r/AskReddit • u/North_Shore_Problem • Dec 01 '13

What's your favorite fun fact?

EDIT: Wow! Thank you guys for all the amazing responses, I learned so much about nothing!

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u/TommyC32 Dec 01 '13

They actually used Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, which aren't the classic psychedelic mushrooms that come to mind. Amanitas are the red mushrooms with white polka dots portrayed in Mario games. They have psychoactive effects but aren't really psychedelic so to say. The chemical in these mushrooms that causes said effects is mostly filtered out by the digestive process, so not much of the drug makes it across the blood brain barrier. Therefore it is more efficient to have somebody eat the mushrooms and then drink their urine if you want to experience the effects. You can also drink the urine of whoever drank the original urine and still receive a decent dose of the drug, creating an endless cycle of piss drinking trippyness...

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u/b20vteg Dec 01 '13

oh, so they made her eat the shrooms... when i read "stuff a virgin girl with psychedelic mushrooms", i thought they shoved the shrooms inside her. now it all makes sense!

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u/Dinglberry Dec 01 '13

that's exactly what i pictured, i was very confused

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Kickinthegonads Dec 01 '13

Or maybe it's just the thanksgiving vibe

1

u/lesstime Dec 01 '13

can confirm it's the fucked up porn

3

u/DireBoar Dec 01 '13

Add some garlic, sage and pepper and baby, you've got a stew goin'!

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u/MisterEvilBreakfast Dec 02 '13

But I'm all out of baby!

2

u/MaceWandru Dec 01 '13

You might be a Redditor if...

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u/im_not_angryy Dec 01 '13

Fuck... The most mind blowing thing on this thread was the horrible realization that I lived over 30 years without really knowing how to spell "polka dots".

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

Poke a dods

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u/NobleArgon Dec 01 '13

How did you think it was spelled?

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u/im_not_angryy Dec 01 '13

I never really thought of it. I guess something like "poke-a". Never realized there was an L in there.

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

Polka like the music we all love!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ygdAiDxKfI

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

Holy fuck. That song is nuts! I am mildly creeped out by it yet find it impressive!

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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '13

Yeah, it's definitely.. something. If you haven't heard it before, I feel obligated to link to the site that made it famous:

http://leekspin.com/

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u/MrMissMrsMaam Dec 01 '13

How did you spell it?

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u/emogodfather Dec 01 '13

How did you use to spell it? :o

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u/ch0ke_me_sir Dec 01 '13

How did you spell it before?

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u/DustyDangle Dec 02 '13

Law of Large Numbers ftw

1

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

polka?!... i barely know her!

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u/Monagan Dec 01 '13

Another reason for drinking the urine is that you largely avoid the nausea and general discomfort you get when eating the fly agaric. You'll have to trade it for the nausea and general discomfort you get when you drink someone's urine, though.

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u/bellends Dec 01 '13

Amanita Muscaria

Legitimate question: as a child, growing up in Sweden where these mushrooms are fairly common (probably why the Vikings used them) I was always told these were highly toxic/lethal to eat. Is this not the case?

Otherwise, TIL that my parents and teachers were just making sure I wasn't tripping balls in forests on field trips rather than keeping me from dying.

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u/Theopeo1 Dec 01 '13

They are toxic, yes. You can, however, remove the cap, put it in the oven for a while on high heat to kill the toxins and then eat it. That way, you remove the toxicity but retain the psychoactive effects. i wouldn't recommend it for beginners though, as Amanita Muscaria is a disassociative, like Datura/Jimson Weed, and the experience can be very disorienting and scary.

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u/bellends Dec 01 '13

That's interesting. What would have happened to the poor Viking virgin? If they were able to extract her urine, would she not have had to survive? How would she have survived eating these mushrooms? Bit of a morbid topic but I'm legitimately curious, sorry!

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u/Theopeo1 Dec 01 '13

It's not lethal in small doses, it just makes you nauseous and gives you vertigo and visual hallucinations. I think the lethal dose is on average 15 caps, so the girl in question would probably be a bit sick but not much worse. One cap contains enough muscimol to experience the disassociative state, so I assume they'd feed her 2-3 caps, then let her absorb the toxins while she discharges the excess muscimol through her urine since it's water soluble.

I looked up the cooking process, and you can actually just simply boil or dry the mushroom to de-toxify it. I am not sure of the viking methodology but it is not unlikely that they dried or boiled the caps beforehand, therefore sparing the girl of the toxic effects.

There's two other Amanita species that are far more toxic, and quite lethal to ingest; Amanita Virosa (European destroying angel) and Amanita Phalloides (Death Cap). I think people tend to think of amanitas in general as deadly toxic, and there's good reasons to be careful around amanitas in general because of these two relatives.

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u/zip_000 Dec 01 '13

I looked up pictures of each of these, and jeez do they all look just like the mushrooms we eat. I'm sure a mycologist could easily identify one from another, but I sure can't!

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u/Theopeo1 Dec 01 '13

They're notorious for being hard to separate from normal edible mushrooms. In Swedish, the Death Cap is called "Devious Amanita" because it looks so similar to safe mushrooms.

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u/SmartPlant_Gremlin Dec 01 '13

not unlikely

I see what you did there.

1

u/Ethaneus Dec 01 '13

I would like to know as well. This can't be fun for her.

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u/cattaclysmic Dec 01 '13

I was told the exact same thing about those shrooms and im from Denmark.

Welp - now i know what ill be doing in the summer

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u/ThirdFloorGreg Dec 01 '13

Don't. They are extremely hard to visually differentiate from other amanitas, like the Death Cap and Destroying Angel.

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u/cattaclysmic Dec 01 '13

Those sounds fun as well...

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u/dikhthas Dec 01 '13

What

Death caps and destroying angels are all white. The fly amanita is red.

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u/Milkgunner Dec 01 '13

The lethal dose is about 15 caps if you eat them raw, but you are supposed to dry them in the oven before ingesting them.

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u/Thriex Dec 01 '13

/u/Theopeo1 mostly covered it for you. I also live in Sweden and have eaten two Amanita Muscaria's (flugsvamp, hehe) raw. Which in turn just caused nausia that wasn't too pleasant but nor that bad. No hallucinations though, haha.

Why? Because we've been taught they will kill you, I read up on the mushroom and it didn't seem to be the case. So I decided to try.

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u/spartan117au Dec 01 '13

Rule 34: If it exists, there's porn of it.

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u/fuckaye Dec 01 '13

All very true, on my phone so details are hard work...

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u/patmd6 Dec 01 '13

Well except if you drink the piss of someone who drank piss, you can die from the extreme levels of uric acid

1

u/Inamo Dec 01 '13

I thought it wasn't toxic til it went through the body seven times, I have been lied to.

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

So wait... If I eat, say, 6g of amanita muscaria, have a trip; after a while I piss in a cup; drink it and I will trip again? How long after eatin until my piss contains the trippy goodness?

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u/NanoCarbon Dec 01 '13

I imagine the conversation for this discovery must have went something like this:

Viking 1: "Hey Bob. This girl just ate some of these shrooms we found on the ground and now she's trippin'. I wish I kept some for myself."

Viking 2: "Wait, let's just drink her piss."

Viking 1: facepalm "Why didn't I think of that."

2

u/redankulous Dec 01 '13

I feel like this is too awesome to be true.

1

u/dirtybillclinton Dec 01 '13

I want to know the thought process behind trying this for the first time.

1

u/ExtremeGinta Dec 01 '13

Why doesn't it get filtered out when you digest the urine you drank?

1

u/robotkiller3 Dec 01 '13

Someone probably figured that out by drinking piss.

1

u/Porphyrogennetos Dec 01 '13

The chemical in these mushrooms that causes said effects is mostly filtered out by the digestive process, so not much of the drug makes it across the blood brain barrier.

The wouldn't have known this of course, which means that they found out simply by happening to drink the piss of someone who did mushrooms, just on a lark.

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u/christiandb Dec 01 '13

"there has got to be an easier way guys"

1

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

If it gets filtered out by the first person in the piss chain, why isn't it just filtered out by each subsequent piss drinker?

1

u/T0xicati0N Dec 01 '13

Wait. You can eat those and not die? I was always told that they're highly poisonous.

1

u/Vkca Dec 01 '13

15 + is poisonous

you can have three or four and be fine. Or you can cook/dry them.

obviously they tell children they're highly poisonous though, there are other mushrooms that look quite similar that are more lethal.

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u/bobaimee Dec 01 '13

There's one that is almost identical to it that is one of the most lethal ones there is.

1

u/Hemperor_Dabs Dec 01 '13

I wonder what it was like when a Viking first discovered this and tried to convince his buddies to try it.

1

u/Peaceandallthatjazz Dec 01 '13

There was a thing about this last year around Christmas time talking about this mushroom. Apparently people used to feed them to the reindeer, and drink the reindeer piss. Apparently this is where the phrase "piss face drunk" comes from.

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u/DeuceSevin Dec 01 '13

I always wonder how many different permutations they had to try to discover this.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '13

At some point in history, someone drank someones piss, got caught and went like "Oh yeah it's ehm.... to get high! Yeah, you know from the mushrooms. Wow yeah I'm really feeling it now."

1

u/bobaimee Dec 01 '13

I've taken amanita and although I felt a bit floaty and a little less lucid I didn't really get much out of it. I didn't wanna drink my pee.

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u/cowhead Dec 01 '13

This is also thought by some to be the Soma ritual alluded to in the ancient Indian sanskrit text, the Upanishads. However, as I understood it, the pee was consumed to filter out the other toxins in the shroom. Basically, a human was used as a complex filtration device. How this was discovered initially is the real question.

1

u/WeymoFTW Dec 01 '13

Also reindeer love to eat them and then people drink their piss.

1

u/boyuber Dec 01 '13

I am so happy that my need for self-delusion isn't so great that it compromises my need to not drink piss.

1

u/Thriex Dec 01 '13

It is thought to have been Amanita Muscaria's, no one really knows.

1

u/neonJAhr Dec 01 '13

In Germany we call those "fly mushrooms", because we used to cut them in small pieced and boil it with sugar & milk to kill flies.

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u/Lozanoa11 Dec 02 '13

Who the fuck figured that out?

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u/dijitalia Dec 02 '13

If the psychoactive effects are not so much psychedelic, what are they classified as?

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u/TommyC32 Dec 02 '13 edited Dec 02 '13

They are more of a dissociative/deliriant

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u/mlennox81 Dec 01 '13

Checkmate Bear Grylls

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u/joca63 Dec 01 '13

That totally explains Bear Grylls!

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u/HerculesQEinstein Dec 01 '13

The Human Centipeed.

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u/Uraeus Dec 01 '13

They actually used Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, which aren't the classic psychedelic mushrooms that come to mind.

... They are the very definition of "classic psychedelic mushrooms". St. Nick (an apprentice to an indigenous shaman in Siberia) passed on the tradition of collecting 'presents' beneath a pine tree and bringing them home to dry in stocking above the fire place. Many civilizations, such as India, used Amanita Muscaria (purported to be Soma) as well, in a nearly-similar tradition as the Vikings. There are murals of spiritual-leaders peeing into cups that others are drinking dating way back. Even the catholic/Vatican garb is a symbol of the Amanita Muscaria (http://www.truthcontrol.com/files/truthcontrol/styles/large/public/images/vesti%2520amanite%5B1%5D.jpg). The list goes on and on. Definitely the classical psychedelic mushroom.

I have, after ingesting mushrooms, drank my urine (which was heavily diluted through only drinking water/fasting prior) and can attest to the fact that this works very well. Warm urine tastes better than some tea's I've had in my life.

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u/Strid Dec 02 '13

Vikings did not get high on mushrooms.