You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [36]
This one’s just an old wives’ tale that slowly became popular over time. Supposedly, your stomach is using oxygen to digest food that your muscles need to swim. In actuality, the amount of oxygen your body needs to swim is more than satisfied, whether or not you’ve eaten.
Who was fooled?
Plenty of books and websites offer swimming tips that still buy into the thirty-minute rule. Go to any pool party with children, and we guarantee you’ll hear someone’s mother squawking about it.
1. CHRISTMAS CAUSES SUICIDE
It might be true that Christmas has become commercialized, but people generally seem to enjoy it. Aside from the stress, family you hate, travel, and the junk lying around the house, of course. And the music.
When we hear that suicide rates jump during the holidays, it’s easy to believe. Especially if you’ve ever spent a Christmas drunk and alone, eyes tearing as you sat in your apartment watching your favorite Christmas movie from childhood (Die Hard).
Why is it a load of crap?
According to Canada’s Centre for Suicide Prevention, the suicide rate actually goes down significantly around the holidays.
While it’s depressing as hell to be alone on Christmas, the truth is that most of us aren’t. It’s hard to commit suicide when there are people around constantly trying to get you to wear ugly sweaters. Depressed or not, most people aren’t big enough dicks to let the kiddies find them hanging over the Christmas tree with a note pinned to their chest.
Who was fooled?
Just about every newspaper in the country tends to climb on board. In 1999, a press release was issued to major newspapers warning against reporting the myth. During the holidays that same year, the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that two-thirds of newspaper articles mentioning the word suicide cited the mythical stat.
In the general population, whether or not you believe this stat tends to depend on how much you hate Christmas. When we’re miserable, we like to project it on other people and assume they’re all miserable too. And if thinking that other people are suicidal makes you feel a little less suicidal yourself, then go for it.
THE FOUR MOST INSANE ATTEMPTS TO TURN NATURE INTO A WEAPON
NATURE inspires mankind’s greatest ideas. The vivid colors of the setting sun might be reflected in an abstract masterpiece. The simple, rugged lines of a mountain range could serve as inspiration for an architectural wonder. The gentle caress of ocean waves lapping on the beach may be heard undulating in the symphonies of Mozart.
Or we could just shove nature into a gun and kill people with it. We do that a lot too.
4. BALL LIGHTNING CANNON
What is it?
Ball lightning is a phenomenon that usually occurs during thunderstorms and is often mistaken for fire or, in the South, a UFO. It’s quite similar to ordinary lightning, but it’s much rarer, lasts longer, and comes in a playful ball shape, presumably just to mess with your head. Science really doesn’t know a ton about it, beyond the fact that it’s astoundingly dangerous and notoriously unpredictable. So obviously scientists started trying to weaponize it the moment it was discovered. Nobody’s gone public with how successful they have actually been, but Dr. Paul Koloc has been working on it for at least thirty years. Koloc’s not one of those PhDs with pretentious fake goals like “advancing understanding” or “doing good”—no, his goal is now and has always been to create a functioning plasma cannon. He calls it the Phased Hyper-Acceleration for Shock, EMP, and Radiation, or PHASER, because he’s a triple-threat guy: deadly, brilliant, and a giant nerd.
A ball lightning-based weapon would theoretically destroy man and machine alike. It would be useful for shutting down electronics, shooting down missiles, stopping car engines, or just barbequing square-jawed do-gooders while the operator laughs maniacally and screams electricity-based puns from atop a giant robot spider.
Does it