Alex Palmer - Weird-o-Pedia: The Ultimate Book of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts about (Supposedly) Ordinary Things

Copyright 2012 by Alex Palmer

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Cover design by Jane Sheppard

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-5107-2224-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2225-5

Printed in China

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INTRODUCTION

W herever you happen to be right now, as you read this sentence, stop for a moment and look around.

You may be lying in a park enjoying a nice sunny day, or on a crowded bus trying to block out a person next to you talking on his cell phone. You may be standing by a shelf in a bookstore, deciding whether the book in your hand is worth taking all the way to the cashier and purchasing. But whatever you are doing, look around.

See something weird?

Of course you do.

It might not be weird like a two-headed Gila monster shuffling by in a tiny top hat, or a woman dressed as a giant raspberry doing backflips. It might just be a coffee mug, or an easy chair, or a dandelion. It could be something youve seen every day for years, and never thought of as anything but unremarkable.

But its weird.

We are surrounded by the bizarre, and the most mundane things in our lives are packed with surprises. This book tries to peel the normal away from so many everyday things, from the food we eat to the stuff we keep in our medicine cabinets, to reveal the strangeness underneath.

That dust in your living room is actually making the air cleaner (see Dust, ).

Below are hundreds of odd tidbits about the world around us, and the strange goings on happening inside our own minds and bodies. These facts may crack you up, get you thinking, or keep you up at night worrying about brain-eating amoebae (see Swimming, ).

If you have any doubt about the accuracy of these curiosities, or want to read more, flip to the Sources section at the back of the book. You will find that as strange as they may sound, or as much as you would like to believe they could not possibly be true, these facts are as genuine as the book in your hand.

Or the shoes on your feet.

Or the zombie orb spider in your backyard, mindlessly following orders from the parasitic wasp babies growing inside of it (see Wasps, ).

CHAPTER 1

FOOD & DRINK

Weird facts about what you put in your body

APPLE PIE

Apple pie is not actually American. English apple pie recipes go back to the time of Chaucer, though these apple pies were baked in straight-sided, free-standing crusts, usually without sugarquite a bit different from the pies that Americans celebrate today.

The first cookbook written and published in America, Amelia Simmons American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life, from 1796, includes four recipes for apple pastries. Thats the same number given to all the other fruit pastries combined.

Pie Town, New Mexico, is actually named in honor of the apple pies produced by a general store built there in the 1920s. When the authorities urged the Pie Towners to use a more conventional name, they refused, and some ninety years later, they are still proudly holding annual pie festivals each September.

In 1934, Ritz introduced a recipe for Mock Apple Pie, a combination of sugar, lemon, cinnamon, and of course, Ritz crackers, that imitates the taste and texture of a real apple pie.

As unappetizing as that sounds, it was popular during the years of deprivation during the Depression and World War II, and other mock dishes also took off. Mock maple syrup (brown sugar and water) and mock terrapin (chicken with eggs) were a few mock favorites.

APPLES

Each American eats an average of twenty pounds of apples a year. Germans eat an average of seventy-one pounds.

There are over one thousand apple varieties marketed in the United States. If youre feeling adventurous, put down that Granny Smith and try:

*King Luscious

*Ben Davis

*Northern Spy

*Westfield Seek-No-Further

*Summer Rambo (no relation to Sylvester Stallone)

*Maiden Blush

*New York 429

*Wealthy

*Hubbardston Nonesuch

When it comes to pesticide residue, apples are the most dangerous fruit. A survey by the anti-pesticide advocacy group Environmental Working Group found that apples, celery, and strawberries had the highest levels of pesticide residue when they got to the produce aisle.

On a positive note, the group also offered a list of least-contaminated produce. Onion, sweet corn, and pineapple topped the list.

BANANAS

Bananas cant reproduce. The beloved species of yellow fruit that holds a prominent place in supermarkets and fruit bowls everywhere, the Cavendish banana, is actually a seedless, impotent hybrid of two less appetizing plant species. Bananas have only been able to reproduce with the help of farmers, who remove and transplant part of the plants stem.

This means we may soon be facing a banana apocalypse. Since the global cultivation of bananas has made them genetically identical to one another, bananas face increasing threats from pests and disease, which constantly evolve while bananas remain reliably, and maladaptively, the same. Researchers believe that within decades the Cavendish may no longer be viable for mass cultivation. So, enjoy that banana while it lasts.