Listverse

Top 10 Extreme Genres of Music

2009-11-08T06:30:04Z

Music can soothe the savage beast and it can work us up into a fury. There is a seemingly infinite number of styles of music and this list looks at ten of the less usual ones. Just to clarify, the use of the word “extreme” is simply a way of describing genres that were in one or more ways completely different from anything mainstream.

Political Hip Hop

Description: Political hip hop (also political rap) is a sub-genre of hip hop music that developed in the 1980s. Inspired by 1970s political preachers such as The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, Public Enemy were the first political hip hop group. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released the first well-known sociopolitical rap song in 1982 called “The Message”, which inspired numerous rappers to address social and political subjects.

Why it is Extreme: Political hip hop might not be extreme in every sense of the word but nowadays artists such as Immortal Technique, Dead Prez and Looptroop rockers use their music to promote and sometimes encourage themes such a socialism, anarchy, conspiracy theories, black power and even presidential assassination. This genre should never be compared to the average rap song played on the radio, in fact almost all Political hip hop artist express extreme dislike towards mass produced and highly commercialized artists, an example of this is a passage from the song “The Message and the Money” by Immortal Technique, “To all these saronayas who are too lazy to come up with a way to sell records…that they keep recycling marketing schemes and imagery, C’mon there is a market for everything, there is a market for pet psychologists, twisted shitfetish videos, nipple rings, river dancing, for chocolate covered roaches but you can’t find one for cultured hardcore reality and hip hop?”

Related Genres: Black Nationalist hip hop, Marxist hip hop, Anarchist hip hop, Socialism hip hop

Artists: Nas, Mos Def, Dead Prez, Looptroop rockers, Immortal Technique, Blue Scholars, Sun Rise Above

Choral Music

Description: A body of singers who perform together is called a choir or chorus. The former term is very often applied to groups affiliated with a church and the second to groups that perform in theaters or concert halls. All members come together with what is called “one voice.” One person who makes a mistake can throw off the entire group and a mistake made by by a single person means the entire group makes the mistake. The spotlight is on the choir, therefore it is of extreme importance to perform well for the audience (in a concert) or congregation (in a church). In typical 18th to 20th century oratorios and masses, chorus or choir is usually understood to imply more than one singer per part, in contrast to the quartet of soloists also featured in these works.

Why it is Extreme: Simply the fact that the smallest mistake made by one person could ruin the performance of all other members (anywhere from 20 to 300) makes this genre more extreme than others, where a mistake could be covered up by other members. Another extreme factor is the absence of any kind of time-keeping device such as a metronome, drums or even a finger snap. Choirs also have a very precise structure that needs to be followed to assure a proper sounding harmony, similar to an orchestra where all instruments have an assigned position and tuning.

Related Genres: Symphonic choirs, Vocal jazz choirs, classical, orchestral

Chill (Non-Voc)

Description: Chill out (sometimes also chillout, chill-out, or simply chill) emerged in the early and mid-1990s as a catch-all term for various styles of relatively mellow, slow-tempo music made by contemporary producers in the electronic music scene. Sometimes the Easy Listening sub-genre Lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection. The term “Chill out music”, as well as the genre itself, originated in chill rooms that were set up by DJs off to the edge of club dance floors to give patrons a chance to take a break from the hectic dance vibe and chill out with this style of music. Chill out as a musical genre or descriptive is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms “smooth electronica” and “soft techno” and is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.

Why it is Extreme: Perhaps “Complete Ambiance” is a more appropriate title for this genre as anything that relaxes can be considered chill and each person has their own preferences. This genre is a very specific sub genre of electronic music with characteristics including downtempo, synthetic ambiance, deep bass lines, oceanwave-like rhythm and sound effects such as bells, xylophone, synthetic pings and strictly no vocals (Non-Voc). It might sound like there is nothing extreme about this genre but some songs can last more than 15 minutes and sometimes people have trouble concentrating and staying awake through a whole song due to it’s very affective soothing ability. Chill out rooms at dance clubs fill a safety need for users of Ecstasy, because some songs were so affective that it would put the user in such a deep trance causing them to forget to breath. In 1992 a UK rule required dance clubs to provide free water in response to a number of Ecstasy-related injuries and deaths.

Related Genres: Ambient, Trip-Hop, Nu Jazz, New Age, Downtempo, Lounge, Psybient

Artists: Portishead, Afterlife, Lux, Massive Attack, Boards of Canada

Indian Classical Music

Description: Indian classical music has its origins as a meditation tool for attaining self realization. All different forms of these melodies (ragas) are believed to affect various “chakras” (energy centers, or “moods”). However, there is little mention of these esoteric beliefs in Bharat’s Natyashastra, the first treatise laying down the fundamental principles of drama, dance and music. Indian classical music has one of the most complex and complete musical systems ever developed. Like Western classical music, it divides the octave into 12 semitones however, it uses the just intonation tuning (unlike most modern Western classical music, which uses the equal-temperament tuning system).

Why it is Extreme: I think the only way to explain why this genre is so extreme is to give the definition of a Rāga. Rāga refers to melodic modes used in Indian classical music. It is a series of five or more musical notes upon which a melody is made. In the Indian musical tradition, rāgas are associated with different times of the day, or with seasons. Indian classical music is always set in a rāga. That means that a different song is played depending on which season, day and time it is. Another extreme factor is the use of instruments which include the sitar, a 16 stringed guitar requiring a lifetime of practice to play properly.

Death Metal

Description: Death metal (the modern or “american” death metal not the original 80’s and 90’s death metal) is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal. It typically employs heavily distorted guitars, deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming, and complex song structures with multiple tempo changes. Building off the speed and complexity of thrash metal, death metal emerged during the mid 1980s. It was mainly inspired by thrash metal acts like Slayer, Kreator and Celtic Frost. Along with the band Death and its frontman Chuck Schuldiner (who is often referred to as “the father of death metal”), bands like Possessed and Morbid Angel are often considered pioneers of the genre. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, death metal gained more media attention as popular record labels like Earache Records and Roadrunner Records began to sign death metal bands at a rapid rate. Since then, death metal has diversified, spawning a rich variety of subgenres.

Why it is Extreme: Lyrical themes include death, murder, rape, mutilation, dominance, rage, hatred, torture etc.
The lower the vocals, guitars and bass are tuned the better.

Related Genres: Mathcore, Deathcore, Black Metal, Grindcore, Doom Metal, Speed Metal

Artists (Modern death metal only): Oceano, Suicide Silence, Waking the Cadaver, Ion Dissonance, Suffokate, Annotations of an Autopsy, Winds of Plague, Emmure, Rose Funeral

Just paying the bills...

Speed Metal (cybergrind)

Description: Speed metal is a sub-genre of heavy metal music originating in the early 1980s. It is described as “extremely fast, abrasive, and technically demanding” music. Also according to Allmusic.com, speed metal eventually toned down its intense tempos and evolved into thrash metal.

Why it is Extreme: Cybergrind is not technically a recognized genre though some bands use it as a descriptive genre. So to make things easier i used the closest thing, Speed Metal, as an example. Cybergrind is sort of a blend between Speed Metal and Hardcore (#4 on this list). If Death Metal is too much for you then this will definitely not sooth your musical taste buds, it is quite extreme.

Related Genres: Speed Metal, Death Metal, Mathcore

Artists: The Berzerker, Abramelin, Plague, Disembowelment

Hardcore

Description: Hardcore is a style of electronic music that originated in the early-to-mid-1990s in multiple locations including the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the UK. The style is typified by a fast tempo, and the rhythmic use of distorted and atonal industrial-like beats and samples. As hardcore continues to grow, each different type of hardcore (each subgenre) begins to attract a larger fan base and more support from producers. As new subgenres grow they can become extremely different than other subgenres that are also referred to as “Hardcore.”

Why it is extreme: Hardcore subsequently is an extreme form of techno, house and trance music, it follows the basic guidelines with a constant beat and laud synthetic sirens and other sound effects.

Related Genres: Gabber, Speedcore, Terrorcore, Breakcore, Noisecore, Doomcore

Artists: Neophyte, Angerfist, Delta 9, Gammer, Nasenbluten

Avant-garde Metal

Description: Avant-garde metal, experimental metal, or art metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music characterised by the use of innovative, avant-garde elements, large-scale experimentation, and the use of non-standard sounds, instruments, and song structures. The earliest avant-garde metal bands include Celtic Frost and Master’s Hammer. Many Avant-Garde metal bands can be found on North American label The End Records. The term avant-garde metal refers to bands and musicians who “incorporate new and innovative elements in metal, who break conventions, tear down walls, violate borders.” The genre has also been described as “the art of creating deep and strange atmospheres by experimenting with new instruments and sounds, strange vocals, unconventional song structures, rhythms and harmonies, unusual lyrics or uncommon artwork” or alternatively, “progressive, psychedelic, surrealistic, phantasmagoric, expressionistic, dissonant or extravagant interpretations of extreme metal.”

Why it is Extreme: Almost everything we do in live is done to a certain beat or rhythm that only we can “feel”. When we walk, write, talk, read, breath and eat we do it to the same rhythm we have always felt and when that rhythm is interrupted we try to either adapt to the new beat or get back to the old one. Avant-garde metal bands will not allow you to get back to the previous beat, sudden changes in tempo, off beat and pulsating blast-beats and short bursts of highly distorted vocals create a confusing, complex and random wall of noise that strangely, makes sense.

Related Genres: Post-metal, Drone metal, Mathcore

Artists: Fantomas, Mr. Bungle, Mike Patton, Rahzel, Maldoror

Hoomii

Mongolian throat singing

Description: Perhaps the best-known musical form of the Mongols is the throat singing tradition known as hoomii, extant among all or most Mongols though best known internationally from Tuva. Sung differently than traditional vocals. In Mongolia, the most-famous throat-singers include Gereltsogt and Sundui, while the Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu has an international following. This unique type of singing involves the production of two distinctively audible pitches at the same time, including a low pedal note, or drone, derived from the fundamental frequency of the vocal cord vibrations, and higher melodic notes that result when the singer’s mouth acts as a filter, selecting one note at a time from among the drone’s natural overtone series pitches.

Why it is Extreme: Singing itself is quite difficult for most people and throat singing is probably not something they would even consider. A throat singer can produce 2 to 4 notes at the same time, this gives the effect of a deep sound (bass) a medium sound (guitar) and a high pitch sound resembling a flute or whistle being played. This genre is definitely extreme, some songs can last 3 minutes and depending on how good the singer is could contain only 10 words (words are stretched and sometimes transition into “instrumentals”). Unfortunately the featured clip has an annoying high pitched sound in it but it should not due too much damage to the quality.

Aphex Twin

Description: Aphex Twin is not a genre of music but an artist, i decided to include him in this list because his music is truly unique. Aphex Twin, is a British electronic musician described by The Guardian newspaper as “the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music.”

Why he is Extreme: I think anyone who has heard an Aphex Twin song knows that it is not ordinary, Twin produces songs that have incredible complexity, sound distortions, synthetic sound effects, maximum distorted voices and recordings and off to on beat changes.

Related Genres: Electronic

Related Artists: None

10 More Myths Debunked

2009-11-06T21:55:56Z

Although it has nothing to do with the list, I consider this fact very interesting: Leonardo da Vinci invented the sniper firearm. It was not a rifle, as its barrel was smoothbore, but he greatly improved its accuracy by bolting one of his refracting telescopes onto it, aligning it precisely, and used it, in the company of his employer, the Duke of Milan, to shoot enemy soldiers off castle walls from 1,000 yards. He claims the equivalent of 1,000 yards in his notes, but I doubt the distance was this great. He provides no explanation as to why this weapon never became popular. So now, after that moment of randomness, here is the list:

George Washington’s Teeth

President Washington never owned a set of wooden teeth. He did however own a set of hippopotamus ivory teeth, a set of horse teeth, donkey teeth, and human teeth (from various sources), a set of 18kt gold teeth (he tried 24kt but they were too malleable), and a set of lead teeth, which were not particularly good for him. These four sets of dentures (the human and animal teeth were mixed) are in the National Museum of Dentistry. No other dentures of Washington have been discovered.

The Ruler of Hell

Amazingly, many Christians believe that Satan is sitting on a throne in Hell, laughing at all the agony of the poor damned souls, while his imps and demons run around with pitchforks. None of this is Biblical. Satan is quite frequently described as living on Earth, and doing what he does best, corrupting mankind.

The tradition of a ruler in Hell comes from the Greek god Hades, at least, and perhaps even earlier with the Egyptians. Hades sits on the throne of the Underworld, just as Zeus, his brother, sits on the throne of Olympus.

The Biblical description of Hell is clearly anarchic. No one is in charge. Everyone is screaming and writhing, etc., in a lake of fire. Satan has never been there, and will not go until the end when he loses his fight against God.

The Christian tradition of Satan ruling Hell comes largely from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n,” Satan says, in Book I.

Express Your Anger

There is a very common myth about psychology in which people believe they will alleviate their anger by “letting it out”. This is such a popular concept that many therapies have grown up around it – things like punchbags, squeeze balls, etc. In fact, the opposite is found to be true. When a person expresses their anger regularly, it becomes habit forming. While there may appear to be a temporary relief from the anger when you smash a plate against the wall, ultimately your fits of anger will become an addiction and you will begin to seek out more reasons to become angry – in order to achieve that nice feeling. So ultimate, the best thing to do: bottle it up!

Don Knotts the D. I.

Don Knotts, who played the lovable Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, is said to have been a Marine Corps drill instructor during WWI, on Parris Island, SC, of the savage caliber of R. Lee Ermey. Not true. Knotts enlisted in the Army, not the marines, and served as a traveling comedian, entertaining troops overseas, during WWII, but never trained anyone, and never fired a rifle at anyone.

Caffeine Stunts Growth

Caffeine will do a lot of negative things to you, but it will not stunt your growth. It has nothing to do with growth. Experiments have shown that children who consume caffeine do not grow any slower or less than children who are not allowed caffeine, over a period of years.

The myth was probably dreamed up by some clever parent who didn’t want his or her child drinking so much Pepsi.

Just paying the bills...

Absinthe the Acid

Absinthe was never any more poisonous than whiskey. The myth goes back at least to the 1800s, and claims that it causes hallucinations, as potently as LSD, and fries the brain. Not true. Absinthe is manufactured from Artemisia absinthium, a plant which has no poisons in it. It is very bitter, like the Greek Ouzo, and the distillation process routinely results in absinthe proofs of 100 to 180 (50% to 90% alcohol by volume). This is significantly stronger than the average whiskey, but will not affect the drinker in any way other than drunkenness.

The truth, though, is that during the Moulin Rouge days of Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, starving artists liked getting drunk, and couldn’t afford the good stuff. So they bought absinthe from cheap street vendors, who did not care to sell uncontaminated products. Cyanide and strychnine were found in this absinthe, and caused hallucinations.

Today, it is legal in the U. S., and perfectly safe to drink if bought commercially.

Tornado Myths

Opening windows will not spare your house, or any other building, from a tornado’s destructive power. The strongest on record measured 318 mph, which is more than sufficient to blast any building into pieces, except steel-reinforced concrete, and even then, the building must be short, or the wind will blow it over.

Do not hide under overpasses. The confined eaves in these places only increase the force of the wind, which has been reported as strong enough to drag F-250 pickup trucks out from under overpasses and throw them through barns 1000 yards away.

Tornadoes can, in fact, form in winter, and cause just as severe damage as during any other season. They have been seen traveling over snowfield, almost utterly white, and slamming into residential areas.

They can storm through large cities without any problem, as opposed to the belief that they will never damage Oklahoma City. Fort Worth suffered one in 2000, which killed 2 people, and destroyed 8 skyscrapers. 17 others were severely damaged. 60+, in all, had their windows blown out.

Shakespeare the Wordwright

The myth has gone on for years now that Shakespeare invented about 1,700 words still common in English. Not true. He Anglicized many Latin and Greek words, among other languages, thus coining new English words. But to be invented, a word must have no etymology before a single person imagines it.

He is said to have invented “assassination,” but what he did was derive it from the Medieval Latin “assassinare,” which means “to kill an important person.”

All of the words he is reputed to have invented can be explained this way. He did, however, devise first name uses for quite a few words, including Viola, Jessica, and Adrian. The first is Latin, the second Hebrew, the third Greek.

Sidenote: Sir Isaac Newton Anglicized “gravitas,” which is Latin for “weight,” into “gravity.” As he was the first to discover the mechanism and its properties, how they work, he had to come up with a word for it. No one else had ever called gravity anything.

Darwin and the Origin of Man

Debaters on both sides are grossly misinformed. Darwin never states in his book On the Origin of Species that humans evolved from apes. He states, quite differently, that apes and humans both evolved from a common ancestor. This seems somewhat less offensive to fundamentalists, and if both sides were to consider it, it might smooth the relationship between fundamentalists and science.

Kangaroo

This story of how the kangaroo got its name is unfortunately not true. It states that Captain James Cook first landed on Australia, near modern day Sydney, and met the Gweagal tribe of Aborigines on the beach. At this moment, a kangaroo hopped out of the forest with its joey in its pouch and the Europeans, having never seen such a strange animal, asked the Aborigines, “What in the world is that?!”

The Aborigines turned to each other, then shrugged, and one of them said, “Kangaroo!” which is Gweagal for, “I don’t understand what you’re saying!”

Well, the truth is much more banal. “Kangaroo” is derived from the Guugu Yimidhirr (another Aborigine tribe) word “gangurru,” which means…”kangaroo.”

Top 10 Consistent Ghost Story Elements

2009-11-05T20:24:06Z

We all love a good ghost story, right? What could be better than sitting around a fire, flashlight aimed upward, casting creepy shadows across your face and illuminating all those boogers that nobody has the heart to tell you about? What is more exhilarating than piling into a much-too-small car with a few larger-than-desirable friends and driving to that bridge that your parents told you about? You know, the one where your usually uptight dad spent many an uncharacteristically-adventurous night. What is better than constantly ragging on the little wuss in the back seat who is channeling the “guys-turn-around-we’re-gonna-arrested” spirit, even though he is clearly afraid of what everybody else is desperately hoping will happen? What is better than getting pulled over by the cop whose night was just a little too long, who is currently writing you a ticket for having too many people in the car, half of whom didn’t buckle their seat belts? Inhale deeply and say it with me: “Awww, memories!

But for every original, spooky ghost story you hear, there are 10 more that you hear that sound pretty identical. Like, “we-have-a-story-like-that-in-our-town-except…” kind of identical. Every story has it’s kernel of truth, but sometimes it feels like that kernel was genetically cloned from a kernel in another state, creating clone-corn ghost stories. Here are 10 of the most common elements in the world of ghost stories.

Creepy Nickname

That headless railroad employee that roams the tunnels looking for his lost head is simply not allowed to go by his name in life. After his demise, his spirit must adopt a nickname, one that will scare the bejeezus out of the teenagers looking for him. I mean, nobody likes a boring ghost, am I right? Allen must now go to court to have his name legally changed. Allen has got to go. Besides, you look more like a Headless Hank, or Decapitated Dale, anyway.

Weather Just Right

Most of those idiot skeptics out there will argue that the whole weather issue only exists so that believers and legend-mongers will have a scapegoat when you show up, and the ghost doesn’t. Silly skeptics, logic is for kids! No, it is clear that ghosts prefer certain weather. I mean, might as well make a show of it, right? Or, some ghosts manifest easier early in the foggy morning, or during a full moon with plenty of shadows, or a NEW moon with no light at all. Trust your peripheral vision, that ambiguous shadow or odd shape in the fog that you barely caught out of the corner of your eye is the ghost coming out to enjoy the weather!

Result of Mass Murder

After talking to Satan, Joe Axe-Murderer took off in his 20-year-old pickup truck, found a school bus full of homeless orphans, and hacked them all into tiny pieces. They were all so petrified, that none of the 30-odd children thought to take off and call for help. They all just watched Joe hack up their brethren, and waited their turn. Such a tragic incident would leave an imprint on the fabric of reality, right? Of course! So when you are driving down the road, try to keep and ear open for the screams of the victims or the ghost of a raggedy old man leering at you from the bushes.

Suicide Victim

Linda X was a depressed gal, living in the 18th century when apparently young girls killing themselves were more tragic (don’t ask how, I don’t know), when she was walking down the road. She had a length of rope, and was making towards the town’s covered bridge. Conveniently, nobody noticed her leaving her home or walking towards the bridge, rope in hand. Up went the rope, down went Linda, and now you can see it all with the residual-haunting flashback! All you need is a covered bridge and complete emotional disregard for some ancient girl’s self-inflicted demise.

Specific Time and Date

Back off this one, skeptics, because it is legit. Some spirits are busy, and can only perform at certain times. You can buy tickets, because an event like this is guaranteed to attract more curious teenagers than I’ve got run-on sentences in my introduction. And if you don’t see it, that is because the ghost got scared off by such a big audience, not because it doesn’t exist.

Just paying the bills...

Wedding Night

The ideal wedding night doesn’t involve dying, usually. But, if you want to become a ghost/local legend, this is your best shot. And sorry fellas, this only goes for the brides. A woman in a white dress is far creepier than a dude in a tux. And women dying on their wedding night are more tragic than men, because women actually want it. And most men would tell you, that they die in a much less literal sense on their wedding day anyway. You don’t see us weeping by the road for teenagers to gawk at. It is worth pointing out that regardless of your marital status or the date pertaining to Labor Day, female ghosts ALL wear the same dress to prom.

Ghostly Handprints

Children have to touch EVERYTHING, even after they’ve died. You put a little powder on your car, visit the burned-down orphanage, and when you’re back from snapping pictures, the little turds have gotten their stinking handprints all over your car! It doesn’t matter where you go, it’s like these little touchy-feely kids have never seen a car before, and apparently the texture is simply amazing after you’ve bit the dust. Kids have no consideration sometimes.

Roll Down the Windows

I have my suspicions that this one was thought up by a really slow, down-on-his-luck serial killer who couldn’t run up and knife people before they took off, tires screeching. BUT, I could be wrong. Maybe it is just so hard to make ghostly whispers over the sound of a car engine. Maybe it is annoying to have to be blinded by the headlights. Maybe you have a lot to say, but you know as soon as you start trying to talk to them, they’ll peel out. So, you reserve your ghostly efforts until they turn off their car. Or, you are just a tricky rat bastard who is preparing the victims for item 2:

Car Won’t Start

Ok, so first, the ghosts refuse to show up unless you turn off your car. Then, they won’t even let you leave. Ghosts can be pricks, sometimes. They won’t pose for a picture, but they’ll fuck with your engine something awful. ANd didn’t the vast majority of ghosts die in the 1700’s or 1800’s? How the hell do they know how to dismantle a car? Doesn’t matter, I guess. They just wait until you are seconds away from having an aneurism, and then BAM! Your car is working again.

Disappearing Hitchhiker

Who knows why these dead people constantly need rides, but they don’t thank you or anything. You see them with their thumb out, and you’re like, “Hey, looks like that girl in the white dress with her mascara running could use a ride!” She won’t talk to you the entire time, except to tell you where to go, and for some reason, this won’t freak you out. The bitch will just stare straight ahead, won’t strike up a conversation, won’t say thanks, won’t offer to pay gas, nothing. Then, when you are almost there, she just bales on you. You look over, and *poof* she’s gone. You somehow convince yourself that she had to gone jumped out, or that you were just hallucinating. But there isn’t a body splattered on the pavement, and you haven’t dropped acid since that concert 20 years ago…. Something smells fishy. So you go to her house, tell her parents you were giving her a ride, and they tell you she’s been dead for 6 years! Geesh, would’ve been nice for her to tell you that!

Top 10 Worst Halloween Treats Ever

2009-11-04T21:20:28Z

Halloween is now over for another year and people have had sufficient time to scour through their bags of candy. Here is a list of the worst Halloween Treats that I remember from my childhood. There may be worse additions present day, in fact, I’d be surprised if there weren’t as companies seem to be pulling out all the stops to top their competition year after year with strange flavor combinations, color concoctions, etc. But, going back to my era of trick or treating, the mid 70s – mid 80s, these were the worst of the worst to discover in your trick or treat bag. I welcome feedback from everyone as to your worst Halloween Trick or Treat memories, and hope everyone got great treats this year!

Good n’ Plentys

Okay, there are some people who like black licorice, but for many others, and for many kids who haven’t grown into the taste yet, it is nasty as hell. Not to mention that Good n’ Plenty’s are a tease – colorful pink and white candy shells, anise-flavored hell underneath. Licorice Allsorts also fall into this category. And I won’t even mention how easy it would be to slip a few quaaludes into the mix!

Homemade Candy, Baked Goods, etc.

They looked scrumptious and were usually given to you by the sweet little old lady who lived down the lane. But, if you were born after 1970, you weren’t allowed to eat them, and your folks just threw them out, for fear that those gooey rice krispie squares, homemade fudge, candy or caramel apples, etc., were filled with razor blades and poison.

Mr. Goodbar

The bastard stepchild of the Hershey Miniatures pack. Now whether or not you like nuts and chocolate combined, these yellow goofballs just never quite worked. They always tasted like two separate taste treats thrown together, unlike better chocolate/peanut combinations– Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Butterfingers, Baby Ruths, Snickers, etc. I always came away wishing I had gotten the Krackle, the regular Hershey Chocolate, or even the Hershey Dark.

Apples

Now you might think this falls under the same category as razor blades & poison, but I’m not even gonna go there. Apples as a treat stink! As a kid, I probably ate an apple every day in my lunch. It’s Halloween, gimme some candy!

Money

OK, at first money seems pretty cool, even if you figured you could pool it and buy candy from the candy counter at your local corner store. But, you never got more than a couple of stray nickels, or even pennies from the really cheap people! Never enough to do real candy damage – usually just enough to get a few watermelon jolly ranchers. And on that note…

Just paying the bills...

Jolly Ranchers

They stuck your teeth together until you thought you would have to go to the dentist to pry them apart! Much too much work for way too little a candy thrill. And, the grape ones just tasted strange. Not quite cough medicine, not quite candy – just weird.

Necco Wafers/Smarties

I don’t even know where to start. These were like eating pastel colored dust formed into little round discs. Not nearly sweet enough, and flavorless, these cheap, powder pellets were weak at best, tasteless at worst, and just cluttered the bottom of the treat bag. Although they were fun if you were Catholic and played “Communion” with them.

Any Generic or super-cheap lollipop

A tootsie pop or equivalent could be a somewhat plausible treat – at least you’re working toward getting either a tootsie roll or bubble gum on the inside after all your efforts, but these crappy little teeny lollipops were just the worst. They tasted like old shoes.

“Wrong Candy”

It was just off-putting, getting jellybeans (Easter), hard ribbon candies (Christmas), or other strange candies that just didn’t fit with Halloween. And of course you wondered, “How long have they been saving these to hand out?!!!”

Mary Janes

What exactly were these? Toffee? Peanut chews?? Sawdust?? To the best of my recollection, they were some kind of molasses concoction, but for anyone born after the days of Little House on the Prairie, where the big treat was taking hot molasses out and throwing it down in the snow to cool it in order to make candy, these were a huge disappointment.

Bonus

McDonald’s/Burger King gift certificates

Did anyone’s parents actually let them use these? OK, my folks weren’t fast food nazis, but even if the intention to let me use them was there, no one ever remembered to do so, and they were found months later, after they expired.

Notable Mentions: Circus Peanuts, Generic Peanut Chews, Candy Corn (hard for me to list here because I always loved it, but so many people hate it, I had to include it), Candy necklaces/Candy dots on paper (which were made by the Necco company!)

Top 10 People Robbed of the Nobel Prize

2009-11-04T18:49:52Z

The Nobel prize for peace. It is a controversial award having been granted to many who seemingly don’t deserve it, and not granted to those who do. This list looks at ten people who were robbed of the prize.

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic who died in 2008. From 1939 to 1945, she personally saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She forged identification papers, passports, sheltered them in children’s homes throughout Warsaw.

The Gestapo caught her in 1943 and severely tortured her for the location of the Jews she had extricated from the Ghetto. She refused to give them up. She was sentenced to death and saved by a bribe to the Nazi officer in charge, who simply left her in deep in a forest with all four limbs broken.

She recovered and went right back to work saving Jews from the Ghetto. She was nominated in 2007, but was passed over in favor of Al Gore. She was 98 when she died.

Mohandas Gandhi

Mohandas Gandhi was murdered in 1948. He began his work for Indian independence from Britain in 1916 and finally succeeded in 1947, when Louis Mountbatten relinquished India from Britain to the Indians. One man, by himself, Gandhi has been credited with defeating the British Empire singlehandedly, without raising one finger in violence.

He was nominated in 5 years, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. 19 people nominated him in those years, especially Ole Colbjornsen, member of the Norwegian Parliament, who nominated him the first 3 times. In the years between 1939 and 1947, he was either not nominated by anyone, or the Swedish Academy refused to consider nominations during the War. Likewise, in the years preceding 1937, not one person on Earth nominated him.

A rule stipulates that death before being awarded the Prize renders one ineligible for it, nominated or not. But I think the Academy could have given it to him posthumously, and no one would have complained. In which case, they could still award it to him for the year 1948. He could certainly replace Cordell Hull, for 1945. Hull is mentioned on another Listverse list.

It is possible that his “experiments” with under-aged children (item 8) reduced his chances of receiving the prize, but as earlier stated, most people would probably not object to his having been awarded the prize despite them.

Abdul Sattar Edhi

The head of the Edhi Foundation, based in Pakistan, he is a philanthropist, who in 1951 opened a small medical shop in Karachi, using his own meager funds, with the sole intention of helping anyone who came in. He had learned little about medicine, but wanted to help people. He claims that he does so because he enjoys it, in the same way that an evil man enjoys hurting people.

He has been treating everyone in the Karachi area, and all areas where his branches are located, over the whole world. He treats people at extremely low cost. He began the Edhi Foundation with donations from friends and supporters around Karachi, and the Foundation is a free maternity clinic and nursing school. Students may enroll at absolutely no cost. Tuition, books, and other equipment are free.

Karachi suffered a flu outbreak in 1957, and Edhi immediately set up tents in which he and his faculty treated everyone for free. He bought an ambulance with donations, which he personally drove to accidents, and to his own clinic, or to hospitals. The Edhi Foundation has a $10 million budget, but Edhi refuses to take any of the money for himself. As he is still alive, it is not entirely fair that he should be on this list, as he may win in the future. But I thought it fitting, given the recent 2009 Peace Prize, and the fact that he was considered for it also.

Jose Figueres Ferrer

Jose Figueres Ferrer was the President of Costa Rica 3 times, and during his first term, he granted women the right to vote, stating that while men may be stronger, there is no difference between male and female mental faculties. He abolished his country’s army, arguing that only a police force is necessary for domestic law enforcement, and that an army only exists for the promise of invading another country; he did not believe any country around him wanted to invade Costa Rica.

After nationalizing Costa Rica’s banking and creating a welfare state, he outlawed Communism. Ferrer oversaw the writing of a new constitution, guaranteed state managed public education for every citizen, gave citizenship to the children of black immigrants, and established a civil service bureaucracy.

Dr. Feng Shan Ho

He graduated from Munich University in 1932, and was appointed as a diplomatic secretary in Turkey, then in Vienna in 1937. The next year, Hitler annexed Austria, and Ho was promoted to Consul-General of the Chinese Embassy in Vienna.

After Kristallnacht, everyone in Austria knew full well the predicament facing the 200,000 Jews throughout the country. Their only hope was to escape from Europe, and this was possible only with exit visas. The Evian Conference of 1938 caused 38 countries to refuse Jews immigration, and Ho was ordered by Chen Jie, the Chinese ambassador to Berlin, not to provide visas for Jews.

Ho endangered himself for all six years of the War by refusing to obey this order. He issued 1906 visas by 27 October 1938, some for Jews, some not. How many Jews he saved will never be ascertained, but given that he issued almost 2,000 in only his first 6 months, he may have saved thousands of lives. Whoever saves one life saves the world entire. He was 96 when he died. He has been nicknamed “China’s Schindler.”

Just paying the bills...

Cesar Chavez

He has been called “the Mexican Martin Luther King.” He found working conditions appalling for common Latino laborers in California, and co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which is now called United Farm Workers. He organized civil rights activism, and became the Community Service Organization’s national director in 1958. His efforts to gain higher wages and better working conditions for farm laborers finally succeeded in 1966.

After that, he fought to restrict illegal immigrants from entering the U. S. and taking jobs from legal Mexican citizens. His birthday is a state holiday in California. He died in 1993, and the next year was awarded the Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton.

Stephen Biko

After Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in 1964, Steve Biko became the primary authority of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. He founded the Black Consciousness Movement and advocated a worldwide “brotherhood of man.”

He was the primary architect of the protests that reached a head at the Soweto Uprising in June, 1976. He preached non-violence, which was not entirely heeded, and the uprising resulted in Apartheid police slaughtering school children at random in the crowds.

They then targeted Biko and finally caught him, and beat him to death, from 11 September to 12 September, 1977.

Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, distributist, and devout Catholic convert. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist, movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. A revered figure within segments of the U.S. Catholic community, Day is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. Day has been the recipient of numerous posthumous honors and awards. Among them: in 1992, she received the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey, and in 2001, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler was the most famous member of the Avenue of the Righteous. He saved 1,200 Jews from the Nazis by employing them in his munitions factories from 1943 to the end of the War. He therefore placed himself in extreme mortal peril constantly during that time, as the Nazis knew full well that his workers were Jewish.

He was very persuasive, having paid millions to the Nazi Party up to that time, and insisted that his workers were more useful to the Wehrmacht by manufacturing pots, pans, and ammunition. But secretly, he had his workers sabotage the ammunition so it would not function.

Venerable Pope Pius XII

On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Eugenio Pacelli (soon to become Pope Pius XII) gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis “are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” During the war (when Pacelli had become Pope) he spoke out strongly in defense of the Jews with the first mass arrests in 1943, and L’Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist press came to call the Vatican paper ‘a mouthpiece of the Jews.’

Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places: “[t]he Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of Jews — the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000 — were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope’s summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy.”

The consequences of the actions of Venerable Pope Pius XII in defense of the Jews were such that the Chief Rabbi of Rome (Rabbi Zolli) during WWII converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Eugenio (out of reverence for the Pope). [Source]

15 Fascinating Factlets

2009-11-03T10:33:09Z

It is certainly not a secret that I love all things obscure and unusual. Looking over the list of lists today I realized that we haven’t got a list of just completely random fascinating obscure facts – thus was born this list. Be sure to tell us your own favorites in the comments below as they may appear in a future list.

Fascinating Factlets 1 – 5

1. In the game of Chess, the word “checkmate” comes from the Persian phrase “shah mat” and it means “the King is dead”.

2. In 1835, John Batman settled in what was to eventually become Melbourne, Australia. He named it “Batmania”. Two years later it was renamed Melbourne in honor of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

3. A cannulated cow, also referred to as a cow with a window, is a cow that has been surgically fitted with a cannula, a porthole-like device which allows access to its rumen. Cows undergo this procedure so that their nutritional needs and digestive processes can be more easily studied. [Picture above]

4. The rabbit test was an early pregnancy test developed in 1927 by Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim. The test consisted of injecting the tested woman’s urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit’s ovaries a few days later, which would change in response to a hormone only secreted by pregnant women. Modern pregnancy tests use the same principle but no longer require an animal to discover the presence of the pregnancy hormone.

5. While most male birds do not have “external genitalia”, some ducks have penises up to 14 inches long!!!! They commonly rape the females who have adapted by developing a vagina with three paths, two of which are “dead ends”. They have the ability to close off the true vaginal canal and send a rapist’s sperm into a dead end at will. If the rapists sperm does make it into the true vaginal canal, it is shaped like a coil and can be compressed to turn away unwanted insemination.

Fascinating Factlets 6 – 10

6. A flatulist is a performer who receives payment for farting in an amusing and/or musical manner. Saint Augustine in City of God (14.24) mentions some performers who did have “such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing.”

7. The six-hour clock is a traditional timekeeping system used in Thailand alongside the official twenty-four-hour clock. Like the other common systems, it counts twenty-four hours in a day, but divides the day into four quarters, counting six hours in each

8. Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of one of longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken. The current organ performance of the piece at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640.

9. A pyrophone, also known as a “fire/explosion organ” or “fire/explosion calliope” is a musical instrument in which notes are sounded by explosions, or similar forms of rapid combustion, rapid heating, or the like. The instrument is extremely unusual and makes music which is quite spooky. You can see one in action in the clip above.

10. Mistakes (due to mishearing) in songs are called mondegreens. Most people have at one time or another inadvertently made a mondegreen when singing songs without knowing the correct lyrics. Here is an example: ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song “Purple Haze”, by Jimi Hendrix: “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”).

Just paying the bills...

Fascinating Factlets 11 – 15

11. Ferret legging is a sport that seems to have been popular among coal miners in Yorkshire, England. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English defines it as “an endurance test or stunt in which ferrets are trapped in pants worn by a participant”. The male-only contestants put live ferrets inside their trousers; the winner is the one who is the last to release the animals. Reg Mellor, a retired miner from Barnsley, holds the world record at five hours and twenty-six minutes, a feat he achieved in 1981 at the age of 66.

12. In Japan, Street names are seldom used in postal addresses (except in Kyoto and some Hokkaidō cities such as Sapporo), and most Japanese streets do not have names. Addresses are written from largest area to smallest (the opposite of the Western method) and each district, block, and house is numbered. These numbers are what determine a specific residence. [Picture above]

13. The glass delusion was an external manifestation of a psychiatric disorder recorded in Europe in the late middle ages (15th to 17th centuries). People feared that they were made of glass “and therefore likely to shatter into pieces”. One famous early sufferer was King Charles VI of France who refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself from accidental “shattering”.

14. The miracle fruit, or miracle berry plant (Synsepalum dulcificum), produces berries that, when eaten, cause sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. Needless to say this gives rise to some great party tricks.

15. The Forer effect is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This is the effect which makes fortune telling and horoscopes appear so accurate when they are, in fact, entirely fabricated.

Christmas Competition 2009

2009-11-03T09:50:55Z

Two years ago we ran a fun and successful Christmas competition. This year we have decided to do the same – for two reasons: 1. Competitions are fun, and 2. I am going to be away for a week or two over Christmas.

First Prize

First prize is an 8GB iPod Touch (whichever model is the latest available in January 2010) valued at $199.00

Second Prize

Second prize is an 8GB iPod Nano (whichever model is the latest available in January 2010) valued at $149.00 in any color of your choosing.

Third Prize

Third prize is a 4GB iPod Shuffle (whichever model is the latest available in January 2010) valued at $79.00 in any color of your choosing.

Remaining Prizes

In addition to the above prizes, five published lists will be chosen at random to win a free copy of the Listverse book: The Ultimate Book of Top 10 Lists.

How it Works

The winner will be the person who contributes the list that I feature on the front page of the site on Christmas Day (December 25, 2009). The second place getter will have their list featured on the front page on Christmas Eve (December 24, 2009), and the third place getter will have their list featured on the front page the day before Christmas Eve (December 23, 2009).

At least five other (though I reserve the right to publish all regardless of number) lists will be published, and of those extra published lists, five people will be randomly selected to win a copy of our book.

The Rules

List Format: In order to enter, you must write a list of at least 10 items and include an overall description of your list for the opening paragraph. You can send the list in text form – no markup please. Each item on your list should contain at least one or two paragraphs – please no less or more. Each paragraph should be between 100 and 150 words.

List Topics: The topic of your list can be anything you like. I will accept lists relating to Christmas, but I would like a good variety of many topics so we don’t have a month of nothing but Christmas lists in December. The winning lists may not have anything to do with Christmas – they will be the best of the lists I receive regardless of topic. Remember, bizarre lists are the most popular here – so you might edge ahead with a bizarre list. Other than that, miscellaneous, science, and crime are also popular.

List Content: All content must be your own – you must not copy lists from other sites, text from other sites, or books. A good way to test this out is to do a google search for the list idea to see if anyone else has done it already. Lists must also not duplicate content from Listverse. Please spellcheck twice and grammar check twice. If I have to edit the list I will reject it.

Important Dates: No lists will be accepted after Midnight PST on the 14th of December, 2009. I reserve the right to publish any or all of the submitted lists from the 15th of December. All published lists will be marked as part of the competition. This means that if your submission does not win, it might appear on the site as early as the 15th (though you will still be in the draw for the book prizes).

Copyright: All lists submitted become the property of Jamie Frater (representing Listverse). Once the competition is over, all lists will be included in the general pool of lists for publication at any further date.

Single Entries: Entries are limited to one per person.

Submitting Your List

Please submit lists in text format (either as an attachment or directly in the email) to jfrater@listverse.com.

Please include your username from Listverse, your real name, and use an email address that I can reply to if you win (as I will need your address for prize delivery).

10 Notorious Cases of the Bystander Effect

2009-11-01T22:15:50Z

The bystander effect is the somewhat controversial name given to a social psychological phenomenon in cases where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help has in the past been thought to be inversely proportional to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. This list describes the prototype of the effect and cites nine particularly heinous examples.

The Parable of The Good Samaritan

First, the prototype of the bystander effect. Jesus tells a story to a lawyer, who, in all other ways, is blameless and upright in God’s eyes. He obeys the Ten Commandments, and loves his neighbor as himself. But he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then explains, with the following parable, that everyone is everyone’s neighbor, and that help should be offered to anyone in need of it, regardless of who or what that person is.

A Jew is going along the road, and is beset by bandits, who beat him severely, strip his clothes, and rob him. They leave him for dead. Later, a priest walks by. He sees the Jew, moves to the other side of the road, and walks by without helping. Later, a Levite goes by, sees him, and gives him a wide berth, going on without helping.

Later, a Samaritan (considered by the Jews to be outcasts) comes by, sees him, and immediately helps him, taking him to a nearby inn, caring for him, and paying the innkeeper.

“Which of these is the neighbor of the Jew who is beaten by robbers?” Jesus asked.

“The merciful one,” replied the lawyer.

“Go and do likewise.”

In the following nine examples, no one goes and does likewise.

Shanda Sharer

From the 10th to the 11th of Janury, 1992, 12-year-old Shanda Sharer was abducted and tortured by four teenage girls, Laurie Tackett, Melinda Loveless (a propo), Hope Rippey, and Toni Lawrence. Tackett was more or less the leader of the four, and interested the others in the Goth lifestyle, punk rock, vampirism, witchcraft, Satanism, lesbianism, and such, and devised the plan for abducting Sharer and stabbing her to death, out of revenge for stealing Loveless’s girlfriend.

They abducted Sharer from her house just after midnight, pretending to take her to see their mutual friend, Amanda Heavrin, the girlfriend Lovelessbelieved Sharer to have stolen. As soon as she was in the car, Loveless put a knife to her throat and interrogated her about Heavrin, until they arrived at “the Witch’s Castle,” a local run-down house where teenagers liked to hang out.

They took her inside, tied her up and discuss how they would kill her, at which point Sharer started crying. They claim to have been frightened by passing headlights, so they took her to a nearby landfill in thick woods, where Loveless beat her savagely with her fists. Lawrence and Rippey claim to have wanted out of the situation by this point, but did not dare try to run and call the police.

Loveless then tried to cut Sharer’s throat but the knife was too dull. Rippey then got out, had Loveless and Tackett hold her down, and strangled her with a rope. They thought she was dead and threw in the trunk, then went to Tackett’s home to wash up. They heard Sharer screaming, and Tackett went out with a kitchen knife and returned covered in blood. The screaming had stopped.

She then took out her runes, part of the Wicca lifestyle, and told the girls’ futures. They then Tackett and Loveless went joyriding from 2:30 AM, while Lawrence and Rippey stayed at her home. Sharer began struggling to get out of the trunk, so Tackett stopped, and beat her unconscious with a tire iron.

They returned a little before dawn, washed up again, and Tackett laughed as she told what she had done. They left and went to a neighborhood burning area, where leaves and limbs, etc., are disposed of, and showed Sharer, nearly dead in the trunk to the others. Lawrence claimed to have been so disgusted that she turned away. She still refused to rat out her friends. Tackett sprayed Sharer with Windex, probably to exacerbate her wounds, and taunted her, “You’re not looking so hot, now, are you?”

They then filled a 2-liter Pepsi bottle with gasoline at a nearby station, drove to a secluded field, laid Sharer, alive, in a blanket in the grass, doused and set her afire. Loveless returned a moment later and poured the rest of the gasoline on her, to be sure.

Lawrence was scared to death by this point, and finally called a friend of the same age, and told her what had happened. She refused to call the police, now out of fear as an accomplice. Loveless strangled became hysterical, sorry about what she had done, and called Amanda Heavrin to tell her. Heavrin did not believe them, until she and another friend saw the trunk of Tackett’s car with blood and Sharer’s socks.

None of them called the police. Sharer’s body as discovered by two hunters earlier that morning, the 11th, and reported. By 8:00 PM that night, the whole community knew, and Loveless finally confessed in a fit of hysteria to the police. Tackett, Loveless, and Rippey were sentenced to 60 years in prison, Lawrence 20 years. Lawrence was released on good behavior in 2000, Rippey in 2006.

Ilan Halimi

Ilan Halimi was a French Jew who was kidnapped in Paris by Moroccan “barbarians,” as they like to be called, on Janury 21, 2006, and tortured for 24 days, finally dying on February 13. During this time, his kidnappers, at least 20 of them, beat him all over his body, especially his testicles, completely wrapped his head in duct tape, except for his mouth, so he could breathe and eat, stabbed him, burned his body and face with lighters and cigarettes, and broke his fingers in order to extract a ransom of 450,000 Euros from his family. They stripped him, they scratched him, they cut him with knives, and finally poured gasoline on him and set him afire.

During these three weeks, neighbors in the apartment block where his kidnappers had taken him (and where they lived) heard the commotion and came to watch. No one ever called the police. 27 people have so far been charged with joining in. 19 people have been convicted and given long prison sentences. One of the torturer’s fathers knew what was happening and did nothing to stop them. This man, Alcino Ribeiro, was sentenced to 8 months, but this sentence was suspended. He has served no time.

Those neighbors known only to have watched were not convicted, most not even indicted. Halimi was found handcuffed and bound with nylon rope, naked, to a tree about 40 yards inside a woodlot from a railway outside Paris, on February 13. More than 80% of his body had been burned with acid, as well as gasoline, to the point that he was difficult to recognize. He had severe contusions, blood blisters, and hematomas covering most of his body, to the point that he was more blue than flesh-colored, multiple broken bones, one ear and one big toe missing, and his testicles looked like “blackened oranges.”
Halimi died en route to a hospital.

Edison Electrocutes an Elephant

Not just Topsy the Elephant, but a rather long series of animals, all of which had shown themselves to be a danger to humans. This included horses, lions, tigers, and bears. Edison was happy to oblige the state of NY in executing these “menaces to society,” by employing alternating current, but his ulterior motive was merely to show the world the danger of alternating current, invented by Nikola Tesla, his arch-rival. Edison’s direct current didn’t have the strength to electrocute an elephant, and he considered it safer.

So, on January 4, 1903, at Luna Park Zoo, Coney Island, Topsy was hooked up to Edison’s lighting plant, and electrocuted with 6,600 volts of AC. But this was after they fed her carrots that had been soaked in cyanide, just to be sure. They deemed Topsy to be a permanent threat to humans, as she had killed three handlers in three incidents, one of which involved a handler, who regularly whipped her, trying to feed her a lighted cigarette just to watch her suffer. She stomped on him.

1,500 people watched, and no one said a word in complaint. Edison filmed it, and the film is available on YouTube, if you feel like being outraged. The funny thing is that the ASPCA, which is supposed to protect the rights of animals, considered hanging to be cruel, as it would cause strangulation, not a snap of the neck, and yet had no problem with cyanide poisoning and electrocution.

Kevin Carter’s Famous Photograph

Kevin Carter was a South African Photojournalist who, in March 1993, took the most infamous photograph, so far, of the brutality and disregard for human suffering in sub-Saharan Africa. The photo shows a female Sudanese toddler, alone and severely emaciated, attempting to crawl to an aid station for food. A vulture is standing on the ground behind her, waiting for her to die so it can eat her.

Carter claimed that he waited 20 minutes for the vulture to spread its wings, which he thought would make a better picture, and when it didn’t, he took the picture as is. For those 20 minutes, the toddler had to rest before resuming its trip. She whimpered and panted, and Carter did nothing to help her.

He took the picture, scared the vulture away, then left the girl to continue crawling on her own. No one knows what became of her, but it very likely that she starved to death. This account is denied by Joao Silva, a journalist friend of Carter, who stated that the child’s parents left for only a moment to take food from a plane. Either way, Carter claimed later that he just “didn’t want to get involved.” He killed himself the next year, after winning the Pulitzer for this photograph, by carbon monoxide poisoning, in his truck in Johannesburg.

Just paying the bills...

Forced Relocation of the American Indians

This was not a single incident, but all the major crimes against the Indians were perpetrated for the same reason. European settlers and their descendants wanted more land. They thus drove the Indians westward, killing hundreds of thousands over the centuries, in order to make way for themselves. Unfortunately, no land is ever enough land. They wanted more, and the Indians continued being deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The most astonishing aspect of this crime is that many notable Americans, especially Andrew Jackson, considered it righteous, as the Indians did not have the military strength to defend themselves, and thus deserved to lose their rights. Survival of the fittest, so to speak. Jackson is the man most directly responsible for the “Trail of Tears” relocation of the Cherokee. Later, the Navajo and Sioux, to name just two large tribes, were slaughtered in outright warfare.

Very few Europeans or their descendants, from 1585 with the Lost Colony, to the turn of the 20th Century, ever raised much of a fuss, if any at all, over this disgustingly awesome mistreatment of an entire race of humans.

Murders of Three Civil Rights Workers

If you’ve seen the film “Mississippi Burning” you’re familiar with the murders of James Chaney (black), Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (both white, Jewish). The White Knights of the KKK shot them dead and buried them in an earthen dam in 1964. The outrage in the northern half or so of the United States was immediate and fierce, as it should have been.

But there was no public outcry of any kind in the South. Very few black people, especially in Mississippi, had anything to say about the crime, as they didn’t dare incur the wrath of the white authorities. But the truly astonishing aspect is the absence of an outcry by many white people, if any, as they either agreed with the crime, or just didn’t care about the plight of blacks (and Jews, and anyone other than “WASPs”) in the South.

Racial hatred had become so rampant and impudent that the Judges who presided over the various criminals of this sort of case rarely convicted them, and then imposed the lightest sentences. The culprits of the three 1964 murders, 17 of them, were tried, and only 7 were convicted, not of murder, but of “civil rights violations,” because the prosecution didn’t believe they could be convicted, in Mississippi, of murder, which was probably true. The harshest sentences were 10 years each to two culprits. Others received 7 years, or 3 years. No one served more than 6.

Kitty Genovese

The most infamous example of the bystander effect took place on March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, NY, when Catherine Genovese was entering her apartment building at about 3:15 AM, from work. She was stabbed twice in the back by Winston Moseley, a heavy machine operator, who later explained that he simply “wanted to kill a woman.”

Genovese screamed, “Oh, my God! He stabbed me! Help me!” and collapsed. Several neighbors in surrounding buildings reported hearing her voice, but decided it was probably just a drunken brawl or lovers’ spat. One man shouted from his window, “Let that girl alone!” which scared Moseley away.

This neighbor was sure to have seen Genovese crawling across the street, under a streetlight, to her apartment, but did nothing to help her. Witnesses saw Moseley drive away, then return about 10 minutes later. He had put on a wider-rimmed hate to hide his face, and searched for Genovese in the parking lot, the train station, and the apartment complex, for 10 minutes, before finding her prone in the external hallway at the rear of the building, where the door was locked. She could not get in.

Moseley proceeded to stab her to death, inflicting multiple wounds in her hands and forearms, indicating that she tried to fight him off. She finally succumbed and he raped her as she lay dying. He then stole around $50 from her and fled. The whole incident spanned 30 minutes.

A newspaper blasted it the next day as “Thirty-eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police,” but this is inaccurate. There were approximately 12 people who claimed to have seen the first attack. Many of them later stated that they “just didn’t want to get involved.” A simple phone call to the police would have sufficed, but everyone assumed someone else would do it.

The Richmond High School Incident

The events that transpired on the night of October 27, 2009 inspired me to compile this list and I admit that it has caused me to reconsider the crime of the #1 entry.

The girl’s name has not been released to date, as she is 15 years old, but the accounts of the crime all agree, and it is beyond belief. For 2 and a half hours, while the High School Homecoming Dance was taking place inside the gymnasium, approximately 10 men gang-raped the 15-year-old student, beating her savagely the whole time, all the while 10 others stood around laughing and taking pictures with their cell phones.

The crowd eventually numbered more than 20, and no one called the police. No one went inside to tell a security guard or a policeman, several of which were on campus at the time. A little earlier, the assistant principal looked out his office window and saw 12 to 15 grown men sitting around near the scene of the crime, none of whom had identification badges, as is required, and none of whom appeared to be a teenager, and the assistant principal did not call the police, or alert any teachers or students. He returned to his job and ignored them.

The girl is still in critical condition at a hospital, having been found later by someone leaving the dance.

The Holocaust

The most repugnant, globally violent disgrace of the reputation of humanity gave rise to the equally infamous use of the phrase “diffusion of responsibility,” as the Nazi officers tried at Nuremberg all claimed the same defense, “We were just following orders.”

They argued that if the Holocaust really was as bad as journalists were saying, then someone else must surely have known of it, and thus it was not necessarily their responsibility to report it to the authorities.

They also argued that the only authorities in Continental Europe at the time were German, and thus, they would only have killed themselves by attempting to inform the outside world, and would have accomplished nothing. This is not true. Most of the German population knew nothing of it, but had they, they could easily have banded together and demanded that the Holocaust be stopped. The Nazis would have been reluctant to exterminate their own “master race,” and by that point, the Allies would have heard news of it. So the Nazis wisely concealed the concentration and death camps from all but the small villages nearest to them.

The Holocaust achieves #1, however, because the populations of the villages near these camps, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbruck, to name a few, knew perfectly well of the atrocities and horror inside the camps. The camps were established near fairly large towns and cities, the inhabitants of which could not have ignored the stench coming from them. Allied soldiers all reported smelling camps before finding them, from as far as 20 miles if the wind blew right.

The Allies accused the German citizens of these towns of knowing full well what was happening to Jews and other “undesirables” and yet making no effort to save one life. These German populations were thus forced to clean up the emaciated corpses and bury them in mass graves, as punishment for their passivity.

Top 10 Bizarre Ad Campaigns

2009-11-01T15:01:56Z

Some are funny. Others strike an emotional chord. But some Ad campaigns are truly bizarre. From a commercial encouraging you to rent your wife to robots selling fried chicken (or attempting to do so), we look at ten commercials which are known for the notoriety rather than the products they are attempting to promote. Some famous celebrities have helped engender this list, including Hulk Hogan and the present day Governor of California. You may cringe in disbelief.

Rent a Wife

A Belgian video rental service used a twisted metaphor for this commercial, leading to controversy. It depicts a couple in the mood for love making when the man suddenly packs her off in a box for disposal. Seconds later, the doorbell rings with another woman at his disposal. There was no mention of the video rental service anywhere in the advertisement and the unsuspecting viewer might just have thought the rent-a-wife scheme to be true, only to have checked the website to find an innocuous rental store. Perhaps the creators of the advert should let the poets make use of the metaphors.   

Robocop trying to sell fried chicken

You’ve goto hand it to the Koreans for coming up with something like this. The person who conjured up this idea must have been on something while coming up with this, because he or she has made a very absurd assumption that a robocop devours and relishes the same kind of food that humans eat. The entrance of this friendly monster through the television and the whisking away of the whole fridge at the end of the advert make it all the more unreal. What’s more, he wants ‘frieda chicken’.   

Do not Murder

Of all the things that the Church of Scientology preaches ‘Do not murder’ is perhaps the least controversial. However, because it cannot end there, they went ahead and made an advertisement about it. The advert was supposedly an informational one which would act as a ‘roadmap to a happier life through values of compassion and caring that every member of a civilized society holds dear’. The content of the ad is simply a bullet which has just left a revolver while desperate voices cry out in the background and ends with the message ‘Do not murder’. Very obfuscating, indeed.

Sumo Wrestling and Sprite

Sumo wrestling being a rather obscure sport to most people outside of Japan, it seems only natural that those who conjured up this idea were aiming for the bizarre. And that’s exactly where they got. Iridescent sumo wrestlers bumping into each other to create orgasmic pleasure? Naa. The event is far more likely to produce an earthquake. And all this to simply relate the idea of ‘LYMON’? Utterly disturbing.

Sheila’s Wheels

‘For bonzer car insurance deals, girls get onto Sheila’s wheels’. If you are a girl in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland), you wont have to keep your hands on the steering wheel while you drive because ‘women make the safest drivers’. Coquettish crooning accompanied by a band which follows their tune as the convertible waltzes past the countryside is hardly the way to sell car insurance and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, a mouse appears to be driving the car.

Just paying the bills...

Ice Cream at the Bar

And now to some edification on the art of being illogical. Set an animated lass to cavort in a bar and then at the end of it all, tell the prospective customer to buy your brand of ice-cream. To make it more interesting use a blackboard somewhere along the way to feign erudition and make sure the girl carries the ice-cream with her so that the sensual waves trigger off pleasure which will become readily apparent. Essentially, make sure that your customer is made to believe that consuming ice-cream has the same effects as alcohol.

Pufuleti Gusto

What do Romanians turn to when they need to inject optimism into life? After years of communist rule, high rates of unemployment, the defection of Nadia Comaneci and the retirement of Dan Petrescu and Gheorghe Hagi, they seem to have come up with the answer. Or that’s what this commercial claims. Because when you have just accidentally chopped off your head when peeling an orange, but still have the strength to ask for the Pufuleti snack, there must be something to it.

Hulk Hogan and the air conditioner

Hulk Hogan was the undisputed master of the ring who could possibly do anything and everything. Well, that’s what the makers of this advert for air conditioners thought. Because it is otherwise inexplicable why you would rope in a wrestling star to sing a lullaby to an infant to market a device from which cool air emanates into the room. And the song which is simply a tune of the days of the week does not make up for the faux pas. The only thing that could have made it worse is a video cassette of Hulk Hogan’s singing as a free gift. Simply excruciating.

Of Monsters, transvestites and Light

While this commercial may not seem weird in the end, a second look will expound to you the theory of relativity. Unearthly, grotesque creatures create the suspense but the producers misjudged the addition of the transvestite as somewhat of an unfamiliar, foreign object. Now, this would be perfectly acceptable anywhere in the world but Thailand.

Arnold’s Vitamin Drink

A greater absurdity in the annals of television commercial history has not been recorded. By comparison, it is the toffee apple surrounded by candy floss, the benchmark against which all things bizarre are judged. Takeda Chemical Industries roped in the ‘Terminator’, Arnold Schwarzenegger to market a seemingly energy boosting substance and the result has been a pyrotechnic display beyond human reasoning. The jejune background score, Arnold’s attempt to speak Japanese, and the metamorphosis in the end make this a classic. Maybe this is what he had in mind when he said he’ll be back.

Top 10 Unique Halloween Costumes

2009-10-31T05:13:16Z

[WARNING: contains images that may offend. NSFW] Halloween has finally arrived! As thanks for the suggestions for my own costume this week, I have put together a list to help you all with your costumes – this is a “what not to wear” halloween costumes list. I have to admit that some of them are actually quite hilarious, but all are certain to offend at least one person at a party, or cause people to mock you all night, and there can be no doubt that they are all very unique. If you have photos of your own costumes, be sure to post links in the comments. Happy halloween!

Life was like a box of…

Words fail me

Lots of effort went into this costume

Spot the Costume

Wrong on every level

Just paying the bills...

Sexy harem lady

This will definitely offend

Woody Alien

Labor Pains

Diphallia +