Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  TERM: Match

  MEANING: A small piece of wood or cardboard used to light a fire

  ORIGIN: From the Greek word myxa, which meant “lamp wick”—and also meant “mucus.” The idea was that an oily wick sticking out of a lamp’s spout or nozzle resembled snot dangling from someone’s nose. (Really.) Myxa became micca in Latin, then meiche in Old French, and finally the English match in the 1330s. The term wasn’t applied to what we think of as a match until 1831, a few years after its invention by English chemist John Walker. (And matches were also called “lucifers” for many years.)

  TERM: Greenhorn

  MEANING: Novice

  ORIGIN: It goes all the way back to England in the 1400s, when it referred to a young ox with immature, or “green,” horns. (The horns weren’t actually green; the reference was probably taken from unripe, or “green,” fruit.) Around 1650 greenhorn became a nickname for young, recently enlisted soldiers, and by the 1680s it was being used for novices in any field.

  TERM: March Madness

  MEANING: Nickname for the NCAA’s basketball championship tournament

  ORIGIN: In 1939 Henry V. Porter, an athletic administrator for the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), wrote an article entitled “March Madness” for the organization’s newsletter. It was about the enthusiasm of the fans of Illinois high-school basketball, which held its yearly championship tournament in the month of March. The phrase was associated solely with Illinois high-school basketball until 1982. That year CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who began his career as a sportswriter in Chicago and had undoubtedly heard the term before, used it to refer to the NCAA college tournament, which also takes place in March. It caught on, and in 1996 the IHSA sued the NCAA for using the phrase on their official merchandise. The NCAA won in court, but the two groups agreed to form the “March Madness Athletic Association,” giving the IHSA control of the name on the high-school level, while the NCAA owns it for college.

  TERM: Digs

  MEANING: Home, or rented rooms

  ORIGIN: “Digs” is a shortened version of “diggings,” first used by gold prospectors in the 1820s Georgia Gold Rush, the first gold rush in the United States. Prospectors would go into the wilderness, set up camp, and “dig” for gold, and the area around their mines and camps became known as “diggings.” By the 1830s, the term was being used in reference to the rooms in the boarding houses that sprang up near successful mines. “Diggings” spread around the English-speaking world as a nickname for any rented rooms. Decades later, in the 1890s, it first appeared in its shortened version, digs—in England. And even then, the word had the same casual, hip feel to it that it has today, as shown in this 1893 publication by English bicycle enthusiast John Augustus Lunt, writing about a tour of North Wales:Arrived Betws-y-coed [a village in Wales] 2.35pm. Grand little place down the hollow hemmed in with trees & woods. Dropped on splendid digs—Mrs Williams Pont-y-Pair House just by bridge over R Conway. Sitting room we had all to ourselves.

  “Digs” is most commonly used today in the expression “Nice digs!”

  DUMB CROOKS

  “In 2009 five people were arrested in Maine and charged with arson after police viewed a YouTube video they made describing their crime, complete with theme music and cast credits.”

  —News of the Weird

  PORTA-NEWS

  When outdoor portable toilets make headlines.

  TANGLED UP IN EWW!

  In summer 2008, Bob Dylan’s neighbors in Malibu, California, started complaining about the stench emanating from a porta potty located on the singer’s property. “It’s a scandal!” said David Emminger, whose house sits downwind of Dylan’s. “‘Mr. Civil Rights’ is killing our civil rights!” Emminger claims the fumes have sickened his family, forcing them to install high-powered fans in their yard in the hopes of blowing the stench back toward Dylan’s. Malibu officials are looking into the matter, and each side has hired lawyers. But as of summer 2009, the outhouse is still standing, and its aromas are still blowin’ in the wind.

  SHOW SOME RESPECT

  When presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared at a rally in Portland, Oregon, in May 2008, he unknowingly angered the entire police force. How? An Obama staffer set up a row of porta potties on top of a concrete memorial that honored fallen officers. “There was plenty of room elsewhere, so space wasn’t an issue,” said officer Thomas Brennan. “So someone used some really poor judgement. I mean, it’s hallowed ground!” (Flags were still being flown at half-mast from a service that had taken place earlier that week.) All that the police wanted, they said, was an apology to the families of the fallen officers, and perhaps an explanation. Both eventually came from Obama’s staff. The explanation: The spot was chosen because of a “safety issue for wheelchair access.”

  NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE

  In 2008, in a shopping mall parking lot in Tampa, Florida, a man witnessed someone breaking into his pickup truck. So he and a friend chased the burglar, Lorenzo Earl Knight, into a nearby construction site. Knight ducked into a porta potty, hoping that his pursuers hadn’t seen him. They had. And they tipped over the toilet, causing the unit’s “holding tank” to empty all over Knight. Police arrived and took him into custody.

  THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE

  Here’s a real-life crime story that reads like something

  out of a cartoon. Warning: It’s pretty gruesome

  …but it’s also pretty fascinating.

  THE NEFARIOUS SCHEME

  During the waning days of Prohibition, Tony Marino’s speakeasy served illegal liquor in the Bronx, New York. Marino and his bartender, Joe “Red” Murphy, did some additional business on the side: They’d take out insurance policies in the names of vagrants and then feed them so much booze that they’d die. By December 1932, after having pulled off the scheme successfully a couple of times, Marino and Murphy set their sights on one of their regular customers, a 60-year-old Irish immigrant named Michael Malloy. A firefighter in his younger days, Malloy was now just another old drunk with no money, no home, and no family.

  With three insurance policies secretly taken out in Malloy’s name, the two conspirators offered him an open tab and a cot in the back in exchange for sweeping out the bar each morning. The men stood to collect $3,500 (nearly $60,000 in today’s money), but only if Malloy’s death was accidental. But no matter how much hooch he put down (reportedly more than enough to kill any other man), he’d just sleep it off and then ask for more. Not only that, but Malloy’s health was actually improving—forcing Marino and Murphy to take their plan to the next level.

  A TOUGH CONSTITUTION

  • Murphy, a former chemist, mixed antifreeze with whiskey and told Malloy it was “new stuff.” After drinking it down, Malloy said, “That was smooth!” Then he fell unconscious to the floor. The men dragged him into the back room and left him to die. But he didn’t.

  • The next morning, they found Malloy cheerfully sweeping the bar. So over the next few days, Malloy’s drinks were spiked with more antifreeze—as well as turpentine, horse liniment, and rat poison. He didn’t die.

  • Murphy gave Malloy a potentially lethal sandwich. The ingredients: sardines that had been left to spoil in an open tin for a week, along with some metal shavings and carpet tacks. Malloy happily ate the sandwich. He didn’t die.

  • Then they gave Malloy another rotten sandwich, this one containing oysters that had been soaked in a batch of whiskey and wood alcohol—a poison that‚ if it didn’t kill you, would blind you. Malloy didn’t go blind. And he didn’t die.

  • January brought a cold snap. One night, when the temperature was–14°F, the men fed Malloy so much hooch that he passed out. They then took him to a park, stripped off his shirt, and threw him onto a snowbank. Then they poured a few gallons of cold water over him for good measure. He didn’t die.

  • Then the men paid a cab driver named Hershey Green $50 to run over Malloy. Another accomplice, “Tough Tony” Bastone, held up Ma
lloy’s unconscious body in the road. Just before the cab hit Malloy at 45 mph, Bastone jumped out of the way. They left Malloy’s mangled body in the road, believing he was finally dead.

  HE LIVES!

  Over the next few days, the gang scanned the obituaries and police reports for news of Malloy’s death. It didn’t come. And then, three weeks later, Malloy walked back into Marino’s speakeasy, ordered a shot of rotgut, and explained to the astonished men, “I must have really tied one on, because I woke up in the hospital with a cracked skull and a busted shoulder!”

  The men were at their wits’ end. Bastone, a part-time hit man, offered to “fill the bum full of lead” for $500. Marino refused. He had another plan: He hired a fruit dealer named Daniel Kriesberg to rent a room, take Malloy there, and give him all the gin (mixed with wood alcohol) that he could drink. After Malloy passed out, Murphy brought in a length of rubber hose. He put one end in Malloy’s mouth and the other into a gas jet, and then he turned it on. On February 22, 1933, Michael Malloy was finally dead.

  That night, Marino paid a crooked doctor $50 to sign a death certificate listing Malloy’s cause of death as “lobar pneumonia, with alcoholism as a contributing cause.” Then another member of the gang, an undertaker named Frank Pasqua, buried Malloy in a $12 coffin without even embalming him. The next day, Murphy, posing as the deceased’s brother, collected $800 from Metropolitan Life. One policy down, two to go.

  CAUGHT!

  But then the scheme began to unravel as the conspirators squabbled over who should get a bigger cut. Bastone even threatened to go public. The next day, two Prudential agents came to the speakeasy looking for Murphy but were told he was down at the police station being questioned about Bastone…who had mysteriously turned up dead the night before. The agents became suspicious and told the cops that it looked like a case of insurance fraud. Police exhumed Malloy’s body and concluded that he was indeed gassed to death.

  In a headline-grabbing trial, the Bronx’s “Murder Trust” captured the attention of the public. In his opening statement, Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley referred to the scheme as “the most grotesque chain of events in New York criminal history.” While on the witness stand, each gang member tried to pin the whole thing on Bastone, testifying that he had forced them to kill Malloy. The jury didn’t buy it. The verdict: Guilty. Green, the cab driver, turned state’s evidence and was given a lesser sentence—life in prison. Marino, Murphy, Pasqua, and Kriesberg were each put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in the summer of 1934.

  And to this day, doctors still have no idea how Malloy could have possibly survived all of those murder attempts.

  A RANDOM ORIGIN

  Ralph Teetor (1890–1982) was a prolific inventor who developed many car improvements. Ironically, he was sight-impaired and unable to drive, so his lawyer frequently offered to chauffeur him. The lawyer was a bad driver, though, prone to jerky starts and stops, which annoyed Teetor…and inspired him to invent a way to regulate the car’s speed at a consistent level: cruise control. (It was invented in 1945, but first offered as an option on 1958 Chryslers.)

  OOPS!

  More tales of outrageous blunders.

  THE TWEETER AND THE BRANCH

  While jogging to work one morning in early 2009, 23-year-old James Coleman of Bristol, England, decided to post an update on his Twitter account. So he took out his BlackBerry (while jogging) and started typing. Bad idea: He ran headfirst into a low-hanging tree branch, which sent him tumbling down to the pavement. The resulting bruise on Coleman’s face forced his left eye to stay closed for several days. “I feel a twit,” said the tweeter.

  GET A GRIP

  In June 2009, 22-year-old Eugene Scott Duncan, an amateur mountaineer from West Virginia, decided, for some reason, to try rappelling down a power line tower near his house. (This was one of those very high towers with a metal frame and three sets of high-voltage power lines.) Duncan made it the first part of the way down without incident, but when his foot hit one of the live power lines, the shock caused him to let go of his rope and plunge the rest of the way down, all the way to the ground. He was treated for severe injuries, but survived. Police charged him with trespassing.

  ARREST ME, WILL YOU? BWA HA HA HA!

  Late one night in November 2008, police in Hackney, England, saw some suspicious activity through the window of a building: men wearing white lab coats, flashing colored lights, and strange fluids gurgling in glass bottles and tubes. The police raided the room and arrested the leader, 29-year-old Richard Watson, on charges of terrorism. The cops then evacuated the entire area and called in the bomb squad. “There were a ridiculous amount of police there,” Watson later said. Why ridiculous? As he’d tried to explain (while he was being arrested and for the hour he was handcuffed to a van), he was simply having a “Mad Scientist” theme party. The equipment was fake and the chemicals were just food coloring, bicarbonate of soda, and vinegar. Watson was freed without charges.

  CELLO WHAT?

  “Fiddler’s neck” is a real ailment suffered by people who play the violin;

  “flautist’s chin” is a real ailment suffered by flute players. Here’s

  the strange story of two more strange musical maladies.

  LETTER TO THE EDITOR

  In April 1974, the British Medical Journal published a letter from a physician in southern England:

  SIR,

  I have recently seen three patients with traumatic mastitis [inflammation] of one breast. These were all girls between 8 and 10 and the mastitis consisted of a slightly inflamed cystic swelling about the base of the nipple. Questioning revealed that all three were learning to play the classical guitar, which requires close attention to the position of the instrument in relation to the body. In each case a full-sized guitar was used and the edge of the soundbox pressed against the nipple. Two of the patients were right-handed and consequently had a right-sided mastitis while the third was left-handed with a left-sided mastitis. When the guitar-playing was stopped the mastitis subsided spontaneously.

  I would be interested to know whether any other doctors have come across this condition.

  I am, etc.,

  P. Curtis,

  Winchester

  Clearly, Dr. Curtis believed that the pressure of the guitar against the children’s chests caused an irritation that cleared up as soon as they stopped playing the guitar. As was common practice at the time, the British Medical Journal printed the letter as a courtesy to see if any other doctors had seen such an ailment. The letter did attract responses from a number of physicians, but none had ever seen a case of “guitar nipple,” as it came to be called.

  Some doctors did, however, write in with helpful suggestions for the original sufferers: One wondered if the problem was caused by left-handed children playing guitars intended for right-handed adults, or vice versa. Another doctor suggested that if the irritation persisted, the children should get another guitar instructor.

  HEADING SOUTH

  But the most interesting response of all came from a J. M. Murphy, who had this to say:SIR,

  Though I have not come across “guitar nipple” as reported by Dr. P. Curtis, I did once come across a case of “cello scrotum” caused by irritation from the body of the cello. The patient in question was a professional musician and played in rehearsal, practice, or concert for several hours each day.

  I am, etc.,

  J. M. Murphy

  As had been the case with “guitar nipple,” “cello scrotum” attracted some interest from physicians, but no cases of other patients suffering from the condition were ever reported.

  Instrument-induced ailments are not uncommon, especially among professional musicians who play their instruments day after day for hours on end. Overuse can cause injury all by itself, and the nickel, chromium, brass, and other materials used to make musical instruments can also cause irritation to sensitive skin. So not much notice was taken of “guitar nipple” and “cello scrotu
m” when they surfaced; they were just added to the list of music-related maladies that get written up in medical journals from time to time. Years passed before much thought was given to them again.

  BODY OF EVIDENCE

  Then in 1991 a Connecticut doctor named Philip Shapiro read about “cello scrotum” in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Shapiro knew from personal experience (he played the cello) that the intimate parts of the male anatomy never come in contact with the instrument—the large size of the cello and the position in which it must be held to be played made it almost impossible. The musician’s crotch is at least six inches away from the cello at all times, and besides, most men play the cello while wearing pants.

  Dr. Shapiro stated his case in a letter to the journal and included a photograph of himself playing the cello (with his crotch nowhere near the instrument) as supporting evidence. Even if some cellists do experience irritation in the aforementioned area, he argued, the cellist, not the cello, would be at fault: “Just as people sometimes scratch their heads repetitively, some also scratch their genitals,” he wrote. The journal published Dr. Shapiro’s letter; from then on whenever “cello scrotum” was mentioned in medical journals, it was accompanied with a caveat that the ailment’s existence had been questioned on the grounds that getting it “would require an extremely awkward playing position.”