Strike Twice

how much they protest or plead. Their spouses, children, and even their doctors refuse to accept that something is wrong. So this outspoken minority seeks others like them out. They scour social media and online forums for individuals who have been affected by similar phenomena. Individuals like forty six year old Shanna Turner in North Carolina. She'd been at a girls soccer game when it happened to her. Steve Marshburne was working at a bank when he was hit by

it in nineteen nine. It forced him to undergo almost fifty back surgeries over the course of his life, and it happened to Gary Reynolds three times. All three of these people, and over twenty others were part of a very exclusive group of lightning strike survivors. When the human body is hit by lightning, it's riddled with three hundred

million volts of electricity in an instant. We're not meant to endure that much power, and some victims die of cardiac arrest as a result, but many do survive, albeit with serious consequences. Their skin is burned, their bones are shattered, or their brains are fried. Shanna Turner suffered memory loss as a result of her brush with Zeus, while Steve Marshburn's back was broken when a bolt of lightning traveled through the speaker of his banks drive through window and

struck him. And occasionally, lightning survivors are also graced with scars on their bodies called Lichtenburg figures. They're often shaped like the branches of a tree growing along the back, arms, and chest. But as I mentioned before, not everyone walks away from a power surge like that. It happened in

October of n in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area had been a battleground for some time, with a civil war raging on between rebels and government forces, but amidst all the fighting, there was a brief glimmer of levity in the form of a soccer game. The home team, Benishati, were up against the visiting Basanga team with a thaieh score of one to one. The game was going fine when out of nowhere, a bolt of lightning hit the ground in a flash. Such an incident would have frightened

anyone close by. When everyone's eyes had adjusted and the smoke had cleared, the damage was evident. Thirty people who had been standing on the sidelines were hurt in the blast. They were taken to local hospitals to have their burns treated. The visiting team, though, was not affected at all. They walked away without injury, but the members of the Beneshatti team weren't so lucky. All eleven players, ranging in ages from twenty to thirty five years old, had died instantly.

Many believed that witchcraft was the cause of the strike. It wasn't uncommon for African teams to use witch doctors to curse their adversaries. And what's worse is that this isn't the only time such an event has occurred. Days earlier, as the Morocco Swallows took on the Jumo Cosmos, seven players and the referee were hit by a bolt on the field. Two of the Swallow players were seriously injured. Sadly,

Africa is no stranger to such acts of God. The continent is one of the biggest hot spots for lightning strikes in the entire world, with South Africa alone seen one deaths each year as a result, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Benishatti players were killed, can see as many as sixty flashes per square kilometer each year, and those flashes tend to land in indust real areas which are chock full of people just going about their daily lives. But not all hope is lost.

Many office buildings are built with protective measures in place to mitigate the effects of a lightning strike, and being struck is not a death sentence in and of itself. Only one in ten who are hit by lightning will die, as proven by the folks like Shanna Turner and Gary Reynolds. And being struck is still incredibly rare, even in a lightning prone place like Africa. But don't get your hopes

up too high. You still have a better chance of being struck by lightning twice than you ever do of winning the lottery, and only one of those things leaves you with a really cool scar. Ours is a culture of change. Language, in particular, shifts with every generation. A word like bully used to mean great or excellent, whereas today it has come to signify someone who picks on others. Meanwhile, scientific exploration and biological study have shed new light on

old perceptions over the years. For example, before we knew what germs were, doctors thought that disease was caused by poisonous air coming from the ground, and up until the mid nineteenth century, farmers and even scientists thought that putting a pair of dirty underwear in a bucket of grains would create mice. It was a concept known as spontaneous generation,

which suggested that non living objects could create life. But one person turned our preconceptions about the animal kingdom on their head back in nineteen forty and changed the course of the English language in the process. It all started, surprisingly with the Bible and one important figure. He was the son of Noah's grandson Cush, which made him know his great grandson. He was also a great hunter and a king who old over the land of Shinnar. Otherwise,

known as Mesopotamia. In the Book of Genesis, this king was seen as having rebelled against God after ordering the construction of the Tower of Babel. Remember, according to the Babel story, everyone in the world spoke the same language, and eventually they began building the tower, a massive structure that was meant to reach the sky. But God saw this going on and changed all of their speech to different languages. Unable to understand one another, the builders were

scattered to different places all over the globe. It was a story meant to explain, among many other things, why different languages were spoken in different countries, But it was also about the consequences of blind, unchecked pride, namely that of the great king and hunter Nimrod, which brings us

to the modern age. You see, some kids these days leave out a healthy snack for the Easter Bunny the night before he set to arrive, and when they wake up they might find that a piece of carrot was left behind, along with eggs and candy, proof that their good deed had not gone unnoticed. Of course, carrots and rabbits go hand in hand like peanut, butter and jelly, at least we think they do. But the fact is

that carrots hold very little nutritional value for rabbits. They don't normally eat them in the wild, So why do we think that they like them? And what does that have to do with the biblical hunter. Well, the answer might surprise you. It's all because of Bugs Bunny. When Bugs Bunny debuted in nineteen forty in an animated short called a Wild Hair, he popped up on screen chomping on a carrot. It was a blatant send off of Clark Gable's character in the nineteen thirty four film It

Happened One Night. In one scene from that film, Gable could be seen munching on a carrot while talking to his co star Claudette Colbert. Bugs mannerisms, including how he ate the carrots, were a direct reference to gables performance in that specific film, and the audiences of nineteen forty

knew it. But over time, those children, and then their children and even their children's children all grew up with Bugs Bunny cartoons, and that original Clark Gable connection faded away, leaving behind the image of a rabbit eating a carrot, and so pet owners and Easter celebrants grew up believing that rabbits eight carrots, a new cultural assumption that was

all bugs Bunny's fault. But one other thing happened during a wild hair that altered our culture and you could see it or maybe hear it, and how we use a certain word today. In that ninety animated short, Bugs Bunny refers to his nemesis Elmer Fudd as a nim rod, and to be honest, it did make a lot of sense. Fudd was, after all, dressed and outfitted as a hunter.

There was also a throwaway line, but the sarcasm turned the legendary name into a simple insult, and over time, calling someone a nimrod became a new way to suggest that they were bumbling, error prone buffoon. I think it's fair to say that car tunes can teach us a lot, like how to outsmart a coyote or how to evade being eaten by a cat, But they can also affect the way we see the world and alter the language we use in the process. Some folks say that cartoons

will rot a person's brain. The truth, though it's a lot more curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it

over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.