PROTEST HAIR
Two Saskatchewan ranchers were upset when the United States banned Canadian cattle imports after the mad cow scare in 2003. Early in 2004, Jay Fitzpatrick and Miles Anderson decided to show their displeasure by refusing to cut their hair until the ban was lifted. They expected it to last only a few months, but a year later the ban was still on. The protest attracted national attention and caused some unforeseen problems: “I squeal like a little girl pulling that comb through my hair,” Fitzpatrick said. When the ban was rescinded in July 2005, the two men finally got haircuts. And they turned the barber visit into a charity event: dozens of locals turned up to watch their long locks get clipped—and raised more than $3,000 for the local curling rink.
FARM HAIR
In January 2005, Dr. Margaret Gruber, an agricultural researcher for the Canadian government, announced a new project: growing hairy canola plants. She hoped that they would help control flea beetles, which now cause an estimated $150 million in damage to Canadian canola crops annually. The beetles, she said, “don’t like hair to get in their way.” Canola naturally has small hairs, but the researchers are going to spend the next three years making them even hairier.
90% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border.
VIOLENT HAIR
In 2004 a 26-year-old Winnipeg man got his hair cut and dyed in a salon in a local mall. He didn’t like it. He returned the following day and demanded his money back. The store offered to recolor his hair, and the man accepted—but he didn’t like it that time, either. “There was nothing you could do to make him happy,” the colorist told the Winnipeg Sun. “First it was too ashy. Then it was too gold, then it wasn’t gold enough.” The man then threatened the salon employee, and security guards were called. Suddenly, a witness said, “It became like professional wrestling.” The man punched one of the guards in the face and kicked another, then proceeded to trash the store. Police finally subdued the man and charged him with assault, saying it was the city’s first known case of “hair rage.”
BODY HAIR
Every February people from all over Canada—and many from around the world—flock to the annual Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous in Whitehorse. The festival celebrates the rugged lifestyle of the people in the far, frozen north. One of the most popular events at the festival is the “Women’s Hairy Leg Contest.” Contestants compete in three different leg-hair categories: the densest hair, the longest hair, and the most horrific hair. The winners are chosen by a local barber. Their prize: each receives a gold-plated razor.
HILL HAIR
People who visit the town of Hairy Hill, Alberta, often ask how the town got its name. The answer can be found in the University of Alberta’s Folklore and History Collection (in a document entitled “How Hairy Hill Got Its Name”): When the first settlers arrived in the late 1800s, they were puzzled by one aspect of the place they’d chosen as the site of their new homes. “Everywhere they looked they saw large mats of hair covering the ground.” They didn’t figure it out until the next spring, when they saw hundreds of buffalo “roaming lazily along the slopes of the hill.” It turned out that the hill was a regular spring feeding ground for the bison—and every spring they shed their heavy winter coats. And that is how Hairy Hill got its name.
In a microwave, water molecules vibrate at the rate of 5 billion times per second.
FIRST-CLASS MAIL
Way back in the 20th century, people used to correspond through the real mail—using real paper and everything. Here are some hilarious old letters we recently found.
To: A. J. Child and Son, Mail Order House
123 Washington Ave,
St. Louis, Missouri
Gentlemen:
Your advertisement states that you can furnish everything. My need is simple. I would ask you to rush by express one corpse. Make it as fresh as possible.
Respectfully yours,
Dr. J. Dollison
And the response…
Dr. J.Dollison
Eugene, Oregon
Dear Dr. Dollison,
There are a number of our customers that we would like to annihilate and deliver to you in the form you have requested. Also, we have a useless employee that we have time and again asked to pick up papers under the elevator. If we are successful shall advise you further. In the mean time cannot fill your order for a corpse.
A. J. Child and Son
Mail Order House
During WWII, Disney created over 1,000 military insignias for the armed services.
Dr. J. J. Newman
New Orleans, La.
Sir:
I am on to you and your kind. Yesterday my children had some dental work done on their teeth by you. Then you gave them some candy to eat. Candy makes more cavities as everyone knows. First you fill their cavities, then you fill my children full of candy to make more cavities to make more work for yourself. This could go on infinitely if I did not discover your scheme. I will not pay you for either the work done on James and Mary, nor for the candy you gave them.
Not as ever,
Mrs. A. Kern
P.S. I am going to tell the whole neighborhood.
From a Chinese clerk applying for a post in England…
Dear Sir,
I am Wang. It is for my personal benefit that I write for a position in your honourable house. I have a flexible brain. My education was impressed upon me in the Peking University. I can frive a type-writer with good noise and myh English is great. My references are of good and should you hope to see me they eill be read by you with great pleasure.
My last job has left itself from me for the good reason that the large man is dead.
It was on account of no fault of mine.
So honorable sirs what about it? It I can be of big use to you I Will arrive on some date that you should guess.
Yours faithfully,
WANG
In England, drunk driving became illegal in 1872.
Marshall Field Co.
State Street
Chicago, Ill.
Gentlemen:
Where do you get that stuff about “the customer is always right”? I think you are all wrong. Now if I am right about you being wrong, then the customer is not always right.
I am a customer of your store so (Let me quote from the classics) ib so facto, I am right by your own admission. Then if I am right, you are wrong, and if I am wrong, you are liars.
Go sit on a tack.
Yours truly,
B.Boone
Copy to:
My Attorney
Mme. Ara Hats
88 E. 57th Street
New York, New York
Dear Mme:
I wear the front of my hat backwards because the front part back makes the back front more becominger. Is it a mistake?
Julia P.
The world’s first known vending machine dispensed holy water. (Egypt, A.D. 100)
“I KNOW SOMEONE WHO LOOKS JUST LIKE YOU”
Uncle John has news for you: you may have a twin brother or sister that you know nothing about. Sound crazy? It sounded crazy to these folks, too…but it was true.
JENNY FINDS MARGARET
Jenny Mitchell, 57, of Windsor, England, had always known she was adopted, but she knew nothing of her birth mother. In 1997 she decided to see what she could find out, so she sent away for a copy of her birth certificate. She noticed that the time of birth—4:00 p.m.—was written down next to the date of birth.
In some countries it’s common for the hospital to note the time of birth, but as Mitchell learned, in Great Britain they only note the time of birth when they need to distinguish between one multiple birth and another. “It took a while for the penny to drop,” she told England’s Sunday Mirror. “And then my head started reeling. I couldn’t believe it. I was a twin!”
In Great Britain adoption records are kept secret, so when Mitchell started looking for her sister she got nowhere…until she hired a detective who was an expert
at tracking down long-lost relatives. He found Mitchell’s sister, Margaret Williams, living in Cardiff, Wales. Williams was stunned. Her first inkling that she had an identical twin was when the detective called her one morning in 1998. “I asked him to break the news to Margaret,” Mitchell says. “I was frightened she might not want to know me. But when we got talking it was as if we’d talked all our lives.”
BRENT AND GEORGE FIND EACH OTHER
In 1971 Laura Cain, a 20-year-old college sophomore, became pregnant by her boyfriend, Randy Holmes, and nine months later gave birth to fraternal twins. The stress of caring for twins was difficult for them, so they placed the babies in foster care while they put their lives in order. A few months later they got married, and went to the foster care agency and got their twin sons, George and Marcus, back. Or at least that’s what they thought, for 20 years, until September, 1991, when a kid named Brent Tremblay happened to enroll at Carleton University in Ottawa. One afternoon Brent was sitting in a student lounge when a girl walked up to him and said, “Hi, George!” When Brent told her his name wasn’t George, she gave him a funny look and walked off. A few days later it happened again; but this time the girl went and got her friend George—George Holmes—to show him the guy who looked like him. “It was like looking into a mirror,” George says. “It was incredible.”
The chemical process that turns bread into toast is called the Maillard reaction.
George and Brent looked alike, shared many of the same interests, and even had similar mannerisms. Their friends insisted that they had to be identical twins, but how could they be? Brent was adopted, and George lived with his biological parents. And he already had a twin brother—Marcus. Still, the resemblance was so uncanny that even they began to wonder.
In August 1993, all three boys and Laura Cain had their DNA tested. The results confirmed that George and Brent are, indeed, identical twins, and that Laura Cain is their birth mother. (Laura is certain the doctor who delivered them told her they were fraternal twins, which is why she wasn’t troubled by the fact that George and Marcus didn’t look alike.)
So who is Marcus really? An investigation revealed that Brent and George were placed in the same foster home with a third newborn—Marcus—who’d been born to a different mother five days earlier. When Laura and Randy went to get their twins back, the foster home accidentally gave them the wrong kid. Marcus went home with George; Brent was left behind at the foster home and was later put up for adoption. How could such a mixup happen? Ottawa’s Children’s Aid Society looked into the matter, but after 20 years they were unable to come up with anything. By then the woman who ran the foster home was in her 80s and suffering from Alzheimer’s. They’ll never know how it happened.
LINDA FINDS IAN
Linda Sloan knew she was adopted: she lived in a children’s home until she was adopted by a family in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. But that’s all she knew—and probably would have been all she’d ever know, had she not bumped into one of her adoptive mother’s relatives while vacationing in Spain in 1997. That relative put her in touch with another family member who had worked in the children’s home where Linda spent her early years. And that family member remembered that Linda had a twin brother.
Sleep on this: Mattresses, pillows, and bedding cause 500,000 accidents in the U.S. each year.
Linda spent the next two years searching for her brother, and came up with nothing. Finally in 1999, she contacted the “Helpline” column of her local newspaper, the Scottish Daily Record, and asked for their assistance. After two years of searching on her own, how long did it take the paper to find her brother? Two days. Then the telephone rang and “a voice asked if I was the L. Sloan in the Daily Record,” Linda recounted. “I said I was, and he said, ‘Well, I’m your brother.’”
The caller—Ian McLuckie—filled Linda in on their life story. He’d been raised by their birth mother, who had given birth to twins following a wartime affair with an American G.I. Two kids turned out to be too much for the single mom, so she put Linda up for adoption and kept Ian. She never gave Ian even a hint that he had a twin sister out there somewhere. “I can’t get my head round the fact that after 54 years, I have a sister,” Ian says. “It has all been so amazing.”
WENDY FINDS JOHN
When she was a kid growing up in the town of Cheltenham, England, Wendy Brooks, 62, had no idea that she was adopted, let alone a twin. Then, when she was about 10 years old, her cousin blurted it out during an argument. She immediately confronted her adopted mother, Annie Finch, who admitted the truth and told Wendy how she’d been adopted. Ten years earlier, Finch explained, she had caught a woman abandoning a twin boy and girl on her doorstep. Finch could only afford to take one child, and she wanted a girl, so she took Wendy. The birth mother left with her son, and Finch never learned what happened to them.
Wendy married an American when she was 15 and moved to Oklahoma two years later. She thought about her brother all the time, but it wasn’t until she was in her mid-50s that she became obsessed with tracking him down. The search dragged on for six long years. Finally, in 2001 she tracked down John Bennett, a poultry farmer living in Suffolk, England, and told him she was his twin. Bennett, who had been raised in an orphanage, knew nothing of his birth mother and was relieved to finally know something about his past. “I haven’t come off the ceiling since it started,” he told England’s Guardian newspaper. “I didn’t know I had a twin, though I always had a feeling that something was out there.”
Coca-Cola was forced out of India in 1977 for refusing to disclose their secret formula.
THE ROSEENS FIND BRYANNA
In 2001 Randy and Jane Roseen were in the process of adopting an orphaned baby girl from the People’s Republic of China. They sent a care package to the foster home, and with it they included a small disposable camera. When Randy flew to China to get the girl, whom they named Cyanna, the camera was included with her belongings from the foster home.
When the Roseens had the film in the camera developed, a few photos showed Cyanna lying in her crib with another baby that looked just like her. The babies weren’t officially listed as twins in the foster home’s records because they’d been found separately—Cyanna had been abandoned at a hospital, and the other baby had been found on the doorstep of a government building. But they looked so much alike that the foster home assumed they were twins and put them together in the same crib. Had they been officially recognized as twins, Chinese adoption policy would have required that the two girls be adopted together. But they weren’t, so they were split up.
The Roseens decided to adopt the second child. Officials at China’s Center of Adoption Affairs were skeptical that the babies were really twins, but when they saw the photographs the resemblance was so striking that they ordered DNA tests. The tests confirmed that the girls were a genetic match. And not a moment too soon: the other girl was about to be adopted by another family. Months of paperwork and red tape followed, but by April 2002 everything was in order and the second baby, whom they named Bryanna, was delivered into their arms. “It’s like a thousand miracles,” Randy says. “Every time something went wrong, someone would step in.”
* * *
“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
In 1965 a U.S. Navy bomber accidentally dropped a “practice” bomb on a store in Florida.
BAD GRANNY
Why, Grandma, what big teeth you’ve got!
GRANNY’S GOT A GUN
“A bored granny has been given a suspended prison sentence after staging a fake bank robbery as a practical joke. The 80-year-old, identified only as ‘Elfriede,’ threatened a cashier at a bank in Austria with a toy pistol and hissed, ‘This is a stickup.’ Then she started to laugh. ‘My heart stopped for a second,’ the terrified bank employee said later. ‘But when she started laughing, I realized that it was just a joke.’
“When the pensioner told the co
urt that she’d done it ‘for a laugh,’ the judge warned her that she wouldn’t be let off so lightly if she does it again within the next three years.
“Elfriede replied, ‘If I live that long. But thanks.’”
—Ananova
BLACK MARKET BABA
“Russian police have arrested a gun-smuggling granny who kept mobsters supplied with everything from artillery to assault rifles.
“The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said Tuesday that ‘Baba Nina’ (Grandma Nina) and her eight-person gang had been bringing in weapons from the Baltics for more than a year. The report described the woman as a Robin Hoodish figure who supported a large number of relatives and a handicapped son while she and her husband lived in a modest apartment with only a black-and-white TV. But it added that the pensioner ran her gang with ‘an iron hand’ and knew most of the mobsters in the region.
“Disguising herself as one of the millions of ‘shuttle traders’—small-time entrepreneurs who buy goods cheap abroad, then sell them at a profit back home—Baba Nina flew to Lithuania twice a month, returning with black-market weapons hidden in her bags among cheap T-shirts and trousers. On the telephone, she spoke in code to gang members, calling machine guns ‘big trousers’ and handguns ‘small trousers.’ The newspaper said she is now in jail, but has settled in nicely. ‘Other prisoners pay her respect.’”
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 40