The City of Garbage
Nowhere in the world is garbage as important a part of the economy as Manshiyat Naser, a section of Cairo, Egypt.The people of Manshiyat Naser live by processing the trash of Cairo’s 10 million residents. In this part of Cairo, there is no running water, no sewers, and no electricity. And, every inch of space is packed with towers of garbage. There are also pigs that wander around living on the garbage and the filth.Living in extreme poverty, the families of “Garbage City” tend to each specialize in a particular type of trash, with some relying on recyclable bottles, others on metal, and others burning what they can for warmth.
Canadian Anti-Catholic Book
In January 1836, a former nun named Maria Monk published a book titled The Awful Disclosuresof Maria Monk about her time spent cloistered in the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal, Canada. The book describes a variety of bizarre goings-on, including initiation ceremonies involving coffins, mass physical abuse, infanticide, and a leather hat known as “the cap” which was said to inflict pain. When Monk discovered she was pregnant, she fled the convent, fearing she would die in labor, and wrote her book. But, the whole thing was actually a hoax created by Monk and a number of men who were preying on the anti-Catholic attitudes of that time. The truth was uncovered by a New York City newspaper editor, Colonel William Leete Stone, who traveled to the Hotel Dieu nunnery and revealed that Monk’s story had no basis in fact. Discredited, she spent the rest of her life in poverty, went insane and died in prison in 1849.
Kiwis
A kiwi is not a fruit. It is New Zealand’s native flightless bird and it is also a slang term for a New Zealander. The fruit is call the fruit “kiwifruit” but they are also known as Chinese Gooseberries.
Ballooning Hoax
On the morning of April 13, 1844, readers of The New York Sun newspaper read an amazing story. The article claimed that eight people had flown across the Atlantic Ocean, from England to the United States, in a balloon. The travelers were trying to fly to Paris but had been blown far off course. A number of famous and well-respected figures were said to have been on the journey which the article said took only 75 hours. But, the story was a total fabrication conceived by American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe, who was destitute and needed money. The newspaper retracted the story two days later.
Rarest Snake in the World
The rarest snake in the world is the St. Lucia racer. They were thought to be only found on the small island of St. Lucia in the tropical Caribbean. While these snakes once existed on St. Lucia, they were thought to have been eradicated when invasive predators such as the mongoose and black rat were introduced to the island. They were actually declared to be extinct in 1936 but they were rediscovered on Maria Major island in 1973 where the snakes managed to survive because of the lack of mongooses. This non-venomous snake reaches a maximum length of just under 1 meter (3 ft), and is usually light brown in color with a distinctive brown stripe running from the neck down to the tail. With a recent survey indicating that as few as 18 of these snakes exist on the island, the St. Lucian racer is one of the rarest animals in the world. Currently, major conservation efforts are underway to protect these snakes before they become extinct.
Tony Blair Plagiarized War Statement
In 2003, British prime minister Tony Blair was trying to justify joining the American invasion of Iraq. A 19-page document, subsequently known as the “Dodgy Dossier,” formed the backbone of the case for the invasion. The dossier contained lots of unattributed, stolen material. Material was taken from, among other sources, a doctoral thesis from California State University professor Ibrahim Al-Marashi. Blair’s staff even included the original typing errors.
Earthquake Lights
For centuries, eyewitnesses have reported seeing mysterious lights appearing in the sky moments before or during major earthquakes. The lights were described alternately as bright flashes, blue flames, or faint rainbows that emerge from the ground and sometimes stretch up to 200 meters (650 ft). Before the 1960s, geologists dismissed these reports as hallucinations because no photographs or video footage existed. However, this all changed in the mid-1960s when a series of earthquakes hit Nagano, Japan, giving skeptical geologists an excellent chance to document and finally acknowledge the phenomenon. Several theories have been proposed to explain how earthquake lights form. One of them includes disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field by piezoelectric effect, which is caused by quartz rocks in the tectonic stress region. However, since not every major earthquake is preceded by lightning, these theories haven’t yet been investigated.
Naked Male Marijuana Festival
The Chu Valley of the mostly Muslim nation of Kyrgyzstan grows some of the world’s most verdant crops of wild cannabis. From these, a bizarre drug is harvested. Called “plastilin,” the concentrated marijuana hash is gathered in a strange traditional way and has been for generations. A horseman and his mount are freshly washed. The rider, stripped naked, rides the horse through fields of marijuana for hours, both man and beast working up a sweat. Resin from the plants becomes plastered to their skin. It is then carefully scraped away, molded, and allowed to dry. The result is a spectacularly potent drug which can be easily hidden and later enjoyed. A couple of tiny balls of the substance wrapped in an regular cigarette is enough to leave a user happily buzzed.