You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  3. AFRICANIZED HONEYBEE (APIS MELLIFERA SCUTELLATA)

  You know how you can spot one of these? You can’t. There is no physical way to determine the difference between an Africanized bee and a common European bee.

  You can, however, easily tell the difference based on their behavior. Regular bees will give you about nine seconds of being too close to their hive before attacking you. They’ll typically consider you chased off after about three hundred feet.

  Africanized bees do not roll like that. They give you half a second of being too close before they decide it is time to completely mess your shit up. They empty the entire hive—tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of angry, angry bees. When you run, flailing and crying and soiling yourself screaming, “Jesus Christ, I’m covered in bees!” they will chase you for over half a mile.

  Africanized bees owe their existence to science. Warwick E. Kerr created them in Brazil during the 1950s by crossing a European bee with an African bee. He wanted a bee that could live in the jungle. He got a bee that swarms by the hundreds of millions, is insanely territorial and mindlessly aggressive, has already killed more people than European honeybees in a relatively brief time in existence—and can live in the jungle.

  2. ARMY OR SOLDIER ANT (ECITON BURCHELLII)

  By now, you will not be surprised to hear that these ants are huge, with the soldiers reaching a half inch in length. You will also not be surprised to learn that they have massive, powerful, machete-like jaws half the length of the soldiers themselves. They’re notorious for dismantling any living thing in their path, regardless of size. They’re also completely blind, which for some reason makes the whole thing worse.

  They’re called army ants because the entire colony, comprising up to and over one million insects, is a 100 percent mobile battalion. They don’t make permanent hives, like other ants; they bivouac down in single locations just long enough for the queen to push out thousands of eggs, while the soldiers spread out in wide fans in search of food. Then the eggs hatch and they enter the dreaded swarm phase of their existence.

  Much like the word killer, nature takes words like dreaded and swarm very, very seriously. The ants go on the move, a near-solid mass of insect death and horror, moving steadily and swiftly along the jungle floor, flaying alive and disassembling every living thing too stupid, slow, or asleep to get out of the way. There are no painful stingers or ballistic acids; this is the kind of terror that simply flows over you by the hundreds of thousands and rips you apart with unbelievably powerful jaws, utterly and literally blind to size and species, considering everything in its path to be a threat to the continuation of the colony.

  There are reports of animals the size of horses being overwhelmed and shredded by them. Go stand next to a horse and then think about what that means for you.

  Army ants are also masters of wholly organic, living architecture. For the good of the colony, the ants will use their own living bodies to build any conceivable structure necessary, latching on to each other to create protective walls and ceilings against the ravages of the weather, bridges to cross otherwise impassable spans, whatever happens to be needed.

  There is no other living thing in the entire world that does this.

  And, they’re blind.

  1. BOTFLY

  Oh boy. Ohhhhh boy. Okay, botflies.

  Each variety of botfly is highly adapted to target a specific animal, and they have delightfully descriptive names like horse stomach botfly, sheep nose botfly, and, hey, guess what? Human botfly. The details vary, but each botfly has the same MO.

  The horse stomach botflies, for example, lay their eggs in grass. Horses eat the eggs when eating the grass. The eggs hatch in the heat of the horse’s mouth; then the larvae chew through the horse’s tongue and burrow into its belly. There they meet up and dig honeycombs into the horse’s stomach, getting fat. When they’re ready to be flies, they just let go and get pooped out of the system.

  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 about red over the years, and they can all be backed up by science.

  Wait, what?

  Behavioral studies have revealed that the color red leads to heightened respiratory and cardiovascular rates. This encourages a sense of heightened awareness, making people more likely to act on impulses and therefore more aggre
ssive.

  That’s why red is a common color in bars and restaurants. An experiment on partygoers was conducted by a group of designers and architects, who specially built model rooms decorated entirely in solid colors. They found that the red room was by far the most popular with revelers, who not only flocked to that room in greater numbers but also left substantially earlier. “But why would they leave early?” you might ask if you’ve never had irresponsible, drunken sex with a stranger. It’s the same reason why “red-light district” isn’t just a name—where you find brothels, you will usually find red lights bathing the street in the international color of bad decisions.

  But if red makes us worse at controlling our impulses, why do we use it on stop signs? Well, as coffee drinkers know, having elevated heart and breathing rates helps people pay attention. In a study conducted by the University of British Columbia, red was proven to focus attention and increase performance in detail-oriented tasks.

  But the stimulant red seems most closely related to is cocaine. Like that drug, red speeds up your pulse, heightens your awareness, and was integrally involved in making the eighties an embarrassing decade to live in. Only, red is still getting you high every day of your life, whether you know it or not.

  1. PINK

  So all those connotations of femininity—of passivity and gentleness—that’s all a lie, right? Wearing pink is just a way of expressing how comfortable you are with your masculinity, right? Not so fast: turns out pink may actually be girlier than you ever imagined.

  Wait, what?

  Back in the day, high school football teams would often paint the visiting team’s locker room pink. The gesture was probably given as much thought as whether to call the opposing kicker Nancy or Sally, but then it began to show serious results. Teams that did it won. A lot. So much so that the University of Hawaii and University of Colorado adopted this practice in the NCAA. Unbeknownst to visiting players, the walls didn’t just mock their sexuality but actually sapped their will to fight: Overwhelming win-to-loss ratios were recorded by home teams whose visiting locker rooms were painted pink. It was so effective, the NCAA’s Western Athletic Conference banned the pink visitor’s locker room like it was a performance-enhancing drug.

  Operating on the same logic, the sheriff’s office in Mason County, Texas, converted all its inmates’ uniforms to pink, including shoes, socks, and even underwear (which brings up an important, if slightly tangential, question: There’s jail-appointed underwear?). The chief goal of this practice, according to the sheriff, was to reduce theft. And it worked. Not only did theft rates drop to zero after the switch, but overall repeat-offender imprisonment rates are down 68 percent as well.

  Pink is such an effective calming influence that a specific shade, called Baker-Miller pink, currently graces the walls of many drunk tanks and solitary confinement cells across the country. One such facility is the U.S. Naval Correctional Center in Seattle, Washington. Before switching its color palette, it averaged one assault on staff every day. After going pink, there was none for six months. So either pink is subliminally pacifying violent criminals across the world, or the secret motivation for all crime is the desire to be pretty, and having satisfied it, these hardened criminals are simply and finally happy.

  Dr. Alexander Schauss, director for the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma, Washington, has suggested that pink also has neurological effects on physical abilities. Even if a person wanted to be angry or aggressive, their body would be less likely to respond in the presence of pink. Somehow it limits their heart rates and makes the adrenaline surge needed for most violent actions nearly impossible.

  Of course, wearing pink doesn’t necessarily mean that you are affected by it. After all, if it’s on your body you’re less likely to see it yourself. But everybody else? Well, they have to see it every time they look at you. Do you realize what that means? Wearing pink doesn’t make you a wimp; it makes everybody around you a wimp. Technically speaking, that means the toughest guy in any given situation is the guy in the My Little Pony shirt.

  THE FOUR MOST BADASS PRESIDENTS OF ALL TIME

  THE stories you learned in school about some of America’s most important presidents skipped a few details. Most of what you know about the guys whose faces are on the money in your pocket and the mountain in North Dakota were edited for the same reason health class edited out the best aspects of human sexuality: Because telling you the truth was far more likely to end with you putting someone’s eye out.

  4. ANDREW JACKSON

  When the 1828 election rolled around, a lot of people were terrified when they heard Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson was running. If you’re wondering how a guy we’re calling a badass got such a lame nickname, it’s because he used to carry a hickory cane around and beat people senseless with it, and if you’re wondering why he did that, it’s because he was a freaking lunatic.

  Former Democratic senator and secretary of the treasury Albert Gallatin feared a Jackson presidency because of the man’s “habitual disregard of laws and constitutional provisions.” In other words, the guy was a loose canon—nineteenth-century Washington’s answer to Martin Riggs. Sure, he probably didn’t have an irate black lieutenant to answer to, or a weary partner who was too old for this shit, but he most certainly had a death wish.

  How do we know? Despite everyone’s best efforts, Jackson was elected to the top office, and when he wasn’t busy shaping the presidency as we know it today, you could find him out back dueling. In case you haven’t been to the nineteenth century lately, this unmanly sounding activity involves standing across from an armed man and shooting at him while he in turn shoots at you. The number of duels that Jackson took part in varies depending on which source you consult: Some say thirteen, while others rank the number somewhere in the hundreds, either of which is entirely too many times for a reasonable human being to stand in front of someone who is trying to kill them with a loaded gun.

  On one occasion, Jackson challenged a man named Charles Dickinson to a duel (the reason behind it wasn’t important, not to us and certainly not to Jackson), and Jackson even politely volunteered to be shot at first. Dickinson happily obliged and shot Jackson, who proceeded to shake it off like it was a bee sting. When Jackson returned the favor, Dickinson was not so lucky, and that’s why his face isn’t on the twenty. The bullet, by the by, remained in Jackson’s body for nineteen years because he knew that time spent removing the bullets would fall under the category of “time not dueling”—Jackson’s least favorite category.

  Looking back on his life, spent murdering people for little to no reason, Jackson reflected, “I have only two regrets: I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.” Calhoun, it should be noted, was Jackson’s vice president.

  Greatest displays of badassery: Andrew Jackson was the first president against whom an assassination attempt was made. A man named Richard Lawrence approached Jackson with two pistols, both of which, for some reason, misfired. Jackson proceeded to beat Lawrence nearly to death with his cane until aides pulled him off.

  The guns were inspected afterward, and it was discovered that they were in perfect working order, leading some historians to believe that it was an odds-defying “miracle” that Jackson survived. But we’re pretty sure the bullets, like everyone else, were simply scared of Jackson.

  3. JOHN F. KENNEDY

  Nowadays, John F. Kennedy is remembered mostly for getting shot in the head, which, while admittedly badass, barely makes the top ten of badass things he ever did. Plagued with a bad back his entire life, Kennedy was disqualified from service in the army. Instead of using this as an excuse to pursue the decidedly saner strategy of staying away from exploding things, Kennedy had his dad pull a few strings so he could sneak his way into the navy, where he eventually became a lieutenant. Just to get some perspective, Bill Clinton dodged the draft, Grover Cleveland paid someone else to go in his place when he was drafted, but Kennedy beat the system by forcing his
way into the navy. Once there, he handled himself like a gravel-eating shit miner instead of the rich Boston pretty boy he actually was.

  Upon leaving the navy, he took up boning on a near full-time basis. Sure he dabbled at being a senator and a president or whatever, but his full-time job was pimping. While almost no two sources are in agreement as to just how much tail Kennedy snagged, historian John Richard Stephens says that “Kennedy confided with friends that he could only be satisfied with three women a day.” Kennedy’s closest friend once recalled that “Jack could be shameless in his sexuality … He would corner them at White House dinner parties and ask them to step into the next room away from the noise, where they could hold a ‘serious discussion.’ ” Next time you’re at a dinner party, go ahead and try that “Hey baby, let’s go have a serious discussion” line out and then come back and tell us how much sex you didn’t have.

  JFK’s sexual conquests allegedly include Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, and famous burlesque stripper and rap name pioneer Blaze Starr. There are even rumors that he had sex with his insanely hot wife once in a while too.

  Greatest display of badassery: In August 1943, while serving as skipper of PT-109, Kennedy’s boat was ripped in two by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Kennedy and his crew were tossed into the water and surrounded by flames. Kennedy managed to swim four hours to safety while towing an injured crewman by the life jacket strap with his teeth. His goddamned teeth!