"My mother was pregnant with me and as she approached her due date, the doctor said to come to the hospital on x day at x time," she writes. Emma's mum asked if she could check intothe hospital a couple of hours early - she wanted to be settled in so she could watch Friends. The doctors humorously agreed. When her due date arrived her mum checked into the hospital for her induction, a little earlier than expected. "She gets hooked up to the monitors ... the 'swish swish' of my heartbeat can be heard in the background. The Friends theme-song played shortly after, all was right in the world.
"So no one told you life was gonna be this way" ... swish swish ... your job's a joke you're broke" ... swish swish ... "your love life's DOAAAAA" ... the swishing stops ... mother notices, nurse notices. The next two minutes were a blur ... Just like in the movies nurses and doctors flooded into the room ... an emergency C-Section takes place at the speed of light. I was pulled from the womb with all five fingers tightly wrapped around my umbilical cord. I cut my own circulation off, almost killing my unborn self. What a dork! Had my mother not asked to go into the hospital a few hours early to catch Friends, she would've been at home when my heart stopped beating. No doctors, no medical equipment. I would've died."
A good old-fashioned hoax: The Tasaday Tribe in 1971
A Philippine government minister named Manuel Elizalde claimed to have found a "small stone age tribe" living in complete isolation on the island of Mindanao. The tribe "spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves in the jungle, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion," the Guardian reports. The president at the time declared the island a reserve, banning anthropologists from visiting the site and studying the tribe further. In 1986, the president was forced out of office, and two journalists snuck into the land, only to find that the Tasaday tribe lived in houses, wore regular clothes, and had only temporarily adopted the primitive, stone-age lifestyle at the urging of Elizalde. (Source: sciencealert.com)
