You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [21]
Ben Franklin’s typical morning ritual (according to your sixth grade social studies teacher).
The truth
It’s certainly true that Franklin at least proposed a kite experiment. It’s less likely that he ever got around to performing it. Most scientists familiar with the concepts of electricity and kites agree that if someone flew a kite into a storm and it was struck by lightning, they and everyone around them would be turned into a fine mist of smoldering meat jelly.
In reality, Franklin’s proposed experiment involved flying a kite into some clouds to collect a few harmless ions, in order to prove that the atmosphere carries a charge. The exaggerated story comes down to us by way of revisionist historian Walt Disney and his classic cartoon Ben and Me (a film that also suggests Franklin’s innovations are actually attributable to his pet mouse). The kite story persists to this day, presumably because anyone who’s tried to replicate it hasn’t survived to call bullshit.
In addition to teaching questionable lightning safety, Franklin’s lightning high-five, like Newton in the apple story, portrays one of history’s great geniuses experiencing naive wonder at a now-common idea, as if everyone who lived before the twentieth century was a childlike simpleton.
Why can’t there be some other legend about Franklin that’s closer to his real personality? Like the time he pleasured six women at once. Sure, we made that up. But if you go out and repeat it enough, it’ll be in textbooks by 2050.
THE SIX CUTEST ANIMALS THAT CAN STILL DESTROY YOU
IF animals could talk, they’d spend most of their time calling us dicks and telling us to get off their land. The traits we think of as cute are often simply tricks animals have developed to get tourists to throw food. Here are six animals that you’ll probably want to steer clear of, no matter how adorable they look on that wall calendar.
6. HIPPOPOTAMUS (HIPPOPOTAMUS AMPHIBIUS)
How cute!
Hippos are the very definition of Disney cute. There is no way you could look at a big, fat, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, “If she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy.” You would totally name her Sassy-baskets, and she would be your tutu-wearing, ballet-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassy-baskets against the world!
Oh shit! Run!
The next time you settle in for a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, take a moment to reflect on the fact that hippopotamuses kill more humans per year than any other animal in Africa.
See, there’s this word territorial that nature takes pretty seriously, especially when it’s applied to a two-ton animal with teeth the size of bowling pins. It’s the sort of word you either pay very close attention to or ignore and end up with “Killed to death by hippo” on your tombstone.
“Come on, kid. Just a little bit closer . . .”
A hippo attack usually consists of two phases. The hippo first smashes its giant head into your boat, tossing you into the water. Spencer Tyron is a good example of what happens in stage two. Tyron was hunting on an African river when, according to a 1974 Science Digest article, a bull hippo flipped his canoe, and then for good measure “bit off his head and shoulders.”
That’s probably why the late Steve Irwin, a man who used to tackle twelve-foot crocodiles for fun and wave angry snakes filled with kill-you-before-your-next-heartbeat poison at a camera, considered a five-minute sequence where his camera team had to cross a river filled with hippos to be the single most dangerous moment ever filmed on his show.
The man who toyed with crocodiles was scared shitless of hippos.
5. DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS (ORNITHORHYNCHUS ANATINUS)
How cute!
We don’t even know where to begin.
This is an animal so deliriously