“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Sound familiar? It’s the motto of the United States Postal Service, right? Actually, the USPS has no motto, but this quotation from Book 8 of The Persian Wars, by Herodotus, which is inscribed on the General Post Office in New York City, is a fair evaluation of the lengths to which postal carriers have gone – and still go – to get our mail to us.

In 1860, William H. Russell was sure that his Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company could beat the time of stagecoach wagons, which made the trip from Missouri to California in 24 days. The company built way stations every 10-15 miles, and published the following advertisement:

Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18.
Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred.
Wages, $25.00 per week.

Johnny Fry and Sam Hamilton were first to sign up, signing an oath under which they swore not to cuss, fight, abuse animals, or lie. The Pony Express was born to great expectations. “No danger or difficulty must check his speed or change his route, for the world is waiting for the news he shall fetch and carry… God speed to the pony and the boy!” (The Western Journal of Commerce: Kansas City.) Russell’s prediction proved accurate: the first run was completed in 10 days – less than half the stage time. Riders covered 75-100 miles each day, stopping at the way stations only long enough to change horses.

Sending a letter on the Pony Express was not cheap: $5.00 for 1/2 oz., compared to standard U.S. postage, which was 10¢. But if you were in a hurry, there was no better choice. In 1861, President Lincoln’s inaugural address made the fastest transcontinental trip up until that time: St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in 7 days, 17 hours. But that same year, the transcontinental telegraph was completed, and on October 26, 1861, the Pony Express came to an end after just eighteen months of operation.

Mail has been delivered by horse, boat, sled, snowshoes, skis, trucks, motorcycles, automobiles, mules, pole boats, airplanes, hovercraft, dog sleds, parachutes, and snowmobiles. But none is stranger than missile mail. In 1936, two rockets transported mail about 2000 feet across a frozen lake toward Hewitt, New Jersey, from Greenwood Lake, New York. The rockets crash-landed and slid across the ice. The Hewitt postmaster walked onto the ice and dragged the mail bags the rest of the way.
Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield later attempted again to shoot the mail. On June 8, 1959, Summerfield declared, “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India, or to Australia by guided missiles.”

The submarine USS Barbero fired a guided missile with 3000 letters toward the naval air station in Mayport, Florida. The missile, at 600 mph, covered the 100 miles in 22 minutes. The cost, however, was too great to justify missiles as a standard method of mail delivery.

In Supai, Arizona, a sign in the local café reads, “No fries til mail.” The town of Supai eats more mail than it reads. At the bottom of the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and home to 525 Havasupai Native Americans, Supai is the last place in the United States to get its mail by mule train delivery. Helicopters and air drops are impractical here, so the 3-5-hour trip is made by mule five days a week, with each mule carrying up to 200 lbs. of mailed supplies.

When New York jeweler, Harry Winston, decided to donate the fabled Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, he chose first class mail. “It’s the safest way to mail gems,” Winston was quoted as saying. The delivery from New York City to Washington, D.C., cost Winston $2.44 in postage, and an additional $142.85 for a million dollars’ worth of insurance.

Letter carrier James Todd picked up the diamond at City Post Office and drove to the Natural History building, where he delivered it to the curator. Afterward, Todd told the Washington Post that he felt “a little shaky,” not because of the enormous value of the 45.52 carat diamond, but because he was not used to getting so much attention at his job.

In December, 1954, the postmaster in Orlando, Florida, received the following letter:

Dear Sir:
I am sending my chameleon because I live in Fostoria Ohio and it is too cold for him here. Will you please let him loose.
Sincerely yours,
David __________
P.S. Could you let me know if he arrives there OK? Thank you very much. I am so worried about him.

On December 7, 1954, David received the following response:

Dear David,
I received your chameleon yesterday and he was immediately released on the post office grounds. Best wishes for a merry Christmas!
Sincerely,
L.A. Bryant, Jr.
Postmaster

In 1914, a four-year-old named May Pierstorff, who lived with her parents in Grangevillle, Idaho, was going to visit her grandmother in Lewiston. Her parents calculated that Parcel Post was cheaper than full fare. At 48.5 lbs., the child came in under the weight requirement of less than 50 lbs. It was then legal, and still is today, to mail chickens, so her parents were charged postage at the chicken rate. The Pierstorffs pinned the fifty-three cents in postage to her coat and put May in the baggage car, under the care of the postal clerk. Though it was customary to leave packages in the post office overnight, when May arrived in Lewiston, the postmaster took her to her grandmother. By 1920, it was illegal to mail human beings, although not before an angry mother mailed a baby to the husband who had left her.

The pneumatic tube systems represented a different kind of tunnel vision. Under New York City, workers still occasional encounter remnants of what was once a flourishing underground mail delivery system. Powered by positive rotary blowers and reciprocating air compressors, pneumatic mail tubes could fly under the city at a rate of 100 mph, regardless of snow or traffic snarls overhead. At one time there were 136 operators in New York City, called rocketeers. They could send one tube every 12 seconds. By the 1950s, 55% of NYC mail was send by tubes.

There were problems, however, Each container could hold only five pounds, and could not carry more than one kind of mail. The process was expensive, partly because each container needed to be sorted twice. The time saved in shooting the mail through the tubes was lost in sorting and resorting. The system was suspended from 1919-1922, briefly resurrected in New York and Boston, and finally discontinued in 1953.

Rural Free Delivery, RFD, was born when Postmaster General John Wanamaker thought it made more sense for one person to deliver mail to country homes that for fifty people to go to town for their mail. Until that time, postmasters would often hire a boy to deliver; schoolteachers sent the mail home with their students, and the post office stayed open for one hour after church on Sunday, but none of these systems seemed satisfactory.

The problem with delivery to country homes was, of course, mailboxes. Soon the roadsides were “littered” with orange crates, lard cans, feed boxes, and many other contrivances to hold mail. By 1901, Congress went into action, deciding after prolonged debate that country mailboxes needed to be of a standard size, have a signal flag to show when mail was inside, and be of a height and proximity to the road to be convenient for the mail carrier. The standard basic mailbox cost fifty cents, but there were some locked boxes that cost several dollars. As a result of this expense, some customers refused to buy a mailbox, and the post office refused to deliver their mail, resulting in some contentious exchanges.

When Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began sending out large catalogs each year, they hit upon a retailing gold mine. But the mailboxes needed to be resized, and in the 1920s, Congress approved the larger mailboxes still in use today.

History’s first airmail flight happened in 1859, aboard the hot air balloon, Jupiter. The historic flight took place on August 17, with the temperature in the 90s. John Wise, the aeronaut, was given 123 letters in Lafayette, Indiana, to deliver to New York City. The balloon had to ascend to 14,000 feet to pick up any wind, but that wind, unfortunately, carried it south. After covering only 30 miles in five hours, Wise descended in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his trip was labeled a “trans-county-nental” flight. Wise gave the mail to a postal agent, who put it on a train for New York.

Henry “Box” Brown, a slave who had seen his wife and children sold away from him, mailed himself to freedom on March 29, 1849. With the help of a storekeeper in Louisa County, Virginia, Brown had himself packed into a crate that was 3’x 2’x 2.6’ and labeled “This Side Up With Care,” to be sent to the home of Philadelphia abolitionist James Miller McKim.

At 5’8” and weighing 200 lbs, Brown curled himself into the box with only a small container of water and traveled in that position for 27 hours. The crate was loaded onto a wagon, then to the baggage car of a train, then another wagon, then a steamboat, then another wagon, then a second baggage car, then a ferry, then a third railroad car, and finally a wagon that delivered him to McKim’s house. When no sound was heard from the box delivered to his house, McKim asked, “Is all right within?” and Brown answered, “All right.” When the box was opened, Brown stood up, and passed out.

Public outrage at his story led to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to help escaping slaves. When the law was passed, Brown moved to England, where he remained until 1875.

Some are funny. Others strike an emotional chord. But some Ad campaigns are truly bizarre. From a commercial encouraging you to rent your wife to robots selling fried chicken (or attempting to do so), we look at ten commercials which are known for the notoriety rather than the products they are attempting to promote. Some famous celebrities have helped engender this list, including Hulk Hogan and the present day Governor of California. You may cringe in disbelief.

A Belgian video rental service used a twisted metaphor for this commercial, leading to controversy. It depicts a couple in the mood for love making when the man suddenly packs her off in a box for disposal. Seconds later, the doorbell rings with another woman at his disposal. There was no mention of the video rental service anywhere in the advertisement and the unsuspecting viewer might just have thought the rent-a-wife scheme to be true, only to have checked the website to find an innocuous rental store. Perhaps the creators of the advert should let the poets make use of the metaphors.  



You’ve goto hand it to the Koreans for coming up with something like this. The person who conjured up this idea must have been on something while coming up with this, because he or she has made a very absurd assumption that a robocop devours and relishes the same kind of food that humans eat. The entrance of this friendly monster through the television and the whisking away of the whole fridge at the end of the advert make it all the more unreal. What’s more, he wants ‘frieda chicken’. 



Of all the things that the Church of Scientology preaches ‘Do not murder’ is perhaps the least controversial. However, because it cannot end there, they went ahead and made an advertisement about it. The advert was supposedly an informational one which would act as a ‘roadmap to a happier life through values of compassion and caring that every member of a civilized society holds dear’. The content of the ad is simply a bullet which has just left a revolver while desperate voices cry out in the background and ends with the message ‘Do not murder’. Very obfuscating, indeed.

Sumo wrestling being a rather obscure sport to most people outside of Japan, it seems only natural that those who conjured up this idea were aiming for the bizarre. And that’s exactly where they got. Iridescent sumo wrestlers bumping into each other to create orgasmic pleasure? Naa. The event is far more likely to produce an earthquake. And all this to simply relate the idea of ‘LYMON’? Utterly disturbing.

‘For bonzer car insurance deals, girls get onto Sheila’s wheels’. If you are a girl in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland), you wont have to keep your hands on the steering wheel while you drive because ‘women make the safest drivers’. Coquettish crooning accompanied by a band which follows their tune as the convertible waltzes past the countryside is hardly the way to sell car insurance and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, a mouse appears to be driving the car.

And now to some edification on the art of being illogical. Set an animated lass to cavort in a bar and then at the end of it all, tell the prospective customer to buy your brand of ice-cream. To make it more interesting use a blackboard somewhere along the way to feign erudition and make sure the girl carries the ice-cream with her so that the sensual waves trigger off pleasure which will become readily apparent. Essentially, make sure that your customer is made to believe that consuming ice-cream has the same effects as alcohol.

What do Romanians turn to when they need to inject optimism into life? After years of communist rule, high rates of unemployment, the defection of Nadia Comaneci and the retirement of Dan Petrescu and Gheorghe Hagi, they seem to have come up with the answer. Or that’s what this commercial claims. Because when you have just accidentally chopped off your head when peeling an orange, but still have the strength to ask for the Pufuleti snack, there must be something to it.

Hulk Hogan was the undisputed master of the ring who could possibly do anything and everything. Well, that’s what the makers of this advert for air conditioners thought. Because it is otherwise inexplicable why you would rope in a wrestling star to sing a lullaby to an infant to market a device from which cool air emanates into the room. And the song which is simply a tune of the days of the week does not make up for the faux pas. The only thing that could have made it worse is a video cassette of Hulk Hogan’s singing as a free gift. Simply excruciating.

While this commercial may not seem weird in the end, a second look will expound to you the theory of relativity. Unearthly, grotesque creatures create the suspense but the producers misjudged the addition of the transvestite as somewhat of an unfamiliar, foreign object. Now, this would be perfectly acceptable anywhere in the world but Thailand.

A greater absurdity in the annals of television commercial history has not been recorded. By comparison, it is the toffee apple surrounded by candy floss, the benchmark against which all things bizarre are judged. Takeda Chemical Industries roped in the ‘Terminator’, Arnold Schwarzenegger to market a seemingly energy boosting substance and the result has been a pyrotechnic display beyond human reasoning. The jejune background score, Arnold’s attempt to speak Japanese, and the metamorphosis in the end make this a classic. Maybe this is what he had in mind when he said he’ll be back.

A home menagerie – every child’s dream! But some children never seem to grow up as is evidenced by the large number of private zoos discovered around the world by law enforcement officials. While it can be legal to have your own private zoo, oftentimes it is not. This list looks at ten unusual cases of people owning and maintaining a menagerie for their own pleasure.

In September 2009, police raided a small home in the New York suburb of Queens, expecting to find the owners in possession of illegal substances. What they found, was quite a bizarre surprise. The garage was littered with cages, housing a monitor lizard, a baby python and two iguanas. Also found at the home were: a baby caiman, four geckos, two marmosets, three tarantulas, seven adult pitbulls, 1 pitbull pup and a bulldog. The Center for Animal Care & Control was dispatched, and while the home itself was in a state of disrepair, reports were that the animals were fairly well taken care of.

Former cab driver, turned New York Real Estate billionaire Tamir Sapir, 61, had his luxury yatch boarded by the US Customs and Border Protection division in late 2007. Officers seized approxmiately $85,000 worth of specimens including: bar stools upholstered with python and anaconda skin, seven carved elephant tusks, hides of jaguars, tigers and zebras, a cigarette holder made from python skin, a cigar box wrapped in elephant hide, a zebra skin lined children’s bed and a fully stuffed and mounted lion. Sapir was charged with 29 counts of attempting to import items in violation of the Endangered Species Act and slapped with a $150,000 fine. A statement from his attorney explained that Sapir was not trying to smuggle the goods into America, they were simply part of the decor of his “home away from home”.

On a passengar bus travelling from Poland to Ukraine, Border Officials were conducting a routine inspections for prohibited items. All seemed fine until they reached the cargo hold where, packed into various sized luggage, they discovered: two miniature kangaroos, five miniature ponies (each approx 50- 60cm in height) and eleven pheasants. One of the ponies was appeared pregnant. The bus driver denied knowledge of any illegal activity and claimed the luggage was delivered to him with instructions to transport them to an unknown person in Lviv, Ukraine.

Local residents phoned police and the Rock County Humane Society when they became disturbed by the presence of a dog tied to the second story balcony of the Memorial Avenue home. Upon entering the home, the discovered: six chickens, thirteen rabbits, two ball pythons, one cat, a snapping turtle, several cages full of mice and rats and (according to the source) “one native snake of unknown origin”. Officials released the turtle and snake into the wild, while the remaining animals went to the care of the Humane Society. It is believed that the owners were planning to sell the animals, except for the rats and mice, which were used as food for the pythons.

Police received several reports of a foul stench coming from a suburban Wisconsin home, belonging to a woman named Jamie Verburgt. State Conservation Warden, William Mitchell was asked to inspect the property, where he found nearly 200 animals including: alligators, scorpions, 70 ducks, snakes, rats, turtles, toads and carnivorous beetles. In an adjacent garage, Mitchell discovered the decaying corpses of ‘roadkill’ which the owner had used to feed the animals. On top of this, carcasses of raccoons, rabbits, opossums and squirrels were found in the owner’s freezer. In a very closely related case, four years earlier Verburgt’s boyfriend, John Walters was prosecuted for mistreatment of exotic animals. At the time his home was raided by police who seized: a female cougar, female leopard, silver-tailed fox, monitor lizard, two caracals, a coatimundi, chinchilla and reticulated python.

Approximately 185 animals were found living in deplorable condition at a home in Apache Junction, Arizona. Neighbours suspected mistreatment of animals and made several pleading phone calls to police before any action was taken. Included in the 185 were: 47 dogs, 96 rabbits, 18 chickens,13 goats, six horses, two cats, one pot-bellied pig, African parrot and cockatiel. In a muddy area on the other side of the property, police found a horse, undernourished and poorly cared for – it was euthanised shortly after.

A man was pulled over for a routine check, and police were astonished when he opened his hatchback to reveal over 1000 animals cramped into the small space. The animals were: 1000 terrapins, 216 budgies, 300 white mice,150 hamsters, 30 Japanese squirrels and six chameleons. Driver, Francesco Lombardo admitted smuggling the animals across Europe with the intention of selling them.

How could we talk menagerie’s without mention of Michael Jackson’s collection of strange and wonderful animals? Since Jackson’s death in September, all the animals have been sent to new homes. Amongst the more memorable were: Bubbles, the chimpanzee (Center for Great Apes, Wauchulu), Bengal tigers Thriller and Sabu (Shambala, California), Rikki the African parrot (with Freddie Hancock at the Voices of the Wild Foundation), pythons, giraffes, anacondas and two black caimans. The rest of the animals are currently at a wildlife reserve in Oklahoma, but will soon be moved to a location in Arizona.

Maybe one for a Marine Mysteries list, but in 2007 a deserted cargo ship was discovered off the coast of Qingzhou Island, China, after having lost engine power. On board were up to 5000 of some of the world’s rarest species of animals. Packed into cramped wooden crates were: 31 pangolins, 2720 monitor lizards, 44 leatherback turtles, 1130 Brazilian turtles, 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper and a photo depicts what is suspected to be an Asian Giant turtle. The animals were transported to the nearby Guangdong Wild Animal Protection Centre.

This famous 7.7 sq. mi estate owned by drug lord, Pablo Escobar, is one of the largest privately owned menageries ever found. At the height of his success in the 1980s, Escobar imported rare and expensive animals from all over the world. The zoo included: giraffes, ostriches, elephants, ponies, rare antelopes, hippopotamuses, zebras, buffalos, camels, lions, an ocelot and several species of exotic birds. After his death in 1993, many of the animals became property of the Columbian government, except for two hippopotamuses which escaped and were later shot dead by authorities. Today, Hacienda Napoles is an official zoo and considered a major tourist attraction.

We all love a warm bowl of soup, it is filling, nutritious and delicious. For years soups have been a simply way to make a good meal out of what you have. Sometimes what you have may be more than your traditional chicken noodle soup. With that here are the top ten most bizarre soups that span the globe.

This is a personal favorite and while it is not very bizarre where I come from, some may find cow stomach soup to be a little odd. Menudo is a traditional Mexican soup that is very popular and often made for special occasions. It is also widely known as a cure all for hangovers. Menudo consists of tripe or cow stomach, onions, cilantro, oregano, chilis and hominy. It takes anywhere from seven to ten hours to make, as the meat needs to cook for an extended time to make it tender. Some people wonder how stomach lining can be delicious but when you add all of the other ingredients and let it simmer for hours what you get is an insanely good soup. The tripe is so tender it almost melts in your mouth, add some corn tortillas for dipping and you got yourself a meal. Who knew cow stomach could be so good? The origin of Menudo varies, found throughout Mexico, the soup most likely came from a need to use every part of the cow, in this case stomach lining. You can find the soup in most Mexican restaurants.

Perhaps the simplest soup on the list comes to us from the Chagga tribe that lives at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. The tribe depends on agriculture for their livelihood focusing on bananas and coffee. A no frills type of life gets you a no frills soup, made of sweet bananas, beans and dirt or “earth” as they call it. Essentially the ingredients are all mixed together to form the soup including bits of twigs that can be seen in the picture. The dirt supposedly gives the soup a saltiness and earthiness flavor.

This soup reminds me a little of Menudo, with many parts of the animal being used to create a flavorful soup or stew. Supu simply means soup, but the breakfast version of this Tanzanian soup is the most extravagant, made from goat lungs, heart, liver, head, cow stomach, intestines and tongue. If you are lucky, you might even get a cow hoof and tail thrown in. The hooves are sometimes boiled and is called supu ya makongoro. The soup eaten for breakfast is a traditional dish in Tanzania and is also widely known to cure hangovers.

Very similar to our traditional chicken noodle soup except that it has chicken testicles instead of chicken meat. The soup simply made from testicles and vegetables is cooked in broth until tender. The testicles are creamy on the inside and very soft, similar to tofu but with tight skin like a sausage. Others have compared it to an under cooked egg with a custard consistency. Again, the testicles are said to have good side effects, in this case good skin for the women and stamina for the men. I have always heard that kind of stuff is good for your skin. There are black and white chicken testicles available for soups.

One of the most expensive soups on the list, Bird Nest Soup is made from the nests of Swiftlet birds. The Chinese soup is a delicacy, and sells for as much as $30 to $100 per bowl, a kilogram of the nest can cost up to $2000. Soups made from nests are almost entirely from the birds own sticky saliva. The nest dissolves and becomes gelatinous with water. The bird’s nests have been in Chinese cooking for centuries usually in the soup. Swiftlet birds make their nests in caves by the male and take over 35 days to build. The cup shaped nests are interwoven strands of salivary cement. Some common health benefits that are associated with the soup are, focus, improved asthma, libido, and the immune system.

In Shanghai, China, you can have Deer Placenta Soup that will help you in bed, your kidneys, skin and vitality. I am starting to see a trend here. The soup is made from mushrooms, flowers, black chicken (must be where the black testicles come from) and deer tendon in a broth. While the soup actually sounds good, the placenta is elastic making it chewy when eating it. If you do not know exactly what a placenta is, here is the definition to make it even more appetizing. The sac-shaped organ that attaches the embryo or fetus to the uterus during pregnancy in most mammals. Blood flows between mother and fetus through the placenta, supplying oxygen and nutrients to the fetus and carrying away fetal waste products. The placenta is expelled after birth.

Known as Cods Milk Soup stateside and Shirako in Japan, the soup is essentially the sperm sac of male codfish. Shirako is served raw or in a soup. The sperm sac cooks until it melts down into chowder like broth becoming creamy, almost like custard. Shirako, appropriately means “white children” and is available in the winter. As with many animal parts in Asian cuisine that have special qualities, eating the Cod’s sperm gives you stamina in bed. There is a restaurant in New York that serves the dish as a specialty.

This next soup would not be so bad if they would at least take the fuzzy fur off the bat. In the islands of Palau, this soup is again a delicacy in town. Although I am starting to think many of these “delicacies” came from unknowing tourists willing to try anything. The island has two types of bats, the insect eating and the large fruit bats. The latter are cooked in coconut milk, ginger, spices and boiled for several hours. At some restaurants, the customer is able to choose his or her bat before cooking it alive in boiling water. Many people who have tried the soup stated it is delicious, although having a furry rodent like head staring at you can be unsettling.

There are many penis soups out there but this is by far one of the most rare and expensive. Tiger Penis Soup has been around for centuries in Asian cultures, known for its almost mythical properties akin to Viagra. The dried tiger penis is soaked in water for a week and then simmered up to 24 hours with other spices and medicines, at times with tiger bone. A single bowl of soup can cost you up to $400.
Tigers are an endangered species and protected, yet many Asian markets still carry tiger parts in their shops. A recent survey of New York’s Chinatown revealed that 60% of the shops claimed to carry tiger parts. If you do decide to buy some tiger penis make sure it is legit, shady shop owners often substitute ox or deer tendons for the real thing.

Finally, we have a soup so bizarre it can hardly be called a soup at all. It is a traditional soup in Vietnamese cuisine made from simple ingredients, raw blood (usually duck), cooked gizzards, and topped with peanuts and herbs. The soup is refrigerated so the blood coagulates and can then be eaten chilled before the blood loses its jello like consistency. Supposedly, the soup gives both the person making and eating it strength. Its popularity has declined since the bird flu spread through Asia. Although many still eat it, there is concern for the public’s health in consuming raw blood from ducks. Did I really have to tell you that though?

Soup #5 has been added as a bonus for the sake of completion. Strong like a bull is a phrase that attracts some lovers to this four-legged mammal with a notorious temper. In areas of Southeast Asia, a soup (known as soup # 5) composed of onions, carrots, broth and bull’s penis and testicles is a popular dish noted for its aphrodisiac properties. The parts in question are given a good scrubbing and scalded in boiling water for good measure before winding up in an aromatic soup loaded with vegetables. Unlike some truly wild aphrodisiacs that are potentially harmful, bull’s soup is pretty tame by any stretch of the imagination. And while ostrich testicles are said to be tasty, they fall short in the bedroom when compared to the hardy bull variety.

There are plenty of strange animals living today, but few people know how odd some of the creatures of the past were. Here is a list of fifteen such creatures, ranging from dinosaurs to various other reptiles and fish. All are unseen by modern man (except in the form of fossils) and all are bizarre. In no particular order.

This genus of elephant-like creatures was not only huge, but they also had a pair of chin tusks. These odd tusks might have been used to dig up the soil to gain access to roots and vegetables. They also had a relatively short trunk compared to other Proboscideans. They ranged from 12-15 feet high, making them one of the largest mammals to ever walk on the earth.

This family of strange, mysterious theropods was notable for their long necks and their large claws. However, unlike most other theropods, they were herbivores (or at least primarily). Some of them may have had feathers. The genus that the family is named after, Therizinosaurus, is actually only known from a few fossils, but its claws were quite large, likely reaching a meter in length.

This bird-like dinosaur reveals an interesting part about the evolutionary history of birds. This member of the Scansoriopterygidae (“climbing wings”) had no flight feathers, but it did have four long tail feathers. These feathers were likely used in displays. Due to its age (It lived in China around 152 to 168 million years ago), it provides evidence that feathers evolved several million years before flight did (not surprisingly). It was also one of the smallest dinosaurs, reaching just 10 inches in height as an adult (not counting its feathers). That’s the size of a pigeon.

Another bird-like dinosaur, this one belonged in the same family as Epidexipteryx. It is currently the earliest dinosaur known to have adapted for life in the trees, an important moment in the evolution of birds. More bizarrely, this dinosaur had an oddly long third finger, twice the length of the other ones. They may have been used to dig for insects.

Yet another bird-like dinosaur, this dinosaur had four wings (and a feathered tail), although it could not fly. Instead, it likely glided from place to place, kind of like a flying squirrel. It is likely that this creature is one of the most recent common ancestors between birds and dinosaurs, its gliding ability eventually evolving into flight. Unfortunately for the genus, one fossil was used in a forgery, along with a fossil of a primitive bird, Yanornis, to create a fake fossil that was said to be the ultimate missing link between birds and dinosaurs: Archeoraptor. Although it could have been caught before the public noticed, it was published in National Geographic before it could be peer reviewed. When it was exposed for the fraud it was quite embarrassing to the scientific community. There are two species of Microraptor.

Living during the Triassic, Longisquama was a small, lizard like creature that appears to have had a series of long feathers on its back. This implies that birds might have not evolved from theropods, but lizard-like reptiles instead. Of course, things are not always what they seem. Some scientists think they are just specially modified scales. Others think that the fossil’s form is an optical illusion: that the feathers are just fern fronds. Due to the large amount of feathered dinosaur fossils, it seems that these two possibilities are more accurate.

When I describe a long necked reptile, most people think of sauropods or even plesiosaurs. This Triassic reptile was neither of these. This reptile was 20 feet long, yet had a 10 foot long neck! Evidence indicates that this was a fish-eating reptile, since fossils of it have been found in mainly partially aquatic fossil sites and fish scales and Cephalopod tentacles have been found in their stomachs. They might have stayed on the beach, using their long necks to help them devour fish from the sea. It is also thought to have been at least semi-aquatic.

Another gliding reptile, this Triassic critter glided similarly to Microraptor. However, Sharovipteryx had two “wings” on its hind legs and two small “wings” on its front legs. It might have used its wings while jumping from place to place on the ground. Some scientists think it was related to Pterosaurs, but its reversal of wings to its legs instead of arms questions this.

This genus of pterosaurs is the only one that does not have claws on its wings. Otherwise, most species looked quite average, similar to the famous Pterodon… until a new, currently unnamed species was discovered in 2003. The species had a huge, antler-like crest, larger than any other pterosaurs crest. Some speculated that there was a flap of tissue in between these antlers, like some other pterosaurs, which could have been used like a sail to enhance its flight. However, research shows that a crest that large would actually impair its flight, so it likely just had an odd set of antlers.

This pterosaur had an unusual set of teeth, similar to the baleen of some whales. It almost certainly used these teeth to eat small, aquatic organisms, similar to the way a flamingo eats brine shrimp. Since flamingos get their pinkish hue from their diet, Pterodaustro might have been pinkish too.

One of the scariest creatures ever to live in the ocean, this Devonian fish could grow up to 33 feet long, had an armored face, and likely had one of the strongest bites in history! It used a beak-like mouth instead of teeth to devourer its prey. It was one of the largest of the Placoderms, a group of armored fish that are now extinct.

Sharks have lasted for over 400 million years. Although they have remained relatively unchanged throughout the fossil record, there are definitely some odd balls. This particular shark had an anvil-shaped dorsal fin, with small spikes on it, as well as having a very bizarre growth on its head. The fin could have been used for courtship or for defense.

This bizarre fossil was originally thought to be an ammonite, as the fossil looked like a spiraling, circular shell. However, after some examination, it was revealed that is wasn’t a shell, but a spiraling set of shark teeth, a “tooth whirl”. Unfortunately, due to a lack of a body (cartilage does not fossilize as well as bone), so a guessing game began. It was guessed to be on the shark’s dorsal fin, tail, or even its snout. Thankfully, a skull of a related shark, Ornithoprion, was found to have a tooth-whirl on its lower jaw. The tooth whirl likely contained all of the shark’s teeth that it would use in its life: its older teeth would be moved away to make room for its newer, better teeth. This does not solve the problem yet, however! The tooth whirl was then placed on the tip of the lower jaw but it turns out that that would actually slow down the shark! Perhaps the most accurate representation is one where the tooth whirl existed deep in its mouth instead.

The only fossil of this dinosaur is a pair of arms. These arms look like they belonged to an ornithomimid but they were 8 feet long. This means that either Deinocheirus towered over the rest of the ornithomimids (and most theropods, since, regarding proportions, it would have been 40 feet long!) or it simply had very long arms for its body. The use of its arms is debated: some say it used them to tear apart large dinosaurs, others say that the claws were too blunt, so they were used as defensive weapons. Some have even said that Deinocheirus used its huge arms to climb trees, although this hypothesis is widely disregarded. Once again, the lack of a body leaves many questions unanswered.

This elusive fossil was discovered by the famed paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, the same man who competed with Othniel Charles Marsh in the infamous “Bone Wars”. Cope discovered many prehistoric fossils, but this one is, by far, the oddest. The only fossil that exists of it was a single vertebra fragment. It was 5 feet high, estimated to be 8.8 feet high if the entire fossil was intact. Compare that to your vertebrae. Yeah. Estimates vary, but they range from 131 to 196 feet in length, making it, by far, the longest creature ever, competing with the blue whale for being the heaviest creature ever (along with another, very elusive sauropd, Bruhathkayosaurus). But, as luck would have it, the fossil just disappeared. It vanished without a trace. Was it a hoax? A misconception? Or was it really the largest animal to ever walk the earth? Sadly, we will probably never know.

This list is possibly not safe for work. The penis. Without it, none of us would be here. It has been the source of pleasure and pain since time began and controversy in modern history. This list takes a look at ten of the most famous penises through history – both factual and fictional. Be sure to add your own “favorite” penis to the comments (so to speak).

Juan “lucky” Baptista dos Santos has appeared on a previous list here, but no one will disagree that his appearance on this list is essential. He may not be famous the whole world over but he is certainly famous with the millions of people that have read Listverse. Juan Baptista dos Santos was born in Portugal around 1843 in the town of Faro. As a child, Juan was considered quite handsome, fit and well proportioned – except for the two distinct penises and third leg he possessed. Santos’ third leg was actually two legs which were fused together and while it lacked motor control, it could be moved freely by hand. Both penises functioned perfectly. An 1865 report stated that Santos used both penises during intercourse and, after finishing with one he would continue with the other. It also stated that he had a ravenous sexual appetite. You can view a NSFW photo of Juan’s double-penis here.

It is rare that a German book generates any interest in the United States. And children’s books are usually completely off the radar. So it came as quite a surprise to many when the huge scandal arose over the German children’s book by Rotraut Susanne Berner. A request was made for a US publishing house to print English translations of the book for distribution in the US – and then the shit hit the fan: “It was really a sensation,” said Berner, “At first. As it turned out, there were a couple of changes that had to be made before the books could be unleashed on the America public. First off, smokers had to be removed from the illustrations. But that wasn’t all. One image shows a scene from an art gallery — and for realism’s sake, there is a cartoonish nude hanging on the wall along with a tiny, seven-millimeter-tall statue of a naked man on a pedestal.” The publisher said: “American kiddies, obviously, could never be expected to handle such a depiction of the human body.” The series, which playfully follows the daily life of children and adults through the four seasons, is already a bestseller in 13 countries from Japan to the Faroe Islands. The United States is the only country to kick up a stink and the books are still unpublished there.

Boogie Nights is a 1997 American drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Set in Southern California in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the Golden Age of Porn, the screenplay focuses on a young nightclub dishwasher (Dirk Diggler) who becomes the popular star of pornographic films and finds himself slowly descending into a nightmare of drug abuse when his fame draws him into a crowd of users and abusers. Dirk’s success in the porn industry is due to his enormous manhood which is frequently referred to throughout the film but only shown in the last scene. This is essentially a film about Dirk’s penis but it does everything possible to conceal it from the viewers.

Everyone knows Bart Simpson from the popular cartoon series “The Simpsons”. In the The Simpsons Movie, viewers of all ages (due to the low rating) were surprised to see a full-frontal image of a naked, skateboarding Bart. Its inclusion was surprising considering number nine on this list. The scene involves Bart eagerly accepting Homer’s dare to skateboard at high speed to Krusty Burger, stark naked. After a series of fortuitous cover-ups, there is a fleeting glimpse of the 10-year-old’s modest, but distinctly yellow, penis. Fortunately audiences around the world took it for what it was: a humorous drawing.

What is this? A woman on a list of penises? Well, Lili Elbe happens to be the first documented case of a transexual. Einar Wegener (born in Denmark) was a leading artist in late 1920’s Paris. One day his wife Grete asked him to dress as a woman to model for a portrait. It was a shattering event which began a struggle between his public male persona and emergent female self, Lili. Einar underwent a series of experimental operations in which his penis was removed. The surgeon attempted to implant ovaries and a uterus but was unsucessful. When the experimentation was finally over, Einar became Lili Elbe. The government annulled her marriage and she even managed to get a new birth certificate listing her as a female. Quite extraordinary for the times.

The Catholic feast of the circumcision is considered so important that on the 1st of January every year, all Catholics in the world are obliged to attend Mass under pain of mortal sin. The feast remembers the Biblical tale in which Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised. It is considered by many to be the first moment that Jesus bled which is significant for those who consider that his blood gave man redemption. The actual account of the circumcision can be read in Luke 2:21.

Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916) was a Russian mystic believed by some to be a psychic and faith healer having supernatural powers. He was seen as having greatly influenced the later days of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra. When Rasputin was murdered by a group of noblemen in 1916, some accounts say he was also sexually mutilated and his penis was severed. Since then, a number of people claiming to be in possession of his severed penis have come forth, although none of them have been able to prove it definitively. Witnessed described the penis thus:

One woman confessed that the first time she made love to him her orgasm was so violent that she fainted. Perhaps his potency as a lover also had a physical explanation. Rasputin’s assassin and alleged homosexual lover, Felix Yusopov, claimed that his prowess was explained by a large wart strategically situated on his penis, which was of exceptional size.

John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis became so famous when his wife cut it off, that it spawned a new verb: “to bobbitt: to cut off a person’s penis”. On the night of June 23, 1993, John Wayne Bobbitt arrived at the couple’s Manassas, Virginia apartment highly intoxicated after a night of partying and, according to testimony by Lorena Bobbit in a 1994 court hearing, raped his wife. Afterwards, Lorena Bobbitt got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. In the kitchen she noticed a carving knife on the counter and “memories of past domestic abuses raced through her head.” Grabbing the knife, Lorena Bobbit entered the bedroom where John was asleep; and she proceeded to cut off more than half of his penis which she fled with and proceeded to toss into a field. It was later recovered and re-attached and John went on to star in a number of extremely tacky porn movies.

John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd, was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest in the porn industry, although no definitive evidence of Holmes’ actual penis length exists. Holmes’ first wife recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25.4 cm) when he first measured himself. Holmes himself once claimed his penis to be fifteen inches (38.1 cm) long and his manager said: “I saw John measure himself several times, it was 13 and a half inches” (34.3 cm). Another longstanding controversy regards whether or not Holmes ever achieved a full erection. A popular joke in the 1970s porn industry held that Holmes was incapable of achieving a full erection because the blood flow from his head into his penis would cause him to pass out. Holmes’ co-stars have stated that his penis was never particularly hard during intercourse, likening it to “doing it with a big, soft kind of loofah.”

This is perhaps the most viewed penis in all of history. When the Victorians ran about cutting penises off statues for reasons of propriety, David fortunately survived mutilation, but the cast of David at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), had a detachable plaster fig leaf, added for visits by Queen Victoria and other important ladies, when it was hung on the figure using two strategically placed hooks; it is now displayed nearby. David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture sculpted by Michelangelo from 1501 to 1504. The 5.17 meter (17 ft) marble statue portrays the Biblical King David in the nude. Unlike previous depictions of David which portray the hero after his victory over Goliath, Michelangelo chose to represent David before the fight contemplating the battle yet to come. Commentators have noted David’s apparently uncircumcised form, which is at odds with Judaic practice, but is considered consistent with the conventions of Renaissance art.

This is a bonus item as the penis belongs to an animal not a human. Kenneth Pinyan (June 22, 1960 – July 2, 2005) was a Boeing engineer residing in Washington who engaged in receptive anal sex with full-size stallions at a farm near the city of Enumclaw. He videotaped those sex acts and distributed them informally under the name Mr Hands. During a July 2005 sex act, videotaped by a friend, he suffered a perforated colon and later died of his injuries. Killed by a horse’s penis: fail.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. Text is derived from Wikipedia.

They are supposed to be cathedrals of higher learning. In recent years,colleges have revamped their course structure to pave the way for some unusual courses to be incorporated into the curriculum. While some of them may have dregs of intellectual inquiry, others are downright bizarre.We take a look at some courses which may make you wonder if that beer pong championship your son enrolled in is not such a bad thing after all.  


A mandatory course for some freshmen at Occidental College, ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie-Race and Popular Culture in the United States” tries to explore ways in which “scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie.” Elizabeth Chin, the instructor of this course warns students that the course itself is no child’s play. With assigned readings ranging from Sandra Kisneros to Karl Marx, the course incorporates some pretty hardcore academic content. Nevertheless, a course on race which describes the whiteness of Barbie as unbearable seems incredibly unscientific. Wonder if this course was offered when a certain gentlemen named Barack Obama was roaming the corridors of this West Coast institution.

Since such an important aspect of everyday living must have theological implications, Loyola college decided that the inextricable link between God and eating was to be explored. Students are taught the ‘complex religious aspects associated with eating’, exploring the texts to expound the intricacies of etiquette in a canonical context. The evolution debate may not have been decided, but common sense predicts problems for those who do not eat a balanced diet. However, if free servings are part of the deal,it may help all those poor souls dissect (food) theology.
 

Occidental college makes another appearance on the list, this time for the accommodation of stupidity. Of course, the word refers the name of the course rather than a quality possessed by its students. The course itself uses works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze among others to clarify that ’stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite’. Only those who indulge in it must know.  
 

No matter how useless Garbage sounds, Virginia Matzek of Santa Clara University will try to change your impression of it. A ’science class for non science-majors’, the Joy of Garbage is apparently a ’serious class where students are required to do research and learn how to work with data’. Among the questions asked are “What is the difference between ‘garbage’ ,’discard’ and ‘waste’?” and “What could be a better title for the course?” ‘The Joy of Wasting time’,perhaps?
 

The Rhode Island School of Design attracts aspiring artists and designers from around the country but it is inconceivable to think that some of them might want to ‘lust with the saints and burn with the sinners.’ However, if any one of them accepts the invitation, they can spend the semester analysing the moral dimensions of the works of classical as well as modern artists. Being the artsy school that RISD is, the course and the teacher should have a cult following.Well, different strokes for different folks.
 

Philosophy students at Georgetown University read works by Aristotle, Kant and others. However, its done under the pretext of understanding the philosophical depths of Star Trek.
The course serves as an introduction to metaphysics and epistemology philosophy,and tries to dissect the major philosophical questions which come up in the science fiction entertainment drama. Another proof that the ingenuity of educators has conjured ways of teaching which were hitherto unknown.
 

The American South is still the bastion of conservatism and evangelism, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to expound Zombies. The credit for this pioneering course must go to Sean Hoade, professor of English at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who draws parallels between American consumption patterns and Zombies. His observation that ‘zombies act as a mirror for Americans, not only as we see ourselves but also as the rest of the world sees America in the time of George W. Bush: as a roaming, voracious killer turning its victims into soulless creatures like itself’ may be a little far fetched, but his students are not complaining. 
 

 Those who decide to attend Alfred University in a bucolic part of Western New York State, may find themselves in a classroom studying the subtleties concerned with the production of maple syrup. The only prerequisite for the course is the ‘willingness to work for long periods in snow,cold and mud’. The production techniques invented by the Native Americans which have endured constant change are dissected, visits to local producers, restaurants and festivals augmenting the process. It’s the Real Thing, so students can find jobs easily with this course on their resume!
 

The Art of Walking might seem trivial to some, but not to Dr Ken Keffer, Professor of Modern Languages at Centre College, Kentucky. He conducts a class dedicated to the understanding of ‘intelligible and sensual design in inner and outer nature’,first expounded by Immanuel Kant. Apart from the customary walks which he takes with his students to the nearby Perryville Battlefield and the surrounding areas,Dr Keffer assigns freelance walking assignments for students to appreciate the subtleties of walking. Now, where is this college again?

The people at Occidental College decided that in the course of human events it becomes necessary for students to delve into the ’signification of the phallus’ and the ‘relation of the phallus to masculinity, femininity, genital organs and the fetish’. It being self evident that the phallus occupies a central theme in the psychoanalytic theories of gender and sexuality, the course occupies a pivotal role in the Intercultural and Queer program.All this for a price of about four thousand five hundred dollars.

We have run the gamut of bizarre diseases and and even surgical treatments, but we have not yet published a list of bizarre non-surgical medical treatments. So today we are able to add this list to the many other medical related lists on listverse. The requirement for entry on this list is that the treatment must still be in use today; this excludes such treatments as bloodletting – or does it? We have also excluded surgical treatments as they appear on this list.

Sweat therapy is the combination of group counseling/psychotherapy with group sweating. Group sweating is social interaction while experiencing psychophysiological responses to heat exposure. Group sweating has strong cultural validity as it has existed throughout the world for thousands of years to promote well-being. Examples include the Finnish Sauna, the Russian Banya (sauna), the American Indian Sweat lodge Ceremony, the Islamic Hammam, the Japanese Mushi-Buro or Sentō, and the African Sifutu. Group sweating has been used for various physical and mental purposes for thousands of years. It has been asserted that the potential health benefits of regular participation in Native American sweat lodges are numerous, but that there is a scarcity of research about the practice.

We are all familiar with the use of clay in health resorts where people bathe in it to improve skin conditions, but what many people don’t know is that clay (or mud) is also used in internal medicines. It is sometimes used as a coating on pills but it is also consumed in larger doses for the treatment of bowel disorders. Even NASA uses clay treatments: “The effects of weightlessness on human body were studied by NASA back in the 1960s. Experiments demonstrated that weightlessness leads to a rapid bone depletion, so various remedies were sought to counter that. A number of pharmaceutical companies were asked to develop calcium supplements, but apparently none of them were as effective as clay. The special clay that was used in this case was Terramin, a reddish clay found in California. Dr. Benjamin Ershoff of the California Polytechnic Institute demonstrated that the consumption of clay counters the effects of weightlessness.” [Source]

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also known as electroshock, is a well-established, albeit controversial, psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for severe major depression which has not responded to other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania (often in bipolar disorder), catatonia and schizophrenia. It was first introduced in the 1930s and gained widespread use as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s; today, an estimated 1 million people worldwide receive ECT every year, usually in a course of 6–12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week. Most, but not all, published reviews of the literature have concluded that ECT is effective in the treatment of depression.

Dousing is the practice of making something or someone wet by throwing liquid over them, e.g., by pouring water, generally cold, over oneself. Cold water dousing is used to “shock” the body into a kind of fever. The body’s reaction is similar to the mammalian diving reflex or possibly temperature biofeedback. Several meditative and awareness techniques seem to share similar effects with elevated temperature, such as Tummo. Compare cold water dousing with ice swimming. The effects of dousing are usually more intense and longer lasting than just a cold shower. Ending a shower with cold water is an old naturopathic tradition. There are those who believe that this fever is helpful in killing harmful bacteria and leaving the hardier beneficial bacteria in the body.
Steam may be seen to rise off of the body, especially when dousing in wintertime.

The term urine therapy (also urotherapy, urinotherapy or uropathy) refers to various applications of human urine for medicinal or cosmetic purposes, including drinking of one’s own urine and massaging one’s skin with one’s own urine. A practitioner of urine therapy is sometimes called a psychopath. Just kidding, they are actually called uropaths. There is no scientific evidence of a therapeutic use for urine. Urinating on jellyfish stings is a common folk remedy, but has no beneficial effect and may be counterproductive, as it can activate nematocysts remaining at the site of the sting. Urine does contain substances that are beneficial, such as Vitamin C; however, these substances have been excreted because they could not be used or because they were present in excess, so re-taking them will just result in re-excretion. The most obvious physiological effect of drinking urine, at least when it is taken on an empty stomach, is bowel movement (sometimes in the form of diarrhea) due to the laxative action of hypertonic solution of urea.

Bloodletting is the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. It was the most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the historical use of bloodletting was harmful to patients. But, bloodletting has not died a death – it is still one of the most effective treatments of excess iron in the bloodstream and for treatment of excess red blood cells which can occur in diseases such as porphyria. In the old method, the patient was cut and a suction cup was placed over the wound to draw out blood. In modern times syringes are used.

Medicinal leeches are now making a comeback in microsurgery. They provide an effective means to reduce blood coagulation, relieve venous pressure from pooling blood, and in reconstructive surgery to stimulate circulation in reattachment operations for organs with critical blood flow, such as eye lids, fingers, and ears. The therapeutic effect is not from the blood taken in the meal, but from the continued and steady bleeding from the wound left after the leech has detached. The most common complication from leech treatment is prolonged bleeding, which can easily be treated, although allergic reactions and bacterial infections may also occur. Devices called “mechanical leeches” have been developed which dispense heparin and perform the same function as medicinal leeches, but they are not yet commercially available.

Helminthic therapy, a type of Immunotherapy, is the treatment of autoimmune diseases and immune disorders by means of deliberate infestation with parasitic worms (helminths) or their eggs. This is such a cure-all that it is also occasionally used in the treatment of hay fever and asthma. Depending on the particular autoimmune disease in question, infection with helminths can result in remission of symptoms in as high as approximately 70% of patients. The worms are administered via oral doses which are taken repeatedly over a course of weeks and can result in some fairly severe side-effects. Some patients can receive up to eight doses of 2500 worm eggs over the course of their treatment.

Fecal bacteriotherapy is used in the treatment of certain inflammatory bowel disorders such as ulcerative colitis. The treatment comes in form of a series of enemas given to the patient over a five day period. In order to create the liquid used in the enema, a “poop donor” is needed. In other words, a sample of poop is taken from a healthy person (usually a relative of the patient) and turned into a liquid for anal insertion. The idea is that the healthy bacteria from the poop provider will grow in the sick person and heal them. What is perhaps even more revolting than an enema of someone else’s poop, is the fact that the liquid can also be delivered via a tube in the nose.

For centuries doctors prescribed smoking for a variety of ills and while this does still happen (though the doctor’s generally don’t want it publicized) the numbers of doctors who do this has become extremely small. Research with regard to neurological diseases, evidence suggests that the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease might be 50% lower in smokers, compared to non-smokers. Nicotine has also been found to improve ADHD symptoms and appears to have effects in the brain that are similar to those of stimulants. Although such findings should certainly not encourage anyone to smoke, some studies are focusing on benefits of nicotine therapy in adults with ADHD. Recent studies suggest that smokers require less frequent repeated revascularization after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Risk of ulcerative colitis has been frequently shown to be reduced by smokers on a dose-dependent basis; the effect is eliminated if the individual stops smoking.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. Text is derived from Wikipedia.

In the good old days before electricity and massive industry, many jobs that now require no or little labor, were undertaken by humans. This list looks at ten jobs that are now (mostly) extinct. Each job contains at least one element of the bizarre. Be sure to add your own favorites to the comments.

We have all heard of the court Jester – the fool who was permitted to insult the king without losing his head – as long as it made the king laugh. It was a job that came with accolades and with fear. It is also a job unlike any existent today. How many families do you know that employ a private “comedian” so to speak? But, while the job did vanish from history for hundreds of years, as recently as 1999 one Kingdom (Tonga) has appointed an official jester. In a bizarre (and very amusing) twist, the man appointed happened to also be the government’s financial advisor. He was later embroiled in a financial scandal. The American jester to the Tongan court was Jesse Bogdonoff and he is pictured above.

A tosher was someone who scavenges in the sewers, especially in London during the Victorian period. The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings. As most toshers would reek of the sewers, they were not popular with the neighbors. Similarly, the mudlarks were people who would dredge the banks of the Thames in the early morning when the tide was out. They would have to wade through unprocessed sewerage and even sometimes dead bodies in order to find little treasures to sell. In a kind of weird twist, this is now the popular hobby of some middle class Londoners who travel the banks to clean up trash.

A Knocker-up was a profession in England and Ireland that started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution, before alarm clocks were affordable or reliable. A knocker-up’s job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time. The knocker-up often used a long and light stick (often bamboo) to reach windows on higher floors. In return, the knocker-up would be paid a few pence a week for this job. The knocker-up would not leave a client’s window until they were assured the client had been awoken. This all leads to the obvious question: who knocks up the knocker-up?

Toad doctors were practitioners of a specific tradition of medicinal folk magic, operating in western England until the end of the 19th century. Their main concern was healing scrofula (then called “the King’s Evil,” a skin disease), though they were also believed to cure other ailments including those resulting from witchcraft. They cured the sick by placing a live toad, or the leg of one, in a muslin bag and hanging it around the sick person’s neck. Needless to say this job would also require growing or gathering up a large collection of toads, and in the case of doctors who used just the leg, chopping their legs off to give to their patient.

A dog whipper was a church official charged with removing unruly dogs from a church or church grounds during services. In some areas of Europe during the 16th to 19th centuries it was not uncommon for household dogs to accompany – or at least follow – their owners to church services. If these animals became disruptive it was the job of the dog whipper to remove them from the church, allowing the service to continue in peace. Dog whippers were usually provided with a whip (hence the title) or a pair of large wooden tongs with which to remove the animals. They were generally paid for their services, and records of payments to the local dog whipper exist in old parish account books in many English churches.

In Britain, the crime of snatching a body was only a misdemeanor and so was punishable by a small fine only. This led to a huge industry in body snatching in order to provide corpses to the blossoming medical schools of Europe. One method the body-snatchers used was to dig at the head end of a recent burial, digging with a wooden spade (quieter than metal). When they reached the coffin (in London the graves were quite shallow), they broke open the coffin, put a rope around the corpse and dragged it out. They were often careful not to steal anything such as jewelry or clothes as this would cause them to be liable to a felony charge. During 1827 and 1828, some Edinburgh resurrectionists including Burke and Hare changed their tactics from grave-robbing to murder, as they were paid more for very fresh corpses. Their activities, and those of the London Burkers who imitated them, resulted in the passage of the Anatomy Act 1832. This allowed unclaimed bodies and those donated by relatives to be used for the study of anatomy. This effectively ended the body snatching business.

Fulling is a step in woollen clothmaking which involves the cleansing of cloth (particularly wool) to eliminate oils, dirt, and other impurities, and making it thicker. In days gone by, the fullers were often slaves. In Roman times, fulling was conducted by slaves standing ankle deep in tubs of human urine and cloth. Urine was so important to the fulling business that urine was taxed. Urine, known as ‘wash’, was a source of ammonium salts and assisted in cleansing and whitening the cloth. By the medieval period, fuller’s earth had been introduced for use in the process which ameliorated the process and removed the need for urine.

A whipping boy, in the 1600s and 1700s, was a young boy who was assigned to a young prince and was punished when the prince misbehaved or fell behind in his schooling. Whipping boys were established in the English court during the monarchies of the 15th century and 16th century. They were created because the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, which stated that kings were appointed by God, and implied that no one but the king was worthy of punishing the king’s son. Since the king was rarely around to punish his son when necessary, tutors to the young prince found it extremely difficult to enforce rules or learning. Whipping boys were generally of high birth, and were educated with the prince since birth. Due to the fact that the prince and whipping boy grew up together since birth, they usually formed an emotional bond. The strong bond that developed between a prince and his whipping boy dramatically increased the effectiveness of using a whipping boy as a form of punishment for a prince. The idea of the whipping boys was that seeing a friend being whipped or beaten for something that he had done wrong would be likely to ensure that the prince would not make the same mistake again.

The Groom of the Stool was a male servant in the household of an English monarch who, among other duties, “preside[d] over the office of royal excretion,” that is, he had the task of cleaning the monarch’s anus after defecation. In the early years of Henry VIII’s reign, the title was awarded to minions of the King, court companions who spent time with him in the Privy chamber. These were the sons of noblemen or important members of the gentry. In time they came to act as virtual personal secretaries to the King, carrying out a variety of administrative tasks within his private rooms. The position was an especially prized one, as it allowed one unobstructed access to the King’s attention. Despite being the official bum-wiper of the king, the Groom of the Stool had a very high social standing.

A gong farmer or gongfermor was the term used in Tudor England for a person who removed human excrement from privies and cesspits, gong being another word for dung. Gong farmers were only allowed to work at night and the waste they collected, known as night soil, had to be taken outside the city or town boundaries. As flushing water closets became more widely used, the profession of gong farming disappeared. A latrine or privy was the toilet of the Middle Ages. A gong farmer dug out the cesspits and emptied the excrement. Gong farmers were only allowed to work between 9 pm and 5 am, and were permitted to live only in certain areas, for reasons that should not be too elusive. Due to the noxious fumes produced by human excrement, coroners’ reports exist of gong farmers dying of asphyxiation. This was obviously a shit job to have.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. Text is derived from Wikipedia.

[WARNING: Graphic images] You may remember that some time ago we published an article on the most gruesome methods of execution. Well, today we are publishing the second installment. The first list covered some pretty awful things, but we can assure you: this present list is not for the weak hearted. Finish your breakfast and sit back for a ride through some of history’s horrors.

As a means of torturous capital punishment, death by wild beasts was a punishment for enemies of the state, a category which included those taken prisoner and slaves found guilty of a serious crime. These were sent to their deaths naked and unable to defend themselves against the beasts. Even if they succeeded in killing one, fresh animals were continually let loose on them, until the bestiarii were all dead. It is reported that it was seldom necessary for two beasts to be required to take down one man. On the contrary, one beast frequently dispatched several men. Cicero mentions a single lion which alone dispatched 200 bestiarii.

Death by crushing or pressing is a method of execution that has a long history during which the techniques used varied greatly from place to place. This form of execution is no longer sanctioned by any governing body. A common method of death throughout South and South-East Asia for over 4,000 years was crushing by elephants. The Romans and Carthaginians used this method on occasion. In Roman mythology, Tarpeia was a Roman maiden who betrayed the city of Rome to the Sabines in exchange for what she thought would be a reward of jewellery. She was instead crushed to death and her body cast from the Tarpeian Rock which now bears her name. The most famous case in the United Kingdom was that of Roman Catholic martyr St Margaret Clitherow, who was pressed to death on March 25, 1586, after refusing to plead to the charge of having harboured Catholic (then outlawed) priests in her house. She died within fifteen minutes under a weight of at least 700 pounds. The only executee of crushing in American history was Giles Corey, who was pressed to death on September 19, 1692 during the Salem witch trials, after he refused to enter a plea in the judicial proceeding (pictured above).

Snake pits were a historical European means of imposing capital punishment. Convicts were cast into a deep pit containing venomous snakes, such as vipers. They died from snake venom poisoning as the irritated snakes attacked them. An example of execution by this method is that of the Viking warlord Ragnar Lodbrok in 865, after his army was defeated in battle by King Aelle II of Northumbria. A similar penalty appeared in ancient China during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-960). The southern Han, one of the states, imposed a penalty in which a prisoner was thrown into a pool of water containing hundreds of venomous snakes. Soon the prisoner was killed by dozens of snake bites. The geeks amongst us will also remember the appearance of the snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones is trapped when he tries to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant.

Throwing or dropping people from great heights has been used as a form of execution since ancient times. People executed in this way die from injuries caused by hitting the ground at high velocity. In pre-Roman Sardinia, elderly people who were unable to support themselves were ritually killed. They were intoxicated with a neurotoxic plant known as the “sardonic herb” (which some scientists think is hemlock water dropwort) and then dropped from a high rock or beaten to death. Iran may have used this form of execution for the crime of sodomy. According to Amnesty International, two men were convicted of raping two university students and sentenced to death. They were to be thrown off a cliff or from a great height. Other men involved in this incident were sentence to lashes, presumably because they did not engage in penetrative sex with the victims. Pictured above is the Roman Forum which had an excellent view of the Gemonian stairs from which people were flung to death.

In ancient Rome a Vestal Virgin convicted of violating her vows of celibacy was “buried alive” by being sealed in a cave with a small amount of bread and water, ostensibly so that the goddess Vesta could save her should she have been truly innocent. In the 17th and early 18th centuries in feudal Russia, the same mode of execution was known as “the pit” and used against women who were condemned for killing their husbands. The last known case of this occurred in 1740. During World War II, Japanese soldiers were documented to have buried Chinese civilians alive, notably during the Nanjing Massacre.

Mazzatello (abbreviated mazza) was a method of capital punishment used by the Papal States from the late 18th century to 1870. The method was named after the implement used in the execution: a large, long-handled mallet or pole-ax. The condemned would be led to a scaffold in a public square of Rome, accompanied by a priest (the confessor of the condemned); the platform also contained a coffin and the masked executioner, dressed in black. A prayer would first be said for the condemned’s soul. Then, the mallet would be raised, and swung in the air to gain momentum, and then brought down on the head of the prisoner, similar to a contemporary method of slaughtering cattle in stockyards. Because this procedure could merely stun the condemned rather than killing him instantly, the throat of the prisoner would then be slit with a knife.

The upright jerker was an execution method and device intermittently used in the United States during the 19th and early 20th century. Intended to replace hangings, the upright jerker did not see widespread use. As in a hanging, a cord would be wrapped around the neck of the condemned. However, rather than dropping down through a trapdoor, the condemned would be violently jerked into the air by means of a system of weights and pulleys. The objective of this execution method was to provide a swift death by breaking the condemned’s neck. Executions of this type took place in several U.S. states, notably Connecticut where amongst others the “Count of Gramercy Park”, murderer and gang member Gerald Chapman was put to death by the method. The upright jerker was never very efficient at breaking the condemned’s neck and was withdrawn from use by the 1930s. A version of the “upright jerker” is used for capital punishment in Iran (a nation which seems hellbent on using every revolting method of execution conceived). Iran uses a crane to jerk the noose upward violently.

Crucifixion is an ancient method of painful execution in which the condemned person is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross (of various shapes) and left to hang until dead. Rope was commonly used to attach the victim to the cross – but nails were also used from time to time. Although artists have depicted the figure on a cross with a loin cloth or a covering of the genitals, criminal were generally hung nude. When the criminal had to urinate or defecate, they had to do so in the open, in view of passers-by, resulting in discomfort and the attraction of insects. The length of time required to reach death could range from a matter of hours to a number of days, depending on exact methods, the prior health of the condemned, and environmental circumstances. Death could result from any combination of causes, including blood loss, hypovolemic shock, or sepsis following infection, caused by the scourging that preceded the crucifixion, or by the process of being nailed itself, or eventual dehydration. In the year 337 Emperor Constantine I abolished it this method of execution in the Roman Empire, out of veneration for Jesus Christ, the most famous victim of crucifixion. Interestingly, Saint Peter was also executed by crucifixion but he asked to be crucified upside down as he felt unworthy to be killed in the same way as Jesus was (picture above). In some countries using Sharia law, crucifixion is still permitted with the most recent legal use being in Sudan in 2002 where 88 people were sentenced to death.

A Colombian necktie is a method of execution where the victim’s throat is slashed (with a knife or other sharp object) and their tongue is pulled out through the open wound. It was a frequent method of killing during the Colombian history period called La Violencia that started in 1948 after the leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was murdered. It was performed on enemies as psychological warfare meant to scare and intimidate those who later encountered the body. Others have tried to ascribe the method to their nationality dubbing the Colombian necktie as the Italian necktie, Sicilian necktie, Cuban necktie, Slovakian necktie,and less frequently, Mexican necktie. Because of the graphic nature of this execution method, I have included a picture of a Gucci Necktie instead of a Colombian one. For those who are particularly tolerant to revolting images, a google images search for the term is quite revealing.

The blood eagle is known to us through ancient Nordic legends. When a person is to be executed in this way, they are forced to lie face down on a table while the execution cuts a slit in their back giving access to the ribcage. The ribs are then cut so they expand out into the shape of wings. The executioner then removes the lungs of the (still living) victim and sprinkles salt in the wounds. There is debate about whether or not this method was used in reality or in fiction, but many historians do believe it was real. Some of the alleged victims of this manner of execution are King Edmund of East Anglia, and King Ella of Northumbria.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. Text is derived from Wikipedia.