It's not makeup or paint that makes Paul Karason's skin a deep purple color. The 57-year-old started making the transition from fair skin and freckles to what he looks like today 14 years ago.
"The change was so gradual that I didn't perceive it and for people around me, likewise," Karason said. "It was just so gradual that no one really noticed. It wasn't until a friend that I hadn't seen in several months came by my parents' place to see me and he asked me 'what did you do?'"
What Karason did was use a substance called colloidal silver, which is made by extracting silver from metal. It goes into water with an electrical current and then you drink it. Colloidal silver is billed as something that will cure just about everything that ails you and Karason swears by it.
Karason does not believe drinking the potion is what caused his discoloration. He believes it happened because he rubbed it on his face to treat a skin problem. A medical condition called Argyria has been linked to such discoloration since the days when silver solutions were used as antibiotics.
See a video about this story here: http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/12/mans-skin-turns-dark-blue.html
With so many superhero movies around, such as Spiderman or Hulk, we are used to see people with special abilities in fiction. But people with amazing abilities actually do exist in real life; here's a list of 10 of the most amazing of these people!
The Incredible Brain (Daniel Tammet)
Daniel Paul Tammet is a British high-functioning autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematical calculations, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy. Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synesthesia, but the detail and specificity of Tammet's mental imagery of numbers is unique. In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, that he can "see" results of calculations as landscapes, and that he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful. Tammet not only verbally describes these visions, but also creates artwork, particularly watercolor paintings, such as his painting of Pi.
Tammet holds the European record for memorising and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. He also speaks a variety of languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh and Esperanto. He particularly likes Estonian, because it is rich in vowels. Tammet is creating a new language called Mänti. Tammet is capable of learning new languages very quickly. To prove this for the Channel Five documentary, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic in one week. Seven days later he appeared on Icelandic television conversing in Icelandic, with his Icelandic language instructor saying it was "not human."
The Boy with Sonar Vision (Ben Underwood)
Ben Underwoodtaught is blind, both of his eyes were removed (cancer) when he was 3. Yet, he plays basketball, rides on a bicycle, and lives a quite normal life. He taught himself to use echo location to navigate around the world. With no guide-dogs, he doesn't even need hands: he uses sound. Ben makes a short click sound that bounces back from objects. Amazingly, his ears pick up the ecos to let him know where the objects are. He's the only person in the world who sees using nothing but eco location, like a sonar or a dolphin.
The Rubberboy (Daniel Browning Smith)
Five time Guiness Record holder, The Rubberboy is the most flexible man alive and the most famous contortionist. He has been in many professional basketball or baseball games and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ESPN's Sports Center, Oprah Winfrey, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Cirque du Soleil, Best Damn Sports Show Period, The Discovery Channel, Men in Black 2, HBO's Carnivale, and CSI: NY and American got a talent. He dislocates his arms to crawl through an unstrung tennis racquet. He performs contortion handstands and unique acrobatics.
Mister Eat-it-All (Michel Lotito)
Michel Lotito (born 1950) is a French entertainer, famous as the consumer of undigestables, and is known as Monsieur Mangetout (Mister Eat-it-all). Lotito's performances are the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and so on in items such as bicycles, televisions, a Cessna 150, and smaller items which are disassembled, cut-up and swallowed. The aircraft took roughly two years to be 'eaten' from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material while a child and has been performing publicly since 1966. Lotito does not often suffer from ill-effects due to his diet, even after the consumption of materials usually considered poisonous. When performing he consumes around a kilogram of material daily, preceding it with mineral oil and drinking considerable quantities of water during the 'meal'. He apparently possesses a stomach and intestine with walls of twice the expected thickness, and his digestive acids are, allegedly, unusually powerful, allowing him to digest a certain portion of his metallic meals. Watch the Video at YouTube.
ed: This is a hoax. Sorry folks. Tried it on two canon calculators but no go.
You'll just have to pull out your Colecovision. This is the one I used to have. I was always disappointed that I couldn't watch a show while playing. That didn't seem like too much to ask.
The following is reprinted from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: World of Odd.
Here’s the story of how scientists unlocked the secrets of the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African nation of Cameroon… and what they’re doing to try and stop it from happening again.
THE DISCOVERY
On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, towards the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead rats, and further on, a dead dog and other dead animals. He wondered if they’d all been killed by a lightening lightning strike – when lightening lightning hits the ground it’s not unusual for animals nearby to be killed by the shock.
Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if anyone there knew what had happened to the animals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bodies strewn everywhere. He didn’t find a single person still alive—everyone in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicycle and ran all the way back to Wum.
SOMETHING BIG
Nyos village, where nearly 2,000 people were killed (Image Credit: Jack Lockwood)
By the time the man got back to the village, the first survivors of whatever it was that had struck Nyos and other nearby villages were already stumbling into Wum. Many told tales of hearing an explosion or rumbling noise in the distance, then smelling strange smells and passing out for as long as 36 hours before waking up to discover that everyone around them was dead.
Wum is in a remote part of Cameroon, so it took two days for a medical team to arrive in the area after local officials called the governor to report the strange occurrence. The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles around.
The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. Whatever it was that killed so many people seemed to have disappeared without a trace just as quickly as it had come.
NASA scientists revealed today that they had been unable to contact the Pathfinder lander and the Sojourner rover for a period of over seven hours last week. During that time, the computers that are responsible for maintaining contact with Pathfinder were apparently under the control of hackers who had broken into the site through a modem dialup connection ordinarily used for system maintenance. Pictures revealed by NASA today showed that the hackers had reprogrammed the Sojourner rover to scrawl graffiti on the rock known as "Yogi". The grafitti appears to resemble the logo of a nefarious criminal hacker site known as "DigiCrime". Authorities have been questioning the chief members of DigiCrime, who deny any involvement in the incident. DigiCrime representatives were unavailable for comment.
The Sojourner rover appears to have suffered no significant damage other than losing precious time. NASA officials believe that the graffiti was created by spraying a lubricant from one of the Sojourner's robotic arms. The lubricant container in that arm is now empty, but the rover can function normally with the lubricant from the other arm.
According to NASA spokesman Carl Harmon, NASA officials quickly noticed that the breakin had occurred, and eliminated the connection from the modem. Unfortunately, by the time they realized there was a problem, the hackers had left behind a modified version of the inetd program on one of the control machines that continued to feed commands to the lander. Each time that NASA scientists tried to regain control by sending commands to the lander, they were rejected because the authentication keys in the lander had been replaced. The problem was finally fixed by reinstalling the operating system on the main control computer, breaking the new keys in the lander, and reinstalling new keys known only to NASA.
"If we had been able to use strong cryptography, this would not have happened", said Harmon. "Unfortunately, the combination of US export controls and NASA's joint space program with Russia resulted in an engineering design decision to use 40 bit keys," continued Harmon. The hackers were apparently able to break these keys with ease, and it took NASA some time to break the replacement keys again and regain control.
Former astronaut and now Senator John Glenn (R-Ohio) called for an immediate investigation into the apparent inability of the US to secure their civilian information systems. "If this is what NASA could do with all of their millions, we should probably worry about smaller organizations like the Air Traffic Control System", said Glenn.
NASA officials appeared to be more embarrassed than upset, but are still keeping a tight lid on information surrounding the incident. It is rumored that NASA officials are frantically investigating whether the same problem could arise with the Space Shuttle program. Officials from the Russian space program observed that Russia does not have such controls on cryptography, and the MIR space station is unaffected by the weakness.
It's not makeup or paint that makes Paul Karason's skin a deep purple color. The 57-year-old started making the transition from fair skin and freckles to what he looks like today 14 years ago.
The Incredible Brain (Daniel Tammet)
The Boy with Sonar Vision (Ben Underwood)
The Rubberboy (Daniel Browning Smith)
Mister Eat-it-All (Michel Lotito)
On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, towards the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead 
