Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (44 page)

OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF MIND

One of those human behaviors is
mental time travel
—the ability to call on memories of past experiences to guide future actions. Dr. Clayton observed mental time travel in corvids one day while she was outside having lunch at the University of California, Davis. Scrub jays (smaller cousins of the crow) would battle each other for food scraps and then hide them in
caches
—storage places such as small holes in the ground and under shrubs. But after all the jays flew away, a few returned by themselves and rehid their scraps in new caches. Did the birds come back because they knew they were previously being watched by other birds who wanted to steal their food? If so, that would qualify as mental time travel.

About 1 out of every 20 people with asthma are also allergic to aspirin.

Clayton and Emery decided to test this theory in the lab. The jays who knew they were being watched by other birds when they hid their food returned later and re-hid it. The control group that wasn’t watched left the food in the original hiding places. The scientists’ conclusion: “Since re-caching is not dependent on the potential thief being present, the experienced jay must be using some cognitive ability to perform this behavior.” Again, this is a behavior that, until recently, was thought to only occur in mammals.

Here are two more examples of higher thinking in crows.

• Crow hunters have reported that if three hunters enter a hunting blind, the crows will fly away and won’t return to the area until not one, not two, but all three hunters have left. That puts the bird in a very exclusive animal kingdom club: those that can count.

• Another trait thought to be uniquely mammalian is the ability to enjoy things for pleasure. Crows have been witnessed collecting bright objects such as coins and hiding them away. Biologists can find no evolutionary or survival motive for this action except that the birds just seem to like shiny things.

SCARY CROWS

To say that crows have adapted to living alongside humans is an understatement. They thrive in rural areas, cities, and suburbs. And to many people—and other animals—they’re a nuisance.

• For millennia, farmers have been trying to scare crows away from their fields. Here’s an excerpt from an 1881 book,
Household Cyclopedia of General Information,
by Henry Hartshorne:

Machinery of various kinds, such as wind-mills in miniature, horse rattles, etc., to be put in motion by the wind, are often employed to frighten crows; but with all of these they soon become familiar. The most effectual method of banishing them from a field is the frequent use of the musket.

• In their quest to find food and nesting materials, urban crows are smart, creative, and relentless. They empty trash cans, terrorize pedestrians, and have even knocked out high-speed Internet networks by stealing wires from control boxes. In one case in Japan, a crow was blamed for shutting down a bullet train. Since 2000, game officials in Tokyo have killed more than 100,000 crows, but they remain a daily problem.

What are
murmets, hodmedods,
and
tattie bogles?
Different names for scarecrows in England.

• In Cape Cod, Massachusetts, endangered piping plovers nest on the beaches, but crows eat their eggs. Conservation officials built protective cages over the plover nests, expecting that the cages would keep out the crows but allow the smaller birds to come and go. The officials might as well have painted big bull’s-eyes on the nests. Now the crows simply land hard on top of the cages and rattle them until the spooked plovers abandon their nests…and become easy crows’ meals themselves. In 2010 the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a plan to set up fake plover nests (without cages) that contain poisoned hard-boiled eggs. They’re counting on the crows being intelligent enough to make the connection that eating the plovers’ eggs will kill them. The question yet to be answered: Are the crows smart enough to discern between the real nests and the fake nests?

QUOTH THE RAVEN

All birds use complex forms of communication, but crows and ravens may actually use rudimentary forms of language. When you hear that cacophony of caws in the morning, that’s the group of crows or ravens discussing where to go look for food. However, deciphering the subtle differences between corvid alarm calls, assembly calls, distress calls, and their other vocalizations has proven difficult. According to the University of Vermont’s professor emeritus of biology Bernd Heinrich, who authored several books about ravens: “Our research has been something like that of aliens from outer space who make sonograms of human vocalizations. Certain differences noted in frequency, intonation, and loudness are correlated with feelings and emotions. But human sounds convey much more, and perhaps ravens’ do, too.” One particular behavior that has led scientists to believe that ravens may use language is their distinctive regional dialects. When ravens from different areas meet, it takes some time for them to learn each other’s calls.

A few ravens have even learned to mimic the human voice. Of course, there’s one bird order known for this skill: the
Psittaciformes,
or “true” parrots, which include lories, cockatoos, and parakeets. And their intelligence level ranks close to corvids.

To read about the world’s most learned parrot, as well as some other amazing avian abilities, migrate on over to
page 416
.

Jesus most likely had short hair, as that was the popular style at the time.

WEIRD CRIME

This year’s surreal selections of scurrilous scofflaws features sausages, superheroes, a snake, and the seeds of a dandelion
.

T
HE MISSING LINKS
After a 23-year-old man named He finished his meal at a restaurant in the Chinese city of Benxi, he grabbed the owner’s daughter, pulled out a knife, and demanded all the cash from the register. Some of the other patrons overpowered He and held him until help arrived. When the police came, He opened his shirt to reveal what looked like a belt of tube-shaped bombs around his chest. Officers rushed He outside and called the bomb squad. “When they arrived,” said an officer, “they laughed out loud as they quickly realized the explosives were actually sausages.” He later explained that he came up with the idea when he looked in his refrigerator: “The sausages looked liked bombs, so I decided to try it.”

SAVE THE LAST TRANCE

“You are getting sleepy.” That’s the last thing the women told police they could remember before they regained their senses and discovered their cash registers were empty. The strange crime spree took place at several banks and supermarkets in northern Italy in 2008, and so far the suspect has eluded capture. Although experts say that this kind of hypnotism is impossible—you can’t just walk up to someone and with a single command and get her to do your nefarious bidding—surveillance footage clearly shows the man (who police say “bears a striking resemblance to Saddam Hussein”) talk to the women and then simply reach into the register and take the money. In each case, the svengali walked out with a wad of cash and a smile on his face.

A SEEDY NEIGHBORHOOD

In 2010 police in Hittfeld, Germany, received an emergency call from a boy who said that his eight-year-old friend had just been abducted by a man driving a Porsche. The cops put out an allpoints-bulletin and began a city-wide search. A few minutes later, the Porsche driver (age 47, name not released) walked into the police station dragging the kid behind him. The man said the boy had vandalized his Porsche. How? He was blowing dandelion seeds into the air and some of them “hit” the sports car. The boy was freed; the man was arrested and faces up to two years in prison.

During WWII, Josephine Baker smuggled photos of German military installations out of enemy territory by pinning them to her underwear.

JOE UNCOOL

“This has got to rank as one of the worst attempted jailbreaks ever,” said a prison official in Albany, Isle of Wight, England. The first problem: The perpetrator tried to break into the wrong prison (his cousin was incarcerated at a prison in a neighboring town). Second, the man’s weapon was a squirt gun. Third, the man—who tried to no avail to kick down a door—was wearing a Snoopy costume. “He wasn’t too conspicuous,” said the official.

SNAKE ATTACK!

In 2010 a guest in a Rock Hill, South Carolina, motel knocked on his neighbor’s door and asked the occupant, 29-year-old Tony Smith, to please turn down the music. Smith complied, and the other guest thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t. A few hours later, he stepped out of his room and saw Smith quickly walking toward him carrying a four-foot-long python. Then, according to police reports, “Smith hit him in the face with the snake’s head.” Smith was charged with assault and lost custody of the snake.

IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

On April 21, 2010, police in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, received a strange call: A woman said she was walking through town when she felt a sharp pain in her chest. She looked down and saw a tiny dart sticking out of her blouse. A little while later, a similar call came in from another person, and then another, and then another. Then it dawned on police that they were probably dealing with a serial tiny-dart shooter. Thankfully, the darts weren’t poisonous. And the cops had a lead: One of the victims saw a small tube sticking out of the window of a black minivan, which sped away. Police found the minivan; sitting inside was 41-year-old Paula Wolf…and her blow darts. Why did she do it? “I like to hear people say ‘ouch.’”

BUMPER STICKERS

We keep thinking that we’ve seen every clever bumper sticker that exists, but every year readers send us new ones
.

Never do anything you wouldn’t want to explain to the paramedics

To err is human. To arr is pirate.

I’ve got a God-given right to be an atheist

Free airbag test: come a little closer

If you’re not supposed to eat animals, how come they’re made of meat?

E
VEN IF THE VOICES AREN’T REAL, THEY HAVE SOME GOOD IDEAS

If it weren’t for physics and law enforcement, I’d be unstoppable

Drive it like you stole it

I’m great in bed: I can sleep all night

Look out! I drive just like you

Eliminate and abolish redundancy

I missed winning the lottery by only six numbers

I STARTED WITH NOTHING, AND I STILL HAVE MOST OF IT LEFT

Lord, give me patience…but hurry!

I beat up five hippies and all I got was this lousy VW bus

---

Help! I Farted and can’t roll down my windows!

T
HIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED VEHICLE

Even though this is a stupid sticker, you’re squinting to read it
.

Hello, officer. Put it on my tab.

IF GOD IS YOUR CO-PILOT, PLEASE SWAP SEATS

My other bumper sticker is funny

On
Star Trek,
Spock’s blood type was T-negative.

VOLCANO MOON

Using any half-decent telescope, you can easily view Jupiter and its four largest moons. The moon closest to the gas giant—called Io—may look like any other point of light, but don’t be fooled: Io is perhaps the strangest, and certainly the most volatile, celestial body in our solar system
.

I
O’S CONTENTIOUS DISCOVERY
In 1610 Galileo Galiei claimed he discovered four moons around Jupiter. So did one of his chief rivals, fellow astronomer Simon Marius. But because Galileo published his findings a few days earlier than Marius, Galileo got the credit.

• It was Marius, however, who named Jupiter’s moons. Based on a suggestion from Johannes Kepler that he name them after Jupiter’s illicit lovers in Greek and Roman mythology, Marius chose Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Galileo hated those names and simply called the moons Jupiter I, II, III, and IV. Those names stuck until the 20th century, when several more moons were discovered, and Marius’s original names became official. (To date, 63 moons have been discovered orbiting Jupiter.)

LAND OF EXTREMES

• For centuries Io was assumed to be similar to the other moons in the solar system—an inactive rock speckled with impact craters. But in the last 50 years, more-powerful telescopes and several unmanned flybys revealed a different picture: Io is a volcanic world. Only a handful of moons and planets have volcanic activity, but none are anywhere near as active as Io.

• Io owes its violent nature to the extreme forces constantly affecting it. About the same size as our moon, Io is actually closer to Jupiter than our moon is to Earth. (Picture a BB floating a few inches above a beach ball.) So on the near side, Jupiter’s gravity is pulling tremendously on Io. At the same time, Io’s far side is being pulled on by the gravity of Europa and Ganymede.

• This tug-of-war results in what’s called “tidal heating.” Io’s surface bulges in and out an average of 328 feet each day. Compare that to Earth’s tides, which at their maximum reach about 60 feet.

Since the Federal Reserve was created (1913), the U.S. dollar’s value has fallen 98%.

• This creates an incredible amount of friction
inside
Io, which heats it up—sort of like the way kneading dough makes it warm. That heat gets released in the form of more than 400 active volcanos, including the most powerful one in the solar system, called Loki, which spews lava several hundred miles above Io’s surface. At any given time, dozens of Ionian volcanoes are erupting, creating huge umbrella-shaped plumes that cover vast areas.