VICE PRESENTS THE PEOPLE'S LISTS - PART 2
Excerpted from The New Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK
 HUM MISTY FOR ME
A noise a bit like amplifier feedback had been heard for three years coming from the right ear of a Welsh pony called Misty, according to the Veterinary Record (April 1995). It varied in intensity but stayed at a constant pitch of seven kilohertz. Hearing a buzzing in one’s ears is called subjective tinnitus; very much rarer is when other people can hear the noise, a condition called objective tinnitus, the cause of which is a matter of debate.
POSTCARD FAREWELL
When Jim Wilson’s father died in Natal, South Africa, in April 1967, both Jim, living in England, and his sister Muriel, living in Holland, were informed. Muriel contacted her husband, who was on business in Portugal, and he flew to South Africa right away. Changing planes at Las Palmas airport in the Canary Islands, he bought a postcard showing holiday-makers on Margate Beach in Natal and sent it to Muriel. It was she who noticed that the photograph showed her father walking up the beach.
BOVINE ENIGMA
On June 28, 2002, in the middle of a spate of unexplained cattle mutilations in Argentina, something macabre was found in a field near Suco, west of Rio Cuarto in San Luis province. Nineteen cows were stuffed into a sheet-metal water tank, closed with a conical cap. Nine were drowned; the rest were barely alive, having endured freezing temperatures, not to mention the shock of their lives.
ENIGMATIC EARTH DIVOT
An irregularly shaped hole, about ten by seven feet with two-foot vertical sides, was found on remote farmland near Grand Coulee, Washington, in October 1984. It had not been there a month earlier. “Dribblings” of earth and stones led to a three-ton, grass-covered earth divot 75 feet away. It was almost as if the divot had been removed with a “gigantic cookie cutter,” except that roots dangled intact from the vertical sides of both hole and displaced slab. There were no clues such as vehicle tracks, and a seismic cause was thought very unlikely, although there had been a mild quake 20 miles away a week before the hole’s discovery.
RIVERSIDE MYSTERY
Gloria Ramirez, 31, died of kidney failure at Riverside General Hospital in California, in February 1994 after being rushed there with chest pains. Emergency room staff were felled by “fumes” when a blood sample was taken. A strange oily sheen on the woman’s skin and unexplained white crystals in her blood were reported. A doctor suffered liver and lung damage and bone necrosis; at least 23 other people were affected. One hypothesis was that Ramirez, who had cervical cancer, had taken a cocktail of medicines that combined to make an insecticide (organophospate), but exhaustive tests yielded no clues. The hospital was later demolished. The episode remains a mystery 13 years later.
THE PEOPLE'S LISTS | 1 | 2 | 3 |
 Anonymous, on Oct 17, 2008 wrote:
myabe you should stop being such an ungreatful whine ass and start your own fucking magazine hmmm? get the fuck out if youre gonna get all moist you fuckin shitstain.
vice, i loved this shit. | | |
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