5 Mental Disorders That Only Occur in One Place on Earth. What's awesome about crazy people is they always find ways to surprise us. And there might not be anything stranger in the world of mental illness than culture-bound syndromes. These are specific, and incredibly bizarre, forms of insanity that only happen in certain countries or cultures, for reasons that often leave experts baffled.
Such as... #5. Wendigo Psychosis: Normal Folks in a Man-Eating Frenzy The Wendigo is a mythical monster that is featured in the folklore of some northern Native American and Canadian tribes. They all describe it as a "malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural being of great spiritual power, associated with winter, coldness, famine and starvation. " Pre-Rice Vampires.
Now that we've cleared up what a true Wendigo is, you might be wondering in terror what exactly "Wendigo Psychosis" entails, and if you're not, you should probably start right about now. What? That's the best guess as to where Wendigo Psychosis comes in. . #4. Guess what he's doing right now. #3. The 6 Creepiest Places on Earth (Part 2) In Cracked's continuous effort to make your local haunted house look like a boring pile of dog turds, we once again present the creepiest real places on Earth. Whether it's due to their bizarre histories, suspicious coincidences or good ol' human insanity, these are the locations even the die-hardest of atheists wouldn't venture into without a crucifix and a Super Soaker full of Pope-blessed water. Located smack in the middle of a swamp in the heart of Aztec country is the popular tourist destination La Isla de las Munecas, or Island of the Dolls, a name missing at least two adjectives and the word "fucking.
" To get there, visitors have to hire a guide to take them by boat through the canals of Xochimilco, then to the island itself, all the while making the guide promise on a stack of Bibles that he's not going to abandon them once they reach their destination. "Seriously, Pablo? We will haunt your ass. " Not that he'd do that, right? Oh. One that will cost tourists sleep for decades.
6 Glitches That Accidentally Invented Modern Gaming. Half of the art you enjoy every day is probably due to some happy accident. For instance, most of the tension in Jaws can be credited to the fact that the fake shark they were using was a mechanical nightmare and too ridiculous to show on screen. You wouldn't think video games would be subject to this, however -- a mistake in the code of a game would most likely just melt your Xbox (again) rather than invent some fun new game mechanic. Yet, some of the most iconic features of games can be credited to serendipity: A Bad Mouse Click Leads to Lara Croft's Rack It's not fair to say that Lara Croft and Tomb Raider are only famous for one reason (or even two).
There have been many excellent and critically acclaimed games in the series. Via 101 Video GamesThose are the protruding orbs on her chest. Well, as it turns out, Lara's bust is a result of a mistake. And apparently replaced them with oil-change funnels. Via TheAngryPixel.comYep. Via Wikimedia Commons"You're welcome, polygon booby lovers! " 6 Intimate Details You Can Tell Just By Looking At Someone. How much would you pay to be able to read another person's mind? As superpowers go, it's a hell of a lot more of a game changer than, say, flight. Your career, your relationships -- everything would change. But experts say you can gather a whole bunch of intimate details about a person just by looking at them. No, it's not 100 percent accurate, and it's not magic.
It's just science. Is She Interested In You? Getty Remember back in high school when you were talking to that cute girl you really liked, but you couldn't tell if she liked you back, and your fear of rejection prevented you from expressing your feelings in any way apart from night after night of tearful masturbation? Science to the rescue! How? Experts will tell you it's all in the body language, but you know better. Getty"I realized she was into me right around the time we started having sex. " But watch her feet. GettyThe angle of her heels says "I put out," but those knees say "not for you. " And while we're on the subject ... 7 Legendary Acts of Petty Revenge. Everyone gets pissed off sometimes. Occasionally, even the most even-headed among us will overreact in childish ways, such as locking your boyfriend out of the car or calling your girlfriend "the Devil.
" But there are some people who take petty revenge to dizzying levels of perfection. Getting a Bunch of Scientists to Sign a Paper Saying You're Stupid Being a scientist has to be tough. They spend their days staring down microscopes, knowing full well that when someone asks, "What do you do for a living? " any answer they give is going to elicit nothing but blank stares. Via WhatWouldOakleyDo"Whatever. When it comes to dealing with people who believe in creationism, it's got to be especially tough.
Creationists tend to be less resigned, and often try to prove the legitimacy of their theory by compiling lists of scientists who doubt evolution. GettyIt was exactly as relevant as a Flogging Molly set list. Via Universe TodayLike building this. Putting a Bear on Your Property GettyThat's right. 5 Guilty Pleasures The Web Killed While You Weren't Looking. We're guessing not a single person reading this would be willing to take a time machine and go back and live in the pre-Internet era. Some of us start showing signs of physical withdrawal within 10 minutes of losing our iPhone. Yet... there are things we miss about the world before the World Wide Web. Guilty pleasures that a less connected world used to let us get away with.
The odds are none of you have ever, say, robbed a liquor store or assassinated a public figure. But we've all broken the law, if only to sneak a beer before the statute said we were old enough, or to paint a dong on an abandoned bridge. Minor stuff. Ah, but now you're living in the future, where the cops can use the miracle of social networking to nail you for crimes you didn't think anyone really gave a shit about. Let's say you've gone off to college and, though you're still two years under age, you attend a party and have 27 beers.
It turns out the cute girl was actually a cop. Hiding Your Stupid Past Grandpa, 1938. 4 Child Vloggers Who Make Us Fear For Their Future. LinkSTORM. 5 Popular Safety Measures That Don't Make You Any Safer. It's so hard to think logically about safety. We figure that any time our health or the safety of our children is at stake, it's better safe than sorry. Our safety is too important for logic, damn it! Unfortunately, this leads to a whole lot of well-publicized and expensive safety measures that are often worthless, or downright dangerous. Like... Airport Security Measures After 9/11, we knew that stopping terrorism would take a bold, creative strategy, one flexible enough to adapt quickly to changes in tactics. How about this: let's find every person who's shown even the slightest criminal tendency and bar them from ever getting on a plane! And America was saved forever. Thus the no fly list was established. But while those two anonymous passengers were terrifying enough to ban from flying over America, they weren't enough of a threat to be worth arresting.
Is it weird that we're more afraid of this man's beard than of terrorists? And that wasn't an isolated incident. "$150? Presumably, Mr. 6 Non-Medical Excuses That Should Qualify You for a Sick Day. There are a handful of good excuses for not going to work: illness, death in the family, and actually that's just about it. But considering just how soul-crushing so many jobs are, I think that list needs to be expanded.
I know for me getting to work on time and in a productive state is dependent on so many rituals, all of which must go exactly as planned or I'm just no good to anyone. Am I being a big baby? I sure I am, but when I'm King these will all be valid excuses. (Also you will be disemboweled for calling me a big baby, you fucking peasant.) #6. It doesn't happen often, but once every five years or so, I dream a member of my family has died. After this nightmare, I then go to work, but I shouldn't. Dear Boss, Sorry to hear your wife is dead. Boss, you and your now dead wife. . #5. When I was in college I saw this Kids in the Hall skit extolling the virtues of the 20 minute morning dump as one of life's great pleasures.
But what happens when that morning dump gets interrupted? #4. 10 Words and Phrases You Won't Believe Shakespeare Invented. Shakespeare invented more words than most people even know. Seriously, there's at least 1,500 different words and phrases that don't appear anywhere prior to the Bard of Avon putting them on paper. When he got stuck trying to think up a word, the man just made his own.
It's kind of like what rappers do today, except the words Shakespeare made up got embedded into our culture and have formed the cornerstone of our discourse, rather than being obnoxiously spouted by white college students trying to be ironic. And while they weren't all winners ("unhair" still seems to be struggling) others, as you'll see, are so common you've probably already quoted Shakespeare today and you didn't even know it. First Used: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene ii, Oberon to Puck.
"Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye; Whose liquor hath this virtuous property, To take from thence all error with his might, And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight. " King Lear, Act II, Scene iv, King Lear to Regan. 5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we like to call a real, live, undead fucking zombie. So there. Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse: Think about it. Under every legal system in the world, all rights and responsibilities are terminated at death. All it takes is someone with resources and a need for a mindless workforce of totally obedient slave labor. How long until somebody tries this? We're betting somebody in the world, maybe North Korea, will have a working zombie by Christmas. As seen in... What are they?
How it can result in zombies: Scientists have already created a nano-cyborg, by fusing a tiny silicone chip to a virus. According to studies, within a decade they'll have nanobots that can crawl inside your brain and set up neural connections to replace damaged ones. Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse: Do the math, people. Some day there will be nanobots in your brain. Now, it should be more than clear by this point that our goal is to be responsible researchers.
5 Personality Flaws That Science Will Cure in Our Lifetime. At least half of the bad people in the world avoid trying to change because they insist nothing is their fault. It's all due to their childhood, or their genes -- their temper, their weight, their bad habits -- all of it is outside of their control. It's bullshit, right? Well ... not entirely. As we learn more about genetics, we find that more and more bad habits at least have their roots in our DNA.
. #5. There used to be a time when a weekend hookup with a lady at the county fair might have life-changing consequences, e.g., her daddy showing up at your doorstep with a shotgun, a preacher and some Gone With the Wind commemorative wedding china. It'll be the end of tennis coaching as we know it. Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. Cured By: Scientists know that the hormone called vasopressin is integral to the formation of social bonds. Imagine a future where being vasopressin negative was something you flaunted on your Match.com page. Or as they call it, "the vole-tron. " #4. . #3. The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs. Have you ever blurted out, "Wow, that guy is just so...so... " and then were left floundering with nothing to say? Well, it's not always your fault. English doesn't have words for every situation, or even the ones that happen every damned day. Fortunately, other languages usually do.
And since we already borrow words from them (just recently we've taken "schadenfreude," the German word for pleasure in someone else's misfortune) here's a few that we need to pick up right away: Bakku-shan (Japanese) Means: A beautiful girl... as long as she's being viewed from behind. Say you're in a bar, and you look over to see the most incredible sight you've ever seen: a tall, slim woman with a waterfall of dark copper hair, an ass like a fresh peach in shrinkwrap and legs all the way down to the floor. That's when she turns to look at you. Bile rises in your throat. Congratulations, you have just been a victim of bakku-shan: a girl that looks attractive from behind, but not from the front. The 6 Creepiest Places on Earth. It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in ghosts, there are some places in which none of us would want to spend a night. These places have well earned their reputations as being so creepy, tragic or mysterious (or all three) that they definitely qualify as "haunted.
" Places like... Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around. What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. More than 500 fucking people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s. The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. Also skulls. Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing!
Winchester Mystery House Oh, bitch...! 6 Adorable Cat Behaviors With Shockingly Evil Explanations. There seem to be two kinds of people in the world: those who don't understand cats, and those who think cats are kind of douchebags. Unfortunately for cat lovers, science has kind of come down on the side of that second group. Research has revealed that a lot of the quirky and even cute things your kitty does are actually signs that your cat is kind of a dick. Meowing to Imitate a Baby Human Cats have many different ways of communicating, but the meow is every cat's go-to vocalization when it wants to tell us something; be it, "I'm hungry," "pay attention to me" or "I just took a dump, go clean it up. " A recent study has shown that people subconsciously can tell the difference between a pleading or soliciting meow and a run of the mill, casual one just by listening to sound clips taken from different felines in different situations.
In fact, further studies have proven that a cat's cry for food or attention shares a remarkable similarity in frequency to a baby's cry. And guess what? 5 Reasons The Internet Could Die At Any Moment. The Internet was originally invented to be a communication network that could survive a nuclear war. Ironically, the monster that grew from that idea known as the World Wide Web is actually very, very fragile. They didn't anticipate what the Internet would become--because they weren't fucking insane--and as a result, the whole operation now sits on a rather shaky foundation. #5. The Internet is a Series of Cables, and Cables Can be Cut The Catastrophe: Considering how much people freak out when a single big site goes down (everyone remember the Great Gmail Outage of '09?) "It must be pretty bad. But the truth is, the Internet travels from continent to continent by way of a network of trans-oceanic cables, each thousands of miles long and only as thick around as a thumb.
Since these cables are the backbone of a huge portion of the global economy, they must be pretty well protected, right? We're pretty sure AT&T has at least one of these at their disposal. Actually... So What Can We Do? #4. The 5 Most Horrific Ways People Have Tried to Discourage Sex. 7 Shockingly Dark Origins of Lovable Children's Characters. 6 Creepy Animal Behaviors That Science Can't Explain. 6 Things That Are Secretly Turning You Into A Bad Person. The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don't Work) 6 People Who Had No Clue Their Faces Were World-Famous. The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales. 6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of. 6 Ways They're Turning Random Crap into Alternative Energy. 9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think. The 5 Least Romantic Keys to a Happy Relationship. 6 Terrifying Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth. 8 Racist Words You Use Every Day. 6 Everyday Words With Disturbing Alternate Meanings.
5 Reasons The Internet Could Die At Any Moment. The 8 Worst X-Men Ever. The 9 Most Devastating Insults From Around the World. 5 Retarded Health Campaigns That Backfired (Hilariously) 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. 5 Modern Sports That Started As Excuses for Sex and Violence.