Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  PSEUDOCIDAL TENDENCIES

  On page 75, we told the stories of some people who didn’t

  want to go on living their lives, but didn’t want to die—

  so they faked their own deaths. Here are some more.

  GRAHAM CARDWELL. In 1998 the belongings of 46-year-old Cardwell, an assistant dockmaster, were found on the mud flats near Immingham, England. Air and sea search teams did all they could to find him, but his wife and three children had to give him up for dead, assuming he’d drowned in the nearby Humber Estuary. But he hadn’t drowned—he had begun a new life 200 miles away in the West Midlands of England as a bachelor with a new name, new job, and new apartment. After his secret was found out, Cardwell claimed he took off because he was depressed, convinced he was dying of cancer, and didn’t want to distress his family. The police declined to prosecute, and his family declined to have anything more to do with him.

  ALLEN KIRK WOLFORD. In 2006 Wolford, a Colorado funeral director, tried to forge his own death certificate, hoping it would get him out of paying $42,000 in overdue child support and $7,000 in student loans. But before the certificate was officially registered at the state Department of Public Health, authorities pegged it as fake. Wolford’s first mistake: He listed the Evergreen Funeral Home, his workplace, as his home address—which looked odd to state officials. Second mistake: He listed the Nolan Funeral Home as the facility that cremated his body. When officials called to check with owner Neva Nolan, she said she’d never heard of him. Wolford was arrested and convicted of fraud, but he skipped out on his court date. He surfaced in New Zealand in 2007—applying for a job as a funeral director.

  KARL HACKETT. In 1987 Hackett, an Englishman, served a one-year prison sentence for assault. When he got out of prison, he assumed the name of a dead friend, Lee Simm, who had committed suicide. For more than a decade, the new “Lee Simm” lived a perfectly respectable life as a computer consultant with a (false) driver’s license and (false) passport to prove his (false) identity. Then, in 1999, came London’s infamous Paddington train crash, which killed 31 people and injured 520. It seemed to “Simm” that this was the ideal opportunity to kill off his real identity. On the day of the crash, he called the police to report his concern that his “lodger,” Karl Hackett, was missing and might have been on the train. A day later, the police got another call, this time from someone claiming to be Hackett’s brother, confirming that Hackett was on the train. Hackett’s father and sister got the news and attended a memorial service for the Paddington victims, assuming that Karl, whom they hadn’t seen in years, was among the dead. But suspicious police took one of Hackett’s relatives to “Simm’s” house…and the jig was up. In England it’s not illegal to disappear and adopt a new identity, but it is illegal to waste police time: The local magistrate gave Hackett/Simm a suspended sentence and urged him to get help for his “psychological problems.”

  JOHN DARWIN. On March 21, 2002, Darwin took his canoe out onto the calm North Sea, half a mile from his home on the east coast of England. Later, the smashed-up remains of the canoe washed onto shore, and the 57-year-old ex-teacher was presumed drowned. His wife, Anne, watched the massive search operations from the window of their five-story home and accepted the condolences of friends and family. “All I want is to bury my husband,” she said. After the inquest, a death certificate was issued and the life insurance money—a whopping £250,000 ($400,000)—was paid to the grieving widow. She also collected death benefits and a widow’s pension. The real story? Less than a year after his “death,” Darwin showed up at Anne’s door and quietly moved back into their home. They also owned the house next door, and for the next three years, whenever friends came calling he’d slip through the interior door that connected the two residences and hide until they left. In 2006 Anne sold the two houses for nearly £500,000, and she and John moved to Panama. But a few weeks later, John started complaining that he didn’t want to live in hiding for the rest of his life. On December 1, 2007, he walked into a London police station, looking tanned and healthy, and claimed he’d had amnesia for the past five years. Both Darwins were arrested for insurance fraud. (They didn’t even bother asking their friends for bail money.)

  DECENT PROPOSALS

  These three guys really went the extra mile for love.

  The Setup: Texan Kyle Sandoval told his girlfriend, Shannon McCarthy, that they were going to San Diego to see his brother and maybe visit the San Diego Natural History Museum. But Sandoval had more planned. He arranged with the museum to place an engagement ring inside one of the exhibits.

  The Proposal: As they browsed the museum’s rocks and gems exhibit, McCarthy noticed something unusual among the samples of calcite and gypsum: a diamond ring. Next to it was a small sign that read “Shannon’s diamond, on loan from the Sandoval collection.” (She said yes.)

  The Setup: Aaron Weisinger and Erica Breder had bonded over the fact that both had great-grandparents who’d come to America via the immigrant processing center at Ellis Island, New York, and the Statue of Liberty had deep personal meaning for both of them. So when the monument was scheduled to reopen for the first time after 9/11 on July 4, 2009, Weisinger entered a lottery for the 240 available tickets. He won, and he and Breder flew from their home in San Francisco to New York City.

  The Proposal: They climbed the 354 steps up the steep, spiral case to the statue’s crown. That’s where Weisinger got down on one knee and presented a ring. (She said yes.)

  The Setup: One of the biggest hit songs of 2009 was Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” advising men to marry their girlfriends before they lose them, or else “if you like it, then you should’ve put a ring on it.”

  The Proposal: During a show in Florida in June 2009, halfway through “Single Ladies,” the music stopped and the lights went out. A single spotlight came on. “Lindell has something he wants to say,” said Beyoncé, as she handed her microphone to a man in the front row. “Beyoncé told me if I like it, I need to put a ring on it,” Lindell said as he got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend. It’s unclear exactly how he contacted Beyoncé and got her to agree to pause her concert…but his girlfriend said yes.

  THE SOCIETY FOR THE COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS

  Since 1988, the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has stood up for those who

  like to sit down and read in the bathroom. In the spirit of camaraderie,

  we thought we’d showcase a few other societies of people who band

  together for a specific cause. Because if they didn’t, who would?

  Society for Barefoot Living. “We are a group of people who love going barefoot pretty much everywhere.” (They also love bolding certain words on their Web site.) Founded in 1994, the SBL’s mission is to remind the shoe-wearing public that it’s a lot healthier and more fun to let your soles touch the ground than to keep them covered up. They also dispel the myths about going bare-footed, such as the likelihood of catching athlete’s foot (it’s less than with shoes); that it’s illegal to walk into a restaurant without shoes (it isn’t); and that it’s gross to go into a public restroom in bare feet (“Urine is not a toxic waste product and this has been scientifically proven!”).

  National Coalition for the Advancement of Baton Twirling. Don’t think spinning around a metal stick is a sport? The NCABT says, “Try it.” Not only is baton twirling a sport, but a very difficult one to master, and therefore should get the respect it deserves. The NCABT, formed by a group of coaches, is lobbying the NCAA to make it an officially sanctioned college sport. Meanwhile, another organization, the U.S. Twirling Association, is working tirelessly to make baton twirling an Olympic event.

  Society for Creative Anachronism. If you don’t feel at all weird referring to your friends as “Milord” and “Milady,” then you may be stout-hearted enough to join the SCA. Formed in 1966 by a group of history buffs in Berkeley, California, members dress up as Medieval knights, damsels, royalty, and villains. The SCA ha
s 30,000 members all over the world, which they’ve broken up into 19 “kingdoms,” such as “Calontir” (the U.S. Midwest) and “Drachenwald” (Europe, Africa, the Middle East). SCA members hold local events and attend renaissance fairs, where they compete in tournaments of jousting, archery, and axe-throwing. After the last foe has been waylaid, they feast merrily and pay tribute to the guy who’s dressed up as the king.

  The Skeptics Society: Do you believe in ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, or ESP? Then this isn’t the organization for you. “Some people think we are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo, but this is not so,” says scientist Michael Shermer, who founded the Society in 1992. Its 55,000 members simply maintain that “seeing is believing.”

  And for the kids, they offer the Junior Skeptic Club. Their hero: Scooby-Doo. Why? Because at the end of every cartoon, the dog (and those meddling kids) prove that the ghost isn’t real.

  National Coalition for Men. Is today’s man still supposed to open a door for a woman? Is it okay for guys to talk about their feelings? What specifically is the role of the male in this increasingly complex society? The NCFM—born in 1977 at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement—aims to help “emotionally adrift” men. They hold workshops and conduct support groups in an effort to help guys gain their freedom from male stereotyping, conditioned competitiveness, fear of sharing their feelings, getting their sense of identity from their jobs, thinking that violence is manly, having distant emotional relationships with their children, and a host of other issues. (And it’s still okay to open the door for a woman.)

  The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Founded in 1957, this nonprofit organization consists of more than 1,000 educators, doctors, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and biologists who share theories and findings with each other. They operate under the assumption that science illuminates sexuality, and sexuality enhances the quality of our lives. The 2009 SSSS Annual Congress was held at a spa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

  MOMENTS OF CANDOR

  On page 26, we shared some shallow “Confessions” from stars. This page

  is kind of like that but…deeper. These celebrities really do open up.

  “The trouble with being me is that at this point, nobody gives a damn what my problem is. I could literally have a tumor on the side of my head and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, big deal. I’d eat a tumor every morning for the kind of money you’re pulling down.’”

  —Jim Carrey

  “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 60.”

  —Jack Nicholson

  “I have a lust for diamonds, almost like a disease.”

  —Elizabeth Taylor

  “I used to make appearances at cocktail parties in Florida, pretending that I was an old friend of the host.”

  —Mickey Rooney

  “I feel cheated never knowing what it’s like to get pregnant, carry a baby, and breast-feed.”

  —Dustin Hoffman

  “It’s pretty sad when a person has to lose weight to play Babe Ruth.”

  —John Goodman

  “Fame can be just so annoying because people are always so critical of you. You can’t just say, ‘Hi.’ You say hi and people whisper, ‘Man, did you see the way she said hi? What an attitude.’”

  —Juliette Lewis

  “I could be the poster boy for bad judgement.”

  —Rob Lowe

  “My biggest nightmare is I’m driving home and get sick and go to the hospital. ‘Please help me,’ I ask. And they say: ‘Hey, you look like…’ And I’m dying while they’re wondering whether or not I’m Barbra Streisand.”

  —Barbra Streisand

  “I had my first childhood depression at eight. It was severe, intense, hole-in-the-soul loneliness. No one noticed.”

  —Ashley Judd

  “Life is like a B-picture script! It is that corny. If I had my life story offered to me to film, I’d probably turn it down.”

  —Kirk Douglas

  (NOT) COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

  Here’s one of our regular features about movies that were

  planned, but never saw the light of day (so far).

  BATMAN: YEAR ONE (2003)

  Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are dark, gritty reimaginings of Batman’s origins, but they could have been even darker and grittier. In 2001 Warner Bros. executives’ first choice to create a new Batman series was writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler). Aronofsky’s script was a complete overhaul of Batman—Bruce Wayne was an orphaned, homeless teenager who uses an abandoned subway station as a “batcave,” installs a bus engine in an old Lincoln for his “batmobile,” and randomly and brutally murders street thugs. The idea of Batman as a mentally ill, violent, homeless psychopath was too much for Warner Bros. They let Aronofsky go and hired Nolan.

  AMERICAN IDIOT (2006)

  The popular ’90s band Green Day enjoyed a comeback in 2004 with American Idiot, a concept album about the coming-of-age of a weirdo named Jesus of Suburbia who lived in a boring, anonymous suburb. It sold 14 million copies and told a complete story, so the idea to turn it into a movie à la the Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall seemed like a no-brainer. The band talked to numerous directors and screenwriters throughout 2005 before lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong decided to write the script himself. Just a few months later, though, putting together a big-budget movie-musical proved to be too much work. So Armstrong adapted his script into a stage musical, and American Idiot: The Musical premiered at the Berkeley Rep, a major West Coast theater, in 2009.

  KING KONG VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1962)

  Willis O’Brien was an animation pioneer who made the stop-motion segments of the giant ape (and the dinosaurs) in the original King Kong (1933). In 1961, with the availability of color film, he set about making a sequel to Kong. His idea: Kong would fight a 20-foot-tall Frankenstein monster in downtown San Francisco. Almost immediately, O’Brien changed his idea because he thought securing the rights to Frankenstein from Universal Studios would be too difficult. (In reality, Universal owned only the rights to the look of the monster as characterized by Boris Karloff—green skin and neck bolts.) He changed the title to King Kong vs. Prometheus (a reference to Mary Shelley’s original novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus). But by then, producer John Beck, to whom O’Brien had shown his screenplay and concept art, had sold the idea to Toho Studios of Japan, who used it to make King Kong vs. Godzilla. O’Brien only found out about it when that film was released in 1962. He died just a few months later.

  STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER (1987)

  In 1985, shortly after he’d purchased the rights to dozens of Beatles songs, Michael Jackson licensed some of them to animation producer Don Bluth (The Secret of N.I.M.H.) for use in a new Beatles-based cartoon called Strawberry Fields Forever, to be done in the style of the 1967 animated film Yellow Submarine. It wasn’t going to be a sequel, though. It was going to be more like Fantasia: a series of vignettes, each based on and scored by a different Beatles song. Bluth planned to computer-animate the entire movie, which would have been a first. He hired a computer animator named Hank Grebe, who drew sketches and prepared 10 minutes of test footage in which he completely revamped the project as Beatles “characters” (Mean Mr. Mustard, the Walrus, Mr. Kite, etc.) in a 1940s gangster movie. Strawberry Fields died when none of the surviving Beatles would allow their (animated) images to be used in the film.

  OLD-TIMEY INSULTS YOU CAN USE

  dodunk • muttonhead • hunky • shuttle-wit • dumbsocks Boobus Americanus • clinchpoop • yuckel • droob • slangrill lorg • flapdoodle • gazook • jobbernoll • ning-nong • sonky zib • slubberdegullion • oofus • wooden spoon • peagoose

  THE 50TH STATE

  What does it take to become a state? Judging by Hawaii’s history, a lot.

  BACKGROUND

  With the Hawaiian
Islands united as a kingdom since 1810, King Kalakaua ascended to the throne in 1874. The following year, he signed the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. Hawaii won the right to sell sugar to the U.S. duty- and tax-free; the U.S. won the right to build the Pearl Harbor naval base on Oahu. Here’s the rest of Hawaii’s timeline to statehood.

  • 1887: The Honolulu Rifles, an armed militia of mostly American and European sugar-plantation owners, force King Kalakaua to sign the Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It strips the king of most of his power, turning Hawaii into a constitutional monarchy. Voting rights are restricted to males over 20 who own property and are not of Asian descent. This disenfranchises almost all natives.

  • 1891: Upon the death of Kalakaua, his sister Liliuokalani takes over the monarchy. Resentful that non-natives have taken over, she nullifies the Constitution. This angers the ruling whites, as does the McKinley Tariff, passed by Congress, which repeals the tax-free trade of sugar. The whites seek annexation to the U.S. to reacquire duty-free status.