Are you as in love with riddles as we are? Well, here are 5 more that just might trip you up if you’re not ready to logic it up.
Good luck!
#5. A table you can eat?
Continue reading to check your answer!
fact
These little-known facts pack a lot fun. They’re great to whip out at a party and impress your friends or simply hang onto them for your own satisfaction.
These 15 people are sharing their favorites, and I’m 100% in.
“Spiked and studded dog collars derive from the days of the Ancient Greeks.
The Greeks gave their sheepdogs sharply spiked collars to protect their necks from wolves as they guarded a shepherd’s flock of sheep by night.”
“Bees testicle explodes after sex.”
“Two guide dogs named Salty and Roselle were with their owners in the twin towers on floor 78 as the attack commenced (9/11). The dogs guided their blind owners to safety. This isn’t mindblowing but I think about it a lot.”
“Cats penises are barbed. Obviously this is painful but also necessary as the pain induces ovulation which happens about 30 hrs later. No pain, no ovulation. The barbs also act as a scraper to remove rival semen. It’s not very effective though so a litter can have multiple fathers.”
“Freddie Mercury was a baritone. He just never sang in his natural register because he was afraid nobody would recognize him. But there are definitely recordings of him speaking and singing, and he’s definitely a baritone – All of his popular stuff just happened to be in his falsetto singing voice.”
“There is a fence in Australia that is longer than the distance from New York to London.”
“That Gone with the Wind was filmed closer in time to the Civil War than to today.”
“So baseball has a special rubbing mud. Since about the 1940s, every baseball used in a major league game has been rubbed with a special mud that comes from a secret location in New Jersey.
New baseballs have a sheen on the leather which makes it difficult for a pitcher to grip the ball. So they had to find something that could reduce the sheen without altering the color or damaging the leather. The answer was the super secret New Jersey mud that’s still in use today. One guy owns the very small company that sells the mud and knows of the super secret location.”
“Did you know that the Big Bang (the actual Big Bang, not the sitcom) was thought up by a Catholic Priest?”
“The BEst before date on crisps in the U.K. is always a Saturday.”
“Reno, Nevada is farther West than Los Angeles.”
“Eating disorders are the most fatal mental illness(es) – anorexia topping the list, then bulimia, then various OSFED/EDNOS. Even more fatal than major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar. ~20% die due to intentional suicide, the rest due to heart failure and other physical complications.”
“Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin owned the same tortoise.”
“George Everest never visited Mount Everest. Yet the mountain is named after him. Also he pronounced his name eve-rest.
So we have the highest mountains named after a guy who never saw it and the name is pronounced wrong.”
“The guitarist for Queen is also a well known astrophysicist.”
I feel smarter now, don’t you?
The post These 13+ Little-Known Facts Might Surprise You appeared first on UberFacts.
With the increase in popularity of shows on the Food Network (shoutout to the Pioneer Woman), meal kits, and recipe blogs on the internet, it’s easier than ever to feel like a professional chef at home.
However, sometimes those outlets make us think we need to be too fancy. Thankfully, these 13+ chefs are here to tell you the steps/processes that you can go ahead and skip.
“Giving the meat a quarter turn a few minutes before it’s done on the grill. It gives the meat beautiful cross hatched grill marks but does nothing for the quality of the meat.”
“Frenching. You usually see it on fancy cuts of meat like tomahawk steaks or racks of lamb. It improves the look of the cut, is pretty easy to do and most people have come to expect it when ordering more expensive cuts of meat. This step is unnecessary to me though because the part that is trimmed off is super tender and fatty and delicious, so if I have the option, I request an unfrenched cut.”
“Truffle oil. I feel the vast majority of the time it’s added only so that the dish sounds more sophisticated.”
“Flambé is bullshit. It’s literally just setting the alcohol on fire that has already boiled off from the dish and doesn’t burn hot enough at the surface to create any Maillard reaction products. I do it to entertain my three year old. He loves it.”
“Tiny stems in fresh parsley, cilantro, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, basil etc.
Seperating that last 2-5 mm from the leaf to the stalk is not important and generally speaking, it’s both tender and packed with flavor. But, but, muh atention too detales…”
“Adding edible gold to any food. It does not affect the taste and has zero nutritional value, as it will just pass through your digestive system without being absorbed. Well, at least you will literally be shitting gold after eating it.”
“Leaving the tails on shrimp for ornament. In stir fries, curries, etc., now I have to get in there and remove something it was actually easier to just take off with the rest of the shell.
Why leave these choking hazards in an otherwise entirely edible meal to be discreetly stashed at the side of a plate or in a napkin?”
“Garnishing with fucking micro greens that you have to clean and fucking pick the seeds out of. It takes forever and most people just take them off anyway. Sure, it’s pretty, but spending 45 minutes of my prep time going through a box of them really sucks.”
“Peeling carrots and potatoes. Give them a good wash and they’re fine. Hell, potato skins improve mashed potatoes, imo.”
“Traditional French desserts like croquembouche and gateau st honore only exist to make me feel like a failure.
Cream puffs have no business being in a conical shape held up by baker’s napalm.”
“the food tower… it may look nice, bit no one wants to try and cut into that mess.”
“Parsley. Put it on anything, and suddenly you’re fancy.”
“Plating.
High-end restaurants take great pains to make sure meals are plated well and look appealing from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
When cooking at home, I generally don’t put as much effort into the “plate appeal”.”
“Here are a few
Vanilla beans. I LOVE them and they are so complex and beautiful. It’s professional to bring them out in dishes, but really not necessary. Vanilla extract, though not as good. Will work just fine. Especially when a vial of 3 beans costs $10.
Those paper things that go on the bone stumps of a cooked turkey. So useless I won’t even google their name.
Blowing smoke into your cloche dome. Revealing your plated food as smoke bellows out from it and revealing the dish is cool as hell and professional. Though it technically adds flavour, you likely also used the smoke gun earlier in the cooking process to add flavour that it is not needed again.”
“Putting all the ingredients in miniature bowls.”
Here’s to your next delicious meal at home!
The post 15 Professional but Totally Unnecessary Things Chefs Do During Meal Prep appeared first on UberFacts.
Do you remember when you first had “The Talk?” It might’ve been with your parents, a friend, a teacher, an older sibling, the weird guy who lived in the garage next door, etc.
Whoever told you about sex for the first time probably told you some things that aren’t true, or at least are inaccurate. After all, it’s an awkward situation for both parties involved and many adults tend to stretch the truth or leave out some key details. These AskReddit users reveal the funny and WRONG things they were taught about the birds and the bees.
“That you can get pregnant from hugging and that you can get AIDS from kissing. It was 1999 when it had been proven that HIV was not spread through casual contact.”
“I always thought you were supposed to be really gentle with the penis. So my first time giving a hand job I had the lightest grip possible so I wouldn’t hurt him. When he showed me just how I was shocked lol.
I also thought your period was supposed to be just a dot of blood, hence the name “period.” Had a rude awakening with that one.”
“I was taught that a woman releases a special chemical in her brain during/right after sex that makes her attached to the man for the rest of her life, because he made that happen. Only women tho, and only your first.
My parents were so hellbent on this that me and my mom often argued about it… she was adamant that I could barely know the guy, yet this would happen and it would ruin my life, she was that convinced (as a teen, they didn’t like my boyfriend and used this to say I won’t know who he will grow up into, in highschool you’ve known him only a few years, this will forever taint your life when you eventually get married etc…. very strong belief they hold). Many other misconceptions as well, but that’s the craziest. Others include:
*Tampons cause infertility because the ovaries cannot ‘air out’
*Having cold feet outside leads to infertility by ‘freeze damage’ to the ovaries
*Sex is a donation to a man, not at all something to share as it can never truly be pleasurable for the woman. However, you’re in luck because women happen to release a forever-bonding chemical when she loses her virginity so you won’t mind ‘doing what is needed to him when do you have to.’ “
“My mum told me there was no such thing as ovulation when I was 9. To this day I haven’t had the courage to ask her how she thinks I got here!”
“Basically sex = your life is ruined and there’s nothing you can do about it then.
Little bit inaccurate.”
“I received absolutely no sex education. I was raised a religious fundamentalist, married at 19 to a girl that was as ignorant as I was and lost our virginity on our wedding night. Married for 13 years. I learned what and where a clitoris was from my 2nd sexual partner at the age of 32.”
“My sex ed was cassette tapes of an old man basically just saying don’t have sex before marriage, but one of the things he said was “I grew up on a farm, and I learned all I needed to know about sex by watching the animals.””
“My middle school teacher told the class that condoms were not effective at all for protecting against STDs and only worked 50% in stoping pregnancies, and that anyone who told you otherwise was a diseased pervert trying to trick you into sex. Abstinence teaching, ladies and gentlemen.”
” “If you both keep your virginity until your wedding night, you will have an amazing sex life forever.”
False.”
“Not sure this counts but when I was 10 and asked my mom what AIDS was, she said it happened when people had sex without protection.
Fair enough. Except my little brain confused “protection” with “permission”. And that was what I thought AIDS was. For longer than I care to admit.”
“If you have sex in a hot tub, you can’t get pregnant. When you go to sleep, your period stops. My friend also believed that girls only had their periods on the full moon cycle.
These are things I had other people come to me about, because they had no sex ed and I was the one friend who actually learned something from their parents.”
“In addition to the usual (condoms aren’t effective, sex before marriages gives you cancer, zero information about discharge or where clitoris is located) I was taught that women don’t feel sexual arousal. At all. Those who think they do are just confused. Women have sex to please men and make babies, no other reason.
I still wonder if the woman who taught me this was just asexual and didn’t know it, and she assumed this was the norm.”
“They taught us that if you have sex, you are dirty and disgusting. It became confusing to me as a child to be excited when someone announced they were pregnant, I thought it was only good if you ended up pregnant.”
“I mean I don’t think this really counts but my class made us watch the lifetime movie “she’s too young” a movie about a high school that has a huge chlamydia outbreak which made it seem like that was gonna happen to our school if we had any sex so that I suppose.”
“Went to catholic school in south Texas. My sex ed was “you are all too young to have sex, if you do you will be a sex offender for life” then we learned about the legal problems of being a sex offender. Not totally wrong, but lots of girls had to leave when they ended up pregnant.”
The post 12+ People Reflect on the Most Inaccurate Things They Learned About the Birds and the Bees appeared first on UberFacts.
We’ve all got ’em. The injury is bad, but the story is worse. I mean, the older I get, the more of these I sustain – I can put my back out for days bending over to pick up laundry, for example.
When I was a teenager, I split my knee open and had to get stitches. I told people it was running into the centerfield fence catching a softball (which was true) but tried to conveniently leave out the detail that the injury happened during warmups and not during an outstanding, homerun-robbing catch.
Alas.
I have to say, though, these 13+ stories definitely put mine to shame!
“Laughing with a friend of mine at Dairy Queen. Laughed so hard because he pulled out a condom instead of money and he thought everyone saw him so I burst into gut wrenching laughter apparently rupturing my L4-L5-S1 vertebrae requiring emergency surgery!”
“I injured my knee by crouching to pet a cat.
I could barely walk for a few days and couldn’t do any exercise or sports for nearly a month.”
“When I was a little kid, I fell over and broke my collar bone while sitting and eating waffles. I wish this was fake.
Edit: About a year before this incident, I broke the same bone playing on my mother’s bed. I believed I was a Power Ranger and rolled off the bed… onto the hard wood floor.”
“I was once concucsed after being dropped off late to school. Turned back to wave to my dad and ran smack straight into a stop sign and dropped cold.”
“I got a hernia from taking a dump.”
“I dislocated my knee….putting socks on. I was standing near the foot of my bed and was doing a balancing act putting socks on. When I went to put my right leg back down, my pant leg somehow got stuck on the footboard of my bed. My jeans somehow then decided to rip and my knee moved in a way it was never intended to.
I’m definitely a klutz and tend to find myself in weird situations like this far too often.”
“Broke my collar bone after accidentally rolling onto the floor off a bunk bed… it was the bottom bunk.”
“I built a nice counter for our laundry room, installed the new washing machine, installed the wall-mounted dryer, made shelves with the leftover wood, and even found time to plant an apple tree my mom had bought, all in the same day. Then slipped a disc when I was washing my hands -_-“
“Little me, around 8 years old spent a few hours gazing through his telescope into the moon, the stars and the sky and it was awesome. When I was done, I hugged my telescope, optical tube down and eye piece up. I was very short, very very short. Almost telescope sized back then.
So, of course I tripped, by reflex I looked down, while at the same time, the big end of the telescope hit the ground, and my mouth caught the eyepiece, almost.
Right between the upper lip and the nose, went almost all the way in, and turns out my face is a gusher. In two spots it went all the way through my facemeat and hit my front teeth, lucky me it didn’t crack a tooth. Thanks for the ER trip Mr. Telescope, Who knew stargazing was such dangerous activity?”
“Pulled a muscle in my right butt cheek while taking a nap. Couldn’t walk properly for the next 7 hours.”
“I got out of bed a few weeks ago and turned my ankle. Tore every ligament and have to use crutches now.”
“Tore my ACL and meniscus in my right knee while pulling my pants up changing in the locker room after swim practice. Took two surgeries and 6 months of recovery to get back to normal. Because of pants.”
“I was sitting on a couch. There was a blanket on the floor barely covering my feet. While seated, I leaned forward to pull the blanket onto myself. Pulled a muscle in my back and was out of work for 4 days.”
“I got a paper cut opening a band aid.”
“Two years ago I tore my miniscus and blew out my knee playing ping pong at our office Christmas party. Stepped to the left and went down hard. Worst part was two days later when I finally stubbornly went to emerg that the nurses keep me a pro athlete and the dude ahead of me had the exact same injury from a “vicious hockey hit.””
The post 15 People Dish on the Dumbest Way They’ve Ever Gotten Hurt appeared first on UberFacts.
Kids can say some truly hilarious things without even meaning to. I mean sure, sometimes they’re inopportune and inappropriate and we can’t actually laugh at them in the moment, but that doesn’t make them any less funny.
Lucky for you, these 17 kids aren’t yours. So feel free to go ahead and laugh right away.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Complete tragedy that this bag wasn’t featured front and center.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Hey, they can’t all be geniuses.
Photo Credit: Twitter
Photo Credit: Reddit
Such a proud moment.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Framers. Every. One.
Photo Credit: Reddit
He calls ’em like he sees ’em.
Photo Credit: Reddit
I’m going to need this movie adaptation immediately.
Photo Credit: Reddit
This picture is perfection.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Maybe just save yourself.
Photo Credit: Reddit
You’re going to need to be more specific.
Photo Credit: Reddit
First, farts are funny. Second, never squash anyone’s creativity, man.
Photo Credit: Twitter
Photo Credit: Reddit
How will he ever top this?
Photo Credit: Reddit
The progression is everything.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Hey, dinosaurs need homes too.
Photo Credit: Reddit
If you don’t get her a cat after all that, you’ve got no heart.
Photo Credit: Twitter
I mean…smart kid.
These are almost enough to make me want to have another child. Almost.
The post These 15+ Kids Have No Idea How Hilarious They Are appeared first on UberFacts.
Noises have the power to terrify us in unexpected ways. Our minds can come up with some truly terrifying images based on sound alone.
These AskReddit users share their personal stories. We dare you not to get freaked out.
“I used to live with my sister during my last teenage years. She had this Holland Flop bunny as her pet. He was a sweetheart that loved to cuddle. One day, I was getting out of the shower and I heard this absolutely blood curdling scream. I wrapped a towel on quickly and dashed into the living room to see what was up. The poor bunny had trapped himself and gotten tangled up in some headphones. I had to calm him down and unwrap him.”
“I remember when I was in middle school, I was working on a project that involved a poster. I worked on it earlier in the day, leaned it against my bedroom wall, and forgot about it. Later that night, it fell down making a long sliding sound down the wall. Being almost asleep, I thought it sounded like an animal hissing very loud. I don’t think my feet touched the ground on my way out of the room.”
“When I was 7-8 years old, a neighbor gave me one of those large 3′ dolls with realistic hair and blinking eyes with long lashes. I think she also walked if you held her arms.
Went to sleep that night with the doll sitting in my little rocking chair. At some point during the night, I woke up and heard this soft ‘click click’ sound and realized that the doll was sitting there blinking at me. Screamed bloody murder, made my parents put the doll outside the house that night and the next day, give it back to the neighbors.
I still don’t like blinking dolls.”
“Used to go camping with my parents and grandparents when i was 12.
Sleeping in our caravan 2AM-ish, grandfather wakes us all up screaming “BOMB”, we were all confused and then we hear an explosion, we put on our shoes and right before we get outside we hear another bigger explosion.
The camping has like streets with caravans on both sides lined up, what happened was (we learned this the next day) someone had a short-circuit with his fridge in his caravan and this started a fire that reached the gas canister.
That was the first explosion (and furthest away) that woke my grandfather up, he said he recognized that sound from WW2 and it shot him right out of his bed.
The explosion set fire to the next caravan in line on our street for the 2nd explosion that was closer, it was nearing us.
Repeat for the next in line which was getting close for the final biggest explosion we heard.
Luckily we had taken out the gas canisters immediately and put them further away on the concrete.
Our caravan melted from the heat but the explosions stopped.
Had to talk to cops about what i saw with my parents at like 3-4AM when i was 12, that was a scare and a half for us.”
“I came home from work a little earlier than usual one day. It was dark in the house and dead silent, except for this weird, rhythmic crinkling sound. I stumbled around the couch to find one of my cats lying on her side with her head buried in a snack size potato chip bag. She was stuck and she was suffocating. I ripped the bag away and saw her foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling around in her head, terrified. She took a deep breath and within seconds was breathing normally again.
We always joked about her being trash can kitty because she would eat pretty much anything, but apparently that day, she’d actually made it into the trash can. We got a can with a lid after that.
I always shudder when I think about that noise and what I would have found if I’d stayed at the office a minute later.”
“I was on the phone with my mom while she got in to a bad car accident. I still remember her screaming. I was at home with a broken ankle at the time. It was horrific and I still think about it today (even though it was months ago).
I’m so grateful she is alive and walked away with only some bad bruising, even though the car was destroyed. I just felt so helpless not being able to do anything in that moment. Thankfully 911 was called immediately.”
“I went up to stay with my mother after my dad died for a few weeks. She went out to run some errands with my aunt so I was home alone. I hear a familiar sound of my dad getting out of his computer chair upstairs in his bedroom. I hear him walk over to the door, open then close it, walk into the hall and down then up the stairs. He then closed the door.
It scared to hell out of me. I couldn’t move. If that was an encounter with a ghost, I don’t want another one.”
“Not long after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, I was living Tokyo and was traveling daily on the Japanese metro. Most Japanese residents have a earthquake detector phone app that sends off an alarm approximately 10 sec before you feel the shaking of an earthquake.
I was riding the busy keiyo line that is deep under Tokyo Station in a packed carriage , when the train stops unexpectedly and suddenly every person’s phone on train suddenly starts playing the same alarm.
There was at least one hundred people in my carriage and hearing a chorus of devices suddenly begin to sing in unison of your impending doom while we are around 8 stories underground will be an experience I won’t soon forget.
Thankfully after the alarm, the quake started and wasn’t anything more than a light after shock, but that 10sec wait was intense. No one said a thing, no one panicked and when the shaking stopped the train silently restarted and we continued our journey.”
“Doing CPR on my mom’s third husband after finding him on the kitchen floor. I’d just stopped by and walked in on my mom, frantic on the phone with 911.
Blood was coming from his mouth and he had no pulse. He was turning cold. But my mom being an RN for the last million years yelled at me to start chest compressions.
His eyes were vacant, but I slapped him and yelled his name and started explaining that I was going to start compressions. It was something I recalled from class to help keep focused on the task. This was happening. I was in the zone. Hero mode activated. Then I started.
With the first push, blood sprayed from his mouth and he made this raspy sound. By the second or third compression, I felt his ribs break. The sound with every push was nauseating.
I wanted to puke. I wanted to cry.
At some point, a cop walked in. I screamed for help and the officer told me I could stop and that my stepdad was dead.
The scene played over in my dreams for weeks after that, but with variations. He was trapped under ice in one. In another, logs were being sawn nearby. In both, the activity mimicked the raspy cough his body made.”
“Sleep paralysis with auditory hallucinations.
Scariest ones:
-A conversation between two inhuman sounding men about how they want to kill me. It was hard to wake up from this one.
-An excruciatingly loud scream. It sounds like a mix between a person and some type of animal. Repeating over and over.
-A man laughing, but it’s really loud and starts becoming distorted.”
“The sound of a person hitting the pavement after falling 11 stories.”
“Hedgehogs mating outside my window, ran out with a knife thinking my cat was being murdered.”
“My neighbor has a horse which I fully am ignorant of the existence of 99% of the time. One night it’s dark, I’m walking to my truck. Turn to the door….
And let me elaborate. It’s one of those just dead quiet nights, no noise.
Then the horse did one of those lip flappy exhales.
I’m like oh, yeah, so this is the end of Jake.
Just like that gypsy woman said.”
“Sounds outside our bedroom window, like someone muttering to themselves. I convinced my husband it was nothing. We kept hearing it at night. It was terrifying.
Turned out it was a severely mentally ill man squatting on the property adjacent to us. When we called the police to ask what to do, they said, “Oh, yeah, that’s so-and-so. Whatever you do, don’t confront him, he’s very violent. It took six officers to bring him down last time he had an episode!” Then they stood on our porch and yelled at him that ‘these people here are complaining about how loud you are, so keep it down!’ “
“Hearing a mountain lion scream/roar in the White Mountains of New Mexico while camping when I was like 13. No thank you!”
The post 15 People Describe the Scariest Sound They’ve Ever Heard appeared first on UberFacts.
For 25 years, kids, and many of their parents, have made watching Hocus Pocus a part of their Halloween tradition. When it burst onto the movie scene in 1993, it was the culmination of almost a decade of work, but what fans probably remember best are the fabulous performances of Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker as the Sanderson sisters. It might not have made a killing at first, but Hocus Pocus went on to become a cult classic that is sure to last for many more generations.
There are, however, some fun Easter eggs that even big fans of the movie may not be aware of. If you think you’re one of them, keep reading and see if any of the below surprise you!
Photo Credit: NBC
Hey, both groups are still having a great time, right?
Photo Credit: Disney
Okay, this one’s a little obvious, but still cute, right?
Photo Credit: Laughing Place
That’s a lot of creepy Bette Midler face.
Photo Credit: Disney
She JUST learned what asphalt was, for Pete’s sake!
Photo Credit: Disney
Can you blame them? Look at those costumes!
Photo Credit: US Magazine
I mean, the latter did get him an Oscar nomination, so I think it was a good decision.
Photo Credit: factinate
Bet she’s kicking herself now!
Photo Credit: The Witch Next Door
You gotta have a full moon when creepy witches are involved, though.
Photo Credit: Disney
I guess his costume and boyish good looks were distracting enough to make him believable while he was in human form.
Photo Credit: Disney
You know, because cats have nine lives…I’ll see myself out.
Photo Credit: factinate
No matter how well you think you know a movie, there are always surprises!
The post 10+ Magical Facts You Might Not Know About Hocus Pocus appeared first on UberFacts.
Day after day, police officers put their lives on the line to protect citizens.
In this AskReddit article, police officers share their most hair-raising “calling all units” stories, so buckle up.
“An armed robbery at the government’s financial institution.
But, unlike the stuff they show in movies, we went in silent, spread around without approaching the premises too close and got all four of them by intercepting their car later on. One of our detectives came in an unmarked car and parked a few cars behind the vehicle with the engine running and the nervous driver behind the wheel and followed them.
We learned about the car thanks to the off-duty officer who was in the right place at the right time to notice the suspicious behavior (the car was parked in an unusual way among everything else that indicated to him that something fishy is going on).
Although, we were lucky in some sense because it took them ages to do what they came to do. Regardless, it all went smoothly and with no casualties.”
“I’ve served as both a probation officer and police officer. There was a natural disaster in the area on a weekend. I got a call from the chief probation officer telling me that we were designated as disaster workers and we were to report for duty. I was an armed field unit officer at the time and when we got into work all the armed officers were told we were going to patrol the disaster area. We were ordered to put on all of our marked clothes and report to an area for patrol.
It was a bit weird as all our cars were unmarked and had no lights. We had radios and cages in the cars but not the other equipment as we normally didn’t need it. The patrolling was fairly uneventful and we didn’t encounter any looters but we put in a number of 13-hour days. The community needed every armed LEO they could get and we did our part.”
“It’s happened three times that I’ve been on duty that I can recall. The first time was a riot at a local theme park, some idiot kids put out that there was going to be a fight in the parking lot and for some reason that meant several hundred high school age kids all gathered in the lot and got into a huge brawl. The first few officers responding got surrounded in the chaos and they put out an officer in trouble, and because of the size of the crowd, they asked for officers from all over the county.
The others were officer down calls where the gunman was still at large.”
“A police officer here, I’ve heard it over the radio many times but never used it my self. We are issued with a button on our radios that causes all radios to beep and vibrate, so it is instantly noticed by every officer in the area. Most memorable was a regular DUI stop that turned south resulting in the officer being attacked and having his leg broken.
It was towards the end of the shift and most of the officers were finishing up on paperwork at the station. As soon as it went off every officer in the station left within 10 seconds of hearing it. The suspect was quickly detained and arrested soon after.”
“Former cop here. The all-units call was basically a riot at a large nightclub in a very rough area of the neighboring city. Once things were finally calmed down and the dozen or so people were taken away, my boss wanted us all back in our city. I was amazed at not only how many cops showed up but from where….counties and towns I had never heard of before. I looked up a few at the end of shift and some came from an hour plus away.”
“We had an all-units call to one of our own stabbed. Everyone went hell for leather to get there, to find one of our guys on the floor with a stab wound to the stomach. We searched everywhere for the suspects and anyone matching the descriptions was arrested. So, it turns out the officer did it to himself.
He’d heard you couldn’t be fired from work if you were injured in the line of duty (he was under investigation for a minor issue, not anything involving the public. Just breach of procedure.) I don’t think I’ve ever been so disgusted with a colleague in my life. All the other “all units” calls I’ve been to have been genuine and luckily my colleagues unhurt.
I almost called one myself when someone pulled out a sawn-off shotgun at me. Luckily that panned out OK!”
“A large wedding in Brooklyn—it was at midnight, so there weren’t that many units, to begin with. The families started warring with each other and when we arrived they, of course, turned on us. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, was brawling and we felt like Custer at Little Big Horn.
We turned out three cars that night and one of them was out on a homicide so we’re just yelling “Keep ’em coming, Central!” The duty captain (the supervisory officer for the patrol boro) shows up, looks around, sees that this is quickly becoming a riot and calls a citywide 10-13, which means a designated number of cars from every borough task force in the city.”
“When I was working for a small town police department I received a phone call from our chief of police, who was off that day. He said a woman showed up on his front lawn saying she had just escaped from her kidnappers. Long story short she said something about him (her kidnapper) having a gun and threatening to use it if she tried to escape.
Me, being young (20 at the time) and oblivious to what I was actually putting out on the radio, called out to the on-duty officer about the situation. My wording must have been terrible because I received radio messages from county and state police stating they were en route to the chief’s residence. They thought someone had come to our chief of polices home with a gun and was holding him hostage. The best part of this story is I gave the wrong address and all these cop cars from city county and state were blocking off the street one block over.”
“I recently had an “all available units respond” call for an unresponsive child.
My partner and I have never driven so fast. When we got there, all you could smell was brakes and exhaust fumes from our cruisers.
We entered the house and found the child: a one-year-old boy. We performed CPR. He was transported. He didn’t make it.
It’s hard to be criticized by the media and the general public when these are the things we deal with.”
“I’m an officer in a courtroom, so our all-units calls are usually for disruptive spectators (victim and defendant families fighting out arguing) or defendants acting up in front of a judge or whole being taken back to jail. Another courthouse nearby had an incident where a defendant produced a blade from his rectum and tried to slash his lawyer’s throat while in the courtroom. One I was involved in, a guy was a known problem in corrections custody but somehow he got free of them and fought his way into the courtroom I was working in.
It’s the most comforting sight when you make that 10-13 call and in the midst of the fight, you see the small army of uniforms come running in to help.”
“Had an all units call, it was horrifying, turned out an off-duty cop was drinking and driving and hit three cars on a bridge. It was chaos, many things flew out of the car, belongings scattered everywhere. He did time, lost his job obviously, stained the department.”
“Retired cop here. I have more than a few ‘Everyone get here now’ calls in my time. Most stemmed from a large gathering that was starting to turn not so peaceful.
My last major one, we had a bomb that was planted in a car in a parking lot. I needed to clear the lot and the adjacent building. And then it became an attempt to keep folks out of the area. That was a tense 12-hours until the device was blown up.”
“A few weeks ago we had an all-units call because an idiot on drugs decided to call 911 and say someone was someone had been shot. As he was on the phone with a dispatcher, someone else calls in that her home is being broken into. Guess who broke into her home while he’s ‘still’ on the phone with 911 saying someone’s been shot.
So an officer arrives and goes in to search for the suspect not knowing at the time it was the guy on the phone with 911. Well, dude runs out, hops in the cop car and tears out! All officers are dispatched along with state police officers. He had a nice joyride and led them on a good chase with a buddy behind him for almost an hour until some state troopers did a maneuver to wreck him when he got on the interstate.”
“I spent 13 months as an officer.
One was during a patrol in the ghetto section, and I spot a car speeding down the street. As soon as I hit my lights, the driver jumps out of the car while it’s in motion and runs into the woods losing a sandal. The car stopped right before hitting a house and figured that another passenger stopped the vehicle, so called for immediate backup and secured it. Turned out to be a notorious dealer with priors, and his ladies snitched when he bailed on them.”
“We had a shooter trying to kill cops. He had several guns on him and he managed to take out a few cops. He ran and hid in the woods traveling around town behind people’s houses for days. Businesses and roads were shut down people were told to stay inside. It was pretty intense.”
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Bloody Mary is more than a character. She’s a Halloween (or anytime) tradition amongst young people. You dare each other and egg your friends on until one of you is brave enough to hit the lights, stand in front of a mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” 13 times…
Photo Credit: iStock
Then you wait for the inevitable: for the spirit of the Bloody Mary to appear out of nowhere, kill you and your friends, and ruin your sleepover!
Okay, the murder part doesn’t actually happen, but you know you thought it might when you were a kid (as did I). The ritual is so impactful that different versions of the legend exist across the globe — sometimes centered around a woman named Mary Worth, sometimes involving the devil himself appearing.
It turns out that seeing things in the mirror really isn’t that strange after all. The longer you stare in the mirror, the more likely you are to see stuff that isn’t really there. This phenomenon can be blamed, in part, on what’s known as the Troxler effect. If you stare at the same object for a long time, your brain gets used to the image and the unchanging stimuli. What happens next is pretty incredible: your neurons cancel the information out, and whatever you’re staring at can start to appear blurry or distorted. Until you blink and look around, you’ll continue to see these unusual visions.
Photo Credit: Deviant Art,Skyberry-13
What’s more, if you stare into your own eyes in a mirror long enough, your face will begin to change shape.
Here’s a test for you. Stare at the plus sign in the center of the image below for 8 seconds.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Your brain probably tricked you and distorted your vision in a number of ways, possibly by making the colors in the image fade to gray. Live Science points out that this is actually a coping mechanism. “If you couldn’t ignore the steady hum of your computer monitor, the constant smell of your own body odor or the nose jutting out in front of your face, you’d never be able to focus on the important things — like whether your boss is standing right behind you,” the article explains.
The “strange face in the mirror” phenomenon, like Bloody Mary, is part of this as well. A 2010 experiment conducted by an Italian psychologist had people stare into a mirror for 10 minutes. 66% of the subjects reported seeing “huge deformations” of their face, and 48 % saw “fantastical and monstrous beings.”
Photo Credit: Unsplash,Taylor Smith
So maybe this is why so many people claim to have seen Bloody Mary in the mirror, and why the legend continues to frighten kids to this day. However, while origin of Bloody Mary is debated, but some believe it dates back to a real person — Queen Mary I from the 16th century, who was called Bloody Mary by her protestant enemies.
Others think the legend may be based on a different real person named Mary because varying legends give different versions of her name (Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, Mary Lou). Either way, one thing is for sure — kids will continue to play this spooky game forever, so let’s just hope Bloody Mary doesn’t get angry enough to come bursting through the mirror.
The post The Story Behind Bloody Mary and Why We Think We See Stuff in Mirrors appeared first on UberFacts.