You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [28]
Wait, it gets worse . . .
Because you’re never going to look at an egg the same way. Every time you crack open an egg after experiencing balut, you will be half expecting a leathery wad of bird to come flopping out into the skillet.
Balut is upsetting on about a half-dozen levels. Sure, all meat eaters know that the delicious chop used to belong to something cute and fluffy, which gamboled in the sun during the brief spring of its life. Most of the time, it’s easy not to give a shit. But when you’re biting into something that hasn’t even had a chance to see its mother’s face, it’s . . . different.
Danger of this turning up in America
If you live in the vicinity of a metropolitan area with a large Filipino population, it’s already here. Folks in central California can go to the Metzer Farms website and order up some “jumbo” balut for a dollar a pop. If marketed properly, these eggs could be a damn good motivator. When you’ve looked death in the face at breakfast time, what the hell else can the day throw at you?
FIVE WACKY MISUNDERSTANDINGS THAT ALMOST CAUSED A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
NOW that it’s over, the cold war seems like a pretty anticlimactic conflict. No big public scares, no major disasters—but behind the scenes the shit was apparently hitting the fan so hard we half suspect the fan was the shit’s ungrateful stepchild. It’s hard to even count the many times we were within seconds of a nuclear holocaust, but we can certainly list off the five times when it was for the most retarded reasons.
5. THE CASE OF THE NUCLEAR “SUNBEAMS” VS. THE IRON-BALLED RUSSIAN
You are Stanislav Petrov, a Russian lieutenant colonel in command of your country’s early warning system. You’re sitting in your impenetrable bunker one evening when, bam! all your computers scream that America just went nuclear on you. Every protocol and years of training demand that in the event of a verifiable missile launch the commander in charge has to launch a counterattack.
A lesser man might’ve panicked, picked up the phone, and screamed, “F**k America with missiles!” but Petrov and his cast-iron balls had other ideas.
How come we’re still alive?
Petrov had a “gut feeling” that the alert was a computer error and ordered the counterattack delayed. As he waited, more missiles appeared, enough to trigger an automatic alert to control. Headquarters called and begged Petrov to launch the counterstrike. He refused and simply waited as the blips came closer. Because you’re not reading this etched on the skin of a supermutant, you can probably guess the outcome: Petrov was right. It turns out that early warning satellites had mistaken glare from the sun for missile exhaust plumes. Thanks to the hunch of one Russian with cojones like collapsed stars, that’s all now a moot point. His reward? A tiny pension, discharge, and a total cover-up. Sure that sounds shitty now, but keep in mind that back then Russians had to stand in line for four hours just for a kick in the junk; Petrov probably came away feeling whatever the Soviet equivalent of happy was. Unctuous?
4. THE CASE OF THE TEST SWITCH AND THE MISSING JIMMY
Aside from the ever-looming specter of nuclear holocaust, being an operator at NORAD was like any other boring security job. But November 9, 1979, was a bad day for the NORAD office. You know the kind—starts when somebody drinks the last of the coffee without starting a new pot and ends when the nuclear-death sirens go off, the shit-your-pants lights flash, and your boss panics so hard he completely forgets how radiation works and barricades the doors to “keep out the atoms, for Christ’s sake!”
On November 9, the computers at NORAD suddenly began to register dozens of incoming missiles. The attack was taken so seriously that the White House launched the Doomsday Plane (the 747 that serves as the pentagon’s mobile office in case of attack) without President Carter on board!
How come we’re still alive?
Common sense. After ten minutes of hand-wringing, someone finally had the idea to check the raw data coming straight