Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents

by Uncle John’s

  Until Richard Parry, a reveler wearing a Joker mask, put the noose around his neck during a 2012 Halloween party. He passed out with his neck in the noose, but it was impossible to know that because of the mask. Parry slumped over, his legs bent at the knees while his dangling, limp body swayed back and forth. His friends laughed and poked and prodded him while posing next to him for pictures. Finally, after about three minutes of dangling, a security guard noticed that something was wrong and rushed over and tried to get the Joker to respond. Parry just hung there, so the guard lifted him out of the noose. He wasn’t breathing. The Halloween party came to an abrupt end as Parry was rushed to the hospital. After several scary hours, he finally came to and made a full recovery. McMahon is relieved Parry didn’t die, but said he has no plans to get rid of the noose.

  HOT MICS

  MICROPHONE MALFUNCTION

  During a 2009 concert in Tampa, Florida, Britney Spears finished a song, the arena went dark, and the crowd started cheering. Then, suddenly, the singer’s voice could be heard over the speaker system, yelling, “My p**** is hanging out!” Spears had apparently had a wardrobe malfunction and was yelling to her stage techs, thinking her microphone was off. Videos of the incident were on YouTube within hours.

  PUTTING THE “F” in “FCC”

  In July 2008, veteran WNBC (New York) anchor Sue Simmons was getting ready to go to commercial when the video inexplicably went to a large ship in a harbor. After a second or so of silence, Simmons, still on a live mic, was heard by her millions of viewers saying, “What the f—?” The ship was on the screen for eight more seconds before the station cut to a commercial. When the news returned, Simmons apologized, saying she was “truly sorry” for using “a word that many people find offensive.” What had happened—and who she was talking to—was never revealed.

  AW, NUTS

  In July 2008, Jesse Jackson was getting ready for an interview on Fox News when he leaned to the guest sitting next to him and, speaking about presidential candidate Barack Obama, whispered, “Barack’s been talking down to black people. I wanna cut his nuts off!” Jackson wasn’t on the air—but the remarks were caught on camera nonetheless, and someone got the tape to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who played it on his show. Jackson was forced to issue a hasty public response, especially since he publicly endorsed Obama’s candidacy.

  POTTY BREAK

  Longtime CNBC host Bill Griffeth was interviewing former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in April 2009 when the show was suddenly interrupted by the unmistakable (and very loud) sound of a toilet flushing. Griffeth paused, his head jerked to his left, his eyes narrowed, and, as the sound of the toilet receded, he said, “Anyway, we’re going to take a quick break here…” and the show cut to commercial. A member of the technical staff had apparently forgotten to turn another guest’s microphone off while they were doing their business. Griffeth didn’t mention the gaffe when the show resumed.

  WHY THE JUICE ISN’T LOOSE

  In 1995 NFL Hall of Famer O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson may have been acquitted, but the court of public opinion found him guilty. Simpson’s career as an actor and pitchman (for Hertz and HoneyBaked Ham) was over. In a 1997 civil suit brought by Goldman’s family, Simpson was found liable in the deaths and ordered to pay Goldman’s family $33.5 million.

  Initially, Simpson managed to avoid paying because California law protected his NFL pension. But the Goldmans didn’t back down, and in 1999, Simpson auctioned off his Heisman Trophy and other memorabilia to pay the Goldmans $500,000. To avoid paying more (and to escape a $1-million-plus back-taxes bill), Simpson moved to Florida to protect his estate.

  In December 2001, FBI agents searched his Florida home after receiving a tip that he was involved in a drug-trafficking ring. Authorities didn’t find any narcotics on the premises, but they did discover that O.J. was pirating cable, leading to tens of thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees.

  A year later, Simpson was caught speeding a 30-foot powerboat through a wildlife-protection zone and got hit with another fine. But despite his various run-ins with the law, he was still a free man.

  Then, on the night of September 13, 2007, Simpson and a group of men burst into Bruce Fromong’s room at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Simpson was convinced that Fromong, a sports memorabilia dealer, had stolen some of his NFL mementos. Simpson and the group fled the scene after nabbing several items. The following day, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he wasn’t a suspect. “I’m O. J. Simpson. How am I going to think that I’m going to rob somebody and get away with it?” He also contrarily quipped, “I thought what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.”

  Unfortunately for Simpson, one of his accomplices brought a tape recorder along on the crime. The former NFL star was arrested a few days later on charges that included robbery and conspiracy. Simpson was found guilty on all charges and was sentenced to prison in December 2008. The presiding judge offered him little leniency and demanded that eight of the ten counts run concurrently for a maximum sentence of 33 years. Simpson is currently incarcerated in the Lovelock Correctional Center in Pershing County, Nevada, and is eligible for parole in 2017.

  WHEN BOUNCY HOUSES GO BAD

  In 2011 a bouncy house took flight during a youth soccer tournament on Long Island. A gust of wind caught the structure and carried it across a field, causing it to collide with two real houses and several bystanders. Parents rushed to the scene and frantically tried to grab hold of the flying house, to no avail. Thirteen people were injured by the time it finally came to a halt.

  •A May 2011 fifth-grade graduation party in Tucson, Arizona, went horribly awry after a bouncy house got caught in a sudden gust of wind. The young grads inside all managed to escape before the house broke free and wrapped itself around a light pole. Six onlookers were hurt by flying debris.

  •Also in Arizona in 2011, two 10-year-olds were seriously injured during a cultural festival when a freak dust storm blew a bouncy castle they were in 15 feet into the air, over a fence, and across a busy highway.

  •A Pennsylvania man died in June of 2010 after sustaining injuries inside a bouncy house at a Cleveland Indians game. One of the inflatable sides collapsed, leaving him pinned underneath.

  •In January 2011, winds carried another bouncy house away during a Florida birthday party. A five-year-old girl was caught inside. She was rescued by neighbors after the house landed in a pond.

  •Inflatable houses and other attractions are still banned at many church festivals in southwest Ohio. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati issued a decree after an inflatable slide flipped over during a softball tournament in 2009. Wind threw the slide 70 yards and sent an 11-year-old boy along with it. Amazingly enough, he walked away from the accident with only a few bruises.

  REAL 911 CALLS

  Awoman in Kissimmee, Florida, called 911 in April 2009 and said she was stuck in her car. “I cannot open my door. I can’t get the windows down. Nothing electrical works,” she told the dispatcher, adding, “and it’s just getting very hot in here.” The dispatcher asked the woman if she had tried to pull up the manual locks on the doors. The woman unlocked her door, got out, and apologized.

  •In October 2011, a man in Hertfordshire, England, called 999 (the British equivalent of 911), and said, “There’s something flying over our house. It’s coming towards me now. I don’t know what the hell it is!” The dispatcher spent several minutes taking the man’s information, then told him she was contacting air authorities. The man called back a few minutes later, having figured out what the object was. “It’s the moon,” he said.

  •Also in October 2011, a woman in Danvers, Massachusetts, called 911 to say that she, her husband, and her two children were lost. “I’m really scared,” she said. “And we’ve got a baby with us,” she added tearfully. The dispatcher tried to keep the woman calm, and a police K-9 unit rushed to t
he family’s location—a Halloween maze cut into a cornfield. They were about 25 feet from the exit.

  BLOCKBUSTED

  In the early days of home video, up until the mid-1980s, video rental stores tended to be small operations, run locally, with a limited selection of titles. That changed with the arrival of Blockbuster Video, which opened its first four stores in the Dallas, Texas, area in 1985 and 1986. The difference: Blockbuster had a computerized checkout system and a whopping 8,000 titles in stock. The concept was clearly prime for success, and the small chain was sold to a group of investors with national chain experience. By the late 1990s, Blockbuster dominated the home video market, with more than 1,000 stores in the U.S.

  By 2000 the company was already starting to lose value, but company leaders were offered the chance to purchase a new player on the movie rental scene: Netflix, which rented out DVDs via mail at a flat, monthly cost—with no late fees like the ones Blockbuster made millions from. (It’s corporate legend, but Netflix founder Reed Hastings supposedly got the idea to start the company after returning Apollo 13 to a Blockbuster six weeks late and paying a $40 late fee.)

  Speculators saw great potential in Netflix. The young company was offered to Blockbuster for $50 million—a price many analysts at the time called a bargain. But Blockbuster’s corporate brass balked at the price and turned the deal down, instead spending millions in 2000 on a 20-year-deal to distribute movies digitally with a media subsidiary of the oil company Enron.

  Yes, that Enron. The oil giant that went down in flames in a well-publicized accounting scandal about a year later, bringing down hordes of investors, executives, and deals along with it…including the one with Blockbuster.

  Netflix, meanwhile, turned its first profit of $6.5 million in 2003 and was valued at about $4 billion in late 2012. But the choice to not purchase Netflix was just one bad decision in a series of missteps and bad luck for Blockbuster, including the launch of fresh competitors like the kiosk DVD rental company Redbox. Blockbuster tried an online subscription service, its own kiosk service, a “no-late-fee” policy (an advertising ploy that led to investigations for misrepresentation, resulting in the irony of a $650,000 fee for Blockbuster), and even a baffling bid to buy the struggling Circuit City. All these efforts failed to save the company. Plans to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy were announced in late 2010, and the remains of the company were purchased by Dish Network in 2011. Most stores were shuttered.

  SORRY ABOUT THE RACISM

  Can’t be beat! Apple isn’t the only company that makes personal digital music players. German company TrekStor entered the market in 2007, and, capitalizing on Apple’s tendency to put “i” in the name of its products (iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc.), TrekStor called its device the i.Beat (as in beats, because it’s a music player, get it?). However, the device was also colored black, leading TrekStor to release to the world a product called i.Beat.blaxx. Perhaps because of a language barrier, TrekStor was flummoxed by the outcry, and the company’s president issued a press release stating that “beat” referred to music, not violence. Nevertheless, the company renamed the device the TrekStor blaxx.

  Definitely unique. In 2012 Adidas announced plans for an athletic shoe that came with rubber shackles attached (shoe goes on the foot, shackle goes on the leg, for support or something). After many people on the Internet pointed out that foot shackles are primarily associated with slavery, and that basketball shoes have a large African-American customer base, Adidas pulled the shoe, but defended the design as “outrageous and unique.”

  McStupid. In 2002 a severe drought led to widespread famine in Africa—not the first time the continent had been ravaged by starvation. Somehow unaware of this, that same year McDonald’s locations in Norway began selling a sandwich called the McAfrika, an “African-inspired” sandwich composed of pita bread, beef, and vegetables. After thousands of complaints and public shaming in the media, McDonald’s pulled the sandwich and put famine relief donation boxes in its Norwegian outlets to help the estimated 12 million starving people in Africa at the time.

  Bad Barbie. There have been hundreds of Barbie dolls released over the past several decades. In 1997 Barbie maker Mattel, in tandem with Nabisco, released an Oreo-branded Barbie to promote the popular cookie. The fact that Barbie’s dimensions, if applied to a real woman, would negate the possibility of eating anything, let alone junk food, is not the most offensive aspect of this ill-advised marketing scheme. Mattel releases Caucasian and African-American versions of almost all of its Barbie dolls, and it did so with the Oreo-loving Barbie. Thus, a black “Oreo Barbie” made it to the market. Evidently neither corporation was familiar with the slang term “oreo,” a derogatory term for a black person that means “black on the outside, white on the inside,” like an Oreo, a way of calling a black person a sellout or accusing them of “acting white.” (The doll was recalled.)

  Sour milk. Dairy Queen introduced its version of the Starbucks Frappuccino in 2004. A combination of vanilla soft-serve ice cream and coffee, it was called the MooLatte, because it was a combination of dairy products (moo) and fancy coffee (latte). MooLatte, however, is very similar to the word mulatto, an outdated and offensive word that means “of mixed race.” Dairy Queen apologized… but has kept the MooLatte on its menu to this day.

  Not o-k-k-k. A 2011 alumni magazine for a University of Kentucky sorority ran a picture of three women in matching Kentucky tank tops, along with the caption “Sisters cheer for the Wildcats at a Kentucky football game.” More than 200,000 readers saw the picture of three young, white women whose shirts spelled out “KKK.”

  The facts of “Life.” Quaker’s Life cereal comes in several varieties. The “regular” variety is packaged in a white box, and features a Caucasian woman and boy. Life’s maple and brown sugar flavor comes in a brown box and shows two African American children.

  Looney Zune. In 2006 Microsoft debuted the Zune, an MP3 player designed to compete with Apple’s iPod. The name “Zune” was meant to sound like futuristic nonsense…until Hebrew scholars pointed out its similarity to the Hebrew zi-yun, which is basically that language’s F-word.

  HERE, I’LL SHOW YOU!

  Clement Vallandigham was a 19th-century Ohio congressman and, during the Civil War, a leader of the little-known Copperheads faction: antiwar, pro-Confederate Democrats from the North. During the war, he was charged with treason, but President Lincoln commuted his two-year prison sentence to exile to the South. After the war, Vallandigham returned to Ohio and started a law practice. The night before a trial was to begin in 1871, Vallandigham was demonstrating to some of his law partners that his client, Thomas McGehan, was innocent of shooting Tom Myers to death, and that Myers had really shot himself.

  So Vallandigham put a pistol in his pocket, pulled it out, cocked it…and shot himself, the same way he alleged that Myers had. McGehan was acquitted of murder, but he was represented by another lawyer, because Vallandigham had, evidently like Myers, accidentally shot and killed himself.

  IT’S CRIMINAL

  KNOT FOOLED

  In 2003 a Pennsylvania family dressed their seven-year-old son in a Cub Scout uniform and sent him door-to-door to collect donations for his troop. Except that he wasn’t really a Cub Scout—it was a scam, of course. They visited more than 150 homes and had earned $667 before they got caught. They knocked on the door of an Eagle Scout, who knew something was up when he saw a Cub Scout with a knotted kerchief. Cub Scouts use scarf slides, not knots.

  FOOL ME ONCE…

  In 1990 Charles J. Bazarian was convicted of swindling hundreds of thousands of dollars, which lead to the collapse of five savings-and-loan banks. He was prosecuted in Irvine, California. Three years later, as part of another swindling spree, Bazarian convinced the prosecutor who convicted him in 1990 to invest $6,000 in what turned out to be a fraudulent business.

  CLICK? CLINK.

  In 1993, 24-year-old David Bridges broke into a home in Grapevine, Texas, and stole a television. He probably would
have gotten away with it, too, had he not returned to the home, where police were waiting, to retrieve the TV’s remote control.

  CUSTOMER SERVICE

  Most bank robbers disguise themselves before they commit the crime. Others simply go to a place where they wouldn’t be recognized. And then there’s the woman who in October 2012 went on a string of bank robberies in the Boston area. One of the banks she hit was the bank where she has an account. The teller she held up recognized her, called her by name, and easily led the cops to her home.

  BLUFF CALLED

  Derrick Johnson annoyed a Kansas City gas station clerk over the course of three months in 1990, coming in every few days and stealing food from a cooler, each time taunting the clerk by saying “Catch me if you think you can!” The last time, the clerk shot and killed him.

  CARPET BAGGERS

  In 1981 Dora Wilson of Harlow, England, looked out the window and saw some men moving her next-door-neighbor’s prized collection of Persian rugs into a van. Wilson asked the men what they were up to, as the neighbors were away on vacation. The men replied that they were rug cleaners. Pleased at the opportunity, Wilson asked the crew if they would take her Persian rugs to be cleaned as well. They did, and neither Wilson nor the neighbors saw the rugs again. Obviously, the men were not rug cleaners.

  BAD .COM NAMES

  Who Represents is a resource for finding out what talent agent represents any celebrity: