You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [5]
The human botfly lays its eggs on a horsefly or a mosquito, which finds a human and lands on him or her. The eggs rub off onto the human, whose body heat hatches them. The larvae drop onto the skin and burrow right the hell in. Where they live. Under your skin. Eating.
The larvae can grow anywhere in your body; it just depends on where the eggs wind up. You could end up having a fat wormy thing in your tear duct. Or eating through your brain. We know, because it’s happened.
THREE COLORS YOU DON’T REALIZE ARE CONTROLLING YOUR MIND
“COLOR doesn’t matter; it’s what’s inside that counts.” “Love is color-blind.” “There’s no black and white; everything is just shades of gray.” Phrases like these dismiss the influence of color, but that’s not what science says: Science thinks colors are screwing with your head pretty much 24-7.
3. BLUE
Blue skies signal a nice, relaxing day, and blue eyes have more songs written about them than all other eye colors combined. People who don’t fish or swim will pay more money to live next to the ocean blue. It seems that blue just happens to be associated with a lot of the things that make us feel good about the general state of the world.
Well, actually, science says it might not be a coincidence that all those blue things make us feel so damn good. After all, blue is the only color in the spectrum that has actively prevented people from killing themselves.
Wait, what?
Blue has a scientifically proven calming effect on human emotion, and that’s being exploited in a variety of ways. In 2000, police in Glasgow, Scotland, installed blue streetlights in high-crime areas. Since then, crime in those notoriously dangerous neighborhoods has dropped by 9 percent.
Figuring anything that might reduce drive-by head butts in the heart of Braveheart country was worth a try, police in England and parts of Japan began using the color blue around popular suicide destinations like Blackfriars Bridge in London, which was repainted blue in an attempt to reduce the number of jumpers. For the same reason, several large Japanese railway companies switched exclusively to blue light at all their railroad crossings. So far it’s been an astounding success: In 2007, the year before the lights were installed, there were 640 suicides by train. In 2008, after the switch was made, there were none. Zero!
If you find yourself asking the perfectly valid question, “What the hell?” hold on: It gets weirder from there. One theory states that the color itself has a tangible, biological effect on our brain chemistry. Harold Wohlfarth, president of the German Academy of Color Science, conducted a study that found the color of lighting did indeed have an effect on children, but even more bizarrely, it had an equal effect even if they were blind.
It’s hard to argue that children have preconceived notions associated with a color when you have to stop in midsentence and explain the entire concept of color to them until they break down and cry about all the things they’re missing. Wohlfarth believes that traces of the electromagnetic energy that makes up colored light affect certain neurotransmitters in our brains. When light of a certain color falls on an eye, even if it’s the defective nonseeing variety, it’s relayed to the gland that produces melatonin, which sets off a chain reaction that elevates mood and calms emotions. Basically: blue gives you eye orgasms.
2. RED
It’s what you “paint the town” if you’re about to go out and get drunk (assuming you drink with your grandpa). It’s the color that tells bulls to charge, that tells people to stop (assuming they’re not suicidal and approaching a Japanese train track). It’s what mysterious women wore in 1980s soft-rock ballads, a decade when it was generally assumed that painting your car red would make it go faster. Yes, people have believed and said a lot of contradictory, ridiculous things