Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (65 page)

Some doctors did, however, write in with helpful suggestions for the original sufferers: One wondered if the problem was caused by left-handed children playing guitars intended for right-handed adults, or vice versa. Another doctor suggested that if the irritation persisted, the children should get another guitar instructor.

But the most interesting response of all came from a J. M. Murphy, who had this to say:

As had been the case with “guitar nipple,” “cello scrotum” attracted some interest from physicians, but no cases of other patients suffering from the condition were ever reported.

Instrument-induced ailments are not uncommon, especially among professional musicians who play their instruments day after day for hours on end. Overuse can cause injury all by itself, and the nickel, chromium, brass, and other materials used to make musical instruments can also cause irritation to sensitive skin. So not much notice was taken of “guitar nipple” and “cello scrotum” when they surfaced; they were just added to the list of music-related maladies that get written up in medical journals from time to time. Years passed before much thought was given to them again.

Then in 1991 a Connecticut doctor named Philip Shapiro read about “cello scrotum” in the
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
. Shapiro knew from personal experience (he played
the cello) that the intimate parts of the male anatomy never come in contact with the instrument—the large size of the cello and the position in which it must be held to be played made it almost impossible. The musician’s crotch is at least six inches away from the cello at all times, and besides, most men play the cello while
wearing pants.

Dr. Shapiro stated his case in a letter to the journal and included a photograph of himself playing the cello (with his crotch nowhere near the instrument) as supporting evidence. Even if some cellists do experience irritation in the aforementioned area, he argued, the
cellist
, not the cello, would be at fault: “Just as people sometimes scratch their heads repetitively, some also scratch their genitals,” he wrote. The journal published Dr. Shapiro’s letter; from then on whenever “cello scrotum” was mentioned in medical journals, it was accompanied with a caveat that the ailment’s existence had been questioned on the grounds that getting it “would require an extremely awkward playing position.”

Then in 2009, after “cello scrotum” was mentioned in yet another
British Medical Journal
article
,
Dr. Elaine Murphy, a former medical school professor serving in the British House of Lords, came forward and admitted that the ailment was a hoax. Dr. Murphy and her husband, John M. Murphy—the J. M. Murphy who signed the original letter—had gotten such a laugh out of Dr. P. Curtis’s original “guitar nipple” letter in 1974 that they decided to try and top it. “Somewhat to our astonishment, our letter was published,” she wrote. “Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realize the physical impossibility of our claim.”

That clears up “cello scrotum”…but what about “guitar nipple”? After all, it’s been written up in many prestigious publications, including the
British Medical Journal
(and
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader
). So, if you play the guitar, should you still be on guard against it? Probably not—Dr. Murphy says she and her husband had suspected back in 1974 that it, too, was a hoax. “The following Christmas we sent a card to Dr. Curtis of ‘guitar nipple’ fame, only to discover that he knew nothing about it,” Dr. Murphy wrote. “Another joke, we suspect.”

 

O
N THE SCREEN:
In the 1984 “mockumentary” film

This Is Spinal Tap
, the fictitious band orders their prop maker to build them a 12-foot-tall statue of Stonehenge. But there’s a miscommunication. Result: When the statue is lowered to the stage during a live performance, it’s only 12
inches
tall.

 

IN REAL LIFE:
Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, told this story to London’s
The Times
: “Back in 1999, we were supposed to be using a giant gong on stage that was about five feet high, and I would slam it dramatically. But at one show in Barcelona, someone screwed up: The gong was more like one of those pathetic little dinner gongs that a Chinese restaurant would use to tell everyone dessert was being served. I don’t know how much closer to
Spinal Tap
you could get.”

 

ON THE SCREEN:
In 1929 German film director Fritz Lang made one of the first science fiction movies,
Frau im Mond
(
The Lady in the Moon
). In the scene where the rocket launches, Lang wanted to add more dramatic tension. So instead of using the standard method of counting up to a predetermined number (1-2-3-launch), Lang used a countdown: 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.

IN REAL LIFE:
Three decades later when NASA began sending rockets into space, it adopted the countdown popularized by Lang.

 

ON THE SCREEN:
In Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel
Psycho
(and in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film that starred Anthony Perkins), innkeeper Norman Bates impersonates his dead mother and blames “her” for the crimes he commits.

IN REAL LIFE:
In 2003 Thomas Parkin of New York City pretended to be his deceased mother so he could collect her Social Security and benefits. He even wore a wig, sunglasses, and painted nails when he went to the DMV to renew “her” license. In 2009 when police arrested Parkin, he said, “I held my mother when she was dying and breathed in her last breath, so I am my mother.”

 

ON THE SCREEN:
On a February 2009 episode of the comedy show
Flight of the Conchords
, the prime minister of New Zealand attempts to arrange a meeting with America’s new president, Barack Obama. He’s denied, though, because the U.S. “doesn’t recognize New Zealand as a country.”

IN REAL LIFE:
A few weeks later, New Zealand’s real prime minister, John Key, attempted to arrange a meeting with Obama, but was denied. “I’m a bit of the view that he’s got so many things to deal with and, on a relative basis, we are a pretty small country,” said Key.

 

ON THE SCREEN:
In the
Friday the 13th
movies, a deranged man named Jason dons a hockey mask and attacks his victims with an axe. Some of his victims fight back.

IN REAL LIFE:
At a party for the premiere of 2009’s
Friday the 13th
remake, an actor who played Jason in a previous movie jumped onto the stage with the trademark axe and hockey mask. A nearby woman must have thought it was real, because she wrestled the axe away from him, severely slashing his hand. “It was straight out of a horror movie,” said a witness, “Lingerie-clad models were screaming, as a blood-soaked Jason ran off the runway to get to a hospital.”

 

ON THE SCREEN:
In the 1988 movie
Naked Gun
, Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) leaves a press conference to go to the restroom…forgetting that his lapel microphone is still on. Outside, everyone can hear him peeing while he sings to himself.

IN REAL LIFE:
In 2006 CNN was covering President Bush’s speech on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But in addition to the president’s plans to rebuild New Orleans, viewers heard CNN anchor Kyra Phillips go to the restroom, where she complained to a coworker about how hard it is to find a compassionate man. Then a loud zip was heard. (That’s when CNN finally turned off her microphone.)

MORE REAL LIFE:
In 2009 the cast of the sitcom
How I Met Your Mother
was doing a Q&A session with fans when Neil Patrick Harris got up to go to the bathroom…with his mic still on. His publicist could hear the shuffling sounds and ran in to tell Harris to turn it off, but not before everyone in the room heard the actor unzip and say to himself, “Wake up!”

 

Just before 3:00 a.m. on the morning of December 26, 1980, a bright light was seen racing across the night sky over Rendlesham Forest, which separates two Royal Air Force bases: RAF Bentwaters to the north, and RAF Woodbridge, which juts out of the forest’s western edge. The strange light made no noise, but the sight was so startling that the airmen who saw the light thought that an aircraft might have crashed in the forest. They asked for permission to investigate.

Three U.S. Air Force airmen who were patrolling Woodbridge —Staff-Sergeant Jim Penniston, Airman Edward Cabansag, and Airman First Class John Burroughs—were dispatched into the forest to take a look. Nearly 30 years later, they still can’t agree on what they saw among the trees—except for one thing: They all saw a lot of lights. Big lights. Little lights. Colored lights. “Blue, red, white, and yellow,” Cabansag wrote in a report several days later.

In his report, Penniston stated that he thought they had come within 50 yards of the source of the flashing lights. “It was definitely mechanical in nature. This is the closest point that I was near the object at any point. We then proceeded after it.” They moved closer to where they thought the object was, but they never seemed to get any closer to it—it appeared to move farther away as they approached. “It moved in a zig-zagging manner back through the wood and then [we] lost sight of it,” he wrote.

Even creepier than the unexplained lights were the
noises.
“Strange noises,” Burroughs wrote in his statement, “like a woman screaming. Also the woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises, and there was a lot of movement in the woods.”

The airmen were in the forest for about an hour before it became clear that whatever they were seeing and hearing, it wasn’t the result of an airplane crash. They were ordered back to base.

At 4:11 a.m., an airman named Chris Armold called the local police, the Suffolk Constabulary, and asked if they’d received any reports of a downed aircraft. They hadn’t, but they sent two officers out to examine the scene anyway. The officers saw nothing unusual. A short time later, Armold accompanied Burroughs on a second trip into the forest. “We could see lights in the distance, and it appeared unusual as it was a sweeping light,” Armold recalled in a 1997 interview. “We also saw some strange colored lights in the distance but were unable to see what they were.”

Then after daybreak, more airmen went into the same part of the forest. They found three small indentations in the ground, each one roughly 1½” deep and 7” in diameter, laid out on the ground in a triangular pattern. Were they made by the landing gear of a UFO? The airmen also noticed some strange marks in the surrounding trees: The bark had been removed and the sap had crystallized in the wound. Were they burn or scrape marks made when the UFO lifted off?

A second call to the Suffolk Constabulary brought another officer to the scene…but he didn’t note anything particularly unusual about the marks on the ground or in the trees.

That might have been the end of the “Incident at Rendlesham” were it not for the fact that on the following night (December 27), airmen on guard duty at the back gate of RAF Woodbridge, which faced Rendlesham Forest, again saw strange lights coming from the forest. When word of the sighting reached the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, he organized another team of airmen and sometime after midnight led them into the forest to investigate. This time the party brought a Geiger counter and a tape recorder, into which Halt recorded nearly 18 minutes of live observations as the group examined the site over the next four hours.

Halt’s tape recording makes for compelling listening: He and
the search team examined the impressions in the ground and the marks on the trees, carefully taking radiation readings as they went. The strongest reading was from one of the indentations, which gave a reading of 0.07 millirems per hour. The men also noticed small branches that had been freshly broken off nearby trees about 15’ to 20’ off the ground, and reported hearing strange animal noises just like the first team had the night before.

Then, around 13 minutes into the 18-minute tape, Halt and the men suddenly saw a strange, flashing yellowish-red light in the forest. “It’s coming this way. It’s definitely coming this way! Pieces of it are shooting off,” Halt says into the tape recorder. “There is no doubt about it. This is weird!”

Halt and his team followed the strange light out of the forest, through a field, and past a farmer’s house into another field. “Now we have multiple sightings of up to five lights with a similar shape and all,” he says on the tape, “but they seem to be steady now rather than a pulsating or glow with a red flash.”

They crossed a creek as they pursued the lights, which were now considerably farther away. “Made sighting again about 110°,” Halt says. “This looks like it’s clear off to the coast. It’s right on the horizon. Moves about a bit, and flashes from time to time. Still steady or red in color.” The men saw strobe-light flashes, and then two “strange objects…with colored lights on ’em” to the north, and a similar object to the south, about 10 degrees off the horizon. “Hey, here he comes from the south, he’s coming toward us now,” Halt says. “Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. This is unreal!”