40
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
The Truth:
He only chopped off the
bottom half
of
his left
ear—somewhere between a Tyson–Holyfi eld fi ght and a full-
fl edged ear-ectomy. And he didn’t mail it to a prostitute.
Some claim he
gave
it to a prostitute named Rachel (hey, we
never said he was well adjusted), but he never
mailed
any-
thing. Given his complete fi nancial distress (in his lifetime,
he only sold one painting), Vincent could hardly aff ord the
postage.
✖ ✖ ✖
The Lie:
Hair grows back thicker and darker after you shave it.
The Truth:
Sadly, it does not—although balding men surely
wish it did. Hair may seem to grow back thicker because short
hairs tend to feel and look dark and coarse, but it’s an illusion.
Nor does your hair keep growing after you die. Nor does 100
strokes with the brush before bedtime
improve the health of
your hair. Nor can any fancy-pants shampoo repair your split
ends (someone had to say it).
✖ ✖ ✖
The Lie:
You only use 10 percent of your brain.
The Truth:
You, beloved and brilliant
mental
_fl oss
reader,
use
all
of your brain. And so does everyone else. PET and MRI
scans of the brain show that while you don’t use all of your
brain
all the time, you use all of it some of the time. Frankly,
we’re off ended on your behalf that anyone would
ever
say that
your well-fl ossed, knowledge trap of a brain was only func-
tioning at 10 percent capacity! Maybe those idiots think Van
Gogh mailed his ear to a hooker, but not you! Again, even
those idiots
use all their brains as well, but we’re on a roll
here. It’s just total bull! Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered
why we say “bull” rather than “cow” or “hog” or “three-toed
possum” . . .
41
05
Bulls:
From Chicago to Pamplona
Watch us get through this without cursing:
Bull,
as in
baloney,
is
not short for BS. Believe it or not,
the Middle English word
bull,
meaning not a male cow, but “false talk or fraud,” entered the
lexicon about 800 years before BS did. Th
e word
bull
is as unre-
lated to the animal as the word
bear
(as in “grin and bear it”) is
to a grizzly. Witness,
for instance, the Middle English epic poem
Cursor Mundi:
“Said Christ to the hypocrites, you are all full of
wickedness, treason, and bull.” Although it might be more fun
if Christ were telling the hypocrites they were full of . . . you
know, they were actually just full of meaningless talk.
✖ ✖ ✖
If you’ve never heard of the Chicago Zephyrs (founded 1962) or
the Chicago Stags (founded 1946), that’s because they just
weren’t very good basketball teams. Of course, from 1966 to
1983 the Chicago Bulls weren’t
very good, either. But their luck
changed when, in 1984, they scored the third pick of the NBA
draft and picked up a 21-year-old shooting guard named Mi-
chael Jordan. Under the command of the man that Larry Bird
called “God
disguised as Michael Jordan,” the Bulls won their
fi rst, second, third, fourth, fi fth, and sixth (i.e., last) NBA
championships. Since his departure (his retirement, then his
move to the Washington Wizards, and
then his retirement
again), the Bulls have gone back to being Zephyr-esque.
✖ ✖ ✖
Th
e animal commonly known as the bull, not to mention
the cow and the ox, descended from the aurochs, a now-ex-
tinct species that lived in Europe until the 15th century.
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