You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News

  Cracked.com

  PENGUIN group (2010)

  * * *

  Some facts are too terrifying to teach in school. Unfortunately, Cracked.com is more than happy to fill you in:

  * A zombie apocalypse? It could happen. 50% of humans are infected with a parasite that can take over your brain.

  * The FDA wouldn't let you eat bugs, right? Actually, you might want to put down those jelly beans. And that apple. And that strawberry yogurt.

  * Think dolphins are our friends? Then these sex-crazed thrill killers of the sea have you right where they want you.

  * The most important discovery in the history of genetics? Francis Crick came up with it while on LSD.

  * Think you're going to choose whether or not to buy this book? Scientists say your brain secretly makes all your decisions10 seconds before you even know what they are.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  THE FIVE MOST HORRIFYING BUGS IN THE WORLD

  THREE COLORS YOU DON’T REALIZE ARE CONTROLLING YOUR MIND

  THE FOUR MOST BADASS PRESIDENTS OF ALL TIME

  FIVE FAMOUS ARTISTS WHO DIDN’T CREATE THEIR SIGNATURE CREATION

  SIX TERRIFYING THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT CHILDBIRTH

  FIVE FUN THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU

  FIVE MOVIES BASED ON TRUE STORIES (THAT ARE COMPLETE BULLSHIT)

  OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO (WHEN YOU’RE DEAD): SIX INSANE THINGS SCIENCE MIGHT DO …

  THE FIVE MOST RIDICULOUS LIES YOU WERE TAUGHT IN HISTORY CLASS

  THE SIX CUTEST ANIMALS THAT CAN STILL DESTROY YOU

  FIVE STORIES ABOUT JESUS’S CHILDHOOD THEY HAD TO CUT FROM THE BIBLE (TO AVOID …

  THE SIX MOST TERRIFYING FOODS IN THE WORLD

  FIVE WACKY MISUNDERSTANDINGS THAT ALMOST CAUSED A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST

  THE SIX MOST DEPRESSING HAPPY ENDINGS IN MOVIE HISTORY

  FIVE FAMOUS INVENTORS WHO STOLE THEIR BIG IDEA

  THE FIVE MOST FREQUENTLY QUOTED BULLSHIT STATISTICS

  THE FOUR MOST INSANE ATTEMPTS TO TURN NATURE INTO A WEAPON

  THE FOUR GREATEST THINGS EVER ACCOMPLISHED WHILE HIGH

  FOUR MYTHOLOGICAL BEASTS THAT ACTUALLY EXIST

  FIVE WAYS YOUR BRAIN IS MESSING WITH YOUR HEAD

  FIVE FIGHT MOVES THAT ONLY WORK IN MOVIES

  FIVE AWESOME PLACES TO HAVE SEX (AND THE HORRIFIC CONSEQUENCES)

  FIVE AWESOME THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW COULD MAKE YOU SICK

  FOUR THINGS YOUR MOM SAID WERE HEALTHY THAT CAN KILL YOU

  THE GRUESOME ORIGINS OF FIVE POPULAR FAIRY TALES

  FIVE HORRIFYING FOOD ADDITIVES YOU’VE PROBABLY EATEN TODAY

  FIVE STORIES THE MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT

  FOUR BRAINWASHING TECHNIQUES THEY’RE USING ON YOU RIGHT NOW

  FIVE HOLLYWOOD ADAPTATIONS THAT TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT

  THE TEN MOST INSANE MEDICAL PRACTICES IN HISTORY

  FOUR GREAT WOMEN BURIED BY THEIR BOOBS

  THE AWFUL TRUTH BEHIND FIVE ITEMS ON YOUR GROCERY LIST

  FIVE CLASSIC CARTOON CHARACTERS WITH TRAUMATIC CHILDHOODS

  FIVE CONSPIRACIES THAT NEARLY BROUGHT DOWN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  FOUR TICKING TIME BOMBS IN NATURE MORE TERRIFYING (AND LIKELY) THAN THE ONES IN …

  FIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT PROVE HUMANITY IS DOOMED

  THE FIVE CREEPIEST URBAN LEGENDS THAT HAPPEN TO BE TRUE

  FIVE BELOVED U.S. PRESIDENTS THE MODERN MEDIA WOULD NEVER LET INTO THE WHITE HOUSE

  THIRD REICH TO FORTUNE 500: FIVE POPULAR BRANDS THE NAZIS GAVE US

  FIVE SCIENTIFIC REASONS WHY A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN

  CREDITS

  Praise for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News

  “Hugely enjoyable. I found it irresistible but, sadly, too useful by far.”

  —Noel Botham, chairman of the Useless Information Society and author of The Book of Useless Information

  “Trivia on steroids! A wild, irreverent ride through some of the craziest facts I’ve ever come across, and that’s really saying something. I read it straight through.”

  —Don Voorhees, author of The Book of Totally Useless Information

  “A hugely enjoyable read—witty, well researched, and worth buying for ‘Five Stories About Jesus’s Childhood They Had to Cut from the Bible’ alone.”

  —Karl Shaw, author of 5 People Who Died During Sex

  “This book blows the lid off dozens of absurd fallacies and unearths scores of highly entertaining historical ironies.”

  —Joey Green, author of Contrary to Popular Belief

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. * Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) * Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England * Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) * Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) * Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India * Penguin Books (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) * Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2011

  Copyright (c) Cracked.com, 2011

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  You might be a zombie and other bad news : shocking but utterly true facts / Cracked.com. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47815-8

  1. Curiosities and wonders—Humor. I. Cracked.com

  PN6231.C85Y68 2011

  818’.60206—dc22

  2010030031

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For refusing to collapse into an earth-devouring black hole under the force of its own staggering density, we dedicate this book to Theodore Roosevelt’s left testicle.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE Cracked.com editorial team would like to thank the thousands of talented comedy writers who worked tirelessly, often under threat of violence, to make this book possible.

  In addition to the folks listed in the credits section, we would like t
o thank every last member of the Cracked Writer’s Workshop. The Workshop is an ongoing experiment based on the idea that if you let thousands of Internet strangers into your writers’ room, some of them will turn out to be geniuses. Others will turn out to be dangerous and deranged, sure, but that was a risk we were willing to take. It paid off—you’re holding the proof in your hands. We would also like to thank the effortlessly funny PWoT forum moderators, for cultivating the only online community where such an experiment could be anything but an embarrassing failure.

  We’re eternally grateful to the illustrators and Randall Maynard, for their ability to draw exactly what we had in our heads, except way better and without all the dicks. Also, to our fact checker Ben Smith, for the hours of Google and library searches that have almost certainly made him a person of interest to the FBI.

  A huge thanks to everyone at Demand Media, especially Larry Fitzgibbon, Jeremy Reed, Stewart Marlborough, and Lex Friedman, for taking a chance on a site that, in retrospect, probably wasn’t very good yet, and to Richard Rosenblatt and Shawn Colo, for trusting that it could one day be worth a damn. And, of course, thanks to Cracked.com GM Oren Katzeff, for putting up with us and running a tight ship that features far less sodomy than most in naval history. We’d especially like to thank Mandy Ng, Adam Tourkow, Simon Jia, Lina Ung, and Jeremy Rylan, for the incredible work they put in every day to keep Cracked.com up and running. We’d also like to thank Matt Polesetsky, David Ho, and Emma Sansing in the legal department, Wadooah Wali and our PR team, and our SEO, marketing, sales, and monetization teams. Special thanks to Wil Teran and the design team for making us look like a real, legitimate website, and to Shannon O’Brien and Moment Design for all the free advice.

  We would especially like to thank Becky Cole and Nadia Kashper from Penguin, and our agent Dan Strone from Trident Media Group, for their invaluable feedback, and for giving us the creative license to stray outside of the rules as dictated by the AP (and common decency) when we swore it was necessary.

  And of course none of this would be possible without the young men and women who have fought and died so we could go on doing our ridiculous job. We may not know any of your names, but you are the bravest interns in the world.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CONSPIRACY

  YOU have been the victim of a conspiracy to make the world around you more boring than it actually is.

  It’s true. Did you know that you could save the lives of thousands of depressed people by painting the Golden Gate Bridge blue? How about the brain parasite currently infecting 50 percent of people on earth that turns lab rats into zombies—did you know about that? We didn’t think so.

  Nearly everything your impressionable mind soaks up from your peers, teachers, parents, and the media is a lie. Imagine if Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas had been rolled into a single movie and set loose aboard the spaceship from Aliens. That’s the real world you’ve been missing. The people who taught you everything you know took that movie, edited out all of the most aggressively ass-kicking scenes, and made it into a Saturday-morning cartoon. This book is the shocking, unrated director’s cut.

  You hold in your hands the most mind-blowing nuggets of information federal and local anti-headsplosion laws allow us to print on anything that’s not a tarp. In these pages, you will find answers to questions you didn’t even know you should be asking. Questions like, Why were the Nazi’s so well dressed? and, Why is this five-inch-long hornet chasing me?

  THE ROAD TO YOU MIGHT BE A ZOMBIE

  The many shocking answers you’ll find in this book all arose from a single question we found ourselves asking about two years ago: How can we come up with $2.5 million, and fast?

  It didn’t take us long to settle on the idea of writing a book. Like our online humor articles, books contain words. But while our website is free, people who suck at shoplifting pay money for books. The more we looked into this book business, the more the idea checked out. Our first move was to take a quick survey of some of the bestselling books of all time.

  The Bible (300 BC-AD 95), 6 billion copies sold

  Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964), 800 million copies sold

  The Koran (AD 610-632), 800 million copies sold

  Xinhua Dictionary (1957), 400 million copies sold

  A number of striking similarities jumped out immediately. In addition to being old as shit, we noticed that all four endeavored to answer some of life’s biggest questions. After literally hours of brainstorming, we sent off the first draft of our book proposal and began taking out sizable loans and buying tiny expensive jets (to serve as fuel for our larger, also expensive, jets). Unfortunately, some guy named Webster had somehow retroactively stolen our idea “What Words Mean” and had even found definitions for real words rather than ones he’d just made up. After follow-up calls with publishing houses failed to turn up a single major religion looking to join forces with Crackedism, the official religion we promised to make up, one of the publishers said something that made us realize that life’s “big questions” had changed.

  “Life’s big questions have changed,” she said. “Why don’t you write a book called You Might Be a Zombie?”

  Whether she realized it or not, that lady (whose name now escapes us) had given us the idea for our book. Nobody needs to know the meaning of things like existence and words anymore. Hollywood has already answered those questions for us. Modern people have more-pressing concerns, like “Seriously, I’ve been sprinting for like ten minutes straight. Why won’t this enormous hornet stop chasing me?” and “Did … did it just shoot poison at my eyes?”

  The answers to those questions and more are contained somewhere in the following pages. We don’t want to spoil it for you, but the short answer to the second one is yes, that giant hornet did just shoot poison at your eyes. That shit happens all the time.

  DIRECTIONS FOR PROPER USE

  You Might Be a Zombie should be read in a seated position.

  Due to risks posed by rapidly descending jaws, males are advised to wear an athletic supporter.

  Females are advised to wear as little as possible, though that’s more of a marketing thing.

  During the course of reading, you may find yourself motivated to lead a torch-wielding mob to the home of every teacher who failed to tell you about Teddy Roosevelt’s life. Our legal department asks that you resist this impulse or, at the very least, that you blame it on Catcher in the Rye.

  THE FIVE MOST HORRIFYING BUGS IN THE WORLD

  THERE are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that’s a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs.

  But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you’ll want to avoid at all costs.

  5. JAPANESE GIANT HORNET (VESPA MANDARINIA JAPONICA)

  It’s the size of your thumb, and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for dramatic effect because, goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch, acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots the acid directly into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that’ll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?

  Also, it can fly fifty miles in a day. It’d be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like “Don’t worry, they only live on top of really tall mountains where nobody wants to live,” but no, they live all over the freaking place. They kill more people in Japan than all animals—venomous, nonvenomous, irradiated mutant—combined. At least forty people die that way every year, each of them horribly.

  You’d think the fact that humans aren’t their favorite target would provide some measure of consolation. You’d think that until you heard what they do to bees. An adult hornet will fly miles to pick a fight with a hive humming with thousands of them. Outnumbered, the Vespa mandarinia sprays the nest with some of the acid/pheromone and brings in reinforcements, usually thirty or
so fellow hornets. They then descend upon the beehive like an unholy plague of hell-born death engines and proceed to make this world a scary place.

  In three hours, thousands of adult bees will be lying around, in piles of limbs and heads and bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets will have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bee’s children, who will then be eaten.

  Yeah, nature is hard-core.

  4. BULLET ANT (PARAPONERA CLAVATA)

  It’s a full inch long, lives in trees, and can and will fall on you to scare you away from its hive—the one you didn’t know was there, because it’s in a goddamn tree. Before it does this, it shrieks at you. This ant, you see, can shriek.

  It’s called a bullet ant because its unusually severe sting feels like you’re getting shot. On the Schmidt Sting Pain Index (yes, somebody with the worst job in the world has calibrated the relative pain of different insect stings), bullet ants rate as the number one most try-not-to-shit-out-your-spine painful in the entirety of the phylum Arthropoda.

  Also—and we do feel the need to stress this—they f**king shriek at you before they attack.

  Some of the peoples indigenous to the Central American rain forests, where bullet ants live, use them as part of their initiation-to-manhood ceremony. You know the kind. In the West it’s a big party where your relatives give you money. In bullet ant country, they knock out a few hundred bullet ants with naturally occurring chloroform, weave them into leaf sleeves so their heads are stuck and their stingers are facing inward. They then wait for the ants to wake up cranky, put the sleeves on their arms, and immediately have the holy bejesus stung out of them by—and this is important—the hundreds of bullet ants woven into the sleeves, stingers inward. The goal is to leave them on for ten minutes, after which the young man’s arms are stiff, useless lengths of twisting agony, and his body wracked with uncontrollable spasms for days. In order to actually become a man, they have to endure this ritual twenty times.