You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  1. THE BILL

  Births are really expensive. Even a complication-free birth is likely to cost upward of ten thousand dollars, and if your baby comes out and so much as sneezes in the delivery room, this number is likely to start rolling up like a pinball score. Sure, maybe you’re one of those fancy-pants families with “health insurance.” But tack on the cost of the car seats, baby clothes, toys, diapers, bottles, playpens, and some placenta-memory-erasing Belgian ale, and you can plan on having spent the equivalent of a new car before you set foot outside the hospital.

  So basically you let a strange man touch your (wife’s) private parts, write him a check, watch him speed away in a Lexus, and then spend the next three months telling everyone what a miracle the whole thing was. Congratulations!

  FIVE FUN THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU

  YOU know what’s fun? Fun. We spend billions of dollars a year on products and activities that serve no purpose other than distracting us from the soul-crushing daily grind for a few precious moments before we have to get back to the miserable office. But many of the things we do to lighten up the misery of our monotonous lives have the potential to end them in startling ways.

  5. OWNING A SWIMMING POOL

  There are approximately 7 million private swimming pools in America today, which is proof that sometimes the simplest ideas—digging a hole in your backyard and filling it with water—are the best. We’ll get the obvious out of the way first: Water can drown you. An estimated 350 kids drown in backyard swimming pools every year.

  Drowning in a swimming pool is the second leading cause of death in children under twelve in the United States, and, statistically speaking, having one in your backyard is more dangerous than having a gun in your house. But the danger isn’t even limited to drowning: That’s just the surface of the pool’s lethal potential. (That was a wacky pun! About tragic child death!) We all had that friend in grade school who swears up and down that his friend’s cousin’s babysitter once knew a guy who knew a guy who got stuck on a pool’s intake vent and had his guts sucked out through his anus.

  That kid was so full of shit.

  Except he wasn’t. That’s totally true. In 2007, CBS reported on a girl who lost her entire small intestine while swimming at her family’s country club. It’s rare, but anything with even one check mark in the “might tear your guts out through your asshole” column deserves to be handled with a little caution.

  Studies have also demonstrated a link between chlorinated pools and cases of asthma and lung damage, and people who spend a good deal of time swimming in or working around chlorinated water are over 50 percent more likely to develop lung and kidney cancer. When you add all that together, owning a pool is like having an occupied tiger pit with a diving board attached (if tiger bites gave you cancer).

  4. USING A SLIP ‘N’ SLIDE

  What do you get when you connect one ordinary garden hose, one long sheet of plastic, and one precocious child? Well, either thirty years to life or a slip ‘n’ slide (depending on how the parts were assembled). The slip ‘n’ slide has sold over 9 million units since its inception, which is fine: slip ‘n’ slides are safe—provided that you are three to five feet tall and weigh less than 107 pounds. It’s only when you start moving into the gray areas of “drunken adulthood” and “childhood obesity” that things start to get paralytic. See, a slip ‘n’ slide’s thin sheet of plastic is only capable of redistributing a certain amount of weight to create that cushioning hydroplane, so heavyset kids and drunk adults trying to use it tend to hit the ground harder than Hans Gruber.

  There has been a staggering number of injuries over the last fifty years from slip ‘n’ slide abuse, ranging from torn skin to paralysis and even death. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has had an ongoing investigation in place since 1993, and despite all of this, sales of the product are as strong as ever. That just proves that Darwinism is alive and well, and its official motto is, “Woo! Do a backflip!”

  3. GOING TO AN AMUSEMENT PARK

  According to the CPSC (which should just go ahead and change its name to the Buzz-Kill Institute of Fun Destruction), in 2008 there were about eighteen thousand injuries reported at amusement parks in the United States alone. And that’s not even counting carnivals and state fairs—where you’re required to undergo years of meth addiction and inbreeding before operating a ride. (To any carnies who might have been offended by that sentence: Quit making the crossing guard read to you; she has important work to do.)

  Some of the injuries are just idiot comeuppance: Hundreds of people have been killed by releasing their harnesses and standing up on roller coasters, those spinning teacup rides, and Splash Mountain—not to mention one teenager who was decapitated by the Batman ride at Six Flags Over Georgia after jumping a fence to look for his hat.

  That’s not to say you’ll survive if you follow all the safety protocols: A thirteen-year-old girl was riding on Superman: Tower of Power at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom when a cable snapped and sliced her legs off. A man riding on the Columbia , a full-size replica sailing ship at Disneyland, was struck in the face by a metal cleat when a mooring line pulled it loose from the ship’s hull.

  There are too many moving parts to make most attractions 100 percent safe, so there’s always a chance that you’ll be horrifically murdered by some whirling steel monstrosity with cartoon elves painted on the side. And that’s the kicker: having to tell Saint Peter, upon entrance to heaven, that your life was tragically cut short by something called the Screamin’ Reamer.

  2. JUMPING ON A TRAMPOLINE

  Trampolines were initially conceived as a training apparatus for gymnasts. They weren’t sold commercially until the 1940s, when developers George Nissen and Larry Griswold went completely insane and decided to wipe children off the face of the earth. Today about half a million trampolines are sold every year in the United States. Now consider that there are over two hundred thousand trampoline-related injuries annually—almost half of which result in serious emergency room visits.

  Trampolines harm so many people that some personal-injury law firms have a specific telephone extension just for trampoline accidents. A twenty-year-old woman landed so awkwardly, she severed an artery and broke both bones in her leg and had to have it amputated. She trampolined her goddamn leg off! In Tasmania, a boy was jumping on a trampoline in his backyard when it turned into a remake of Final Destination and tossed him into a clothesline, hanging him.

  There are countless safety guidelines in place to try to curb the staggering bloodlust of the trampoline. For example, it is recommended that you always jump alone and install safety nets along the edge. A boy in Colorado followed those pointers and was strangled to death by the safety netting around his trampoline. Apparently, the more you try to temper the insatiable murder frenzy of the trampoline, the more furious it becomes. In retrospect, perhaps sacrificing a few backflip-ping fatties a year is a small price to pay to appease its terrible appetite.

  1. PLAYING ON INFLATABLE STRUCTURES

  Invented by former NASA employee John Scurlock in 1959, inflatable structures (bouncy castles for readers who clap their hands when they read phrases like bouncy castles) are typically made out of thick vinyl and powered by motorized fans. According to the CPSC (which we’re fairly certain is one lawsuit away from installing childproof locks on hugs), there have been about six thousand inflatable structure-related emergency room visits in the United States every year since 2005. You might expect injuries related to falling out and landing on the pavement, but the most deadly form of bouncy-castle mayhem occurs when, due to improper tethering or strong winds, the structures flip and launch people through the air like balloon-sculpture trebuchets.

  An eight-year-old girl was thrown fifty meters through the air when her bouncy castle was caught by a powerful gust. In Hawaii, a girl was trapped inside a castle that got tossed into the air and flew fifty yards offshore into the ocean! An inflatable maze in England took flight across a field,
with thirty people still stuck inside, sending two women falling out to their deaths before finally crashing back into the ground.

  Perhaps the most horrible aspect of these accidents isn’t the number of lives lost but the tragically inappropriate mind-set of the victims right before impact. These inflatable structures are often completely enclosed, and the reason people enjoy them is the feeling of weightlessness. The poor victims often have no warning that their play structure has escaped from its tethers and is now hurtling with murderous intent toward the nearest wood chipper—they probably just think they’re bouncing really well. Their last words are most likely, “Wheeeeee!”

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

  SOMETIMES a movie comes along and takes on special meaning because it’s based on a true story, and so we watch with rapt attention knowing that real people lived through all the awesomeness on screen. But if you’re going to go with the “based on a true story” tag, all we ask is that you make the stories sort of, you know, true. You can do that—right, Hollywood?

  Not if these movies are any indication.

  5. A BEAUTIFUL MIND

  The Hollywood version

  John Forbes Nash was really smart. When he wasn’t working on the concept of governing dynamics, he was having hallucinations of Paul Bettany, seeing hidden messages in newspapers, and getting recruited by Ed Harris to break codes for the government, all while running from Russian spies. Which is even weirder when you find out all that shit happened in his head. Yep, turns out he was also really, really crazy.

  The hallucinations became more frequent and, as hallucinations are prone to do, they drove him batshit insane. Fortunately, his loving wife stood by him, and Nash committed to a medication regimen, and learned to ignore his hallucinations just in time to win the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.

  In reality …

  There’s no denying that Nash was both brilliant and afflicted with a bad case of the crazies, but filmmaker Ron Howard was widely criticized for making up the whole “seeing people who weren’t really there” thing. Nash did hear voices, but that’s it—his hallucinations were entirely auditory.

  The love story? Nash and his wife divorced in 1963, just six years after being married. They were remarried in 2001, but it’s fair to say that being married to a paranoid schizophrenic isn’t the smooth ride we see in the film.

  Neither is being a schizophrenic. At the end of the film, Nash learns to ignore his imaginary friends and deliver a Nobel Prize acceptance speech dedicated to his wife. This suggests that you can reason your way out of schizophrenia, a strategy that’s about as medically advisable as trying to think your way out of a heart attack. Nash would know. He quit taking his medication in 1970 and consequently has continued to be unstable, prone to shockingly unbrilliant fits of anti-Semitism.

  The only thing remarkable about Nash’s real Nobel Prize acceptance speech was that he wasn’t allowed to give one. Public speaking opportunities are rare outside of Alabama when you’re known for screaming racial slurs at imaginary Jews.

  4. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

  The Hollywood version

  Will Smith stars as Chris Gardner, who only wants to make enough money to provide for his adorable son. In his travels, he solves a Rubik’s Cube in record time, wowing an employee at Dean Witter, and somehow (magic?) becoming a stock broker. With his son at his side, he toils for months, eventually claiming the one and only opening at Dean Witter, crying tears of joy and warming our hearts with jigginess.

  In reality …

  First, while Gardner was focused on getting the job that would eventually earn him his millions, he didn’t actually know where his son was. For the first four months of his program, Chris junior was living with his mother, Jackie (Linda in the movie), who refused to tell Chris where they were.

  In addition, the movie tells us Gardner got arrested for unpaid parking tickets, forcing him to show up to his first day of work wearing his friend’s grubby clothes. It’s one of the only memorable scenes that actually happened, except instead of parking tickets, Chris was arrested after Jackie accused him of domestic violence (he claims she fell into a rose bush). That’s why she wouldn’t tell him where she was. During the events depicted in the movie, Chris wasn’t caring for his adorable son, he was crashing on his friend Darnell’s couch while the mother of his child and his son hid from him.

  Don’t get us wrong, Chris did indeed get his life turned around. But in the book the movie was based on, he also admitted to some things they couldn’t quite bring themselves to have Will Smith do on screen. Like selling drugs or doing cocaine with Jackie (who it turns out was his mistress from a previous marriage).

  Doing drugs and having sex with your mistress? Not having to worry about the resulting offspring? It says something about the man that he didn’t drop the pursuit, despite having pretty much found happyness already.

  3. LEAN ON ME

  The Hollywood version

  Joe Clark is badass. When Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, found itself on the brink of being taken over by the state due to piss-poor test scores, Clark was brought on board as principal to right the sinking ship.

  And right it he did, by fighting expelled students in the hall and throwing chains and padlocks on the doors. After all, if Joe Clark was going to go out in a blaze of glory he was going to take as many students with him as possible. In the end, thanks to a hip new school song and the bullying ways of Principal Clark, Eastside saw a meteoric rise in its test scores, and everyone celebrated by joining together in song, as inner-city ruffians often do.

  In reality …

  Apart from the fact that the test scores never improved, or that state takeover had never actually been threatened, or the various ways they fudged facts to make it appear that Joe Clark was a super badass, it’s pretty close to the real story. That is to say, a man named Joe Clark did serve as principal at Eastside High for a short time in the eighties.

  Here’s the punch line to the whole thing: One year after Clark resigned and less than two years after the film’s release, the state came and took control of the school. And since they weren’t actually threatening takeover in the first place, we’re forced to assume they got the idea from the movie.

  2.RUDY

  The Hollywood version

  Back in the seventies, there was a plucky little football player who dreamed of nothing other than playing for Notre Dame. Unfortunately for Rudy, he was small enough to be played by Samwise from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his support system consisted of people who repeatedly went out of their way to let him know that dreams are the main ingredient in the devil’s pudding.

  After graduating from high school, Rudy and his best friend resign themselves to a life spent laboring in the same factory as Rudy’s father and brothers. Luckily, his best friend gets blown up right in front of him, teaching Rudy a valuable lesson about how much hard manual labor sucks and reigniting his childhood dream of playing at Notre Dame. And play he does, no thanks to the evil scheming of head coach Dan Devine, who only allowed Rudy on the field after the entire team threatened to walk out otherwise.

  In reality …

  The real-life Dan Devine was actually the one who insisted on playing Rudy in his final game; they were good friends. Sounds like one helluva guy, right? So naturally he was repaid for his kindnesses by being turned into the Snidely Whiplash of college football in the film.

  By the way, ever wonder who saw Rudy play that day and got so inspired that they just had to make the humble young factory worker’s story into a movie? Nobody. Rudy himself spent a full decade trying to convince studios that his life deserved a movie before one of them finally relented. That’s the spirit, little guy!

  1. THE HURRICANE

  The Hollywood version

  The Hurricane is the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer boasting great talent and a badass Bob Dylan song he inspired. The movie tells us how Hurricane wa
s a promising middleweight who was falsely accused and convicted of a triple homicide, derailing his boxing career but making him prime to be the subject of a great protest song.

  Luckily, after twenty years in prison as an innocent man convicted by a bitterly racist system, a few people took up his cause and, after discovering a key piece of evidence, proved Hurricane’s innocence!

  In reality …

  First, there’s a scene in the film where Carter beats the shit out of an inferior white boxer, Joey Giardello, only to lose when racist judges award the fight to the white man. In real life, Carter lost the fight so badly that the real Giardello sued the filmmakers and got a nice settlement out of it.

  Now the murder thing. We’re not saying Carter committed the crime, but we’ll just point out that by the age of fourteen he’d already been arrested for assault and armed robbery. By twenty-two, he’d been imprisoned twice for “brutal street muggings.” He was booted from the military after being court-martialed four times. But that doesn’t mean he killed anyone, right?

  When it came to the murders, there was enough evidence to convict him twice. Carter failed a lie detector test and at his second trial, several witnesses who had provided Carter’s alibi admitted they had been asked to lie for him.

  But what about that evidence that proved his innocence? There was none. The judge was forced to throw out the conviction because the prosecution failed to turn over some evidence and thus didn’t give Carter a fair trial. The prosecution could have chosen to retry the case from scratch, but they decided it wasn’t worth doing since twenty-two years had passed and all the people involved were either dead or ridiculously old.