There're Always Exceptions Trivia Quiz

Answer: sleep

Thai Ngoc has suffered from chronic insomnia since 1973, and his not sleeping once in all of these decades is a medical marvel and mystery. He has resorted to using contemporary medication, folk remedies, and alcohol, but nothing helps. Doctors cannot explain his situation and cannot find any connection between the fever he claims he suffered and his insomnia.

In fact, they cannot find anything whatsoever the matter with him except for a slight decrease in liver function and an occasional grumpy mood. Meanwhile, Thai continues to work on his farm taking care of his pigs and chickens, and in his sixties he was still able to carry two 50kg bags of fertilizer down 2km of road to his home on a daily basis. Sometimes at night, he has used his sleepless time to do other tasks, like the three months he spent building ponds for his fish farm.

Answer: Baghat's twin brother

Dr. Ajay Mehta of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai expected to find an exceptionally large tumor in Baghat's abdomen that had begun to press against his diaphragm so that he could not breathe. Instead, he received the surprise of his life. When he cut into Baghat, a great deal of fluid came out, followed by limbs, hands and feet with long nails, genitalia, jaws, and more. Essentially, an entire mutated human being, a twin brother, had been growing inside Baghat's abdomen. Baghat had suffered a rare condtion referred to as fetus in fetu, a phenomenon that occurs when one twin's body becomes trapped within the other twin's body while the two are growing inside their mother's womb. Usually, this results in the death of both twins as one becomes like a parasite draining the other's blood supply.

However, in even rarer cases, the host twin survives and is born with the parasitic twin inside of him or her. The body of the parasitic twin then continues to live after having created an umbilical connection with the body of the host twin. Baghat experienced a quick recovery following the surgery and almost immediately felt much better.

However, he claims he is still ridiculed in his community as the man who gave birth.

Answer: hiding on the island of Guam from Allied WWII forces

Shoichi Yokoi worked as an apprentice to a tailor when he was drafted by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1941. He was then stationed as a sergeant on the island of Guam in 1943. When American forces conquered the island in 1944, he and ten other soldiers went into hiding. Seven of these men eventually left, and the other three, including Yokoi, remained behind but lived separate from one another.

They visited frequently until the other two died during a flood, and then Yokoi lived alone for eight years, surviving by living in a cave by day, hunting at night, and making clothes and bedding out of native plants from the jungle. Though he had found pamphlets dropped on the island to inform everyone that the war had ended, he refused to believe them, thinking that they were part of a trick by American forces.

In 1972, he was discovered by two inhabitants of the island who were checking their shrimp traps. Yokoi thought they were enemy forces and attacked them; however, they quickly subdued him instead.

In Japan, he became a media sensation and later a television celebrity and an advocate of living a simple life. He died in 1997 of a heart attack at the age of 82.

Answer: a European airport terminal

Mehran Karimi Nasseri is an Iranian political refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in the Charles de Gaulle Airport from August 1988 to July 2006. He existed as a unique individual, trapped by the laws that legally gave him the right to be in the airport but made it illegal for him to be anywhere else as he had no country.

His life story became the inspiration behind the Steven Spielberg film "The Terminal", which starred Tom Hanks. The movie, of course, has little to do with Nasseri's story, other than the concept of a stateless individual trapped in an airport. Nasseri's real story goes like this.

After participating in protests against the Shah of Iran, Nasseri was expelled from Iran in 1977, or so he claims, and he was eventually granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Belgium.

In 1988, wishing to live in the United Kingdom, he flew from France to Heathrow Airport, but because he had no indentification on him (he claimed he had been mugged), UK officials returned him to Charles de Gaulle airport, where he remained until July 2006 when he became ill and had to be hospitalized for about six months. During all of the time he spent in the airport terminal, various human rights lawyers attempted to prove that he had refugee status, mostly with little success; eventually Belgium granted him the right to live there, but he refused because he wanted to live in the United Kingdom.

As of 2008, Nasseri was living in a Paris shelter.

Answer: Jesus Christ

Matayoshi Mitsuo believes or claims that he is the Savior of mankind--Jesus Christ, the human embodiment of God. His goal is to become Prime Minister of Japan and then, hoping that his accomplisments gain the world's attention, become General Secretary of the United Nations. From such a position, he believes he will then be able to administer the Final Judgment on all of mankind and condemn to hell all people found to be unworthy.

In 1997, he created the World Economic Community Party in Japan, a political party that revolves around the premise that Matayoshi is indeed God.

He has been running in all kinds of elections since 1997, but he may be running out of time since he turned 70 in 2014. Some of Matayoshi's other goals are to return Japan to a more agricultural economy and to remove all individuals from Japan who are not ethnically Japanese (he believes abandoning one's homeland to be a sin).

Answer: dead

Lal Bihari had to fight the government for eighteen years--from 1976 to 1994--to prove that he was truly alive. Apparently, a relative of his had bribed a government official to declare Bihari legally dead so that this relative could claim Bihari's property. During this time, Bihari attempted many stunts to draw attention to his predicament; for example, he hosted his own funeral and demanded widow's compensation for his wife.

More importantly, however, Bihari created Mritak Sangh, or the Association of the Dead, to bring recognition and justice to at least 100 other individuals who found themselves in Bihari's situation.

Many of them had reason to believe they were about to be murdered by those who had already had them declared officially deceased. Mritak Sangh is still in existence and has over 20,000 members.

The suspicion is that there are tens of thousands more living in India who have not joined! Lal Bihari has also attempted to run for Parliament.

Answer: reptilian humanoids

David Icke adamantly insists that the world has been ruled since ancient times by a society of people he refers to as "The Elite". According to Icke, at some point in the past, the planet was settled by reptilian humanoids who mated with a few human beings, and these offspring have mostly interbred among themselves since then.

At different points in time, various sects of this society have gone by different names, such as the Babylonian Brotherhood and the Illuminati. Their current descendents include such individuals as George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Bob Hope, and Kris Kristopherson.

In 1990, Icke felt drawn to visit a psychic, and afterwards he was convinced that he was the "Son of the Godhead", an individual destined to save humankind and born with the ability to receive messages from the spirit world.

At one point, he wore only turquoise clothing because he believed this color to be most conducive to the reception of these spiritual messages. He has written and published many books explaining his ideas and theories, and has prophesied the end of the world on different occasions; once, he forewarned that the United Kingdom would be destroyed by earthquakes and tidal waves.

He continues to deliver lectures, each one often lasting for several hours, and thousands of people actually attend them.

Answer: Pope, or Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church

David Allen Bawden refers to himself as Pope Michael, and as such, he refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any of the Popes of the Roman Catholic Church since Pius XII, who died in 1958. His rejection of these Popes is a result of his belief that they are heretics and too modernist in their beliefs.

In other words, he believes that they embraced a more liberal approach to the practice of Church doctrine after embracing the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and secularism. Bawden belongs to a rare group of individuals who refer to themselves as conclavists; these individuals, naming themselves after the official gathering of Cardinals to elect a new Pope, believe that members of the Church reserve the right to elect a Pope if they have sufficient reason to believe any current Pope is not truly the Pope. Of course, one has to wonder if the authority of six people is enough to elect the true Pope, particularly when one of those individuals is voting for himself and two of the others are his mother and father.

Interestingly, in 1975 Bawden and his family joined the Society of St. Pius X, an organization the Roman Catholic Church refuses to recognize as having any canonical authority. Bawden attended this Society's seminaries until he was expelled in 1978.

Answer: photographing and retrospectively analyzing each meal

Dr. Nakamats plans to live to be over 140 years old, and he believes diet is the key to longevity; therefor he has devoted a great deal of attention and time to analyzing each and every meal that he consumes. This includes a continuing record consisting of photographs of everything he has eaten for over forty years.

As of March 2014, he was 85 years old. So far, so good. Among his inventions are the "pyonpyon" jumping shoes with springs on the soles, a toilet seat lifter, a wig that can be used in self-defense to bludgeon an attacker, and a condom with a magnet in it to improve sensitivity. To improve his creative thinking processes, so he claims, he dives underwater to deprive his brain of oxygen momentarily and he has built a toilet room of gold in which he sits to think.

Answer: glass, rubber, various metals, you name it

Lotito was famous for having eaten disassembled televisions, chandeliers, beds, shopping carts, bicycyles, and even a Cessna 150 aircraft (the last item taking him nearly two years to finish eating. Although most of the materials he ingested would injure most people's digestive systems and were made of parts that were often poisonous, Lotito claimed never to suffer any ill effects from anything he ate or passed from his body. Oddly, he possessed digestive organs that were thicker than those of most human beings, and he secreted a more potent stomach acid.

Despite this strange anatomy, he aided the digestive process by drinking large quantities of mineral oil and water. Lotito discovered his extraordinary ability when he was sixteen years old, and he died of natural causes in 2007 at the age of 57.