You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [15]
An eight-year-old girl was thrown fifty meters through the air when her bouncy castle was caught by a powerful gust. In Hawaii, a girl was trapped inside a castle that got tossed into the air and flew fifty yards offshore into the ocean! An inflatable maze in England took flight across a field, with thirty people still stuck inside, sending two women falling out to their deaths before finally crashing back into the ground.
Perhaps the most horrible aspect of these accidents isn’t the number of lives lost but the tragically inappropriate mind-set of the victims right before impact. These inflatable structures are often completely enclosed, and the reason people enjoy them is the feeling of weightlessness. The poor victims often have no warning that their play structure has escaped from its tethers and is now hurtling with murderous intent toward the nearest wood chipper—they probably just think they’re bouncing really well. Their last words are most likely, “Wheeeeee!”
FIVE MOVIES BASED ON TRUE STORIES (THAT ARE COMPLETE BULLSHIT)
SOMETIMES a movie comes along and takes on special meaning because it’s based on a true story, and so we watch with rapt attention knowing that real people lived through all the awesomeness on screen. But if you’re going to go with the “based on a true story” tag, all we ask is that you make the stories sort of, you know, true. You can do that—right, Hollywood?
Not if these movies are any indication.
5. A BEAUTIFUL MIND
The Hollywood version
John Forbes Nash was really smart. When he wasn’t working on the concept of governing dynamics, he was having hallucinations of Paul Bettany, seeing hidden messages in newspapers, and getting recruited by Ed Harris to break codes for the government, all while running from Russian spies. Which is even weirder when you find out all that shit happened in his head. Yep, turns out he was also really, really crazy.
The hallucinations became more frequent and, as hallucinations are prone to do, they drove him batshit insane. Fortunately, his loving wife stood by him, and Nash committed to a medication regimen, and learned to ignore his hallucinations just in time to win the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.
In reality . . .
There’s no denying that Nash was both brilliant and afflicted with a bad case of the crazies, but filmmaker Ron Howard was widely criticized for making up the whole “seeing people who weren’t really there” thing. Nash did hear voices, but that’s it—his hallucinations were entirely auditory.
The love story? Nash and his wife divorced in 1963, just six years after being married. They were remarried in 2001, but it’s fair to say that being married to a paranoid schizophrenic isn’t the smooth ride we see in the film.
Neither is being a schizophrenic. At the end of the film, Nash learns to ignore his imaginary friends and deliver a Nobel Prize acceptance speech dedicated to his wife. This suggests that you can reason your way out of schizophrenia, a strategy that’s about as medically advisable as trying to think your way out of a heart attack. Nash would know. He quit taking his medication in 1970 and consequently has continued to be unstable, prone to shockingly unbrilliant fits of anti-Semitism.
The only thing remarkable about Nash’s real Nobel Prize acceptance speech was that he wasn’t allowed to give one. Public speaking opportunities are rare outside of Alabama when you’re known for screaming racial slurs at imaginary Jews.
4. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS
The Hollywood version
Will Smith stars as Chris Gardner, who only wants to make enough money to provide for his adorable son. In his travels, he solves a Rubik’s Cube in record time, wowing an employee at Dean Witter, and somehow (magic?) becoming a stock broker. With his son at his side, he toils for months, eventually claiming the one and only opening at Dean Witter, crying tears of joy and warming our hearts with jigginess.
In reality . . .
First, while Gardner was focused on getting the job that would