The tourist who mistook Bangor for San Francisco
Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)
Wiki WormholeWe explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 5,664,405-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
What it’s about: The tourist who mistook Bangor, Maine for San Francisco, becoming a local folk hero in the process.
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Biggest controversy: No real controversy here, just a big misunderstanding. Erwin Kreuz was a 50-year-old German brewery worker who spoke no English and had only taken one flight in his life before he booked a trip to San Francisco in 1977. When the flight made a refueling stop in Bangor, a flight attendant whose shift was ending and wouldn’t continue on for the next leg of the flight, bid him to enjoy his stay in San Francisco. Kreuz took that to mean the plane had landed in the Golden City and got off the plane. He got into a taxi, asked the driver for “sleep,” and was taken to the Bangor House hotel, not realizing until the morning he was in the wrong pla
KINJATEN
Wozniak came into Atari after hours for four consecutive nights, after which the duo had created what would become a hit game. But Wozniak saw something bigger. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members would built simple computers. Having successfully designed the hardware for
Breakout, he set his sights on something bigger: a personal computer, one that wouldn’t just play games like the Atari 2600, but would be able to run Integer BASIC, the programming language Wozniak was also developing. The result was the Apple I, a limited-edition, hand-made home computer Wozniak and Jobs sold out of Jobs’ garage the year after collaborating on
Thing we were happiest to learn:
Mad Pooper V. Colorado never became a landmark first amendment case. Once the local news picked up on the story and the Mad Pooper’s fame grew, a video appeared on YouTube from a man purporting to be a family member of the Mad Pooper, who he identified as “Shirley.” He apologized on her behalf, saying she had suffered a traumatic brain injury. But he insisted that she was breaking no law (in fact, she was breaking several), and that public pooping was protected by the First Amendment and belonged in the same protected category as breastfeeding. The local news brought on a lawyer who “emphatically rejected that claim,” and a few days later the video was revealed to be a hoax the man claiming to be “Shirley”’s relative was in fact an established YouTuber “known for producing videos of flatulent pets,” and his pro-pooping manifesto was an attempt at satire.
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What it’s about: A contest where everyone was a winner… with tragic results. In 1992, Pepsi Philippines started printing numbers, 001-999, inside bottle caps, with numbers corresponding to prizes that were announced on TV nightly. It was a huge success at first… until a misprint put the million-peso ($40,000 USD) winning number on 800,000 bottles, resulting in rioting, lawsuits, and a massive debacle for Pepsi.
Biggest controversy: Those 800,000 winning bottle caps weren’t technically winners. Each contest bottle caps had a security code alongside the number for confirmation; the misprints had no code. But that mattered little to people who were convinced they had won. Panicked Pepsi executives held a 3 A.M. meeting and worked out a compromise, where the misprint bottle caps could be exchanged for a 500-peso ($18) consolation prize. Although 486,170 people accepted, it was a lose-lose for Pepsi. The payouts cost the company 240 million pesos ($8.9 million), on
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What it’s about: Fudge! For a long stretch of movie history, profanity was banned by the Hays Code, so it wasn’t until 1970 that
M A S H became the first (non-pornographic) American film to use the word “fuck.” Even then, the word was considered taboo and used sparingly. But here in the 21st century, we say whatever the fuck we want, and Wikipedia lists 138 movies that use the F-word 150 times or more (and tracks “fucks per minute,” ranging from .92 to ten times that amount (in fairness, that 9.2 score comes from
Fuck, a documentary about the word itself and its place in the culture).