Read Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy for Free Online Page B

“nutter,” didn’t appear until the late 1950s.)

GIDDY
    These days, we associate being giddy with being silly or in love. But at one time, being giddy could have gotten you locked up. It first appeared in Old English as the word gydig , meaning “insane” or “possessed.” The root of “giddy” is, in fact, the same Germanic root that gave us the English word “god”—and originally, to be giddy was to be possessed by a god or other supernatural being.

BERSERK
    Thought to be a combination of the Icelandic ber (“bear”) and serkr (“shirt”), Berserkers were Norse warriors who wore bearskins into battle and were known for their terrifying, uncontrollable bloodlust. They were thought to have suffered actual fits of madness, referred to as bärsärkar-gång (“going berserk”), described here in Howard Frabing’s On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry :
        Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power…which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe.
    Today, we use “berserk” to describe out-of-control behavior.
    Crazy for word origins? Go to page 226 for “bonkers,” “wacky,” “madcap,” and more .
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What do Fiji, Chile, and Egypt have in common? You can be jailed there for not voting .
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THE SKIES HAVE EYES

    Google Earth is a downloadable computer program that lets you view the world via satellite images, aerial photography, and a close-up “Street View” feature. It’s great when you need to find a donut shop, but not so great when something unexpected gets caught in the photo .
    • After photographing several U.K. cities for Street View, Google fielded hundreds of complaints from citizens who inadvertently wound up in photos—including a man caught exiting a sex shop, a man throwing up outside of a pub, and a group of teenagers getting arrested.
    • Sharp-eyed Google Earth users noticed a collection of 40-year-old buildings in southern California that, from above, resembled a Nazi swastika. The owner of the structures: the U.S. Navy (the buildings were barracks on a military base). The Navy spent $600,000 to redesign the facility.
    • While photographing for Street View in Melbourne, Australia, Google’s car-mounted cameras captured a man passed out in his mother’s front yard. The man, who’d had too much to drink after a funeral, later complained. Google removed the photos.
    • Users scrolling through pictures of upstate New York on Street View noticed a deer fawn standing in the middle of a rural road. But in subsequent shots, the deer was lying in the road, dead, with blood-soaked tire tracks leading away from it. Google’s camera car, it turned out, had accidentally hit it. The company kept the images, but edited out the deer.
    • If you look closely, you can spot hundreds of photos that caught people urinating in public, including one with a French bus driver photographed relieving himself on the side of his bus.
    • One Google Earth user was looking at photos of a female friend’s house—and spotted her own husband’s Range Rover out front. Divorce proceedings followed.
    • At least one person was ready for the cameras: At Google’s headquarters in California, a software engineer named Michael Weiss-Malik held up a large sign as the camera passed overhead. It read “Proposal 2.0: MARRY ME LESLIE!!” (Leslie said yes.)
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The FDA announced in 2008 that milk from cloned cows may already be in the nation’s food supply .
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TERROR IN TOILET TOWN

    In the last episode of Terror in Toilet Town, we brought you “Snakes on a What?!,” the true story of a woman in China who was bitten by a snake hiding in her toilet. Now, sit back for some brand-new episodes about the scariest room in the house .
    E pisode: “Curses!”
Setup: One night in October 2007 in