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Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xv
The Five Most Horrifying Bugs in the World	p. 1
Three Colors you Don't Realize are Controlling Your Mind	p. 7
The Four Most Badass Presidents of All Time	p. 13
Five Famous Artists Who Didn't Create Their Signature Creation	p. 21
Six Terrifying Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth	p. 28
Five Fun Things That Will Kill You	p. 34
Five Movies Based on True Stories (That are Complete Bullshit)	p. 41
Oh the Places You'll Go (When You're Dead): Six Insane Things Science Might Do With Your Cadaver	p. 49
The Five Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught in History Class	p. 54
The Six Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You	p. 62
Five Stories About Jesus's Childhood They Had to Cut From the Bible (To Avoid an NC-17 Rating)	p. 71
The Six Most Terrifying Foods in the World	p. 79
Five Wacky Misunderstandings that Almost Caused a Nuclear Holocaust	p. 86
The Six Most Depressing Happy Endings in Movie History	p. 94
Five Famous Inventors Who Stole Their Big Idea	p. 102
The Five Most Frequently Quoted Bullshit Statistics	p. 109
The Four Most Insane Attempts to Turn Nature into a Weapon	p. 116
The Four Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High	p. 123
Four Mythological Beasts that Actually Exist	p. 131
Five Ways Your Brain is Messing With Your Head	p. 138
Five Fight Moves that Only Work in Movies	p. 146
Five Awesome Places to Have Sex (And the Horrific Consequences)	p. 151
Five Awesome Things you Didn't Know Could Make you Sick	p. 157
Four Things Your Mom Said Were Healthy that Can Kill You	p. 162
The Gruesome Origins of Five Popular Fairy Tales	p. 169
Five Horrifying Food Additives You've Probably Eaten Today	p. 176
Five Stories the Media Doesn't Want You to Know About	p. 183
Four Brainwashing Techniques They're Using on You Right Now	p. 191
Five Hollywood Adaptations that Totally Missed the Point	p. 197
The Ten Most Insane Medical Practices in History	p. 205
Four Great Women Buried by Their Boobs	p. 213
The Awful Truth Behind Five Items on Your Grocery List	p. 220
Five Classic Cartoon Characters with Traumatic Childhoods	p. 228
Five Conspiracies that Nearly Brought Down the U.S. Government	p. 236
Four Ticking Time Bombs in Nature More Terrifying (And Likely) Than the Ones in Disaster Movies	p. 243
Five Psychological Experiments that Prove Humanity is Doomed	p. 249
The Five Creepiest Urban Legends that Happen to be True	p. 258
Five Beloved U.S. Presidents the Modern Media Would Never Let Into the White House	p. 265
Third Reich to Fortune 500: Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us	p. 272
Five Scientific Reasons Why a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen	p. 280
Credits	p. 289
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Five Stories about Jesus’s Childhood They Had to Cut from the Bible(to Avoid an NC-17 Rating)

The Gospels that made it into the Bible pretty much skip from the birth of Jesus Christ to his adulthood, but there areotherdocuments that chronicle the adventures of Jesus Christ: Boy Wonder. They’re part of something called the New Testament Apocrypha, a series of books deemed unfit for inclusion due to concerns over the message they’d send or, in some cases, the number of faces they’d melt with their sheer awesomeness. Most of the stories are pretty normal fare—healing lepers and raising the dead—but some are so insane that we learn that the answer to, What would Jesus do? is whatever the hell he wants.

5. Jesus Christ: Dragonmaster

The New Testament didn’t just descend from the skies onto newsstands the morning after Jesus ascended to heaven. The twenty-seven books in modern Christian Bibles weren’t declared official until over three hundred years after Jesus walked the earth. By that time, thousands of sayings and stories about Jesus’s life had to be left on the cutting-room floor. Such was the case of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. The name comes from the fact that it’s basically an extended director’s cut of the Gospel of Matthew that made the Bible, covering most of the same territory save for one regrettably deleted scene.

Two years after Jesus was born, King Herod got word of a child being called the “king of the Jews” and ordered that all two-year- old male children in Bethlehem be killed to protect his throne (making Herod the first, and last, member of the controversial “kill all babies” political platform). But God managed to warn Joseph in time, and the family fled before Herod’s men arrived. You probably knew all that. What you may not have known is that on their way to Egypt, Jesus and his family stopped to rest in a cave, which, to their surprise, was populated by a herd of dragons (what do you call a group of dragons? A flock? A pride? A concert?) Actual scaly, fire- breathing, winged lizard-dragons.

And, lo, suddenly there came forth from the cave many dragons; and when the children saw them, they cried out in great terror. Then Jesus went down from the bosom of His mother, and stood on His feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired.
—The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, chapter 18

That’s right: The Bible could have included a passage detailing how Jesus Christ totally gave the cold shoulder to a dragon army. At first glance, this seems like a pretty baffling omission. Jesus Christ, dragon tamer, would have been pretty effective when converting metal heads and fourteen-year- old boys.

It makes a lot more sense if you believe that God was handling editorial duties. Jesus totally could have used his dragon-taming powers to sick an invincible hell-beast armada on Herod’s ass. That’s what the God from the Old Testament would have done. If our son squandered powers that awesome, and we were editing his biography, we’d probably skip that part too.

4. Jesus Takes Pools of Water Very Seriously

Written in the early second century, around the same time most scholars date the four Gospels in the Bible, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas picks up the story a few years after the dragon taming. Back in Nazareth now, five-year- old Jesus was playing beside a small brook with some other children, forming pools of water to make clay (because fun had yet to be invented). Jesus formed some sparrows out of the clay and, since he was not the figurine-collecting type, decided to give the sculptures life, and off they flew on his command. One of the children playing with Jesus saw this and, rather than thinking, “Holy shit! That kid can create life with a word, I should probably not walk up behind him and start splashing his pools with a stick,” instead walked up behind him and started splashing his pools with a stick. And Christ just goes apeshit:

“O evil, ungodly, and foolish one, what hurt did the pools and the waters do thee? Behold, now also thou shalt be withered like a tree, and shalt not bear leaves, neither root, nor fruit.” And straightway that lad withered up wholly.
—Infancy Gospel of Thomas, chapter 3, verses 2–3

And, like the Nazi archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the boy started aging rapidly and withered away. Sure, it would’ve been easier just to kill the kid, but this is Jesus Christ we’re talking about here. He’s not just gonna up and waste some kid.