You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [17]
1. THE HURRICANE
The Hollywood version
The Hurricane is the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer boasting great talent and a badass Bob Dylan song he inspired. The movie tells us how Hurricane was a promising middleweight who was falsely accused and convicted of a triple homicide, derailing his boxing career but making him prime to be the subject of a great protest song.
Luckily, after twenty years in prison as an innocent man convicted by a bitterly racist system, a few people took up his cause and, after discovering a key piece of evidence, proved Hurricane’s innocence!
In reality . . .
First, there’s a scene in the film where Carter beats the shit out of an inferior white boxer, Joey Giardello, only to lose when racist judges award the fight to the white man. In real life, Carter lost the fight so badly that the real Giardello sued the filmmakers and got a nice settlement out of it.
Now the murder thing. We’re not saying Carter committed the crime, but we’ll just point out that by the age of fourteen he’d already been arrested for assault and armed robbery. By twenty-two, he’d been imprisoned twice for “brutal street muggings.” He was booted from the military after being court-martialed four times. But that doesn’t mean he killed anyone, right?
When it came to the murders, there was enough evidence to convict him twice. Carter failed a lie detector test and at his second trial, several witnesses who had provided Carter’s alibi admitted they had been asked to lie for him.
But what about that evidence that proved his innocence? There was none. The judge was forced to throw out the conviction because the prosecution failed to turn over some evidence and thus didn’t give Carter a fair trial. The prosecution could have chosen to retry the case from scratch, but they decided it wasn’t worth doing since twenty-two years had passed and all the people involved were either dead or ridiculously old.
The Hollywood fact-checking process.
Of course the law is the law, and the law said Carter could go free. But it’s probably not quite accurate to use Carter’s story as proof that the criminal justice system is run by the Klan. The whole thing has really made us question Bob Dylan’s research skills.
OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO (WHEN YOU’RE DEAD): SIX INSANE THINGS SCIENCE MIGHT DO WITH YOUR CADAVER
CHRISTIANITY, Islam, Jediism—many of the world’s great religions teach that the soul lives on forever. But what about the rotting hunk of Schlitz-cured blubber your soul leaves behind? If you leave your body to science, you and your soul might find yourselves watching jealously from the other side as your meat suitcase gets to . . .
6. LAUNCH HEADFIRST THROUGH A WINDSHIELD
Regardless of how kick-ass it looks in super slow motion, head butting a windshield at eighty miles per hour is generally a poor idea when you’re alive. “But why would anyone want to be filmed flying into a windshield?” you might ask, if you’re a nerd. The answer is simple, and also largely explains the teenage smoking epidemic: Brad Pitt made it look awesome in Fight Club.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will be more than happy to toss your stiff corpse into a car, drop a cinder block on the gas pedal, and send you flying into a ditch. In fact, the NHTSA and other agencies routinely use cadavers as crash test dummies, closely studying the carnage, frame by frame, to extract valuable insights about vehicle safety and, presumably, the occasional belly laugh.
If you are one of the aforementioned nerds, we’ve got you covered too, since dying qualifies you to . . .
5. GET SHOT INTO OUTER SPACE BY NASA
All little boys dream of strapping into a captain’s chair and hurtling up into space atop a puffy white fireball oddly reminiscent of Anderson Cooper’s pubic mound. Unfortunately, unless you’re