The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage into the World of the Weird

by Dan Schreiber

For someone who has had 400 years to get something right, you’d think that at least one prediction would have come true. But none have. Even when he was alive he failed to see what was just around the corner. One edition of Nostradamus’s Prophecies, published in 1558, carried a dedication to King Henry II, wishing him a happy life. Henry died the following year. Interestingly, there’s a theory that Nostradamus didn’t believe his own predictions, and that he was just compiling existing predictions from multiple sources, one of which was the wizard Merlin from Arthurian legend. Yet in spite of a jaw-droppingly low hit rate, our fascination with him has never waned. Whenever disasters occur, Nostradamus’s name is once again invoked. For example, following the events of 9/11 many bookshops reported a surge in orders for his Prophesies.

Jacqueline was a unique astrologer; she didn’t read palms but rather butt cheeks. ‘Rumpology’, a word she coined, is, according to her own website, ‘The art of reading the lines, crevices, dimples, and folds of the buttocks to divine the individual’s character and gain an understanding of what has occurred in the past and get a prediction of the future.’

The way rumpology works is that both butt cheeks perform different roles: the left cheek lets you look into your past, while the right cheek affords a peek at your future.

Looking into the lives of others via asstrology wasn’t the only way in which Jackie predicted the future. She could also see into the future via her psychic dogs. According to Jackie, her two Dobermans were able to tell future events by channelling them from the spirit realm and then telepathically beaming the messages to her. To be fair to her, they did pretty well. Her predictions, via her dogs, were consistently correct about who would be voted in as president (the dogs predicted, for example, that George W. Bush would win the 2000 election by just a few hundred votes in Florida).

One theory had it that his foot would go up in flames. As Buzz wrote, ‘A modern scientist stated his theory that the lunar soil, roasted by the heat of the sun and the frigidity of space, was in such chemical imbalance that man’s footsteps might trigger a monstrous fire.’ Another worrying prediction was that the moon was so heavily covered in dust that it might swallow him up immediately.This was clearly on Armstrong’s mind as he stood on the lunar module ladder, as Armstrong actually did a practice jump on the ladder to see if the lander would be thrust deep into the dusty surface. It wasn’t.

Buzz, meanwhile, was clearly relieved by the results of the ‘experiment’, since when he made it to the bottom of the ladder, he immediately relaxed and, in front of the watching billions on TV, took a piss. ‘Neil might have been the first man to step on the moon,’ he wrote, ‘but I was the first to pee in his pants on the moon.’* The Guinness Book of World Records subsequently acknowledged this accomplishment.

For many years there was a joke, presented as fact, that when Armstrong stood on the moon and uttered his iconic ‘one small step’ line, he followed it up with the words, ‘Good luck, Mr Gorsky.’ This story has been repeated many times, and even found its way into pop culture, most notably appearing in the opening sequence of the Watchmen film.The story goes that when he was a kid, Armstrong was playing baseball with his brother in their backyard when their ball landed just outside the bedroom window of their neighbours, the Gorskys. As Armstrong snuck over to pick up the base-ball, he overheard Mrs Gorsky yell, ‘Oral sex? You want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!’

Many remarked that perhaps superstition was to blame for Apollo 13’s bad luck. It was Apollo 13, after all. Not only that, lift-off was at 13.13 p.m. Houston time. And one of its crew, Jack Swigert, was the 13th astronaut in the Apollo programme. It was Swigert who clicked the switch that led to the explosion on board. Swigert flicked the switch two days after launch, on 13 April.

what would life be like without all the ‘weirdos’ in it? Would Attenborough have ever become such a great conservationist if it weren’t for Grey Owl? Would Ringo Starr have ever become the great drummer he is, had his exorcist granny not turned him temporarily right-handed? And would Jane Goodall have ever found her calling, if not for the eccentric decisions of Louis Leakey? I could go on, but all you need to do is flick through the previous 300 or so pages of this book to remind yourself of more.

you can’t always take the good without the bad – you can’t have the Theory of Everything without the Theory of Everything Else.

put yourself in the wrong place at the right time, and magical things can happen. And you don’t have to go far to find the evidence; this book is full of people who found themselves in the wrong place at the right time.

Hulagu Khan (brother of Kublai) and his Mongol army had invaded Baghdad, and among the many places they ransacked was the House of Wisdom, a library known to be the intellectual centre of the Arab world. The Mongols stripped the library of all of its books, tossing thousands and thousands of them into the waters of the Tigris. There was said to have been so many books thrown in that they eventually stacked up all the way from the bed of the Tigris to its surface, allowing men on horses to ride across them from one side to the other. Then, slowly, the ink of 500 years of accumulated knowledge, theories, stories, remedies, histories, jokes, culture, recipes, everything slowly smudged into nothingness on the pages that held them, and mixed into the river to colour the water.