Table of Contents
Praise forYou 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 Ive ever come across, and thats really saying something. I read it straight through.
Don Voorhees, author of The Book of Totally Useless Information
A hugely enjoyable readwitty, well researched, and worth buying for Five Stories About Jesuss 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
For refusing to collapse into an earth-devouring black hole under the force of its own staggering density, we dedicate this book to Theodore Roosevelts 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 to thank every last member of the Cracked Writers 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 offyoure 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.
Were 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 wasnt 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. Wed 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. Wed 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 OBrien 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.
Its 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 zombiesdid you know about that? We didnt 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. Thats the real world youve 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 directors 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 thats not a tarp. In these pages, you will find answers to questions you didnt even know you should be asking. Questions like, Why were the Nazis 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 youll 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 didnt 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 lifes 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 hed 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 lifes big questions had changed.
Lifes big questions have changed, she said. Why dont 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, Ive been sprinting for like ten minutes straight. Why wont 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 dont 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
