone brought Optimist A half a bucket of lemons, he’d see the

bucket as half-full. And then there’s Optimist B, the visionary who sees

that same half bucket of lemons as a quarter bucket of lemonade. For

years I’ve been the former—I would happily thank the lemon giver, but

I couldn’t always see the fruit’s full potential.

The Internet has changed me. When Kyle

McDonald of One Red Paperclip proved in

2006 that you could take an ordinary paper

clip and trade up until you got a house, I

started seeing the potential in everything.

Now I look at the tiny bowl of paperclips on

my desk and know I’m sitting on a real estate

goldmine. Other sites have infl uenced me as

well. Cats With Bread made me understand

that just looking at a cat and seeing it for all

its fuzzy glory isn’t enough—that cat has not

reached its potential until it’s put its head

through a piece of bread. Same with Selleck

Waterfall Sandwich. Could I look at a waterfall

and lose myself in the overwhelming beauty and serenity of God’s

powerful brush strokes? Sure. But I also see room for improvement:

how much better the scene would be if someone would just get Tom

Selleck and a hoagie in the mix.

What I mean is there’s no doubt that the Internet has had a

powerful and lasting impact on me. But from the list that begins on

page 37, written by Gawker superstar Adrien Chen, you can see it’s

had a pretty important impact on the world, too. Read it and let us

know if we missed anything. Don’t worry—we’ll only see the upside!

Enjoy,

Mangesh

VOLUME 12 , I SSUE 7 | NOVEMBER 2013

FOUNDERS

Mangesh Hattikudur Will Pearson

EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mangesh Hattikudur

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jessanne Collins

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PROOFREADER Regan Hof man

CONTRIBUTORS Emmy Blotnick, Amir Blumenfeld,

Stacy Conradt, Judy Dutton, A.J. Jacobs, Adam K.

Raymond, Jef Rubin, Brittany Shoot, Matt Soniak, Jamie

Spatola, Caity Weaver

ART

ART DIRECTOR Winslow Taft

ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Joshua Moore

PHOTO EDITOR Rob Culpepper

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Aliya Best

MENTALFLOSS.COM

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CHAIRMAN Felix Dennis

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EDITOR’S NOTE

LOOKING AT A

CAT AND SEEING

IT FOR ALL ITS

FUZZY GLORY

ISN’T ENOUGH.

Not the editor


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November 2013 mentalfloss.com 7

All Hail Dessert

I thoroughly enjoyed your

article about ice cream

(“The Sweetest Revolution”).

Legend has it that when

my grandpa was young, the

kids in the family would run

outside during thunderstorms

to gather hailstones to fi ll up

the ice well of their hand-

crank ice cream churn!

—Kim Baum

Ice Cream Sailsman

Just fi nished Gillian Reagan’s

article, “The Sweetest

Revolution,” and had to thank

you for the memories of who

we in the small Alabama

town of Dothan called the

Ducking the Question

I hate to be a tape pedant,

but old-fashioned duct tape

hasn’t been used on ducts in

years and isn’t even acceptable

under current building codes.

So “duck” it is.

—Rick Garvia

A Sweet Savings Plan

Two years ago, my daughters

removed a Twinkie from its

wrapper, dated it, and set it

aside in a cupboard just to see

what would happen. The shelf

life of a Twinkie? Appears to

be infi nite.

—Mike Gross

Cleveland Mocks

(In “25 of the Most Pressing

Questions Answered!”

we predicted that Cleveland

fans will have to wait

another year for their

Super Bowl parade.)

Thanks for kicking us when

we’re down. Right through the

heart, mental_fl oss … right

through the heart. It’s a good

thing I like you.

—Sarah Shumaker

Sorry, Cleveland. At least

we love your local applejack

distillery! (See page 22.)

Pinky Dinky Man. Also, in

Panama City, Fla., we have an

ice cream boat that delivers

Push Pops, chocolate eclairs,

strawberry shortcakes, and

other frozen treats.

—Kay Keel

Where the Buf alo Dodge

Reading about The Oregon

Trail made me long for third

grade. I’ve tried playing newer

versions, but it’s just not the

same. I can still picture those

squirrels jerking across the

screen, evading my shot. Oh,

the pain of not being able to

carry back all the buffalo to

my starving family!

—Felicia Ramsey

FR

OM

TH

E W

EB

“KUDOS TO MENTAL_FLOSS FOR ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS!” —@CALLAHAN_JEN

AL

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WE

IGH

T, M

AN

WIT

H B

AG

)

Short answer: Blame the closest Roman linguist.

For the full answer, go to mentalfl oss.com/pounds.

Why is “pound” shortened to “lb.”?

LETTERS

Mental Flaws

In last issue’s “The Legend of the Oregon Trail” we failed to cite as a source Jessica Lussenhop’s excellent 2011 City Pages article

“Oregon Trail: How three Minnesotans forged its path.” It was a serious flub on our part. We’re sorry, Jessica!

Reader mail makes us

feel all warm and fuzzy.

Send your thoughts on

the newest issue to

[email protected],

or tweet a comment

with #mentalfloss. If we

print your note, we’ll

send you a T-shirt.


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Joe Pompeo covers the

media beat for Capital New

York, but we gave him a more

surreal task: explaining what

made Twin Peaks a television

masterpiece (page 27). Joe’s

work has also appeared in The

New York Times, Bloomberg

Businessweek, and The New

York Observer.

Paolo Patrizi snapped such

amazing photographs of sumo

wrestlers’ highly disciplined

behind-the-scenes routines

of exercising, eating, and

napping that we had to share

his series “Gentle Giants”

(page 48). The Tokyo-based

photographer’s work has also

appeared in GQ, Vanity Fair,

and Panorama.

Adrian Chen explored the

darkest corners of the Inter-

net while choosing history’s

25 most powerful websites

(page 37), but he recovered

with the help of several

uplifting hamster videos.

Adrian is a senior writer at

Gawker. His work has also

appeared in Slate and Wired.

Ruth Beach may not live

near the ocean, but she was

still able to track down the

reverse Captain Ahab who

saves whales that get tangled

in dangerous nets (page 35).

Ruth has written for every-

thing from Skymall to page-

a-day calendars; right now,

she’s busy working on a series

of children’s books.

AL

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CONTRIBUTORS

Shamu

Owls

Miley Cyrus

Various Deschanels

… and a few indirect contributors who inspired this issue

ired e


IkeaIkea

RZA

Cousin Itt

E. Honda

George Washington


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*EPA-estimated 26 city/35 hwy/29 combined mpg. Actual mileage will vary. **Requires 93-octane premium fuel.

Dillon Van Way

Dillon Van Way

Mark Kleis

Joe Nation

Dramatization*


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R A P U N Z E L’ S LOA D - B E A R I N G LO C K S aren’t just the stuff

of fairy tales. According to the Library of Congress, every strand

of human hair is strong enough to hold 3.5 ounces. And because

the average noggin is home to between 100,000 and 150,000

hairs, that means a human mane could potentially support upwards of 16 tons! But don’t start lifting anvils with your

French braid just yet—it takes only an ounce of force to pluck a hair from your scalp. So while you could throw down

your tresses the next time a dashing prince tries to rescue you, you’d be better off pointing him to a stepladder.

ROCK THAT COMB-OVER

BALDNESS CURES FROM HIPPOCRATES

TURN YOUR HAIR INTO PIZZA

BOB ROSS’S SECRET NEMESIS

HAIR

T H I S M O N T H ’ S T H E M E

MEET THE NEW

RAPUNZEL: YOU!


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I N J A PA N , G U Y S W H O S P O R T C O M B - O V E R S A R E C A L L E D “ B A R C O D E D U D E S ” F O R T H E I R D O M E S ’ L I N E D

A F T E R D E C A D E S of loyal scalp warming,

Frank Smith’s hair handed in its resigna-

tion in the 1970s. The Orlando, Fla., resi-

dent was distraught. He couldn’t stomach

the idea of donning a toupee, and a brief

shaved-head phase drew merciless taunts

from his pals. So one night, over a glass of

wine with his son Donald, Smith began

batting around some new ideas.

Comb-overs were nothing new, but

Smith and son landed on an extreme

variant that required growing out a ring of

hair around the entire head and sweeping

it over the dome in three sections. Frank

Smith was so pleased with the idea that he

successfully applied for a U.S. patent for

“Method of Concealing Partial Baldness.”

The Smiths hoped to monetize the trick

by marketing a spray that held the hairy

illusion in place. Sadly, the business was

a flop, but they didn’t walk away empty-

handed. In 2004, the duo received an Ig

Nobel Prize for their contribution to the

world’s bare pates.

King of the Comb-OverWhen a balding genius perfected a method of scalp coverage, he had no choice but to patent it.

ILL

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THE BOTTOM LINE:

HAIR



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A P P E A R A N C E S . T H E H U M A N B O D Y H A S A P P R O X I M AT E LY F I V E M I L L I O N H A I R F O L L I C L E S . R O L L I E F I N G E R S R E F U S E D T O

Why Does Hair Turn Gray? N O M AT T E R W H AT D E F E N S E S YO U E M P L OY, if you wait around long enough, gray hair is going

to sneak up on you. Every hair follicle contains specialized cells called melanocytes that create the

pigments that determine hair color. As we age, these cells gradually become less active until they die

off, leaving behind pigment-free white manes. Since graying is inevitable, the only question is when

your color will start fading. While genetics are a major determinant, pollution, chemical exposure, and

smoking can speed up the process. Just another reason to quit cigarettes: You’ll live longer—and with

better hair!

THE TAXMAN

SHAVETHYour facial topiary may be overgrown, but at least it’s not illegal!

Even the greats make rookie mistakes. During the first year of her reign, Elizabeth I decided to maintain a beard tax devised by her father, Henry VIII. Men who let their stubble flourish for more than two weeks were required to pay the government three shillings and four pence. Setting aside the dif iculties of precisely measuring the growth, Britain’s bearded men laughed of the charges, and the tax was never enforced.

Nearly 200 years later, Tsar Peter I of Russia waged a similar war on whiskers. After touring Europe in 1698, Peter grew convinced that Russia needed to modernize. He imposed sweeping reforms—upgrading the military, ending arranged marriages, and forbidding beards. When his initial ban was no more successful than Elizabeth’s, he instituted a progressive beard tax that charged aristocrats more than commoners. Taxpayers carried a “beard token,” a small silver or copper coin that served as their tax receipt. Russian razor salesmen rejoiced until the tax’s repeal in 1772.

The mullet has stood the test of time. In the Iliad, Homer describes a warrior tribe that’s business in the front, party in the back.

Hairstyles of the Rich and FamousWe swipe our hairstyles from celebrities, but where do stars find their trademark looks?

THE BOB ROSS

It’s hard to imagine the af able painter hating anything, but Bob Ross loathed his iconic perm, a style he originally adopted to save money as he traveled the country giving painting lessons in shopping malls. But after Joy of Painting debuted in 1983, Ross grew to appreciate the look’s market-ing appeal, and he kept the happy cloud of hair.

THE CARRIE FISHER

Fisher’s rebellious Princess Leia borrowed her swirled side buns from another group of activists. In an interview with Time, George Lucas described the hairdo’s origin: “I went with a kind of Southwestern Pan-cho Villa woman revolutionary look, which is what that is. The buns are basically from turn-of-the-century Mexico.”

THE LARRY FINE

The frizzy Stooge got his famous locks by accident. Fine was wash-ing his hair backstage at the musical revue A Night in Spain, when a producer walked in on him. The sight of Fine’s mid-drying curls was so funny that he encouraged Fine to wear it out. The Stooge spent the rest of his career wetting his hair before every performance.

THE JENNIFER ANISTON

Everyone’s favorite Friend grew up dreaming of Valerie Bertinelli’s ’do, but her sole attempt to emulate the look resulted in an unflattering mul-let. Stylist Chris McMillan saved her hair by inventing “the Rachel,” but Aniston says she never liked the high-maintenance ’90s hairstyle. She prefers a just-rolled-out-of-bed look.



WorldMags.net



HAIR

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J O I N T H E C I N C I N N AT I R E D S I N 1 9 8 6 A F T E R T H E Y D E M A N D E D H E S H AV E H I S M U S TA C H E . W I L L I A M H O WA R D TA F T WA S T H E

The Sheikh of Shampoo The next time you rinse and repeat, give a nod to the Indian surgeon who brought hair washing to the West.

UNTIL THE LATE 18TH CENTURY, Westerners

had a rough time washing their hair. With

no specialized product for the task, bathers

were forced to rely on regular old soap, which

is why very few Pantene ads are set in 1750s

London. Then, Sake Dean Mahomed came

along and changed everything.

Mahomed was born in 1759 in the Indian

state of Bihar. At the age of 11, he joined the

East India Company’s army, and by the time

he was 25, he’d arrived in London as one

of the first colonial travelers to make the

reverse commute. Once he’d settled in the

West, Mahomed got busy. He published a

travelogue, the first book in English by an

Indian author. Later, he opened England’s

first curry restaurant.

These efforts weren’t his most lasting

contributions to British society, though.

For centuries, Indians had been enjoying

a cleansing head massage with oils called

champi. When Mahomed introduced the

practice to Londoners, the name became

corrupted as “shampoo.” Before long,

Mahomed had made a name for himself

scrubbing the heads of London’s high

society. And as business boomed, he drew

customers from continental Europe’s classi-

est addresses. Of course, a little showman-

ship helped. Dressed in traditional Indian

garb, Mahomed wowed crowds by massag-

ing scalps and billing the practice as a cure

for everything from gout to sprains. Before

long, he’d even secured a position as the

“shampooing surgeon” to both King George

IV and King William IV. If you’re looking

for a way to cozy up to the new royal baby,

maybe it’s time to invest in some shampoo

and a towel.



WorldMags.net



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L A S T S I T T I N G P R E S I D E N T T O S P O R T FA C I A L H A I R . H U M A N H A I R C O N TA I N S 1 4 E L E M E N T S , I N C L U D I N G G O L D . A N I M A L

In 1896, Scientific American finally got to the bottom of what was mak-ing people lose their hair: music. Here’s the magazine’s report from an English study linking shedding to certain instruments:

While stringed instruments prevent and check the falling out of the hair, brass instruments have the most injurious ef ects upon it. The piano and the violin, especially the piano, have an undoubted preserving influence. The violoncello, the harp, and the double bass participate in the hair-preserving qualities of the piano. But the hautboy, the clarinet, and the flute have only a very feeble ef ect. ... On the contrary, the brass instruments have results that are deplorable.

THE BEST REASON

TO TURN DOWN

YOUR MUSIC

Headstand Your Way to Better Hair! A bad toupee can look ridiculous, but compared with these historical cures for baldness, even the worst rug seems practically dignified.

The Hippocratic WayThe Ancient Syrian Way

The Eunuch Way The Celtic WayThe Ancient Indian Way

A balm of opium, horseradish, pigeon droppings, beetroot, and spices

At least you get rid of all that pigeon dung and opium cluttering the garage.

Partridge gallbladder mixed with wine, drunk in the light of a full moon

You’ll get a mild buzz going before introducing yourself to werewolves.

Castration: a major step but less expensive than using Rogaine indefinitely

It’s an easy way to show solidarity with your dog and win Bob Barker’s approval.

A mixture of burned raven ashes and sheep suet. It’s a food blogger’s dream!

After you’ve gone to the trouble of catching and burning a raven, growing hair is a cinch!

A strict regimen of headstands, explaining why very few Olympic gymnasts are bald

Down.

The Cure

Plausibility

Upside

(It works!)

A N YO N E C RU I S I N G late-night TV in the early ’90s couldn’t miss the Flowbee—a preposter-

ous haircutting gadget that combined the ease of clippers with the tidiness of a vacuum

cleaner. Night owls across the nation were mesmerized by the strange commercials, but it

left them wondering: Who on Earth would use a Flowbee?

Well, nobody. But lots of people in space used a similar contraption. In 1990, NASA

patented a zero-G hair salon—a large, semicircular plastic bubble that closed around an

astronaut’s head. Two sealed armholes allowed a barber to reach inside, while a vacuum

pump inhaled stray hairs. Since the shaggy spaceman was locked inside the bubble, a

breathing tube was necessary. Unfortunately, the Flowbee’s interstellar cousin wasn’t any

more popular than the earthbound version, and NASA let the patent expire in 1994.

The Flowbee of the Future



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H A I R B A L L S W E R E O N C E T H O U G H T T O C U R E E P I L E P S Y, P L A G U E , A N D P O I S O N I N G . T H E F E A R O F H A I R C U T S I S C A L L E D

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That Thing You ’Do The best haircuts aren’t just fashion statementsÑthey’re history lessons!

THE MOHAWK | Plenty of groups have worn Mohawks over the centuries. In fact, Herodotus wrote about them nearly 2,400 years ago. And while Native American tribes like the Pawnee were known for doing the ’do, there’s no evidence that Mohawks ever sported Mohawks. So why the confusion? The 1939 Henry Fonda hit Drums Along the Mohawk featured the cut.

groups have nturies. In fact,m nearly 2,400

e American tribes like r doing the ’do, there’s ever sported

usion? The s Along the

THE BEEHIVE | In 1960, Modern Beauty Shop magazine gave Chicago stylist Margaret Vinci Heldt a tough assignment: Develop a new haircut. After some tinkering, she perfected the beehive, the sweeping monument beloved by everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Amy Winehouse.

LIBERTY SPIKES | Punk fans rock these long, thick spikes as an homage to the Statue of Liberty’s headwear, but the look’s roots are way tougher. Celtic warriors were allowed to wear the spikes—but only after they had killed an enemy!

THE QUEUE | The Qing Dynasty asserted its power in 17th-century China by forcing all men to wear a queue, a long, braided ponytail with the rest of the head shaved. Unfortunately, the look wasn’t optional—shirk-ing meant certain death, giving rise to the saying “Keep your hair and lose your head, or keep your head and cut your hair.”

THE POUF | Marie Antoinette helped hair reach new heights when she showed up for her husband’s coronation with a towering hairstyle. The look sparked a national craze, and before long Frenchwomen were styling their hair until it stretched three feet above their heads! Of course, because plain old hair is boring, women embellished the style with feathers, figurines, and the occasional birdcage.



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T O N S U R E P H O B I A . H A I R D O N AT I O N S T O C H A R I T Y A R E C O M M E N D A B L E , B U T T H E I R S W O N ’ T G I V E Y O U A D E D U C T I O N .

LOCKED IN BATTLEThe rivalry between blondes and brunettes is usually only good for misplaced stereotypes. Since 2011, how-ever, Russians have been using chess to determine whether the color of one’s hair indicates aptitude. For the past three years, teams of the nation’s top blonde and brunette women have trav-eled to Moscow to battle on the board. But actually declaring a winner has proved dif icult. After three contests, the scoreboard is locked up, with both sides having won a competition before the most recent tilt ended in a draw. Moscow isn’t settling for a tie, though. Next year’s rubber match will finally clear up the age-old question of whether blondes or brunettes have more (intelligent) fun.

PYONGYANG’S

HOTTEST HAIRCUTVisiting North Korea? You’re going to need a trim first.

North Korea has its share of problems. Its belligerent posturing has isolated it from the rest of the world. Its collapsing economy and infrastructure exacerbate frequent famines. So it makes sense that in 2004, then-dictator Kim Jong Il focused his energies on tackling the nation’s most pressing prob-lem: shaggy hair.

To combat messy locks, Kim commissioned a must-see five-part television series, Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle. Each episode not only tracked down mildly bushy men on Pyongyang streets, but shamed them with insults like “Can we expect a man with this disheveled mind-set to perform his duty well?” The series also shed light on the scientific reason why men should cut their hair: because long locks dampen intelligence by robbing the brain of nutrition. (Note from our fact-checkers: Not true!)

To counter this brain drain, men were instructed to keep their hair less than five centimeters long and to get a trim every 15 days. Each episode also featured a handful of state-approved hairstyles. One look that wasn’t on the table for good Socialists: me-ticulously groomed pompadours. Some privileges are reserved for Dear Leaders.

Abraham Lincoln grew his iconic beard on the campaign trail after an 11-year-old girl wrote him: “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you.” IL

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FARMER

Since 2008, organic garden-

ers have been deploying

an herbicide-free weapon:

woven mats of human hair

called SmartGrow laid in the

dirt. The product keeps soil

moist and gives plants a dose

of nitrogen, all while fending

off weeds. And it does it

without getting a single hair

in your salad!

PIZZA MAKER

If you’ve had a slice of frozen

pizza lately, you’ve probably

munched on a bit of hair

without knowing it. Hair is

rich in L-cysteine, an amino

acid that is added to dough

to cut mixing times and add

elasticity. Where do com-

panies get cysteine? By pro-

cessing duck and chicken

feathers and human hair.

OCEAN JANITOR

We have to wash our locks

regularly because oils collect

on the surface. That’s great

news for the shampoo indus-

try, but it’s also a godsend for

the environment. In 2006,

tons of donated hair clip-

pings were dumped into the

ocean to help soak up the

mess after an oil spill in the

Philippines.

Get Your Hair a JobFor years, the mess on a salon’s floor had limited job prospects. If a discarded hair was lucky, it might end up in a wig—a pipe dream for so many shorn locks. But everything’s dif erent now! For today’s trimmed hair, the world is its oyster. Just look at the possibilities.



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The next time you’re having trouble breathing, hop

on a roller coaster. A University of Amsterdam study

found that a few loop-de-loops can help asthma sufferers breathe easier. Apparently, a

wild ride leads to “positive stress,” which can alleviate an asthmatic’s feelings of being

short of breath.

The Best Medicine

THE BEST PLACE TO BUY MOOSE MILK

FRUIT COCKTAILS YOU’LL LOVE

KURT VONNEGUT’S HOMEWORK TIPS

ALAMY

BE

AMAZING


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with AMIR BLUMENFELD

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THE CURIOUS COMEDIANBE AMAZING!

The Milkiest WayAsk the right questions about milk, and you can impress any farmer, cow, or block of cheese you meet.

What’s the

best place to get

chocolate milk?

School. Of the milk

American schoolkids drink,

71 percent is flavored. We

should never have made

the Nesquik Bunny

the secretary of

education.

Whatever

happened to

the milkman?

As of 2007, 0.4 percent of

Americans were still getting

deliveries from milkmen.

Yet only .00001 percent of

Americans still have per-

sonal blacksmiths.

Can I

pour America

a glass of milk?

Probably not. American

milk consumption has fallen

by 20 percent over the last 20

years to just 20 gallons

annually. I suggest we raise

our butter consumption

to make up for the

lost calcium.

Who was the

most milk-friendly

president?

William Howard Taft had a

pet cow, Pauline Wayne, that

lived on the White House

lawn and provided the fam-

ily’s milk. Meanwhile, Bo

Obama can barely

even garden.

What’s

the best place

to open a dairy?

Finland, where per

capita milk consumption-

tops 180 liters per year.

If you’re as bad with the

metric system as I am,

that’s 95 gallons a

day.

What’s a

tasty alternative

to cow milk?

Moose milk is popular

in parts of Russia, which

explains a lot of the

subtext of Rocky

and Bullwinkle.

When did we

start bottling milk?

The first glass milk bottle,

Thatcher’s Common Sense

Milk Jar, was invented in

1884. It was a vast improve-

ment over Thatcher’s

Common Sense Drinking

Straight From the

Udder.


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MODERN PROBLEMS BE AMAZING!with A . J. JACOBS

THAT’S GROSS. Hit that diner with a

strongly worded Yelp review!

But listen: You should also be thankful

that buggy water is a rare occurrence in

modern dining. In the past, your average

meal was so disgusting and unhygienic that

just reading about it would make you reach

for a bottle of Doc Fletcher’s Genuine Pink

Bismuth Nostrum With Extra Opium.

At least your meal was worm-free.

Egyptian mummies’ stomachs have been

found to contain a delicious blend of

tapeworms, liver fl ukes, whipworms, guinea

worms, and roundworms, according to

Morton Satin’s book Death in the Pot. For

centuries, things didn’t get better. British

diarist Samuel Pepys recorded this 1662

meal: “My stomach was turned when my

sturgeon came to table, upon which I saw

very many little worms creeping.”

Even the cosmetically clean food wasn’t

safe. Poisonous (but sweet-tasting) lead

found its way into all sorts of treats, as a

kind of precursor to high fructose corn

syrup. In 19th-century England, red

peppers were painted with shiny red lead

to make them more appetizing. British

country inns ground their salad greens

with a giant ball of lead, giving diners

an unhealthy dose of metal shavings,

according to Swindled, a survey of bad food

by Bee Wilson.

Baked goods were no better. Reformers

accused bakers in 17th-century England

of diluting their breads with ash and

bones (hence the threats by the salivating

giant in Jack and the Beanstalk to

make his bread with “the blood of an

Englishman”). These rumors were

mostly unfounded, but bakers did dilute

bread with the bleaching agent alum,

which has since turned out to be toxic

in large quantities. Where’d they get

the alum? From the urine that paupers

sold to manufacturers, writes Wilson in

Swindled.

Impurities aside, humans have also

voluntarily shoved a baffl ing variety

of creatures into their mouths over the

years. The fi rst known cookbook—dating

to fourth-century Rome—contained

recipes for fl amingo tongues and calf-

brain pudding. And most alarming of all,

21st-century Americans ate something

called the Ballpark hot dog, which

contained … well, I can’t even bring

myself to type it.

ALAMY

Lead Hot Chili Peppers

Have a problem for A.J.? Send your woes to [email protected].

DEAR A.J., I went to my local diner,

and they served me a glass of ice

water—with a dead mosquito in it. I

asked the manager what he planned

to do about it. He said he’d give me

a “free glass of water.” What should I

have done? —PAUL IN SACRAMENTO

Dipping peppers in lead wasn’t the only heavy-metal food trend. Pickle makers in 19th-century England added copper to their cucumbers to make them greener.


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5TO TRY

With these brandies, you’ll no longer see fruit as just a

garnish.

TOM’S FOOLERY

APPLEJACK

Apple skin, fresh apple slice, apple

juice ... if it’s in an apple, you can taste it in

this Ohio treat, a great pick for fall

cocktails.

FINGER LAKES

DISTILLING PEAR

BRANDY

This bruiser packs a blazing wallop, then

reveals its softer pear side.

SANTA FE SPIRITS

APPLE BRANDY

This dry pour blends smoke, apples, and

hard candy, like that delicious fire at Granny Smith’s

orchard.

DUTCH’S SPIRITS

PEACH BRANDY It’s as if whiskey and peach cobbler had a torrid one-night stand, and the real

beneficiary was our bars.

CATOCTIN CREEK

1757 VIRGINIA

BRANDY

This thick Virginia brandy brings together

grapes, caramel, and mint. Thomas Jef erson

would approve.

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WHAT COLONIAL AMERICA LACKED in parliamentary

representation, it made up for with an abundance of

apples. By the late 17th century, colonists had become

experts at making hard cider, spiking the beverage’s

potency by leaving it out overnigh t, letting the water

freeze, and skimming off the ice. The concentrated

booze that lingered was dubbed applejack. When

Scottish immigrant William Laird arrived in New

Jersey around 1698, he kicked things up by distilling

the fruit into a brandy he aged in oak barrels.

Twelve generations later, the Lairds are still

America’s applejack barons. Incorporated in 1780,

Laird’s is now the country’s oldest commercial distillery

in the states. The secret? Fans in high places. George

Washington loved Laird’s applejack so much that he

asked for the recipe and even served it to his troops

during the Revolutionary War. In 1840, William Henry

Harrison poured applejack to draw crowds to his

campaign rallies. And when Abraham Lincoln ran a

tavern in Illinois, Laird’s was one of his top sellers.

The company even stayed afl oat during Prohibition

by making the preservative pectin for the Army and

breaking into the applesauce business. In 1933,

the government gave the family the OK to make

medicinal brandy, giving the Lairds a leg up when

Prohibition ended.

Brandy may not be fueling troops anymore, but

Lairds is going strong with its delicious 12-year-old.

Meanwhile, other distilleries are cranking out dazzling

brandies using everything from peach to pear. If you’re

bored with bourbon, it’s time to give fruit a chance.

Brandied ContentWant to be more presidential? Start by guzzling some applejack.

OUR PICK

IN THE SPIRITBE AMAZING!


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I STARTED TAKING PIANO

LESSONS when I was 4∏. I had always been fascinated with the organ at church. I’d go down and talk to the organist, who was my piano teacher, and beg her for organ lessons. I guess I wore her down. She gave me about

six basic lessons to keep the fi ngers and pedals smooth.

I ALSO TOOK ACCORDION

LESSONS, and my teacher wanted me to be a concert accordionist. I became popular and played Vegas and Tahoe.

AT THE ORANGE COUNTY

FAIRGROUNDS, there was an organ on the stage. The music director asked if I knew how to play it, which I did. He liked the songs better on the organ and told me to leave my accordion at home next time.

I WAS NOT A SPORTS FAN before working for the Dodgers. I was very busy with music. My mother and husband, Billy, were Dodger fans. As an ironworker, Billy helped build Dodger Stadium. He did that for 40 years. Now, he accompanies me to every game.

I PICK ALL THE MUSIC. Over the years, the selection has evolved greatly. I used to play 40 to 50 songs a game. Gradually, record-ed music was introduced. Now, I play four or fi ve songs a night.

I DON’T USE SHEET MUSIC. I have 2,000 songs in my head.

I’VE MET SOME NEAT PEOPLE. How many organists can say they’ve accompanied opera singer Plácido Domingo and some of the American Idol stars?

AS MUCH AS I’VE PLAYED “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I’m not bored with it.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF

A Ballpark Organist When it comes to riling up the crowd at Dodger Stadium, only one woman has the keys: organist NANCY BEA HEFLEY. This is her 26th season manning the ballpark’s pipes.

WORK STUDY BE AMAZING!with BRIT TANY SHOOT


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Stellar SwedenA ginormous scale model of the solar system brings the universe down to Earth.

EVERY DAY ON HIS WAY TO WORK at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, plasma physicist Nils

Brenning pedals his bike past the Ericsson Arena, the largest spherical building in the world. In the ’90s, he

started thinking. What if the hockey venue, which looks like a giant golf ball, represented the sun in a model

of the solar system? Brenning called his friend Gösta Gahm, a Stockholm University astronomer, and shared

his idea. The two started calculating where the inner planets would land, and soon they’d drawn a map that

scattered them across Stockholm, in museums, parks, and shopping centers. Then, they started building.

Nearly two decades later, the Sweden Solar System is a 1:20 million-scale model that stretches over 700

miles of Swedish landscape. This is no simple Styrofoam-ball affair. The model uses one-of-a-kind sculptures

created by artists, designers, and schoolchildren to represent planets, comets, asteroids, and plutinos. But

Gahm says the biggest inspiration for the project is “the unexpected enthusiasm we met among the people

who wanted to host a planet.” The objects stretch all the way up the Baltic coast to the tiny town of Delsbo,

where beloved dwarf Pluto is represented by a 12-centimeter ball wedged in a tomb-like marker. The termina-

tion shock—the region of space where the solar winds start to slow—sits above the Arctic Circle.

Aside from the impressive scale of the project—more than 20 stations currently exist, with more in the

works —what’s awe-inspiring is the way it fuses art and science, the everyday and the extraterrestrial. Whether

visitors seek out stations in a purposeful scavenger hunt or stumble across them in a mall, this ingenious

model delivers a big bang.

POINTS OF INTERESTBE AMAZING!

EAT

X B.A.R. A city built

on 14 islands ought

to know seafood. At

this unfussy brasse-

rie, you choose a su-

per fresh specimen

from a display on ice

and anoint it with a

fun sauce (chili and

ginger, brown butter

and horseradish,

roasted gazpacho).

Simple and so good.

Blasieholmsgatan 4A, restaurangbar.se

SHOP

X ACNE What to do

with the infamous

bank vault that intro-

duced the world to

Stockholm Syndrome

after a 1973 hostage

situation? Turn it into

a flagship shop for a

fashion brand synony-

mous with minimalist

Scandanavian style,

of course!

Norrmalmstorg 2, acnestudios.com

STAY

X HOTEL

SKEPPSHOLMEN

Built as barracks for

the Royal Marines at

the turn of the 18th

century, this serene

hotel (once also, um,

a plague hospital!)

shares an idyllic island

with Stockholm’s pre-

mier art museums.

Gröna gången 1, hotelskeppsholmen.com


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THE CRITICAL AND COMMER-CIAL SUCCESS of Cat’s Cradle allowed him to stick with it.

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Cat’s CradleKurt Vonnegut’s science fiction satire turns 50 this year. Here’s how the

grad school dropout found the hilarious side of nuclear dread.

In 1947, Vonnegut left an anthropology grad program at University of Chicago after it

REJECTED HIS THESIS IDEAS.

Many characters were

PARODIES OF G.E. SCIENTISTS,especially Langmuir.

One of them, Irving Langmuir, told Vonnegut that when H.G. Wells visited his lab in the 1930s, he had pitched Wells a story idea:

WATER THAT WAS SOLID AT ROOM TEMPERATURE. (Wells didn’t use it.)

The idea stuck with Vonnegut. Eventually,

IT INSPIRED HIS FOURTH NOVEL.

To pay the bills, he got a

PR GIG AT GENERAL ELECTRIC, interviewing scientists and sharing their stories.

Before the novel’s release, a struggling Vonnegut considered

QUITTING WRITING.

Vonnegut was happy with it too. When he later graded his own works,

HE GAVE IT AN

CHEAT SHEET BE AMAZING!

Sweeter still:

CHICAGO ACCEPTED VONNEGUT’S NOVEL AS HIS THESIS.

Using warm ice as a starting point, Vonnegut crafted

A SATIRE OF RELIGION AND THE ARMS RACE.


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#


A Shot in the DarkH O W T W I N P E A K S M A D E M O D E R N A R T O F

T H E S O A P O P E R A — A N D S AV E D N E T W O R K

T V I N T H E P R O C E S S . B Y J O E P O M P E O

AVID LYNCH and Mark Frost seemed an

unlikely pair when they met for lunch one

day in 1988. Lynch was an auteur who’d bur-

nished his reputation directing the bizarro

fi lms Eraserhead and Blue Velvet; Frost was best known

as a writer for the network police drama Hill Street

Blues. But the two had hit it off a few years earlier when

they met working on Goddess, a Marilyn Monroe biopic

that never made it to production. Now they were look-

ing to get their hands dirty again.

As the duo sat in Du-par’s, the kitschy L.A. restau-

rant near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura

boulevards, inspiration struck. “All of a sudden,” Lynch

is quoted as saying in Lynch on Lynch, “Mark and I had

MAKE A LIVING PLAYING NINTENDO»

AT SEA WITH A WHALE DISENTANGLER»

HOW HOUDINI MADE A RELIGION DISAPPEAR»

AL

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T W I N P E A K S1 0 1 M A S T E R P I E C E S #65


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this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake.”

From that stray spark, Lynch and Frost sketched the

idea for what would become Twin Peaks, an enigmatic

murder mystery that surrounded its plot twists with

art-house motifs. Though it would run only for two sea-

sons on ABC, the show revolutionized television and

laid the groundwork for the golden age of prime-time

dramas. But before Twin Peaks could storm the small

screen, Lynch and Frost had to convince someone to

roll the dice.

LYNCH WAS A SHAKY CHOICE for prime time. His

name was synonymous with eerily beautiful cult fi lms,

and his one dip into the mainstream, an adaptation of

Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi novel Dune, was a criti-

cal and commercial disaster. To the industry observer,

it seemed that Lynch was just too niche—or maybe just

too weird—for network television.

The move didn’t seem to make any sense from a

career perspective: TV was a giant step backward for

an auteur of Lynch’s caliber. Today, in an era where

shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad enjoy all the

glitz and prestige of the big screen, it’s easy to forget

that television used to be the stepping-stone to fi lm.

An Oscar-nominated director like Lynch working

on TV was like an all-star demoting himself to the

minor leagues.

But Lynch’s agent was keen to see what his cli-

ent could do with the medium. And Lynch and Frost

were starting to develop a killer storyline. Set in a fi c-

tional Washington logging hamlet, Twin Peaks revolves

around the grisly slaying of blonde homecoming queen

Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). The protagonist is a quixotic

FBI agent named Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) with

an obsessive attention to detail and an affi nity for diner

coffee, which he takes “black as midnight on a moon-

less night.” Together, Laura’s killing and the big-city

detective’s arrival upend the small town, pulling back

the curtain on its underbelly—gambling, prostitution,

and backdoor dealings that turn local power brokers

into villains—before uncovering the even more sinister

forces that lurk in its woods.

The mystery is riveting, but it’s the heavy injection of

trademark Lynchism, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the sur-

real, that makes the show so special. For Lynch, it wasn’t enough to

have straightforward heroes and villains, so some of the show’s

rogues haunt an alternate dimension accessible only in night-

mares and, when conditions are right, through a pit of bubbling

tar among the pines. The result is a crime procedural fi ltered

through an off-kilter lens. But the elements that made the show

so original also made it risky. Prime time was the province of

Murphy Brown and Sam Malone, not one-armed shoe salesmen

or dancing dwarves.

When the time came to pitch the show, Lynch received a good

omen. Even when he wasn’t directing, he was always searching for

symbols and oracles. One of his superstitions was that if you saw a

license plate with your initials on it in any order, and the numbers

on the license plate added up to what you’d consider to be a good

number, and it was a really nice car, it would bring you good luck.

Driving down Melrose on the day he and

Frost were headed to present their creation

to ABC brass, Lynch spotted a brand-new

Mercedes with a lucky number and his ini-

tials. He told Frost, “Mark, this is going to

be very good!”

Fortunately for the duo, ABC was in a

gambling mood. As a new decade dawned,

all the major networks were pushing for

more originality in their lineups. The big

three were anxiously watching Fox and

cable channels eat into their ratings, and

ABC was struggling. The network had a

reputation as a stodgy, corporate outfi t that

micromanaged its productions to medio-

cre results. NBC, on the other hand, was enjoying some success

with a laissez faire approach to working with Hollywood talent, so

ABC did what all TV networks do: It replicated the formula. “We

had a strategy to turn the network around by taking shots and

being patient,” an ABC executive, Chad Hoffman, said at the time.

Hoffman spent just 45 minutes with the Twin Peaks pilot script

before deciding: “We’ve got to do this.”

AS PART OF THE TWIN PEAKS deal, ABC gave Frost and Lynch

unprecedented creative control over the fi nal product, and the duo

took advantage of the freedom. As Lynch, who was 44 when the

show debuted, and Frost, who was 36, looked for inspiration, they

PRIME TIME WAS

THE PROVINCE OF

MURPHY BROWN

AND SAM MALONE ,

NOT DANCING

DWARVES.

TELEVISION

Lynch’s characters aren’t the only ones obsessed with cof ee—the director has his own line of gourmet beans called David Lynch Signature Cup.


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fi lm, Wild at Heart, Lynch became less involved with

the second season, leaving his writers’ bench to hash

out the plot. Then, ABC shot itself in the foot by bump-

ing Twin Peaks from Thursday’s prime real estate to

Saturday’s wasteland, which killed the Friday-morning

break-room buzz that had made it a smash.

The fatal blow, though, was the network’s demand

for the show to answer the central question the plot

and the marketing buzz orbited around—Who Killed

Laura Palmer? Midway through season 2, the killer

was revealed and the writers found themselves in

a bind. The series devolved into an unsustainable

hodgepodge of silly side plots as the writers struggled

to keep the story’s larger mythology alive for 14 more

episodes. Lynch himself took control of the series

fi nale, which bridges the gap between Palmer’s mur-

der and the supernatural mysteries of Twin Peaks. The

stunning two-hour episode brought the curtain down

on June 10, 1991. Just a little over a year after it fi rst

rocked TV, Twin Peaks had disappeared.

DESPITE ITS BRIEF RUN, Twin Peaks’ immense infl u-

ence was visible almost immediately. Lynch and Frost

had proved that viewers would tune in for big-screen-

quality production in a weekly format, and in the process

they ushered in a new age of televised drama. Two years

later Fox would debut the The X-Files, which relied on a

similarly elaborate mythology to sustain its nine-season

run. When ABC’s Lost premiered in 2004—constructed

around an ever-unfolding course of otherworldly (and

largely forest-based) mysteries—it drew immediate

Peaks comparisons. “Twin Peaks was a huge impact

on me,” the show’s cocreator Damon Lindelof told an

audience in Manhattan a few days before the Lost series

fi nale in May 2010. One of the lessons he learned? That

a show doesn’t have to solve every mystery it sets up.

More importantly, Twin Peaks proved to fans, crit-

ics, industry gatekeepers, and fi lm creators alike that

television would no longer live in the shadow of fi lm—

it could actually be good. Little by little, TV shows were

becoming every bit as worthy of close attention and

deconstruction as fi lms—a shift that wouldn’t just

make for better water-cooler chatter, but would also

open up a new venue to which writers and bloggers

could devote entire careers. And none of that might

have happened, if one daring network hadn’t gambled

on Frost and Lynch.

benefi ted from the same serendipity that initially spawned their

masterpiece. While scouting locations at a sawmill, they encoun-

tered a woman whose job was to touch each log as it made its way

down the conveyor belt. This chance meeting presumably inspired

the Log Lady, one of the show’s quirkiest characters.

Later, while shooting a scene in Laura Palmer’s bedroom, a set

dresser named Frank Silva was moving some furniture when some-

one warned him not to lock himself in the room. A lightbulb went

off above Lynch’s head. Silva was lanky and wild-eyed, with a long

face and stringy gray hair—someone so completely out of place in

a frilly pink bedroom that seeing him there was unsettling. “Frank,

are you an actor?” Lynch recalls asking. He’d found the man who

would end up playing Twin Peaks’ spectral bad guy, Bob, described

by The Awl as “one of the scariest, most terrifying, most nightmare-

inducing-est characters ever.”

While some of the series’ highlights came from off-the-cuff

moments like these, the ultimate charm of Twin Peaks lies in just

how meticulously Frost and Lynch developed their sordid little

town. Even the minor supporting characters were fully fl eshed out.

And Lynch coaxed his actors into bringing their idiosyncrasies to

life in his own offbeat way. “Think of how gently a deer has to move

in the snow,” he whispered to Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Laura

Palmer’s best friend. After nearly 40 takes, that was the odd direc-

tion she needed to get the scene just right.

Lynch was also literally hands-on. At the very beginning of the

pilot, Jack Nance’s character, Pete Martell, discovers Laura Palmer’s

plastic-wrapped body on the shore of a lake. “David hand-placed

those granules of sand on my face and played with the plastic as if it

were a bouquet of fl owers,” Sheryl Lee told The Guardian in 2010.

When inspiration struck Lynch, he would call Frost to share his lat-

est breakthrough. “Mark, I think there’s a giant in Agent Cooper’s

room,” Lynch once theorized into the phone. (It worked. There is!)

It was as if Lynch was an all-knowing mystic who’d endeared

himself to a congregation of believers. “There’s a scene where Kyle

had to throw a rock and hit a glass bottle. He sat us down and told

Kyle he was going to hit [it]—and that bottle was freaking far away,”

recalls Kimmy Robertson, who played the loyal secretary of the

sheriff ’s department, in that same Guardian

feature. “Kyle hit it, and everybody freaked

out. It was like David used the power of the

universe to make Twin Peaks.”

WITHIN A MONTH of the show’s April 8, 1990

premiere, America had caught Twin Peaks

fever. “Everyone at parties is talking about

it,” a 29-year-old George Stephanopoulos

told Newsweek, while a New York maga-

zine writer put it this way: “In Cambridge,

Massachusetts, in Madison, Wisconsin, and

in Berkeley, California, there are Twin Peaks

watching parties every Thursday night, af-

ter which … Deconstruction.”

Menacing promos that promised some-

thing new and “ ’90s” lured viewers, who

couldn’t get enough of this avant-garde cinema masquerading as

prime-time soap opera. Twin Peaks was scary enough to rival any

horror fl ick, but also at turns funny, beautiful, and heart-wrench-

ing. The ratings were gangbusters. By May, Twin Peaks had been

renewed for a second season. The show was a critical coup as well,

collecting nearly 20 Emmy nominations between 1990 and 1991.

Not even Lynch expected Twin Peaks to resonate with viewers the

way it did. “We had zero thought that this thing would travel so

well around the world,” he said in 2008. “It was a magical thing.”

But it wasn’t long before the bottom fell out. Busy making his next

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ERICH BLATTNER: I had an Atari growing

up. I’d played the Commodore 64 and

128, so I was defi nitely a gamer, although

I didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment

System at that time. When I was going

to try to get the job, I started playing my

roommate’s NES pretty heavily to build

up my game knowledge.

JR: So that was part of the job interview?

Quizzing you about games?

EB: I knew that was one of the things they

checked for. During my interview, they

sat me down in a cubicle and had me play

a game for 15 to 20 minutes and then

came back to ask me questions about it.

JR: What was the exact role of a game-

play counselor?

EB: [We] answered specifi c questions

about games. At the time, it was just a

toll number, a 206 area code number,

that you could call.

JR: But it wasn’t a 900 number, 25 cents

a minute, or anything like that?

EB: No. At fi rst the service was free. Only

the normal long distance charges would

apply. Eventually, they changed it to a

900 line.

JR: So for a time, it’s just a free phone

call? Nintendo’s just running this service

to help people enjoy their product?

EB: Yeah, and the game-play counselors

had this rock-star attitude of “We’re the

pros. We’re sitting here playing games,

and you call us up, and we help you!”

JR: I was into Nintendo hardcore, as was

every single person I was friends with,

because if you weren’t, I didn’t know

what to talk to you about. I’ve never

heard of anyone calling this number.

Was it a popular thing? Were you on the

phone all the time with calls coming in?

EB: Pretty much. I worked different

shifts, and if you worked the 4 a.m. shift,

it would be slow early in the morning.

But it would pick up, and you’d be

answering back-to-back calls through

most of your shift.

JR: Did you have to train to become good

at video games?

EB: That’s the fi rst thing they did when

they hired you, was put you through a

training process!

JR: I want to know everything about that

process. How did they train you?

EB: Well, it’s knowing the most

commonly asked questions for the

most commonly called-about games,

which at the time were things like

The Legend of Zelda, The Adventures

of Link, and Metroid. Your typical

call would be “Are there codes for this

game?” and you could go consult the

database for that.

JR: And what kinds of questions are

these? Are they like “How do I fi nd the

freeze ray in Metroid?”

EB: It’d be like that—“How do I fi nd a

specifi c item in Metroid?”—but it would

also be “How do I get through the ninth

A Hard Day’s Play Plenty of kids dream of playing video games for a living. As a

Nintendo game-play counselor, ERICH BLATTNER was one of

the rare few to have lived that dream. Jef Rubin1 finds out exactly

what it was like to get paid to provide moral support to thousands

of frustrated gamers.

TECH

JEFF RUBIN: Were you good at Nintendo? Were you a Nintendo kid?

1 Host of The Jef Rubin Jef Rubin Show (jef rubinjef rubinshow.com), Battletoads enthusiast


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http://jeffrubinjeffrubinshow.com





level of The Legend of Zelda in the

second quest?”

JR: And did Nintendo train you to play

Metroid or whatever game? Or did they

want you to fi gure it out yourself?

EB: They’d give you training materials,

like all the hand-drawn maps and

whatnot you needed to get through it.

It wasn’t that they wanted you to play

it—they wanted you to be able to answer

questions on it. But generally, to answer

questions, you had to play it.

JR: If someone can’t beat Battletoads,

what do you tell them? “Just practice

Battletoads all day”? Is there any other

advice you can give?

EB: That’s kind of where the “counselor”

in “game-play counselor” came from,

because sometimes it was just that—

offering encouragement, personal

stories, anecdotes.

JR: No! You had to tell anecdotes? Like,

inspiring game-play stories of your own?

EB: Exactly. Like “I had so much trouble

doing that. I spent the last two weeks

doing it. Eventually, I got it. It felt so nice

fi nally beating it. I know you can do it.”

JR: I love how positive you are. You’re a

part of their game-play experience. Is

that something else Nintendo trained

you to do?

EB: Yep, and there was certain terminol-

ogy they wanted us to avoid. You never

killed enemies—you defeated them.

JR: Who’s calling? Are you dealing

mostly with kids here?

EB: That was the perception, but

honestly, you would get calls from people

of all ages. I would get calls from people

in senior citizens’ centers. Or you’d get

lots of calls from parents.

JR: I’m glad I’m talking to someone who

was an offi cial Nintendo representative.

Obviously I did this back in the day,

but I’ve heard since—now that we have

the Internet to fact-check things—that

blowing on a game [when it wouldn’t

load] does not work.

EB: Well, it works in the short term, but

it causes problems in the long term.

JR: So the answer is more nuanced than

I would have imagined!

EB: If the connections [between the

game and the system] were not all

seated properly, you would get garbage

on the screen. By blowing on those

connectors, you’re adding a little bit of

moisture from your breath. That often

helped make the connection, but in the

long run, it would erode those contacts.

So, really, you were better off cleaning

your system with an offi cial Nintendo

Cleaning Kit.

JR: It sounds like being a game counselor

was pretty fun. Was it a cool job to have?

EB: Oh, yeah. They gave you free video

game systems; you had a library of every

game made. You got paid pretty well for

a kid out of high school. It was a great

job to have.


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HISTORY

Houdini often visited séances in disguise,

calling himself F. Raud. He was known to throw of his wig in the middle

of a reading to expose the trickery of these so-called mediums.


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N JULY 23, 1924, Boston was suffering from a brutal heat

wave. The evening temperature hovered in the high

80s when the famed magician Harry Houdini trudged

up to the fourth fl oor séance room at 10 Lime Street.

With him were O. D. Munn, editor of Scientifi c American, and an

esteemed panel of scientists. They had come to witness the psychic

feats of the nation’s most credible spirit medium, a pretty 36-year-

old fl apper with blue eyes and a bob.

Her name was Mina Crandon. Followers called her “Margery”;

detractors knew her as the Blonde Witch of Lime Street. And

she was renowned for conjuring the voice of her dead brother,

Walter, whose spirit rapped out messages, tipped tables, and even

sounded trumpets. Even by ghost standards, Walter was unfriendly,

answering questions and quoting scripture in a gruff disembodied

voice. Margery, by contrast, was charming and attractive—at least

when she wasn’t showing off her most convincing psychic talent:

extruding a slithery, viscous substance called “ectoplasm” from her

orifi ces. Photos show this otherworldly substance fl owing from her

nose and ears, but mostly it emerged from beneath a sheer kimono

like a string of entrails—an “ectomorphic hand” that Walter used to

carry out his commands.

Today we remember the era’s jazz, speakeasies, and

glitz, but the ’20s were also the zenith of America’s

obsession with the spirit world. Reeling from losing

an estimated 15 million people in the Great War and

21 million more to the Spanish-fl u pandemic, people

were searching for ways to connect with the dead.

Spirit guides emerged to help the bereaved, usually

for hefty fees. And as reputable magazines and

newspapers increased their coverage of paranormal

phenomena, mediums became rock stars. Margery

herself had become a messiah to hundreds of

thousands of Americans.

In the summer of 1924, Margery occupied the red-hot

center in the raging national debate over Spiritualism, an

80-year-old religious movement that centered around

the possibility of communicating with the dead. The most famous

of its 14 million believers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the

Sherlock Holmes mysteries and a man of impeccable reputation.

Witnessing a séance in his London home, he became convinced

of Margery’s supernatural powers. Her refusal to be compensated

for her miracles only added to her credibility. It wasn’t long before

Doyle had recommended her to the editors of Scientifi c American,

which was offering a $2,500 prize to the fi rst medium who could

verifi ably demonstrate to its six-man investigative committee a “vi-

sual psychic manifestation.”

Houdini’s Greatest TrickT H E M A G I C I A N I S FA M O U S F O R H I S T H R I L L I N G E S C A P E S , B U T T H E F E AT H E

S H O U L D B E K N O W N F O R I S B R E A K I N G I N TO A S É A N C E . B Y R O B E R T L O V E

This was no fl y-by-night group of spook

hunters. Scientifi c American’s J. Malcolm

Bird chaired the committee, which included

psychologist William McDougall of Harvard,

former MIT physicist Daniel Comstock, and

two members of the Society of Psychical

Research, Hereward Carrington and Walter

Prince. Bird and Carrington had already

examined Margery more than 20 times and

were ready to hand over the money. The New

York Times reported the development with a

straight face: ‘margery’ passes all psychic

tests scientists fi nd no tirckery in

scores of séances with boston medium.

But Houdini, who’d suggested creating the

panel after Scientifi c American approached

him to investigate Spiritualism, had yet to

offer his approval. When he learned the

committee was prepared to endorse Margery,

he was outraged. Having already exposed the

tricks of other celebrity mediums, Houdini

was sure the committee was about to be

duped once more. He canceled his shows

and headed for Boston.

MARGERY GREETED THE PANEL and took

her seat within a three-sided Chinese

screen, the lights dimmed. Soon enough,

an eerie whistling fi lled the room. On cue,

the spirit of Walter whispered his arrival,

even touching Houdini on the inside of his

right leg. After a break, he ordered an elec-

tric bell enclosed in a wooden box brought

to Houdini’s feet. Then Walter levitated a

megaphone and boomed: “Have Houdini

tell me where to throw it.”

“Toward me,” Houdini said, and the mega-

phone fl ew through the air and crashed in

front of him. That was just the beginning.

Throughout the evening, Walter produced

a sequence of metaphysical spectacles, ring-

ing the bell box on command and tipping

over the wooden screen.

Houdini had done his homework. He knew

that Dr. Le Roi Crandon, Margery’s husband,

always sat on her right. (A Harvard-educated

O

MARGERY WAS

CHARMING AND

ATTRACTIVE—

AND KNOWN

FOR EXTRUDING

ECTOPLASM.


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HISTORY

surgeon, Crandon was her greatest promoter,

often showing visitors nude photographs

of his wife in séance delicté). Houdini also

guessed correctly that he would be seated at

her left in the circle, with hands joined, feet

and legs touching. In preparation for the

evening, Houdini wore a tight bandage under

his right knee all day; it was so painful it made

his skin tender to even the slightest touch.

The heightened sensitivity paid off. He could

feel Margery twist and fl ex in the dark as she

moved her left ankle slightly to get to the bell

box under the table. Later, he felt her shift

again to tip the Chinese screen with her foot.

The fl ying megaphone stumped Houdini for a

few hours, but he eventually fi gured out that

Margery had placed it on her head, dunce-

cap-style, with a momentarily free hand. She

then jerked her head in his direction to send

it crashing to the fl oor.

“I’ve got her,” he said when the evening was

over. “All fraud. Every bit of it. One more sit-

ting and I will be ready to expose everything.”

A second séance at a Boston hotel fea-

tured a levitating table. Houdini reached

out in the dark and found Margery’s head

lifting the table from beneath. He again felt

her legs move as she reached to ring the

bell box. “The slickest ruse I ever detected,”

Houdini said later, in something close to ad-

miration. But when he announced his fi nd-

ings to the committee, he was asked to hold

off on a public denunciation.

The committee was confl icted. When

it refused to award the prize after several

additional séances, the Spiritualists became

enraged—as did the spirit. “Houdini, you

goddamned son of a bitch,” Walter roared.

“I put a curse on you now that will follow

you every day for the rest of your short life.”

Bird and Carrington, still fi rmly under

Margery’s seductive spell, continued to

report that she had supernatural powers.

In October, Scientifi c American published

an article that described the committee as

hopelessly divided.

The dithering angered Houdini. In

November, he published a pamphlet called

Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the

Boston Medium “Margery,” complete with

drawings of how she produced her “mani-

festations.” “She certainly was clever in her

maneuvering to pull the wool over the eyes

of the committeemen,” he said, admitting the

ingenuity of her techniques as he debunked

their metaphysical nature. Houdini’s pam-

phlet humiliated Margery, but he wasn’t

done yet: The “scourge of Spiritualism” want-

ed to make the religion disappear. Before

long, Houdini was reproducing Margery’s

so-called miracles to great laughter in perfor-

mances across the nation.

Margery didn’t get the Scientifi c American prize, but Houdini’s

efforts didn’t slow her down. Dr. Crandon pushed his wife to

continue holding séances, inviting all doubters to the room at 10

Lime Street. In 1925, the Harvard faculty formed an investigative

team, which skeptically witnessed new manifestations of her

talents, including a luminous jumping paper “doughnut.” One

investigator reported that he’d witnessed Margery reaching

beneath her dress and pulling out strands of fake ectoplasm, which

appeared to be “butcher’s offal.”

Meanwhile, Margery’s supporters went on the offensive, threat-

ening to beat Houdini to a pulp and rooting for his demise. The

escape artist continued to defy death in his stage show—locked,

bolted, or chained in coffi ns submerged in water or buried under

six feet of sand. Each time, he escaped. But Walter, Margery’s angry

spirit guide, knew better. In August 1926, the spectre proclaimed

that the end was near: “Houdini will be gone by Halloween,” he said.

In fact, Houdini died in agony on the afternoon of

October 31, 1926 from septic poisoning. Throughout

his career, Houdini had offered his steely abs to

anyone who cared to take a shot. But when a student

from Montreal threw a punch before Houdini could

tense up, the blow ruptured his appendix, leading to

a fatal infection. Houdini had worked hard to debunk

Margery, but in a strange twist of fate, it was Margery

who had the last word.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived on for four more years

and died a believer. The author’s spirit appeared to

Margery often as she soldiered on through the depths

of the Great Depression and her own alcoholism, but

Houdini’s debunking had taken its toll. By the time she

died at her house on Lime Street in 1941, her reputa-

tion and the Spiritual movement were in tatters. One

of Walter’s fi ngerprints turned out to be her dentist’s,

and one of her greatest supporters, Malcolm Bird,

admitted to helping produce Walter’s actions at séances. But the

fascination with Margery remained. Even on her deathbed, a psy-

chic researcher showed up, hoping for a confession—or at least a

hint of how she pulled off her most famous tricks. “Why don’t you

guess?” she laughed bitterly. It was clear that the Blonde Witch of

Lime Street wasn’t done toying with them yet. “You’ll all be guess-

ing—for the rest of your lives.”

“THE SLICKEST

RUSE I EVER

DETECTED,”

HOUDINI SAID

LATER, IN

SOMETHING

CLOSE TO

ADMIRATION.

Harry Houdini

exposes

Margery’s trick,

showing how

Walter really

rang the bell.

CO

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sedate her, she’ll drown. In most situations,

the only real option is to tire her and the

calf out until you can get close, Cottrell says.

That’s what he and his team did when they

rescued a calf in September 2012. From their

boat, they grappled on to the commercial

crab gear wrapped around the calf ’s tail and

hung on for nearly fi ve hours until the whale

was exhausted. Even then, cutting the animal

loose takes skill and careful planning. “Cut

the wrong rope and it’s going to be harder

to grapple on,” Cottrell says. “That can be a

worse situation.”

PATIENCE, PATIENCE, PATIENCE Rescues can

drag on for days or even weeks. In May 2009,

a 35-ton humpback got tangled in 15 heavy-

duty prawn traps. Cottrell and his team cut

away as much as they could during daylight,

but they had to suspend the rescue at sunset.

With no other options, they attached buoys

to the animal and estimated its speed. Then

the team went to bed. “That was the longest

night of my life,” Cottrell says. “I was trying to

sleep, thinking if we don’t relocate this ani-

mal, it may wash up dead [with] our buoys

on it.” Thankfully, they freed the whale the

next day.

STAY IN THE BOAT When you’re dealing with

a 40-foot whale, that boat is your best friend.

“Getting into the water, where there’s nets

and lines—that’s how you drown,” Cottrell

says. It’s a rookie move. There are videos of

amateurs disentangling whales on YouTube,

but Cottrell uses them as anti-training fi lms.

“These people are lucky they didn’t die,”

Cottrell says. In other words: Don’t try this

at home!

BE A TEAM PLAYER Cottrell is humble about

his role, always emphasizing that he’s just one

man in a larger network—the British Columbia

Marine Mammal Response Network, to be ex-

act. The organization includes more than 400

volunteers, starting with commercial fi sher-

men or residents who spot a whale in trouble

as well as the local fi shery offi ces with knowl-

edge of currents, weather, and geography.

And then, there’s the elite group of 15 or so

disentanglers worldwide, who are working to

develop a training manual with strict proto-

cols. Of course, while Cottrell is quick to share

credit, he’s also aware of his skills. “I have to

untangle my Christmas lights” just like every-

one else, he says. “But I am good at disentan-

gling, so I quickly, quickly deal with it.”

The Whale LifeguardW H E N A B U S - S I Z E B A L E E N G E T S S N A R E D I N A

N E T, I T ’ S U P T O VA N C O U V E R ’ S M A S T E R W H A L E

D I S E N TA N G L E R , PA U L C O T T R E L L , T O G E T I T

O U T. T H E S E A R E H I S S E C R E T S . B Y R U T H B E A C H

GEAR UP Cottrell started radio tagging harbor seals nearly 25 years ago. As

the Pacifi c regional marine mammal coordinator for Canada’s department of

fi sheries and oceans, he understands sea-animal behavior better than most.

But there’s more to his job than whale whispering. Major entanglements

with an anchor line can trap the mammal below the surface, where it will

drown. Minor snarls, too, can be tragic—a gill net wrapped around a whale’s

head can hinder its ability to eat. Luckily, Cottrell is one of the best in the

world, and to save the whales, he uses a set of specifi c tools. For tracking an

animal on the move, he needs satellite tags and a laptop, buoys, and a 24-

foot rigid-hull infl atable boat. Grappling hooks and blades attached to long,

lightweight poles make short work of lines and nets. And Cottrell is always

on call. When the phone rings, he and his SWAT team suit up and hop a

chartered fl ight.

TUCKER THE ANIMAL OUT There’s no way to tell an agitated 45-foot mama

humpback to chill while you untangle her 25-foot calf from a fi shing net. If you

MARINE BIOLOGY


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Mom, I was just holding those for a friend.”


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Sure, with its sprawling server farms, Google is probably the web’s most powerful entity. But to us, powerful isn’t just about computations—it’s about changing what we eat, how we vote, and the ways we kill time at the of ice. >

BY ADRIAN CHEN

WEBSITES



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THE 25 MOST POWERFUL WEBSITES

THE FIRST successful webcam wasn’t sexy, funny, or even all that

interesting. It was a low-resolution camera pointed at a cof eemaker. In

1991, computer scientists at the University of Cambridge were tired of

trekking upstairs for a cup of Joe only to find the cof eepot outside the

Trojan Room lab empty. They set up a live video feed connected to a local

network. When they made the page public, in 1993, it became Internet

famous. As traf ic swelled, the lab even added a lamp so international visi-

tors could peek in after hours.

By luring millions of visitors, the cof eepot proved that anything can

be hypnotic on the web. That opened the floodgates for slightly more

engaging live streams: from the voyeuristic JenniCam to feeds of live

panda cubs. But by 2001, the cof eepot’s 15 minutes had long passed.

Researchers packed up the camera and moved to a new facility. The

pot? It sold for $2,300.

No.1≥ TROJAN

ROOM COFFEEPOT

SPACE JAM

If you need updates about the hottest movie of 1996, this site boasts, “You’ve made it: Jam Central Station, the central depository for all things Space Jam.”http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

THREE RIVERS STADIUM

Once home to the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers, Three Rivers Stadium met the wrecking ball in 2001, but its digital presence soldiers on in denial.3riversstadium.com

INTERNET EXPLORER IS EVIL

Still livid about Microsoft forcing you to install Internet Explorer 1 in 1998? You’re not alone!toastytech.com/evil/

CNN’S O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL PAGE

There haven’t been any new develop-ments in the O.J. murder trial in 17 years, but CNN’s web portal still collects the network’s breaking coverage.cnn.com/US/OJ/

Old websites don’t die. They

just hang around waiting to

move to digital Valhalla.

INTERNET FOSSILS!

THE STEAMIEST WEBCAM EVER



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http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

http://3riversstadium.com/

http://toastytech.com/evil

http://cnn.com/US/OJ




In 1999, writer Gail Simone noticed an

unsettling trend in comic books: a dis-

proportionate number of female super-

heroes were being killed, maimed, or

depowered, compared with their male

counterparts. So she created Women

in Refrigerators, a database of heroines

who had met untimely demises. The

name comes from the Green Lantern’s

girlfriend, who was stuf ed into a fridge

after being murdered by one of his

nemeses.

Simone did more than just chronicle

these grisly ends. By giving writers the

opportunity to respond, she created an

important forum for discussing sexism

in the art form. The site opened the

doors to similar critiques about the

disproportionate attacks on gay and

lesbian characters. Soon, the phrase

“women in refrigerators” became

shorthand for problematic depictions

of women across pop culture. It also

helped Simone become part of the

solution. In 2007, she became the first

female writer to helm DC’s Wonder

Woman in the title’s 66-year history.

BEFORE THE INTERNET, getting a medical diagnosis required

consulting a trained professional. That changed in 1996, when

WebMD debuted the Symptom Checker, a catalog of condi-

tions that nervous web browsers could peruse for hours. The

problem, of course, is that self-diagnosis isn’t quite the same

as visiting someone who owns a stethoscope. As a result, the

site fomented a brand-new malady: cyberchondria—Internet-

induced hypochondria.

Just how needlessly alarming can the web be? Fewer

than 1 in 50,000 people have a brain tumor, but according

SAVIOR OF SUPERHEROINES

No.4≥ WEBMD

to Psychology Today, enter the word headache into a search

engine and you’ll find that 25 percent of the results point to brain

tumors as a probable cause. That explains why a 2008 study

confirmed that 40 percent of people who use the web to self-

diagnose end up suf ering increased anxiety.

What makes WebMD stand out from the pack? As The New

York Times noted, its click-friendly alarmist tone makes it chum

for cyberchondriacs. And the strategy pays—in 2010, the site

generated more than $500 million in advertising profit. Great for

WebMD. For the suf erer of the common cold? Not so much.

FACEBOOK

USERS UPLOAD

2.5 BILLION

IMAGES A

MONTH.

SPAWN OF A NEW AFFLICTION

Amazon has changed the way

Americans shop, but its most powerful

of ering doesn’t come in a box. Over the

past few years, Amazon has quietly laid

the groundwork for a cloud-computing

takeover that could be even more

far-reaching.

In 2006, Amazon started leasing out

storage space on its massive server

farms, saving companies the hassle of

setting up expensive in-house systems.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), as it’s

known, helps some of the world’s

biggest businesses run. Netflix uses it

to stream billions of hours of video to

consumers, while banks rely on AWS

to crunch numbers from their massive

databases. As Borders can tell you,

don’t bet against Amazon’s ability to

completely transform an industry.

no.

2 Amazon

SERVING THE NEW WEB ORDER

NO.3 WOMEN IN

REFRIGERATORS

You’re

experiencing

trembling. Could

it be associated

with any of these

common causes?



WorldMags.net





GOOGLE FIELDS 40,000 SEARCHES

PER SECOND.

9%According to a

Harvard Business School study, a one-

star increase in a restaurant’s Yelp rating boosts the eatery’s profits by

five to nine percent.

no.

6 YELP

WHERE THE PEANUT

GALLERY MAKES BIG DOUGH

RUSSIA’S Alexei Navalny can ruin a politician’s career with a

single blog post. Known for his bold exposés—including leaking

internal documents from crooked state-run companies—Na-

valny’s incendiary writing helped spark the biggest antigovern-

ment protests Russia has seen in years. Just as the Drudge Report

rocked American politics by picking up the Monica Lewinsky

scandal before mainstream outlets would touch it, Navalny will do

whatever it takes to keep Moscow’s elite honest. What’s surprising

is his weapon of choice: LiveJournal.

In the U.S., the online diary site is best remembered as a cache

of bad poetry and Star Trek fan fi ction. But in Russia, where the

nickname for the site, ZheZhe, doubles as the word for blogging, it’s

a vital broadcast system. Thirty-fi ve million people have accounts,

including celebrities, politicians, and even Prime Minister Dmitry

Medvedev, and it’s seen as one of the few places where citizens and

journalists can publish without censorship. Unfortunately, all that

free speech has hurt Navalny. After four years of rabble-rousing, the

government slapped him with trumped-up embezzlement charges,

the legality of which is no doubt being debated on LiveJournal.

KEEPING POLITICIANS HONEST

No.7≥ LIVEJOURNAL

As a tiny island nation with just

300,000 residents, Iceland’s

gene pool is dangerously shallow;

discovering that your hot date is a

not-too-distant cousin is a distinct

possibility. In 1997, a team that

included deCODE Genetics solved

the problem with the site Islend-

ingabok. Citizens enter a potential

mate’s name into the Book of Ice-

landers, and the site parses 1,200

years’ worth of genealogical data to

determine how closely related they

are. But what if you meet someone

at a bar and don’t want to spoil the

moment by fi ring up your laptop?

Islendingabok has an app for that.

Just tap phones with your prospect,

and wait for the all-clear. As the

tagline cheerfully advises: “Bump

the app before you bump in bed.”

no.

5 Islendingabok

COUSIN-KISSING PREVENTION



WorldMags.net




PETS.COM WAS LITERALLY

fl ying high on November 25,

1999. A 36-foot balloon version

of the site’s famous sock-

puppet dog mascot soared over

New York City in the Macy’s

Thanksgiving Day Parade. A

few months later, the company

would rake in $82.5 million in

an initial public offering.

The sock puppet—voiced by

Michael Ian Black—cemented

its status as a pop culture icon

by appearing in a $25 million

Super Bowl ad. The puppet

was interviewed by People and

appeared on Good Morning

America. When Pets.com began

offering sock puppets, it sold

10,000 in the fi rst week, more

than all its pet-related products.

That fact alone should have

raised red fl ags. No ad campaign

could fi x Pets.com’s unsustain-

able business model, which

required shipping heavy bags of

food at huge losses. This strategy

led to $62 million in losses in

1999. Despite partnering with

Amazon, the site had to be put

to sleep in November 2000.

“The only thing I ended up

with out of that investment is a

sock puppet,” Amazon CEO Jeff

Bezos told Vanity Fair. And the

rest of the Internet-commerce

industry? It learned that the

value of having a catchy mascot

is second only to having a solid

business model. As for the pup-

pet, the critter now serves as the

mascot for 1-800-BarNone, a

Michigan-based car loan com-

pany for drivers with bad credit.

BarNone’s slogan: “Everyone

deserves a second chance.”

You can’t click on too many

sites without running into a troll,

the folk devils of the Internet

who live to spout mean-spirited

nonsense. If you want to trace

the behavior back to its source,

there’s only one place to look:

4chan. When 15-year-old Chris-

topher “Moot” Poole started a

seemingly innocent anime fan

board in 2003, he didn’t realize

he was opening the web version

of Pandora’s box. 4chan quickly

grew into one of the darkest

corners of the web thanks to its

anarchic “/b/” section, where

anonymity gave rise to a culture

of bullying and harassment.

But strangely, even as 4chan

has grown as a staging ground

for flame wars, it’s also been a

hive of positivity. The site incu-

bated many of the web’s silliest

memes, including Lolcats and

Rickrolling.

4chan’s most powerful legacy,

however, is the hacktivist collec-

tive Anonymous. The group first

organized in the mid-2000s to

campaign against Scientology,

but today the masked hackers

often rally around social causes,

taking down government web-

sites to protest censorship or

hounding animal abusers.

Even trolls have hearts.

EVERYTHING GOOD

AND BAD ON THE WEB

no.

9 SLASHDOT

In the late 1990s and early

2000s, long before Reddit

unearthed its first meme,

Slashdot was the center

of the nerd universe. The

collection of tech news,

opinion, and inside jokes

was required reading for

geeks, who flocked to any

site Slashdot endorsed

with a link.

Unfortunately, these

plugs were a catch-22 for

burgeoning sites. Slashdot’s

vast audience was so

enthusiastic that it flooded

and crashed target sites’

servers. Users even coined

the term “Slashdotted” to

describe these outages.

Paradoxically, the durabil-

ity of today’s sites is a direct

result of the “Slashdot

Ef ect.” Programmers knew

they needed more robust

sites to survive Slashdot’s

high-volume love, so they

invested in improving soft-

ware, caches, and servers

to handle large quantities

of traf ic, making great

websites better and harder

to crash.

EVEN WHAT KILLS YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER

IN 2000,

DAVID BOWIE’S

HOURS… WAS

THE FIRST

DIGITAL ALBUM

DOWNLOAD.

NO.10 4CHAN

No.8≥ PETS.COM

ASSERTING THE SOCK PUPPET’S CULTURAL DOMINANCE

AL

AM

Y (

PU

TIN

)



WorldMags.net

http://PETS.COM/

http://PETS.COM/

http://Pets.com/

http://Pets.com/





WHEN college freshman Aaron Peckham launched Urban Dic-tionary in 1999, he used the site to catalog the ridiculous lingo he and his friends made up. But as people from across the web began contributing and voting on the accuracy of definitions, what began as a goof self-corrected and transformed into a valuable resource.

Today, the crowdsourced database contains more than two million definitions of slang words and phrases—a godsend to less-than-hip parents. (For the record, Mom: “nom: 1) The act of eating. 2) An act of af ection.”)

But the site’s greatest beneficiary might be the U.S. legal sys-tem. According to The New York Times, courts are increasingly leaning on the online dictionary to define slang. And while it’s both hilarious and uncomfortable to think of lawyers reading elderly juries the site’s definition of twerking—“when a woman slams her bottom on a man’s pelvic area while dancing”—it makes all the dif erence in cases involving sexual harassment, where decisions often hinge on parsing linguistic intent.

THE FIRST

YOUTUBE VIDEO

SHOWS FOUNDER

JAWED KAREEM

AT THE ZOO.

In April 1993, the particle-physics

lab CERN changed the digital

world forever by launching the

world’s first website. It was refresh-

ingly minimalist—actually, it was

dreadfully boring—just a straight-

forward presentation of informa-

tion. It was the content and the fact

that CERN was making it available

royalty-free that was revolutionary.

The site shared basic technical

information about how to code

a web page, how to search for

information on the web, and the

source code for setting up a web

server. It also provided instructions

for building sites and browsing the

web. Like an invasive species, the

information spread, and websites

began popping up everywhere. By

the end of the year, there were 500

sites. Today, more than 630 million

make up a huge part of the digital

universe as we know it.

no.

12 CERN

THE MOTHERSHIP

WHERE JIVE TURKEYS SWAY JURIES

No.11≥ URBAN DICTIONARY

A few more examples of what makes Urban Dictionary a lifesaver

•couch syrup “The liquor one hides in a couch while pretending to be sober”

•hungs “A shortened way of saying one is hungry”

•textretary “A sidekick who texts for the driver”

•almost-quaintance “A person to whom one has at one point sent a successful social networking friend request”

•on blast “To embarass someone or to make someone look stupid”



WorldMags.net




NO.14 GITHUB

THE ROSETTA STONE

OF CODE

No.15≥ OH MY NEWS

In a medium where unsubstantiated rumors spread like wildfire, verifying information takes on a special significance. David and Barbara Mikkelson run Snopes, the web’s foremost fact-checking site, from their California home, and they’ve allayed our collective anxiety by debunking some doozies.

Thanks to the Mikkelsons’ meticulous research, we are no longer burdened by the following urban legends:

By allowing anyone to con-

tribute lines of code, the open

source movement was able

to tackle some of computing’s

thorniest problems. GitHub, a

kind of Facebook for program-

mers founded in 2008, made

open source even more demo-

cratic by allowing its 1.3 million

members to introduce fixes

without having to go through a

project manager.

Because GitHub catalogs

all the iterations of a code,

sites like TechCrunch have

hailed it as a modern Library

of Alexandria, a catalog that

beginners and experts can use

to better understand coding

and develop ever more elegant

solutions. And as TechCrunch

also notes, GitHub has one dis-

tinct advantage over its ancient

forebear. Because users write

and edit by copying existing

patches of code onto their own

computers, there’s little danger

this incredible resource will be

lost to the sands of time.

BACK IN 2000, South Korean journal-

ist Oh Yeoh-ho was fed up with his

country’s mainstream media, so he

launched Oh My News. True to its

slogan, “Every Citizen Is a Reporter,”

his online newspaper allows anyone to

submit stories, which are then read and

edited by paid staffers.

Two years later, Oh My News rose

to prominence with its coverage of a

story other outlets wouldn’t touch: the

deaths of two schoolgirls crushed by a

U.S. Army truck. When a user posted

a heartfelt plea to protest the deaths,

10,000 Koreans fl ooded into Seoul’s

streets for a massive candlelight vigil.

The rally highlighted Oh My News’s

power as an organizational tool, and

supporters of Roh Moo-hyun, an ideal-

istic presidential candidate, took note.

Although Roh had been a dark horse,

Oh My News helped him squeak out

a win. Roh was so appreciative of his

digital army that he snubbed the major

media and gave his fi rst postelection

interview to the people’s paper.

no.

13 Snopes

A MYTH-BUSTING MARRIAGE

THE SITE THAT ELECTED A PRESIDENT

AL

AM

Y (

RO

H M

OO

-HY

UN

)



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NO.18 THE HUNGER SITE

ONE FOR YOU,

TWO FOR ME

No.17≥ Craigslist

Saving the world is hard work.

Or at least it was until John

Breen revolutionized social

justice in 1999 by creating an

ingenious charity that appealed

to lazy do-gooders. All someone

had to do was click a button,

and, as if by magic, ¼ cup of

food would be donated to the

United Nations’ World Food

Programme.

Breen’s click-to-donate model

was wholly original. He sold day-

long sponsorships to the site,

convincing big-name advertis-

ers to absorb his costs. It was a

win-win for everyone—people

were fed, companies looked

good, and users added a little

satisfaction to their days. Well, it

was great for everyone except

Breen, who was overwhelmed.

As the dot-com bubble burst

and maintenance rose beyond

his capabilities, Breen sold

The Hunger Site to a shopping

portal, where it became a for-

profit corporation and ran out

of money. But the site laid the

foundation for a new generation

of creative capitalism, inspiring

entrepreneurs to find new ways

of getting people to do good

without having to do much.

ASK ANYONE who’s ever desperately needed a roommate, a last-

minute concert ticket, or a used ukulele: We would be lost with-

out Craigslist. What started as a Bay Area email list in 1995 has

grown into a massive hub of more than 100 million ads a month.

Humans have been trading goods forever, of course, but

through the 20th century we had to rely on newspaper classfi ed

ads. That method was time-consuming and relied on a lot of luck

and patience (and your hands got grubby from the newsprint).

Craigslist revolutionized that equation with convenience, speed,

and a much wider draw—all at no cost to most users.

Strangely enough, Craigslist has proved that free can pay.

For all its grassroots charm, the site has backing from serious

investors, and they’re making serious money. In 2012, the site

made $126 million in revenue, primarily from the nominal fees

it charges for posting help-wanted ads in certain markets. That’s

enough to buy a lot of used coffee tables.

In 1999, Napster turned

any computer into an

infi nite jukebox. But

Metallica couldn’t just be

cool about it, and court

orders laid the service to

rest two years later. For

the record industry, the

damage was done—the

notion that music was

something that could

be possessed was gone

forever.

In Napster’s wake,

fi le-sharing hubs popped

up around the world,

sparking lawsuits and

debates about intel-

lectual property. One of

these sites, the Swedish

hub Pirate Bay, came

to embody the inter-

national movement to

reform copyright laws

through its loose affi lia-

tion with the burgeon-

ing political group, also

Swedish in origin, the

Pirate Party. Founded by

tech entrepreuneur Rick

Falkvinge, the Pirate

Party—which stands

chiefl y for civil liberties,

freedom of information,

and copyright reform—

quickly spread through

Europe. It found par-

ticularly strong traction

in Germany and Iceland,

where this year voters

elected three candidates

from the Pirate Party to

parliament. The party is

now organized and cam-

paigning for copyright

reform and the free shar-

ing of information in

more than 43 countries.

no.

16 The Pirate Bay

THE SITE THAT LAUNCHED A POLITICAL PARTY

REFRESHING THE BARTER ECONOMY

At the other end of the spec-

trum, Alex Tew needed tuition

money, so he did something

audacious—he asked for it. In

2005, he started a site, Million

Dollar Homepage, sold the pix-

els to advertisers for a dollar

apiece, and in just six months,

Tew cleared the million-dollar

hurdle. All of which proved

that when it comes to crowd-

sourcing funds, no cause is

too selfish.

NO.19 MILLION DOLLAR

HOMEPAGE

BITTORRENT ACCOUNTS FOR 18% OF ALL INTERNET

TRAFFIC.



WorldMags.net




GRUMPY CAT’S

REAL NAME IS

TARDAR SAUCE.

Inspired by classifieds, Match.com

founder Gary Kremen, started

registering domains like Autos.

com and Jobs.com in 1994. Those

domains were worth a pretty

penny, but during the domain-

name gold rush, Sex.com was El

Dorado.

Unfortunately for Kremen, the

domain also caught the eye of

con man Stephen Michael Cohen.

In 1995, Cohen used forged docu-

ments and incredible chutzpah to

convince a registration company

to transfer the domain to him. He

quickly outfitted Sex.com with

a slew of porn ads that began

amassing millions of dollars.

Kremen sued for control of his

domain, but Cohen’s now-deep

pockets funded a protracted

legal battle. After a five-year fight,

Kremen was awarded the domain

and a $65 million settlement. But

Cohen wasn’t ready to give up his

freedom, so he hid out in Mexico

until 2005. When Kremen finally

got the name back, he sold it for

a then-record $14 million. Today,

Sex.com is an X-rated clone of the

social bookmarking site Pinterest.

The legal system works!

no.

21 Sex.com

No.20≥ HAMPSTER

DANCE

THE SITE WORTH GOING INTO EXILE OVER

SILLINESS PAYS

IN 1998, Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte started a friendly competition with a classmate to see who could drive the most traf ic to a website. LaCarte of ered up Hampster Dance, a page featuring dozens of poorly ani-mated hamsters dancing in an infinite loop to a sped-up version of the Roger Miller song “Whistle Stop.”

LaCarte didn’t know it, but she had

unleashed an Internet plague. A remix

of “The Hampster Dance Song” charted

in countries around the world, and

LaCarte’s critters were licensed for a

children’s television cartoon. LaCarte’s

greatest legacy? Proving Internet popu-

larity is often directly proportional to sil-

liness—an equation that cats and Chuck

Norris have ridden to great fame.

Our Internet Cat Power Ranking

GRUMPY CAT

GREATEST STRENGTH: Always grumpy.

FATAL FLAW: Always grumpy.

KEYBOARD CAT

GREATEST STRENGTH: Dependably

good for a jaunty tune.

FATAL FLAW: Very limited repertoire.

LIL BUB

GREATEST STRENGTH: Adorable

perma-kitten from another planet.

FATAL FLAW: Questionable

spelling skills.

DRAMATIC CHIPMUNK

GREATEST STRENGTH: Theatrically

turning around.

FATAL FLAW: Upon closer

inspection: is not a cat.

NYAN CAT

GREATEST STRENGTH: A Pop-Tart body!

FATAL FLAW: Unrealistic. There’s no air

for pastry cats to breathe in space.

KEYB

GREATE

SUBORDINATE CLAWS

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

MIK

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AV

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BU

B). B

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WorldMags.net

http://Sex.com/

http://Match.com/

http://Autos.com/

http://Autos.com/

http://Jobs.com/

http://Sex.com/

http://Sex.com/

http://Sex.com/





No.24≥ POWERLINE

The web has a woefully short

memory. Links die, codes go bad,

and sites are pulled down in an

instant . Luckily, Brewster Kahle’s

nonprofi t Internet Archive tire-

lessly preserves huge swaths of the

web’s history before it vanishes.

Kahle fi rst had the idea for catalog-

ing the web while designing the

web crawler Alexa Internet. As his

spiders indexed the web, he real-

ized he could store all that informa-

tion. In 2001, he made all of those

cached websites available to the

public with The Wayback Machine,

a massive database of snapshots of

millions of websites through time.

How powerful is this tool for online

researchers? This list wouldn’t have

been possible without it.

no.

23 The Internet Archive

LONG-TERM MEMORY

FROM PRACTICALLY the day they sprang into existence, blogs have

been denigrated as trivial, inaccurate, and derivative. Untrained

writers could never match the accuracy and depth of newspapers

and network news. Power Line, a scrappy right-wing blog, turned

that perception on its ear when it took down one of old media’s most

venerable fi gures: Dan Rather.

In September 2004, Rather and CBS News aired an explosive

story about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National

Guard. The report used military documents to show that Bush had

received preferential treatment and performed poorly while failing to

meet his service obligations. Just two months before Bush came up

for reelection, the report was a bombshell.

Or it would have been, except the documents weren’t authentic.

Power Line cofounder Scott W. Johnson thought something seemed

fi shy, and, thanks to tips from Power Line readers, it took him only

a few hours to expose the critical documents as forgeries. The Inter-

net’s self-taught experts had proved to be more reliable fact-checkers

than the traditional elite in CBS’s news department. As the scandal

erupted, Rather resigned from CBS, and even stalwarts like Time

hailed Power Line’s meticulous work. Score one for new media.

According to a 2012 Stanford

study, 22 percent of heterosexual

couples met online. And Match

claims responsibility for 30 per-

cent of all marriages that began

online. That’s 12 engagements or

weddings per day—in other words,

an awful lot of chicken dancing.

Match didn’t rise to the top of the

pile without competition, though.

Only the strong survive in the

online dating business. Just look

at these rival sites it dispatched

along the way:

•WENEITHER.COM

Attempted to pair of couples by

the things they disliked

•IRRITATEDBEINGSINGLE.COM

For people with IBS or Crohn’s

disease

•CLOWNDATING.COM

A dating site for Bozos

NO.22 MATCH.COM

MADE IN HEAVEN

“AT ONE

POINT, 50

PERCENT OF THE

CDS PRODUCED

WORLDWIDE HAD AN

AOL LOGO ON IT.”

—JAN BRANDT,

AOL’S FORMER CHIEF

MARKETING OFFICER

DAN RATHER, WE HARDELY KNOW YE!



WorldMags.net

http://MATCH.COM/

http://WENEITHER.COM/

http://IRRITATEDBEINGSINGLE.COM/

http://CLOWNDATING.COM/




No.25≥ RAP GENIUS

YOU CAN LEARN how to French braid on YouTube, but deciphering the

lyrics to hip-hop songs? That was nearly impossible before Rap Genius

came along. Started by three Yale alums in 2009, the site has harnessed the

knowledge of rap fanatics to create the web’s most exhaustive database of

lyric interpretations.

But Rap Genius is no mere Wikipedia of samples; the magic is in the

richness of the annotations. Users have fi lled the site with clear but color-

ful footnotes backed by links and additional sources, and rap superstars

occasionally drop by to spill additional knowledge.

Now that the site has proved its value—and nabbed $15 million in ven-

ture capital—the founders want to bring the model into the classroom by

extending into everything ever written. If Rap Genius can unravel dense lyr-

ics, why can’t it break down legal documents? Or historical speeches? Or the

Bible? Silicon Valley’s investors are betting that the Rap Genius model can

make sense of any text. We can’t wait for Ghostface Killah to fi nally explain

Ulysses in language we can understand.

BREAKING IT DOWN

THE AVERAGE

IPOD CONTAINS

$800 WORTH

OF PIRATED

MUSIC.

To be fair, Richard

Dawson was more a

moderator of family feuds

than an instigator.

Also referencing how

he breaks up families

by sleeping with your

respective parents

Or gang wars

Slang for showing off

(REAL ANNOTATIONS

FROM RAP GENIUS)

Since he’s “flossin’, ” this could either mean that

— He’s bragging about his style in a “fashion”

sense, as in how good he looks

Or …

—He’s bragging about how well he can rap,

which is pretty damn well (and most likely).

But he do be stylin’, man.

Rap Genius Explains

WU-TANG CLAN’S

“WU-TANG CLAN AIN’T NUTHING TA F--- WIT”

[VERSE 1: RZA]

YO THERE’S NO PLACE TO HIDE AS I STEP INSIDE THE ROOM

DR. DOOM, PREPARE FOR THE BOOM

BAM! AW, MAN! I, SLAM, JAM, NOW SCREAM LIKE TARZAN

I BE TOSSING AND FLOSSING MY STYLE IS AWESOME

I’M CAUSING MORE FAMILY FEUDS THAN RICHARD DAWSON

AL

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WorldMags.net





They may look like raw heavyweights slapped in diapers and

thrown into a ring, but there’s more to Japan’s oversize athletes

than meets the eye. Behind the scenes, their days are a blend of

rigorous training, fraternity-style hazing, and epic naps.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAOLO PATRIZI

THE SECRET

LIVES OF


WorldMags.net






WorldMags.net




THE STABLE LIFE

At the age of 15, promising wrestlers join

a heya, or “stable,” of 15 to 30 members.

Admission to these elite training camps

is cutthroat—for years, a strict height

requirement forced some shorter hopefuls

to resort to scalp implants. (In 1994, one

diminutive wrestler injected six inches of

silicone into his dome.)

Life only gets tougher after admission.

Tradition dictates a wrestler’s schedule,

wardrobe, and menu. Wrestlers must

maintain a well-oiled chonmage—the

topknot hairstyle once sported by samurai

[below right]—and are obligated to wear

kimonos in public. They also scarf down

about 6,500 calories a day, gorging on a

protein-packed stew called chanko-nabe.

But there is one perk: They can guzzle as

much beer as they want.



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THE DAILY GRIND

Wrestlers rise at 5 a.m. and perform an

endless routine of leg lifts and squats on

an empty stomach. Low-ranking wrestlers

build their stamina by battling senior ones

until they can no longer stand. At noon,

the stable finally eats and then naps [left].

To stack on the pounds, senior wrestlers

can sleep until dinnertime, devour another

meal, and then hit the hay again. The

largest wrestlers can top 400 pounds, but

their frames are deceptively muscular—

they average just 26 percent body fat.

Low-ranking wrestlers’ downtime is

packed with chores: scrubbing the backs

of their elders [right], shopping for gro-

ceries, and cooking for the group. Since

they’re not allowed to drive, wrestlers get

around on bikes—strong, strong bikes.


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MATCHES MADE IN HEAVEN

Japan’s 700 sumo wrestlers

are in constant training for six

annual tournaments, where the

sport’s Shinto roots are on dis-

play. Referees’ outfits are styled

after priests’ robes, and the ring

features a shrine, like the ones

where the first sumo matches

took place 2,000 years ago. To

exorcise evil spirits, wrestlers

toss salt into the ring, and the ref-

eree douses the sacred dirt with

sake. As for the skimpy outfits?

They’re a symbol of toughness.

Baring it all screams “I don’t need

weapons to plow you over.”


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ROM THE MOMENT he fi rst picked up a golf club at

age 10, Jack Nicklaus had an innate grasp of the

game. At 20, he placed second at the U.S. Open.

The next year, he won the tournament, followed

by the Masters and the P.G.A. Championship.

When the 1964 U.S. Open began, he was the

favorite. As he walked onto the course, Nicklaus

was counting on the choreographed power of his swing—which

artfully combined brute force with graceful accuracy—to smash

the ball far onto the fairway.

But something was off. On the fi rst hole, he plunked the ball

directly into a sand trap. Fourteen times that day, he found himself

behind trees and hacking his way out of traps. The next two days

were worse. Nicklaus fi nished the tournament he was supposed to

win tied for 23rd place.

Nicklaus had lost the fi ne sense of timing that was his livelihood,

and he didn’t have long to get it back. In three weeks, he was scheduled

to play in the British Open, one of the most challenging courses in the

sport. Every golfer has a bad day, or even a bad week. But Nicklaus’s

poor performance would put his career in jeopardy if it continued.

B Y D AV I D K . R A N D A L L

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y R YA N S N O O K

While our bodies rest,

our minds get to work.

How a dreaming brain is

your best shot at solving

all your problems.



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A few nights before he left for the Open, Nicklaus dreamed of

pounding the ball onto the fairway. When he woke up, he real-

ized he had held the club slightly differently in his dream, an ad-

justment that allowed him to keep his right arm steady through

the swing. It was a tweak barely perceptible to anyone else, but

Nicklaus instantly recognized it was the solution to his troubles.

He got out of bed, went directly to the course, gripped the club

like he had in his dream, and shot a 68. His old stroke was back.

In his sleep, Nicklaus had solved a problem that was costing him

10 strokes a round: the difference between walking home with a

$100,000 check and barely making enough money to cover air-

fare. His dreaming brain was able to do

something that it couldn’t when he was

awake. Clearly, something happened that

night that led Nicklaus to wake up with a

solution to his swing problem. But what?

SCIENTISTS have long attributed insights

to fl ittering strokes of genius—a mysteri-

ous dance of cells and neurons that adds

up to a game-changing thought—and they

marvel at how the mind, while in a dream,

sometimes suddenly reaches the perfect

solution to a problem. Take the German

chemist August Kekulé, who in 1865 woke

up from a dream about a snake eating its

own tail. At the time, he was working on

a model of the structure of benzene, an

industrial solvent. As he lay in bed, he realized that benzene’s

chemical bonds fi t into the same hexagonal shape as the snake

in his dream. Benzene’s chemical makeup had been confounding

engineers and scientists; the discovery was so important to Ger-

man industry that Kekulé was awarded a title of nobility.

What dreaming does for our brains is most evident in stories like

these, in which the mind solves a problem without any conscious

effort. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously awoke from an opium-

induced dream in 1816 with 300 lines of poetry in his head, which

became “Kubla Khan.” Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” after

waking up with the melody in his mind. Dreaming seems to be the

time when the mind works in its laboratory, testing approaches

and solutions to situations that were a part of its waking life. But

scientists are only now beginning to understand the process.

In the early 1980s, biologists Francis Crick (the Nobel Prize–

winning scientist who helped decipher the structural model of

DNA) and Graeme Mitchison formed a theory about sleep. REM

is when our most vivid dreams occur and a period during which

the mind is as active as it is while awake. If we spend too little

time in REM one night, our brains compensate by prolonging

that stage the next night. Crick and Mitchison theorized that the

brain picks up countless bits of information throughout the day—

the face of a waiter at lunch, the pattern of a coworker’s tie—and

sorts through it at night. Storing all of this information into long-

term memory could keep our brains from fi nding something

important when we need it. Instead, the brain picks and chooses

what it keeps. Information that isn’t essential is forgotten, mak-

ing way for what’s coming the next day. According to the theory,

this process of cleaning up and organizing the mind’s fi ling cabi-

net could take place during REM sleep, which would account for

the randomness of dreams. And with only important information

left, the mind is free to make associations it couldn’t see before.

In the early 2000s, a team of researchers at the University of

Lübeck in Germany put this theory to test. They were curious

whether insights came with time as the brain worked over new

information or whether sleep was the catalyst for new ideas.

To fi nd out, they gave a group of voulunteers number problems

to solve and then allowed them varying amounts of sleep. The

individuals were then assessed on how quickly they came up with

novel solutions to the problems. The subjects who slept discov-

ered quick solutions and shortcuts, while those who didn’t snooze

did not. Sometime in the night, the sleeping subjects’ minds were

able to construct a novel approach. It was as if sleep stretched the

muscles of the brain, and it responded

by bending its conception of facts and

reality in a way that let it arrive at a new

vision. While the study confi rmed that

sleep did enhance problem solving, the

question of whether dreaming played a

role remained. Were dreams just a part

of sleep that occurred while the brain was

consolidating memories and honing new

skills, or did dreams actually help the

brain reach its goal?

ONE NIGHT, after a day of hiking in

Vermont, Robert Stickgold noticed some-

thing strange. As the Harvard professor

started to drift off to sleep, he had the

sensation that he was grabbing rocks

and pulling himself up, as he’d done earlier in the day. When he

shared this experience with colleagues—the feeling that his mind

had been replaying its day as he fell asleep—he learned he wasn’t

alone. His friends had similar experiences after a day of intense,

focused activities like whitewater rafting or—this being a group

of Harvard professors—studying organic chemistry. Stickgold

wanted to conduct a study to see whether this was common.

That’s when a colleague suggested Tetris. Anyone who has

played the video game knows there is something about sorting

all those shapes into straight lines that sticks with you. Stickgold

assembled a group of college students, including some who had

never played the game before. The subjects played a few rounds

and then dozed in the sleep lab. Stickgold woke them up not

long after and asked what they were dreaming about. Approxi-

mately three out of every fi ve replied that they saw falling Tetris

pieces. The challenges the brain had grappled with earlier that day

replayed in the mind as the subjects went to sleep.

Next time you wake up in a cold

sweat, don’t just bury your head under

your pillow and forget it. You could

be sleeping on the next Hollywood

blockbuster! —STACY CONRADT

How to Get Rich

Of Your Nightmares

IT WAS AS IF SLEEP

STRETCHED THE

MUSCLES OF THE

BRAIN AND IT

RESPONDED BY

BENDING REALITY.



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of dreaming, which fused elements of skiing with what the sub-

jects already knew, occurred later in the night, when the adult

brain spends longer amounts of time in REM. As the subjects

slept, their brains conducted free-association sessions, desper-

ately searching for connections.

THIS MAY EXPLAIN not only why the dreams we remember after

a long sleep seem so strange, but also how we craft new ideas

from memory. The open interplay of emotions, facts, and fresh

information allows our brains to see things in a new way. Further

research showed that not all sleep gives the brain the same ben-

efi ts. The quality of sleep a person gets

immediately after learning something

new matters, and the most important

period of learning occurs in the fi rst

six hours of the night. In one study,

researchers trained subjects to per-

form a motor-skill test. One group was

awakened after less than six hours of

sleep and trained to perform a second,

unrelated task. The other group was al-

lowed to sleep normally. Subjects who

did not have their sleep interrupted

were able to complete the motor-skill

test an average of 21 percent faster the

next day. Those who were awakened,

however, improved by an average of

only 9 percent. Their brains, it ap-

peared, were interrupted at a crucial time.

Scientists currently think the process of clearing the mind of

unnecessary information, honing skills, and recognizing patterns

is at work in all stages of sleep. And they know that the benefi ts

improve exponentially the longer someone rests. Subjects who

were able to reach deeper stages of sleep demonstrated a better

command of fl exible thinking, a vital cognitive skill that allows

us to apply old facts and information to new situations. Sud-

denly, a golfer who identifi es a new grip in his sleep doesn’t seem

like an anomaly or even a genius—he seems like living proof of

what our dreams do for us every day. It turns out the old adage

“practice makes perfect” is only half right; success depends on

practice, plus a good night’s sleep.

More reports of Tetris dreams came on the second night of

the study. It seemed that once the mind realized that being

asked to sort falling shapes was no fl uke, it decided to devote

extra time to fi nding a strategy. All the subjects who were new

to Tetris reported seeing game pieces in their dreams, while

only half the experienced gamers did. Intriguingly, Stickgold

also included several subjects in the study who regularly suf-

fered from amnesia. This group, too, reported dreams of falling

shapes, though the subjects could not consciously remember

playing the game. Each person’s brain used sleep as a time to

rehash what it experienced while awake. When subjects played

the game again, their Tetris dreams

appeared to help them improve.

Stickgold decided to take this line of

study further, using more video games.

He convinced Harvard to buy the arcade

game Alpine Racer 2 and install it in his

sleep lab. The game was part of a new

line of machines that required players to

move their whole bodies, rather than just

their thumbs. The experience was paral-

lel to hiking in Vermont or any other full-

body activity that melds decision making

with physical movement, a taxing cogni-

tive process in which time and patience

lead to skill. Stickgold then designed a

study that would test whether humans

continue to dream about new informa-

tion throughout the night. His goal was to determine how novel

data interacts with what the mind already knows. As in the Tetris

experiment, volunteers played the game for 45 minutes and slept

in the lab. But this time, Stickgold waited until some subjects

had completed one or two sleep cycles, the roughly 90-minute

loops that the brain goes through every night, before he woke

them and asked what was going on in their dreams. As in the

Tetris experiment, almost half the subjects who were awakened

early had dreams that seemed out of the video game, dreams of

skiing or hiking in the mountains.

But as the night progressed, something interesting happened:

The dream reports became less straightforward. Subjects be-

gan to say they were dreaming of things like moving quickly

through a forest as if on a conveyor belt. The literal replay of new

information had evolved into analysis. Once an initial phase of

dreaming passed, the brain began fi nding connections and asso-

ciations with the data embedded on its memory cards. This stage

Excerpted from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by David K. Randall. Copyright © 2012 by David K. Randall. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

THE TERMINATOR $78 MILLIONJames Cameron was fighting a 102-degree fever when a vision of a robot dragging itself along the floor with a knife came to him in his sleep. Then California’s future governor got the part, and things really got scary!

MISERY $61 MILLIONWhile dozing on an airplane, Stephen King has said, he “dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig, and bound his novel in human skin. ”

TWILIGHT $398 MILLIONA meadow-side conversation between a girl and a “beautiful, sparkly” boy vampire came to Stephanie Meyer in a dream, she told Oprah. “He was trying to explain ... how much he cared about her, and yet ... wanted to kill her.”

ALAMY



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PH

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JOB ADVICE FOR ASPIRING PILGRIMS

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S WRITING TIPS

ITALY’S CHEESIEST BANK

+ OTHER STUFF WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

In his new series, Time Is a Dimension, Singapore-based artist Fong

Qi Wei attempts to capture the feeling of time in a single photograph.

After shooting the same scene for two to four hours and layering all the shots on top

of one another, Wei slices away scenes to create still images with a moving pulse.

fqwimages.com

GO

MENTAL

City Lights


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CO

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IS (

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BA

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)

How did you become a pilgrim reenactor?

My parents brought me

to visit Plimoth Plantation

when I was a small child,

and a pilgrim woman asked

me to help her do dishes

in the scullery. I wouldn’t

do that at home, but after

drying those wooden

plates, I was hooked!

Afterward, I wrote a hand-

written letter addressed to

Mistress Fuller at Plimoth

Plantation. Somehow,

it got to her, and I got a

letter back. She told me

you could volunteer to be

a pilgrim child. I went to

an audition, and I was so

sad when I had to leave at

the end of the day. It has

literally shaped the rest of

my life.

GO

MENTAL

“Mugwump is a

derogatory word

for somebody in

charge who af ects

to be above petty

squabbles and

factions. So when

your boss tries

to make peace at

the meeting table

like an impartial

angel, he is being a

mugwump.”

“Once you are properly vinomadefied all sorts of

intriguing things start to happen. Vinomadefied,

by the way, does not mean ‘made mad by wine,’

but merely ‘dampened by it.’ ”

“A vomitorium

is not a room in

which ancient

Romans would

throw up halfway

through a ban-

quet in order to

make room for

the next course.

That’s a myth. A

vomitorium is

simply a passage

by which you can

exit a building,

usually a theatre.”

“Once your toes

are snugly

pantofled, you

can stagger of

to the bathroom,

pausing only to

look at the little

depression that

you have left in

your bed, the

dip where you

have been lying

all night. This

is known as a

staddle.”

ONE QUESTION FOR ...

SPEED READ

VISIT Plimoth Plantation, 137 Warren Ave.,

Plymouth, Mass.

of the month:

“There is a single

Old English word

meaning ‘lying

awake before

dawn and worry-

ing.’ Uhtceare is

not a well-known

word even by

Old English

standards, which

were pretty

damn low.”

The Horologicon: A

Day’s Jaunt Through the

Lost Words of the English

Language, by Mark Forsyth,

Berkley, $16

A PilgrimMalka Benjamin, Plimoth Plantation

T

D

Lo

LaLa

B

You know where to stash your money, but where do you keep your extra cheese? Cash-strapped Italian cheesemakers use their maturing parmesan as collateral for loans! Credito Emiliano charges a small premium to defray the cost of its two climate-controlled warehouses, which hold more than 400,000 wheels of crumbly gold, so it never has to eat a loss.

If you learn just six words of Old English this month …

INVESTMENT CHEESE!


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AL

L P

RO

DU

CT

IM

AG

ES

CO

UR

TE

SY

MA

NU

FA

CT

UR

ER

S

1

3

4

2

7 Ways to Be a Smarter

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1 Jack Kerouac typed 100

words a minute and fed

a giant scroll of paper into

his typewriter so changing

sheets wouldn’t interrupt his

flow. 2013’s answer to that? A

USB typewriter that replaces

your keyboard. $499 and

up; conversion kits from $55,

usbtypewriter.com

2 John Steinbeck wrote of

his favorite pencil: it is

“the best I have ever had … it

is black and soft but doesn’t

break of . ...They are called

Blackwings and they really

glide over the paper.” Procure

a 12-pack of Blackwing

602 pencils ($20, pencils.

com). Then send them

to David Rees, artisanal

pencil sharpener, who will

whittle your writing utensil

to a perfect point and return

it with the shavings and a

certificate of sharpening. $35,

artisanalpencilsharpening.com

3 Despite his fascination

with the raven, Edgar

Allan Poe wrote with his cat—a

tortoiseshell named Catterina—

watching from a perch on his

shoulder. Adopt a furry com-

panion at your local animal

shelter. ASPCA.com

4 Other than rum,

Ernest Hemingway’s

primary tools were paper and

a trashcan. In a letter to F.

Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway

revealed, “I write one page

of masterpiece to ninety-one

pages of shit. I try to put the

shit in the wastebasket.” Cel-

ebrate Hemingway’s 91:1 ratio

by crumpling pages into this

Essey Bin Bin Wastebasket,

$55, switchmodern.com

5Mark Twain hid out in his

study from breakfast until

dinner. If his family needed him,

they blew a horn. Rothco Brass

Cavalry Bugle, $61, rothco.com

6 Long before Arianna

Huf ington made them hip,

Virginia Woolf had a standing

desk. Jesper Height-Adjust-

able Laptop Table, $299,

brookstone.com

7 Vladimir Nabokov wrote

on index cards, which,

according to the Paris Review,

he would “copy, expand, and

rearrange” into novels. Our take?

These letterpress note cards by

AnneBVinyl made exclusively

for mental_floss and delivered in

a nifty pocket protector. $38,

store.mentalfloss.com

Getting dressed is for amateurs. Take a cue

from Gertrude Stein and spend the morning

writing in your bathrobe.

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THE SIMPLIFIER

G O

MENTAL

Baroque

(1600–1760)

Classical

(1730–1820)

Romantic

(1815–1910)

Serialism

(1920s–1950s)

Minimalism

(1960s–?)

Full of layers and gaudy

ornaments, they’re

perfect for a big occasion.

Light, airy, and no-frills—

they’re essentials for a

classy party.

It can take forever to

get to the end, but you’ll

want more when you’re

finished.

A little hard to swallow

and easy to dislike, but

give them a chance!

All these products of the

1960s do is loop around

and around and around.

Bach,

Vivaldi,

Handel

Mozart,

Haydn,

Clementi

Beethoven,

Brahms,

Schubert

Schoenberg,

Boulez,

Webern

Philip Glass,

John Adams,

Steve Reich

STYLE COMPOSERS DESSERT REASON

CO

RB

IS (

CA

KE

S). A

LA

MY

(F

RIE

S, F

RU

ITC

AK

E)

Because Sweet Potato Awareness Fortnight just wouldn’t be enough. Do your part by reminding a stranger that sweet potatoes exist.

November is

The Best Ever Made

THOMAS EDISON MAY HAVE MADE POP CULTURE’S FIRST MEMES—

the inventor fi lmed cats doing silly things long before it was cool. In

1892, Edison and W.K.L. Dickson invented America’s fi rst motion picture

camera, the kinetograph. The duo used it to fi lm a bevy of peephole

shorts, capturing everything from fl exing strongmen to Annie Oakley’s

sharpshooting. But this fi lm of two tabbies duking it out in a tiny boxing

ring is the cream of the crop. A century before the web’s existence, Edison

and Dickson had already predicted the Internet’s greatest gift—cat videos.

Thomas Edison - 1894 Boxing cats is available on YouTube.

Wedding cake

Angel food

cake

Fruitcake

Black Forest

cake

Bundt cake

HOT DATE

DE

B

Explained by CAKECLASSICAL MUSIC

SWEET POTATO

AWARENESS MONTH FELINE

BOXING

VIDEO


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THEIR SEX LIVES Since traditional mating tech-

niques are awkward when you each have eight

legs, the octopus has developed a hands-off

approach to procreation. Males pass along their

genetic material by inserting a particular arm

into the female’s mantle (the scientifi c word for

“gelatinous octopus body”). To avoid entangle-

ments, some males with commitment issues sever

the arm right off and simply hand it over.

READ: Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea, by Katherine Harmon Courage, October 31, Current Books

THEIR GENERAL BADASSERY One of the biggest

challenges of studying octopuses in a lab? Keeping

them in their tanks. The wily critters in Middlebury

College’s octopus lab are experts at getting free

and running—yes, running—amok, hiding in

bookshelves and feasting on fi sh from other tanks.

“You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth,

like you were chasing a cat,” a researcher says.

READ: ÒDeep Intellect: Inside the Mind of theOctopus,Ó by Sy Montgomery, orionmagazine.org

THEIR MARTYR TENDENCIES A mother giant

Pacifi c octopus deposits up to 100,000 eggs, each

the size of a grain of rice, in her den. For six months,

she keeps oxygen fl owing to them and brushes them

with her tentacles to prevent algae from smothering

them, not even leaving their side to eat. The

tearjerker ending? Once they hatch, she dies.

WATCH: Life Season 1, Ep. 8, ÒCreatures of the Deep,Ó BBC America, Amazon.com

CO

RB

IS (

OC

TO

PU

S)

Nicholas by René Goscinny(Phaidon, $10)

No matter what Nicho-las does, happy chaos always follows. From the genius behindAsterix, this 1959 clas-sic was available only in French … until now!

My Dirty Dumb Eyes

by Lisa Hanawalt (Drawn

& Quarterly, $23)

Cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt’s works are occasionally bawdy, often absurd, and always hilarious. They also fea-ture the best illustrations of animal hats ever.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh (Bloomsbury, $26)

Mathematical concepts both useful and obscure ex-plained via the antics of America’s favorite yellow family!

Open by Andre Agassi (Vintage, $16)

In chapter one of this autobiography, Agassi’s dad decks a trucker, waves a gun, and rigs a contraption to shoot tennis balls at his son. Then the story gets crazier.

I Don’t Know by Leah Hager Cohen (Riverhead, $18)

A philosophical meditation on the lost art of admitting igno-rance. What does it say? We’re not sure—we actually haven’t finished it yet.

BRAIN KALE

BRAIN CANDY

Our favorite reads right now

THE PAPER TRAIL

Pop Culture Syllabus:

OCTOPUSES


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http://Amazon.com/





BY LUCAS ADAMS

NAME: _______________________ ___________________________ AGE: _______

OCCUPATION: ________________________________________________________

AL

AM

Y (

MO

BIL

E)Pretty Good

The Best

The Worst

Also Pretty Good

0–4

5–7

8–11

12–15

2 Isaac Bonewits is the

only person to have earned

a degree from an accredited

university in which fi eld?

A Air guitar

B Basket weaving

C Magic

D Pantomime

3 Which culprit caused a

12-hour Internet outage in

Armenia in 2011?

A Russian troops

B A feral cat

C 4chan hacktivists

D A 75-year-old Georgian

woman hunting for

copper scraps

Your

Score!ANSWERS

1. a

2. c (U.C. Berkeley, 1970)

3. d (Georgia supplied

most of Armenia’s

Internet, and the woman

accidentally sliced a

cable with her spade.)

4. d (Rumsfeld didn’t

know a stock photo of

him had been used until

it was reported in Time.)

5. c (Scrooge McDuck

was strangely influential.

He also inspired the plot

of Inception.)

6. c

7. a

8. a

9. d (Frings were fries

fused with onion rings.)

10. c

11. a

12. d

13. b

14. c

15. d

4 Which offi cial appeared

alongside a Japanese geisha

on the packaging of a U.K.

brand of wasabi-fl avored

peanuts?

A Kofi Annan

B Arnold Schwarzenegger

C Madeleine Albright

D Donald Rumsfeld

11 Who were the “them” in the

cult 1954 sci-fi classic Them!?A Giant ants

B Enormous dogs

C Killer bees

D Martians

12 Which character was J.K.

Rowling initially planning

to kill off in Harry Potter:

Order of the Phoenix?

A Ginny Weasley

B Hermione Granger

C Hagrid

D Arthur Weasley

13 Which former president

was elected to the Confed-

eracy’s House of Representa-

tives?

A John Buchanan

B John Tyler

C Millard Fillmore

D Zachary Taylor

14 What was the nickname

of Frederick William I’s divi-

sion of extra-tall soldiers?

A The House of Goliath

B The Battle Monsters

C The Potsdam Giants

D The Angry Giraffes

15 The Land Before Time has

12 sequels. Which of the fol-

lowing isn’t one of them?

A Invasion of the TinysaurusesB Journey to Big WaterC The Secret of Saurus RockD Night of the Asteroids

6 Which of these authors

didn’t want their work

burned after their death?

A Emily Dickinson

B Franz Kafka

C George Eliot

D Virgil

7 Which of these is not the

name of a horse that won the

Kentucky Derby?

A Mister Sweetie

B Macbeth II

C Exterminator

D Count Turf

8 What was the title of

Bruce Willis’s 1987 debut

album?

A The Return of BrunoB Sing HardC Willis’s WordsD Look Who’s Singing

9 Which classic Jack in the

Box menu item was aban-

doned in the 1970s?

A Fondue Fingers

B Jello Fellows

C Jack Hammers

D Frings

10 Which of these dishes

does not have a national

holiday dedicated to it?

A Waffl es

B New England clam

chowder

C Kielbasa

D Curried chicken

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1 Artist Alexander Calder agreed to build a gold mobile for the Solomon

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5Which comic character inspired the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark?


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ALAMY

Pretty if y.

Which Failed American Colony Are You?

The Defi nitive Personality Test

START HERE

English, old sport.

Anywhere but here.

Give me a year, tops.

Vanished.

Spanish all the way!

They might have absorbed

us.

Jacksonville, Fla.

Borrowed it from a native word for

white beads.

Got it from an archangel. No

big deal.

It’s a shout-out to my homeboy King Charles IX!

Introducing African slavery to what’s now

the U.S.

A bloody revenge massacre by the

French.

No clue! It’s a complete

mystery.

Being home to the first English

child born in America.

Hosting the first Catholic mass in what’s now the United States.

What’s your claim to fame?

What’s your lasting legacy?

What‘s your Achilles’ heel?

Describe your staying power.

Where do you see yourself in

five years?

On the beaches

of the Carolinas.

Winter, tribal attacks, and

slave rebellion.

Vive la France!

SAN MIGUEL

DE GUALDAPEFounded in 1526, you

predated America’s old-est city, St. Augustine, by 40 years. But be-

tween slave revolts and tribal attacks, you lasted

only three months.

FORT CAROLINE

You took a solid crack at staking a Florida

claim for France, but after the Spanish

routed your forces, Paris asked you to

pack it in.

ROANOKEYou mysteriously

vanished sometime between 1587

and 1590, leaving generations of

historians to speculate about

your fate.

YOU AREYOU ARE YOU ARE

Plymouth’s big day is

NOV. 28!

Where’s your favorite coastal

hangout?

Where did you get your name?

How’s your relationship with

the locals?

Attacks from those

sneaky Spaniards.

I’m good for three months,

minimum.

What’s your national background?

EXTRA CREDITGO

MENTAL


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ALAMY

THE MONA LISA HAS NO EYEBROWS.

1,006 WORDS


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The world keeps getting smaller. Leave a small footprint.

*Based on EPA-estimated hwy fuel economy for 2014 Subaru XV Crosstrek CVT models compared to AWD vehicles within Polk’s CUV segments. Actual mileage may vary. †EPA-estimated hwy fuel economy for 2014 Subaru XV Crosstrek CVT models. Actual mileage may vary. **PZEV emissions warranty applies to only certain states. See dealer for complete information on emissions and new car limited warranties.

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