Oops! My Chair Exploded... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Office chair

Supposedly this happened when the gas cannister that allows you to adjust the height of the chair got compressed with sufficient potential energy to create the explosion, though the physics behind this are dubious. Because the boy met a fate similar to what befell King Edward II, there is a certain salacity to the articles that report it, which casts further doubt.

It is likely that this was a hoax, but the major hoax-determining websites like Snopes have not really weighed in on this question, and pictures of the chair and the story of the hapless lad still circulate on the Web.

Answer: Gunpowder rockets were not invented until c. 1000 A.D.

John Elfreth Watkins not a liar but a civil engineer who worked for the railroads and was famous for predictions about what life would be like in the twenty-first century (published in the 'Ladies Home Journal'). But he was no historian of technology!

In 'Scientific American' (2 October 1909), Watkins presented the legend of the Chinese rocket-chair. In Watkins' account, Wang Tu survived the explosion, but was beaten to death by the angered Emperor of China. When Herbert S. Zim wrote of Wan Hu (the inventor's better-known name) in 1945, he set the story in the Ming Dynasty (16th century), and the protagonist and his chair were obliterated. Most Chinese versions of the legend used that time period and that unfortunate ending! One exception is a Chinese Central Television documentary which claimed that Wan was able to elevate his chair a foot from the earth.

Answer: No

According to the urban legend, at an outdoor children's concert, Paolo Esperanza, bass-trombonist with the Symphonica Maya de Uruguay, sought to contribute to the cannon shots fired in Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture'. So he dropped a lit firecracker into his aluminum straight mute, then covered the bell with his mute. He burned himself, took out the clarinetist, the maestro, and some of the audience besides. David Mikkelson of Snopes believes it originated inside the music industry, because the original e-mail contained specific technical instrumental details, such as the hapless musician's "new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone".

Legends about musical mishaps are very popular.

Answer: Israel

In 1988, Reuters picked up a story by 'The Jerusalem Post' about a housewife in Tel Aviv who was desperately trying to kill a stubborn cockroach. She stomped on it, threw it into the toilet, and then saturated it with bug-spray. Her unsuspecting husband threw a lit cigarette into the toilet, and ... KA-BOOM! To make matters worse, the paramedics spilled the poor fellow off the stretcher and broke his ribs and pelvic bones. UPI also picked up the story, and neither agency did any fact checking! (The stretcher bit shows up in lots of other urban legends, too.)

Weirdly enough, a toilet did actually explode in Arkansas in 1989, when an incompetent hooked up propane gas from a railway car to the water supply of a village in Arkansas. Or so report David Holt and Bill Mooney in 'The Exploding Toilet: Modern Urban Legends' (2004). And Snopes.com, the most respected myth-investigating site on the Internet, reports that something like the Israeli story actually happened in England in August 2010 (though the offending critter was a spider). Evidently, sometimes life does imitate art!

Answer: Yes

Hura crepitans is an evergreen tree commonly known as the possumwood or sandbox tree. It grows in the tropics of the Americas. Explosive dehiscence, as it is known by botanists, is not unique to the possumwood, as it can be an effective way to disperse seeds in the absence of animals, but this species has an unusually powerful explosion, hurling seeds up to 300 ft (100m) with such a bang that some people call it the Dynamite Tree. Yet the possumwood has a further defense: spines grow up and down the length of the tree's trunk, giving it the nickname "Monkey No-Climb" by natives.

The sap from the tree is caustic and made a potent poison for pre-Columbian Caribs' arrow-tips. Moreover, in the 21st century the tree has crossed the Atlantic ocean to become an invasive species in Tanzania, Africa.

This is one dangerous tree!

Answer: No

Urban legends about mobile phones and gasoline (petrol) fumes have plagued the world since 1999, when the "South China Morning Post" reported that a phone rang as an Australian man was filling up his car and... POOF!

But it never happened. Then stories about similar incidents in the USA circulated through users' e-mails, but both the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) denied these reports. While fires at gas stations are often initially blamed on cellphone use, later investigations generally don't support the connection. Furthermore, batteries on mobile phones deliver far less current than car batteries, so which is the greater danger? Nonetheless, many gas stations in the USA have warning signs advising that phones be powered off before pumping gas.

Answer: A Russian chessplayer's head spontaneously combusted

In the 1990s, supposedly during a championship tournament in Moscow, chessplayer Nikolai Titov's head exploded. According to the urban legend, he suffered from Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis (HCE). To be clear, there is no syndrome, and the cranial combustion never happened! Snopes.com reports that in 1994 this story, which spread like wildfire, first hit the pages of the 'Weekly World News', a supermarket tabloid that published pretty much anything but the truth between 1979 and 2007. 'WWN' had frequent reports of sightings of Elvis, bat-boys, extra-terrestrials, etc.

There is, however, a legitimate disorder called Exploding Head Syndrome, in which the sufferer perceives loud noises (crash, bang, boom) when trying to fall asleep or upon wakening. There is no pain (nor explosion) but great emotional distress and confusion, according to the American Sleep Association.

So yes, a Dell laptop did explode at a conference in Japan (it was photographed) when its lithium-ion batteries overheated. In fact Dell had to recall four million laptops in 2006 for that very reason! And Lake Nyosa did erupt a cloud of volcanic carbon dioxide that killed a great deal of human and animal life before the winds dissipated it. And an evaporated-milk processing plant in Visalia, California experienced a dust explosion in 2008, when the powder in the air became ignited, oxygenated quickly, and became a spectacular detonation that demolished the very building.

Answer: False

For decades this myth had been widely accepted in the USA, and in some places the practice is banned. In 2002, University of Kentucky biology professor Jim Krupa asked 600 students whether it was safe to throw rice at weddings, and why. Forty-five percent said "no", for "it would kill the birds."

As a lesson on the scientific method, Prof. Krupa had his pupils test the belief. They performed experiments on the expansion and gas release of assorted varieties of rice, the strength of avian digestive organs, and the diets of several wild bird species. The study, published in 2005 in the 'The American Biology Teacher', a peer-reviewed journal, found that the only kernels that ~might~ pose a risk were instant rice.

The students then challenged Prof. Krupa to feed his own birds instant rice. Krupa, convinced the risk was negligible, fed his 60 pigeons and doves nothing but instant rice and water for 12 hours -- while he monitored them, just in case. Well, the birds were just fine! Nobody died or even threw up. In fact, Krupa reported, "They loved it, and now they're kind of addicted to it."

Still and all, anyone who traverses the steps of a church haphazardly scattered with little grains is in danger of taking a nasty fall. Better to forego the rice-throwing, if not for the birds, than for the people! And the cleanup is a pain, which may be the real reason for such a ban.

Answer: Yes, it gives time for the CO2 to return to solution.

Cecil, the columnist at The Straight Dope website and newspaper feature, conducted an investigation into the question of can-tapping. At first, Cecil pooh-poohed the idea. "What, pray tell, is this supposed to accomplish?" he mocked. "Are we going to noodge [sic] the tiny bubbles to the surface faster, after the manner of herding cows? Are we going to maybe dislodge a few bubbles that have stuck to the sides of the can?"

He then consulted physicist Jearl Walker, who had written in the 1990s about the physics of beverage carbonation in "Scientific American". Walker was equally contemptuous of the tapping notion.

Additional reader input led to further experimentation, which revealed, however, that the issue was in fact time. Cecil concluded, "what tapping chiefly does is kill time, an issue to which I perhaps gave inadequate attention in my original column."

Answer: No

This is a really popular urban legend, but it is entirely untrue. According to May Berenbaum, former head of the Entomology Department at the University of Illinois, human muscles cannot create enough pressure to keep the stinger under your skin until the mosquito's abdomen bursts. The legend may have started in a 1912 animated cartoon by Winsor McKay, which depicted a (male) mosquito who fed off a sleeping man until he took one sip too many and burst. (The film was also wrong in that only females bite.) Or McKay may have been illustrating an urban legend that had already long existed.

Curiously, this factoid appears in even respectable publications, such as the August 1997 issue of 'Discover' magazine. Even Cecil of 'The Straight Dope' at first mistakenly accepted in 1997 the veracity of this legend before retracting it in 2000.