a) and b). If you believe what you read on the internet, Cleopatra also used crocodile turds as a contraceptive. Hence the old Egyptian chat-up line, “Wanna come back to my place and see my dung?”
All three. They were recommended as baldness cures for Julius Caesar, who also tried to compensate for his thinning rug by going out and buying himself a red convertible chariot.
c). Generally speaking, if your car windows don’t have special UV protection, they’ll block most UVB rays— which tan and burn you the most—but not UVA rays, which give you wrinkles and cause so-called “commuter ageing.”
c). The Sultan of Brunei (according to
a). Which shouldn’t exactly come as a fucking surprise if you’ve ever been to the Czech Republic. The first “beer spa” opened at a brewery in Chodovz Plana, near Prague, back in 2006.
FLESH & BLOOD
b). His brothers did it ’cos they were jealous. They also nicked his coat and threw him down a mineshaft. They didn’t let him play their Xbox, either.
c). The mother was supposedly a Russian peasant, married to a guy named Feodor Vassilyev (her first name has been lost to history). According to
a). According to news reports at the time, the victim (who wasn’t named) didn’t realise what had happened until she noticed a wet feeling under her shirt, pulled it up, and her nipple fell on the floor. She put it a bag and took it to hospital. It’s now back where it belongs.
c). “Marriage should be about losing arguments and winning relationships,” according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a leading relationship coach.
c). Lina Medina’s parents took her to hospital, thinking she had a stomach tumor. It turned out she was seven months pregnant. She’s now in her seventies and lives in Peru. The reason Lina was able to have a kid was her very unusual case of “precocious puberty”—her first period came when she was still a toddler—although of course it’s beyond tragic that any man would impregnate her in the first place. The father was never identified, and the baby, a boy, was raised as her brother. He died in 1979 at the age of 40.
UNDER THE KNIFE
a) and c). The guy with the forked tongue—Erik Sprague—had it done on purpose, ’cos he wanted to look like a lizard. He had his teeth filed into fangs, too. He’s available for babysitting.
a) and c). The woman who injected lubricant into her face told ABC News: “By the following day [my whole face] was just completely inflamed. [The lubricant] expands, it’s like rubber, and your own collagen forms scar tissue around it… it looked like horrible blisters.” People who do this kind of thing to themselves suffer from a condition called “body dysmorphic disorder”—which means they drive themselves nuts about one particular part of their body, to the point where they’re willing to self-operate.
b). The
a). They were known as “barber surgeons.” The most common service they provided was “bloodletting”— where you cut a gash in your arm and let your blood run out into a bucket. Personally, I’d have been happy with a short back and sides.
a). The poor guy, who was 70 years old and mentally ill, died from septicaemia within six days. The others are real cases written about in
DOCTOR! DOCTOR!
a). He was sacked and fined for making out prescriptions to himself, then booked himself into rehab. He wasn’t struck off, though—and he went on to kill over 200 patients, that we know of, at least.
a). The woman later withdrew her case and the doc was exonerated.
b). He went to jail. He allegedly told one woman that his magic potion would stop her gums bleeding, but warned it might “taste funny.” He also told her she could swallow it if she wanted to.
c). “I hope that what I’ve done will reassure men that vasectomies can be relatively pain free,” he told the BBC. He added that he’d been thinking of getting the snip for a while, but wanted someone trustworthy to do it. “Eventually I just thought, ’sod it, I’ll do it myself,” he said.
c). The Gallup poll came out in 2010 and showed just how much dough gets spent on “defensive medicine”—basically, doctors covering their own arses in case a patient takes ’em to the cleaners.
MUTANT STRAINS
a). When the bones of tiny, hobbit-like creatures were found on a remote Indonesian island, Flores, some scientists thought they might have been humans with a crazy genetic disorder who lived 18,000 years ago. Others said they were a different species altogether.
a) and b). Although it looked like she had four arms and four legs, she was actually
a) I almost fell out of my fucking chair when my research guy told me about this. It ain’t the antifreeze you put in your car, mind you, but an “antifreeze protein” found in certain Antarctic fish that stops ’em dying from the cold. They’ve even started to use the stuff in some low-fat ice creams—although it’s grown in a lab, not taken directly out of some smelly old flounder.
c). An Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel had the mega-brainwave that led to modern genetics after growing and studying 29,000 pea plants between 1856 and 1863. He didn’t get any recognition during his lifetime, but at least he never went hungry in the lab.
b). Said one of the scientists who cloned her: “Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell, and we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.”
PERSONAL SKILLS
