Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge (27 page)

(my attorney’s asleep)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, prison conversations, scaring defendants into paying for better lawyers

KEYWORDS:
lawyer, incompetence, or attorney-cot privilege

THE FACT:
Calvin Burdine was scheduled to die on April 11, 1995, 12 years after being convicted of killing his boyfriend in Houston. But a federal judge stopped the execution a few hours before it was scheduled.

What prompted the justice’s change of heart? Well, amongst other things he was troubled that Burdine’s lawyer had slept through portions of the trial. Amazingly, a three-member federal appeals court panel overruled the judge, reasoning that a defendant had no constitutional right to a conscious attorney (this was Texas, after all). Fortunately for Burdine, however, a full appeals court ordered a new trial, and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred. As of 2004, Burdine was doing life in a Texas prison after a plea bargain. And lawyers all over the country were trying to stay awake.

USEFUL FOR:
chatting up atheists, conspiracy theorists, and people who just plain love Dan Brown

KEYWORDS:
The Da Vinci Code
, Catholic sects, and secret societies

THE FACT:
The Catholic sect Opus Dei has a $42-million, 17-story building on Lexington Avenue in New York, claims 85,000 members in 60 countries, and it’s just now surfacing on the pop culture radar screen.

Founded in 1928 by St. Josemariá Escrivá, Opus Dei is the short name for the Prelature for the Holy Cross and the Work of God. The sect stresses a return to traditional Catholic orthodoxy and behavior, especially celibacy, with members falling into one of three levels. Numeraries live in Opus Dei facilities, devote their time and money to the prelature, attend mass daily, and engage in mortification of the flesh (wearing a spiked chain around the thigh called a cilice
,
taking cold showers, or flagellating themselves). Next come Associates (kind of like Numeraries, but living “off campus”), then Supernumeraries (the rank-and-file members). Critics accuse the group of links to right-wing organizations, including Franco’s fascist government in Spain, and of anti-Semitism and intolerance.

(and why the city screamed for
The Scream
)

USEFUL FOR:
museum dates, chatting up art lovers, and basically anytime you walk into a college dorm room

KEYWORDS:
art heists, Munch (the name, not the verb) or munch (despite what we just said, you can use the verb to bring up the name to bring up the fact)

THE FACT:
The Scream
, Edvard Munch’s 1893 expressionistic masterpiece of anxiety and despair, is one of the most famous paintings in the entire world. And on Sunday, August 22, 2004, administrators at Oslo’s Munch Museum were definitely given reason to let life imitate the art.

In broad daylight, armed thieves yanked
The Scream
and another famous Munch,
Madonna
, off the wall, then made a break for it. Police found only the getaway car and two empty frames. Understandably, Norwegians reacted with disbelief and outrage at the theft of two national treasures. Oddly enough, this wasn’t the first time the painting was purloined. There are actually
four
versions of
The Scream
. Another version was stolen in October 1994 from Oslo’s National Gallery Art Museum. That one turned up three months later, but the most recently ripped off version remains missing.

(and condoms?)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, bachelor parties, and definitely, definitely office parties (spread the word!)

KEYWORDS:
sex, photocopier, or sex on the photocopier

THE FACT:
We think of ozone as a useful gas. And indeed it is, as long as it’s up there in the stratosphere where it belongs. It’s a little less helpful when it’s messing about with your birth control.

Ozone forms when oxygen is exposed to ultraviolet light, and it’s a good thing because ozone’s a great absorber of ultraviolet radiation, thus protecting us from skin cancer. At ground level, however, ozone is a pollutant, forming as a result of internal combustion in our car engines. It’s also the characteristic smell you sniff around photocopiers or other electrical devices. While ozone irritates our lungs, it can also affect our sex lives. Condoms are made of natural rubber, a substance that degrades on exposure to ozone. In layman’s terms, this means that your protection needs protection if you’re storing it around a photocopier.

(Aztec style)

USEFUL FOR:
half-time discussions, seventh-inning stretches, and after any call involving the roughing of a player

KEYWORDS:
brutal, sports, man down, or just the word
ouch

THE FACT:
Playing ball, Aztec style, tended to get pretty rough, pretty quickly. Even worse? Losing meant sacrificing more than just your pride.

A ceremonial ball game played by the Aztecs a few hundred years before the European discovery of America, Ullamalitzli called for players on two teams to don large stone belts or hip paddles that were used to bounce a small rubber ball back and forth down a narrow court with inclined stone walls. The players used each other’s bodies and the walls as they attempted to maneuver the ball into a small stone ring high above mid-court, an extremely difficult task. The game ended when either side scored a goal. Amazingly enough, the game enjoyed long popularity among the native peoples of Mexico and Central America before the Aztecs played it. Of course, the stakes were a little greater when the Aztecs came to play. In their version of the sport, at the end of the game one of the captains was sacrificed to the gods, giving even more meaning to the phrase “sore loser.”