All this week, we at TopTenz will be celebrating the publication of 1,000 articles, with a series of articles centered around the number 1,000. Along with letting The Count from Sesame Street act out his ultimate wet dream, the 1000-themed week will showcase many great articles, this one most of all. Modesty is for weenies.
With that, I bring to you a look into the world of things that shouldn’t weigh 1,000 pounds, but very much do. No Oprah jokes allowed; it’s not 1993 anymore, and her fluctuating weight has long become an accepted part of everyday life, just like death, taxes, and blindly idiotic rage in Internet comment sections.
The same cannot be said, however, for:
10. Whale Testicles
Just in case you were wondering, for the next time you come across a whale and start feeling frisky. The right whale, one of the largest whales on Earth, has testicles that weigh roughly 1,000 pounds EACH. That’s the rub; combined, their balls are a little over a ton. This is important. If each one were a mere 500 pounds, then they would be easier to handle, provided handling whale balls is your thing.
But 1,000 EACH? You’d have to pump some major iron before dealing with those things, though the eatin’ would be fabulous if you can get a hold of them. Hey, why not? People eat other animal testicles, so why not a whale’s? They’re massive, likely meaty as Hell
9. A Butter Sculpture
Every year, millions of poor, unfortunate pieces of perfectly good toast are left unbuttered, and totally dry, unless you remembered to buy peanut butter, jam, jelly, hummus, mayonnaise, or barbeque sauce. But assume you forgot. Dry toast. And who do you have to blame? Those damned Pennsylvanians! Always up to no good!
Every year, the Pennsylvania Farm Show displays butter sculptures: literally gigantic blocks of butter, carved into any image imaginable. Or at least, the images considered acceptable by the kinds of people who would attend a butter show in Pennsylvania. Probably no nude carvings of Catwoman, is what I’m saying.
The winning sculpture will be turned into fuel by being combined with cow manure, which both creates fuel-generating methane and makes you never want to touch a stick of Land O’ Lakes ever again. So at least the locals do something with their wasted butter, instead of letting it melt and then creating a Slip-N-Slide out of the remains.
It’s either that or donate it; Norway is experiencing an unprecedented butter shortage, and would love to eat what Pennsylvania is using to make pretty pictures. What, you thought I was kidding earlier, when I grieved for dry toast everywhere? No way; I’m the Voice Of The Voiceless, provided the Voiceless is really hungry.
8. A Robot Wine Rack
Some have speculated what would result if the Internet was a real person. And yes, by “some,” I mean me and my goldfish. But it IS an entertaining idea; if the Internet was a physical being, what would it look like? Perhaps a giant (naked) Terminator, with guns a-blazing, loaded to the gills with 30+ full bottles of booze? Yeah, that sounds like the Internet in a nutshell, especially if it comes with a robotic My Little Pony, or perhaps a robot cat wearing something retarded on its head.
The creator of this half-ton monstrosity is selling it for a cool $7,000, though if it turns sentient, kills its master, and then chugs all the wine, Bender-style, expect the price to fall dramatically. Barring that possibility though, this is a fine addition to any home, one that will, according to the creator, “make you the talk of your wine club, home owners association, or Alcoholics Anonymous support group.” Yes, the 30-bottle robot of doom: perfect for when you want to immediately DISSOLVE your local AA chapter in a haze of demon alcohol. That’ll get ‘em talkin’.
7. Cars
The average car weighs roughly 4,000 pounds: moreso if you’re one of those annoying people who insist on adding three DVD players, six video game systems, a 40,000-decibel stereo system, and a luggage rack the size of Rhode Island. But the search is always on to make our vehicles lighter and greener. Enter the 1,000-pound cars. Right now, they’re still pipe dreams, single designs that may one day become mass-produced. But the possibility is very much there, with lighter materials forming the frame, and many models emphasizing compressed air engines, which literally run on hot air.
Other brainstorms include four tiny motors, one inside each wheel, versus one big-ass motor weighing down the front of the car. Which sounds great, until one of the tires go flat, and then what? Will you not only have to get the donut on, but fix an entire freaking motor at the same time? A lot of people still have trouble pumping our own gas, never mind having to deal with four separate tiny motors. Stick with the uber-light outside frames, car people. Easier for the typical fragile little head to deal with.
6. Queen Victoria’s Cheese Wheel
Cheese is awesome. There; probably the least controversial thing I’ve ever written, unless you’re lactose intolerant. In which case…oopsie-doodle?
Anyway, despite being little more than sour, curdled, solidified milk, cheese is a universally adored food. Nowhere was this more evident than in 1840, when Queen Victoria was presented with a 1,000-pound block of cheddar cheese for her wedding. Luckily for her, the other wedding guests weren’t nearly as creative, and gifted her and her new husband several dozen cheese graters on their big day. Some things never change.
To put that size into perspective (in case a half ton of cheese is some run-of-the-mill thing for you), the typical cheese wheel weighs anywhere from 45-50 pounds. Victoria’s cheese was, well, bigger. As in twenty times bigger. No word on whether she shared with anybody or not, as the above drawing indicates, or if there was an 8,000 pound rat nearby that could handle the leftovers. Actually, there’s very little detail in this story, aside from “we gave the Queen a crapload of cheese”. Documentation was sparse back then, leaving us to fill in the blanks. I choose to fill it with tales of royal constipation lasting for the rest of the year. Leave your interpretations in the comment section, in place of whatever blahblahblahyakyakpfft you were planning to write.
5. A Wild Boar
Remember prehistoric times? Of course you don’t, you weren’t around. The sex made to create you didn’t happen for hundreds of millions of years. So quit lying.
Let’s try that again. You know those bones and fossils that date back to prehistoric times? They paint a picture of a time when many animals were just HUGE. That tiny, adorable newt that you keep in an aquarium has an ancestor that was roughly 15 feet long. So when something comes along like a thousand-pound-plus wild boar, when boars typically weigh 100-200 pounds, you tend to wonder if evolution has reached its endgame, and is now replaying everything to unlock all the secrets it missed the first time through.
At least the guy who bagged this beast can use its gigantic head as one Hell of a medicine ball, or else a truly effective weapon against people he doesn’t like. Or he could just turn it into a boring ol’ trophy hanging like everyone else. One thing’s for certain though: that dude won’t have to buy any bacon, sausage, or ham for the next ten years. Unless Oprah comes by and eats it all.
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…alright fine, I lied. It was too easy though. Just staring me right in the face and daring me to make the most outdated reference in site history and I couldn’t resist and so I did it and oh God I’m so weak. Maybe a Triple Baconator or ten will help ease the pain.
4. A Bull Shark
The word “shark” gets such a bad rap. Even though most sharks stay away from humans, and even the aggressive ones only rarely attack, the word alone is enough to spread fear among beach-goers everywhere.
Especially when a thousand-pound shark gets discovered. Even MORE especially when said shark is typically under 300 pounds. It’s like the gigantic boar from earlier, only the boar is far less likely to rip you to shreds simply because you got too close and smell yummy. As I said earlier, most sharks don’t attacks human, but bull sharks do. In fact, they’re among the top three sharks most likely to go after an errant swimmer. And now they’re mutating.
Oh hey, would you like to have even more nightmares? This half-ton shark was captured, not in the middle of the Atlantic or anything, but off the coast of the Florida Keys, where waters are a mere 150 feet deep. In ocean terms, that’s nothing. In people terms, that’s just deep enough so we can’t see what’s below us, but not so deep that a gigantic potential man-eater can’t sniff the delicious bloody scent of that annoying paper-cut we got that just opened up again.
Anyone up for a swim?
3. An Ancient Lead Coffin
Thousand-pound coffins are no big deal today. But several millennia ago, in Ancient Rome? Very different story. Back then, a thousand pounds of any metal, much less the lead used in this burrito-looking thing, was an extremely expensive rarity. Also, Romans tended to not care very much about the whole coffin thing. More often than not, you were either cremated, buried in a bunch of dirt like you were a seedling, or chucked into a giant hole to rot (the latter reserved exclusively for the poorest of the poor. Jupiter was cool with it.)
The bottom line here: taking that amount of heavy, expensive lead, and using it to make an airtight home for dead people, seems counterproductive. And yet here we are, unearthing one and working fervently to decipher who’s inside. Most figure the body is likely that of an Emperor, or a major celebrity, or a really hot girl. Anything else is completely unfathomable.
2. The Flash
Back in the day, when comic book writers ran out of ideas, they would resort to gimmick stories: alternate realities, dream sequences taking up an entire issue, a deus ex machina time machine which would render the entire story moot, and giving the heroes wacky, yet always-temporary, physical disorders. The latter of which was handled no better than when they made The Flash morbidly obese.
A supervillian named Gorilla Grodd (a gorilla who can disguise himself as a human, because being small, weak, and hairless is AWESOME), invents a gun that causes its victim to absorb sky-high levels of moisture from the air, causing them to gain hundreds of pounds almost immediately. And so it goes that the fastest superhero alive is now 1,000 pounds, and barely able to waddle around. He should count his blessings: real thousand-pound people are all but immobile, and can’t even slowly waddle from here to there (that’s a teaser, kids).
What’s a half-ton superhero to do? Simple; sit in a room, surrounded by dehydrated potatoes. Most obese people, in this situation, would turn the entire room into a French fry orgy, and that would be that. Not Flash though; in his universe, sitting on top of a mountain of spuds causes all the water in his body to be absorbed into the potatoes, thereby reverting him back to his old self. Is THAT what dieters have been doing wrong? Now you know: simply rub potatoes all over yourself and watch the fat literally evaporate away. Potatoes: Nature’s…Sponge?
1. A Man
And now for what happens when actual people weigh 1,000 pounds. Hint: potatoes turn out to not be the answer.
Back in 2004, a man named Patrick Deuel was admitted to the hospital due to a weight issue. Namely, that he weighed 1,072 pounds and could no longer move. This weight was verified by a group called the League Of Human Dignity, who should have forfeited all rights to that name after weighing him on a livestock scale. Great, so now he’s a cow. At least if they took him to, say, a local car factory and weighed him there, he could brag to his friends about how he was literally Built Ford Tough.
Amazingly enough, Deuel (who has since lost over 700 pounds) was never the heaviest man in history. A man named Jon Brower Minnoch clocked in at 1397 pounds before dying in 1983. And if you happen to find that funny, please let us know so we can find the current world’s heaviest man, and send him to sit on you. Ha.
5 Comments
Oh God, the SMELL from that 1,000 lb guy! I’d rather deal with that cheese wheel under an August sun.
I did some more research on right whales, and it turns out that they have 9 foot long penises.
Now that is something you wouldn’t want to run into.
Puerility =/= comedy
I liked the list, but I have to point out that most cheeses are lactose- free, as the ripening process uses up almost all of the the lactose. If you prefer aged cheeses, then the amount of lactose is even smaller, close to none…
Well done, Jason. I needed a chuckle this morning!