Here’s how it works: We’ll tell you an actual news story and leave out one important piece of information—and you have to guess what it is. And we’ll give you one million guesses, because you’ll need at least that many to get it. Good luck!
STORY: 27-year-old Jens Wilhelms of Frankfurt, Germany, was climbing the stairs to his top-floor apartment one night in April 2008 when he noticed that the door to an elevator was open. The elevator had been broken for some time, and he peered in through the door to see if it was finally being worked on. Then he slipped—and fell 25 feet to the floor of the shaft. But he wasn’t injured, because he landed on something. What?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: He fell on a woman who had fallen down the same shaft a day earlier. The unidentified 57-year-old woman was unconscious and bleeding internally, and Wilhelms managed to climb out of the shaft and call emergency services. And although he made her injuries worse by falling on her, police said she was lucky—because she almost certainly would have died if Wilhelms had not landed on her and then gotten help.
STORY: A woman pulled into a Winona, Minnesota, auto repair shop in August 2009 with a broken fan belt. The mechanic told her it would take an hour to fix, and the woman let him in on a secret: She had something special in her trunk. What was it?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Did you guess “a live goat that had been painted purple and gold, the colors of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, with the number 4, the number of new Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, shaved into each of its sides”? Then you were right. She told the mechanic that she planned to butcher it later. The mechanic called animal control, and police arrived shortly afterward to arrest the woman on animal-cruelty charges. The goat was saved and was eventually given a new home on a Wisconsin farm. Its new owners named it Brett.
Experts say: The best badminton shuttlecocks are made of the feathers from a goose’s left wing.
STORY: In April 2009, Artyom Sidorenko, 28, of Izhevsk, Russia, started coughing up blood and having seizures. He was admitted to a hospital, where doctors told him that he had a cancerous tumor in his lung and would need surgery to remove it. He was operated on—and doctors discovered that the growth in his lung wasn’t a tumor. What was it?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Hopefully one of your guesses was “A piece of a fir tree.” Dr. Vladimir Kamashev opened Sidorenko’s chest and, he said later, was about to remove most of the lung but decided to analyze the growth first. He cut into it and found what looked like a needle from a pine tree. “At first I thought that I was seeing an illusion,” he said. “I asked my assistant to check it out, and he confirmed it. There was a fir tree in his lung.” They removed the approximately two-inch-long piece—complete with several needles—and were able to save Sidorenko’s lung. Even stranger, the doctors actually believe that it was a tiny tree growing in his lung. Kamashev said that Sidorenko must have inhaled a fir tree seed or bud, and that it had somehow germinated and started growing. Botanists said that that’s not possible because trees, like all plants, need light to grow. Sidorenko, they say, must have somehow inhaled the tiny branch as it was. (The question is: Wouldn’t he have noticed that?)
STORY: In September 2009, Tatiata Kozhevnikova, a 42-year-old housewife and fitness enthusiast from the Russian city of Novosibirsk, made it into Guinness World Records. What was her world record?
ONE MILLION GUESSES LATER: Kozhevnikova set the record for having “the world’s strongest vagina muscles.” Fifteen years after she had children, she explained to reporters, she developed an exercise for what she called her “intimate muscles.” It involved a specially designed device that she clamps down on with—well, you get the idea. The other end of the device is attached to a set of weights. Her record lift: 14 kilograms (just over 30 pounds).
If you’ve got a few more million guesses in you, we’ve got some more quiz questions on page 313.
Why sue? Only 3% of all legal cases in the U.S. ever make it to the courtroom.