Urban Myths: Should you beware of flesh-eating underwear?

Women have been known to remove their clothes in a hurry after hearing a persistent rumour about the dangers of newly bought underwear. According to a warning that has circulated via e-mail and internet message boards for several years, it is extremely dangerous to put brand-new bras and knickers on straight away, because they can harbour vicious flesh-eating bacteria. The messages, which often come with ghastly photographs of afflicted women, stress that freshly bought undies should be thoroughly washed before they are worn. The warnings seem to carry a racist subtext about imported goods: as one worried woman with an interesting take on grammar puts it, ‘We tend to forget that the clothes we buy have been who knows where and who touched them.’ At no point do the messages explain why the evil bugs choose to lurk only in ‘smalls’ and not in skirts, blouses, stockings or other garments. This is because the whole idea of flesh-eating underwear is a hoax. The anonymous prankster behind it may derive excitement from the idea of people stripping in a panic, or from the sight of frilly items rotating in a washing machine.

Unsung Hero: The slave girl who gave the world a wake-up call

Mary Prince was born to enslaved parents in Bermuda in 1788, and was soon torn from her family to be sold to a succession of cruel owners in the Caribbean. She was made to work until she dropped, forced to sleep in stalls like cattle, and flogged or beaten for the tiniest offences. In 1828, her 40th year, she was brought by her latest owners to England, where missionaries in east London helped her to escape. After finding a safe home with an anti-slavery campaigner, she arranged to have her explosive life story published. Slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1833 — around the time that history lost track of Mary Prince. It is possible that she lived the rest of her life on Antigua with her husband, who was also a liberated slave.

Under Cover: The kung-fu legend resurrected by Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino’s two-part samurai revenge movie Kill Bill was originally going to star Warren Beatty as Bill, head of an assassination squad and the quarry of a vengeful Uma Thurman. But when the actor and director fell out over the project, Beatty suggested hiring the man Tarantino had based Bill on in the first place: David Carradine (below). Famous for playing a fighting Shaolin monk in the 1970s TV series Kung Fu (bottom right), Carradine had made scores of schlocky action films and cowboy movies that were right up Tarantino’s street. Carradine was 65 and well past his heyday when he went to China for the Kill Bill shoot, and he later admitted he had wanted to work with Tarantino since they had met six years earlier: “I figured he could be my salvation. He did it for Travolta, and I’m much more his style.” In his everyday life, Carradine affected a hybrid Oriental-cowboy style of dress, and the Kill Bill wardrobe staff used whole rails of the actor’s own clothing for research. He later said that Bill was very similar to him, sharing “my literacy and my hipness and my modernity” — though he stressed that he didn’t really “go around killing people with samurai swords”. While Bill is boss of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, Carradine played in a real band called the Cosmic Rescue Team. Bill’s code name is “Snake Charmer”, and Carradine starred in two films with “Serpent” in their titles: The Serpent’s Egg (1977) and The Winged Serpent (1982). Carradine was born under the Chinese sign of the rat ­— and Bill insists that the squad doesn’t sneak into Thurman’s bedroom and kill her in the night “like a filthy rat”. Bill succumbs to the “five-point palm exploding heart technique”, and the man who played him also had an unusual demise. Carradine was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room in June, aged 72, with police suspicions focusing on the possibility of suffocation during an auto-erotic act.

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