Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents

by Uncle John’s

  STRIPPER WAR

  In October 2012, two strippers got into a fight at Hot Bodies, an Austin, Texas, strip club. Then another joined in…and yet another…and BAM!—it was a full-on bench-clearing stripper brawl. In the middle of the melee, stripper Victoria Perez took off one of her high-heeled shoes and winged it across the room. In a repeat of the Michael Ireland story almost too exact to be true, the heel of that shoe went right into an eye socket of an unidentified Hot Bodies patron. When police arrived minutes later, they found 17 strippers in a full-tilt rumble—and the unidentified man wailing and holding his hands over his bloody face. He was taken to the hospital and, fortunately, released that night—but doctors said the man might eventually lose his eye. Perez, who police officers said was caught on security footage throwing the shoe, told them it “may have been” her who did it. She was arrested on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—the high-heeled shoe—and jailed on $50,000 bail.

  FROM COPPING A FEEL TO COPPING A PLEA

  In July 2012, Wendy Haddon of Humpty Doo, Australia (really), was treated by her friends to a “hen’s night,” the Australian equivalent of a bachelorette party, at the Humpty Doo Hotel’s bar. Hours into the party, two carloads of men in police uniforms pulled into the parking lot, and the drunken gals ran outside shouting, “Here come the strippers! Here come the strippers!” But they weren’t strippers dressed like cops—they were actual cops. Senior Sergeant Louise Jorgensen told reporters the next day, “Someone approached the officers about taking their clothes off. They weren’t willing to do that.” She added that the two officers “nearly had their shirts taken off, but they managed to escape with their dignity intact.” Bride-to-be Haddon spoke to reporters, too, saying, “We thought they were going to be strippers. But, no, they weren’t. Bugger.”

  “BUT THEY WEREN’T STRIPPERS DRESSED LIKE COPS—THEY WERE ACTUAL COPS.”

  The cops actually took the mistake in fun, and even posed for pictures with Haddon. One of the photos showed an officer pretending to arrest Haddon—standing behind her as he bent her over the hood of his police car.

  GREAT BUTTS OF FIRE

  Do right by yourself, your teammates, and your club.” That was the friendly advice the Barossa, South Australia, police department posted on its Facebook page ahead of the annual end-of-season celebrations for Australian rules football teams. Many players failed to heed that advice.

  The five worst offenders were from the Tanunda team. They were partying at a hotel when one of them had an epiphany: It would be easier to slide butt-first down the hallway if there were some sort of slippery substance on the floor. So he broke into a supplies closet, grabbed a bottle of floor polish, and poured it all over the floor.

  Then they all slid down the hallway. Whee!

  Then their buttocks all started burning. Badly. The footballers started screaming as they tried to wipe off their rears, but that just made it worse. It turned out that the inebriated footballer had unwittingly snatched an industrial cleaner chockfull of hazardous acid-based chemicals that burn skin on contact. Ouch.

  CORPORATE GAFFES

  Bloody informative. British Aircraft Corporation made an in-house training film in 1976 to instruct its factory workers on the importance of wearing protective goggles. However, the film was of the “if you don’t do this, this will happen variety,” meaning it included graphic depictions of on-the-job eye gougings, losses, and injuries. One worker fainted as he fell off his chair, opening a gash in his head that required stitches.

  What a card! In 1938, about two years after Social Security debuted, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, New York, put mock Social Security cards in its wallets (similar to the fake pictures used today). But the company didn’t put a fake number on them—they used 078-05-1120, the number of the company’s secretary. It was half the size of an actual Social Security card and stamped “specimen” in red ink, but hundreds of people still assumed for some reason that it was a real card, their card, and that that was their number. It wasn’t fully straightened out until the 1970s.

  Yo quiero basura! Taco Bell’s most famous ad campaign involved a talking Chihuahua going up to people on the street and saying, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” It was the ’90s most famous fast food catchphrase, the “Where’s the beef?” of its time. The ad campaign lasted from 1997 to 2000, when it was yanked off the air after Taco Bell discovered that its sales had actually dropped by 6 percent since the introduction of the Spanish-speaking dog mascot. Some fast-food industry analysts think it’s because people don’t want to see themselves as the kind of people who eat what dogs eat: Dogs eat literally anything, including garbage. Even worse: In 2003 two men sued Taco Bell, claiming they had pitched a “talking Chihuahua ad campaign” six years earlier, and that Taco Bell rejected it, but then ran it anyway without paying the men anything. The advertisers won the suit, and Taco Bell had to pay them $42 million.

  D’oh! In 1993 the U.S. Postal Service released its most popular commemorative postage stamp ever: the one featuring a young Elvis Presley (which won out over an older Elvis in a national poll). The USPS sold out its run of 517 million of the 29-cent stamps. In 2009, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons debut on Fox, the Postal Service debuted a line of five Simpsons stamps, one for each member of the Simpson nuclear family. The agency printed a staggering one billion 44-cent Simpsons stamps in all, twice that of the Elvis run. How many did they ultimately sell? Not even as many as Elvis. Only 318 million stamps were sold. In 2012 the USPS raised the rate (and standard stamp value) to 45 cents, rendering the 682 million unsold Simpsons stamps in need of an additional one-cent stamp to mail a letter. The USPS pulped them, a waste of $1.2 million in printing costs, not to mention the $286 million retail value of the unsold postage. This debacle is just a drop in the bucket for the USPS’s woes: It lost $15 billion in fiscal 2012 and was even considering dropping national Saturday mail delivery. Overall, fewer people are using first-class stamps to mail letters, opting instead for email and other forms of electronic communication—especially young people, the target demographic for the Simpsons stamps.

  Royally dumb. Legend has it that in 1934 Cunard Cruise Line planned to name its gigantic new flagship ocean liner the Queen Victoria, after the deceased British monarch. The company thought it might be a good idea to seek approval from the current monarch, King George V. Cunard director Thomas Royden asked King George for his blessing to name the ship “after the greatest queen this country has ever known.” The king replied, “That is the greatest compliment ever paid to my wife. I’ll ask her.” And so, the Queen Mary was named.

  TEXT MESSAGING ACCIDENTS

  Hey, I don’t think this is working. I’m breaking up with you.

  I’m your wife. You can’t exactly break up with me. I’m living in your house. You could just walk over to the other side of the room and tell me you want to get divorced.

  Oops, sorry. That was meant for someone else.

  Oh ok Wait…WHAT?

  How’s our pregnant little daughter?

  Mom! How did you know that?

  I meant precious. Sorry, typo. WAIT, WHAT?

  Your mom and I are going to divorce next month.

  What? Why! Call me please?

  I wrote Disney and this phone changed it. We are going to Disney.

  Where is Granny? I thought she was going to be here for Thanksgiving?

  Grandma is in the grave.

  What grave? What are you saying?

  Oops, sorry. Garage.

  Do I look like a cow?

  Moo

  Great

  Moo

  Be nice! That’s mean

  That was the worst autocorrect ever. I said Noooooo, I swear to God.

  “HEY, Y’ALL—WATCH THIS!”

  Roamin’ Roman. Roman Retynski often described himself as invincible. He was not. Trying to channel his inner Indiana Jones one night, the 34-year-old Alaskan was driving his pickup truck at 60 mph on a bumpy rural road. “Grab
the wheel!” he shouted to his girlfriend. Then he was out the window and onto the hood and gone. The next day, Retynski’s friends told reporters they were sad the avid car surfer was dead, but not all that surprised.

  Le manteau de la mort. On a freezing February morning in Paris in 1912, a crowd gathered at the Eiffel Tower to watch Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt test his new invention: an overcoat with a built-in parachute. He’d received permission to perform the test—on the condition that he use a dummy. When Reichelt arrived, he announced that he would be the dummy. Onlookers tried to dissuade the “Flying Tailor” (as he called himself), but Reichelt was adamant. He carried his bulky contraption up to a platform nearly 200 feet above the ground, stepped up onto a chair next to the railing, peered out over the edge, and stood there. He looked down again, and stood there some more. And then some more. Finally, Reichelt took a deep breath (his last) and stepped off. His parachute did not open, and he slammed face-first into the rock-hard ground at 130 feet per second. He left a crater nearly six inches deep.

  BMW DOA. A century later in Germany, some adventurous young men were filming a Jackass-like web series called Bavarian Dumbasses. A 20-year-old daredevil named Tobias tied one end of a rope to a playground merry-go-round and the other end to a BMW. His friends then duct-taped him to the outer railing of the merry-go-round. Tobias gave the signal, and his buddy floored the BMW, sending the merry-go-round spinning at breakneck speed…which is exactly what happened to Tobias. The duct tape was no match for the centrifugal force, and the stuntman was flung into the air. He hit the ground so hard that his neck broke and his skull cracked open. Not only did Tobias succumb to his injuries, but the merry-go-round was later removed from the playground.

  Lion in wait. In 2006 Ohtaj Humbat Ohli Makhmudov, 45, set out to prove that God exists. He went to the lions’ den at the Kiev Zoo in Ukraine, used a rope to tie himself to a railing, and climbed in. As onlookers yelled at him to get out of there, Makhmudov walked in between four lions and announced, “Because God loves me, the lions will not harm me!” An atheist lioness named Veronica pounced on him and nearly bit his head off. He died instantly.

  Drawing a blank. Jon-Erik Hexum was an up-and-coming actor until he got bored one day in 1984. During a halt in filming his spy series, Cover-Up, Hexum started messing around with a .44 Magnum that his character was going to load with blanks. Blanks aren’t bullets, Hexum surmised, so the gun couldn’t hurt him. But blanks consist of gunpowder (which explodes) behind a wad of paper (which keeps the powder in the chamber). So a gun loaded with blanks not only fires, it also has a severe kickback. Not knowing that, Hexum placed the barrel on his temple and then said to the cast and crew, “Let’s see if I get myself with this one.” The bad news: Hexum got himself. The good news: A dying man got his heart; an elderly blind man got one of his corneas; a blind little girl got his other cornea; an ailing grandma got one of his kidneys; a dying five-year-old boy got his other kidney; and a severely burned toddler got some of Hexum’s skin.

  Go Vikings! Of course, the ultimate way to show off is to carry around the severed head of your slain enemy. After a ninth-century battle, Sigurd the Mighty, the Viking Earl of Orkney, defeated his greatest foe, Máel Brigte. He carried the dead man’s head as he rode home on his horse, eager to show the gruesome trophy off to his people. But during the ride home, one of Brigte’s teeth gouged a hole in Sigurd’s leg. With antiseptic cream still a millennium away, Sigurd’s wound became infected and he died a slow, painful death.

  THE STONER REPORT

  Burning question. Robert Michelson of Farmington, Connecticut, called 911 one day in February 2011. When the dispatcher asked if there was a crime in progress, Michelson said, “Possibly. I was just growing some marijuana and was just wondering how much trouble you can get in for one plant.” After a long pause, the dispatcher replied, “It depends on how big the plant is.” “It’s only a seedling,” said Michelson. The dispatcher informed him that having a plant does constitute possession of marijuana. Michelson thanked her and hung up. The dispatcher alerted the police, who arrived at Michelson’s house a short time later. However, there was no plant. Michelson told police he was only thinking about growing marijuana. However, he was still arrested, as he was in possession of marijuana, marijuana seeds, and several bongs.

  Must-stash. In February 2011, Joel Dobrin, 32, of San Diego, California, was driving down a road in Sherman County, Oregon. Some marijuana and hashish rode shotgun on the front seat of his pickup truck. He was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, but before the cop could get to his window, Dobrin grabbed a sock that was lying on the floor of the truck and stashed his drugs inside it. But his dog, a pit bull, grabbed the sock and started playing tug-of-war with it, and the sock flew out the open window of the truck. The sheriff simply retrieved the sock and found the drugs. “I wish everyone traveled with their own personal drug dog,” a sheriff’s spokesman told reporters.

  Green giant. Ramiro Gonzalez, 30, of Progreso, Texas, was driving a tractor-trailer filled with papayas in the far south of the state one day in January 2011. A sheriff’s deputy pulled the truck over and found 3,103 pounds of marijuana underneath the papayas. Gonzalez was arrested on felony drug trafficking charges. He probably would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the expired tags on his truck, which was the only reason he’d been stopped in the first place.

  Above the law. Robert Watson was driving down an East Haven, Connecticut, road late one night in April 2011. Watson came across a police sobriety checkpoint—where police found marijuana in his car. (He had also been drinking, but was just under the legal limit.) Watson was arrested for possession of marijuana. A blood test found that he also had small amounts of cocaine in his system. Unfortunately, Watson was a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives—and had a record of stridently opposing marijuana legalization, and of voting for stiff penalties for drug offenses. As of press time, Watson had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

  BABY ON BOARD

  In May 2012, a video appeared on YouTube showing closed-circuit tape of the inside of a laundromat. A couple and a small boy can be seen at a machine not far from the camera. The man picks the boy up off the floor and sticks him in a large front-loading washing machine. He closes the door, steps back, and looks at the child in what seems like a harmless game.

  Then the machine automatically starts spinning. And filling with water. The man and woman rush to the machine—but they can’t open the door: It automatically locked when the machine started. The couple frantically try to get the door open, run to get help, and try again to open the door as a crowd grows around the machine. Finally a man runs up, throws some tables out of the way, opens a hatch behind the machine, reaches into it—and the machine stops running. The door finally opens and the boy is taken out. Luckily, the boy was fine—he only got a few bruises.

  But, weirdly, if it hadn’t been for the video being posted on YouTube, the child’s mother might never have known about the incident. The laundromat was quickly identified by YouTube viewers as the Federal Laundromat in Camden, New Jersey. A news station there played the video, and the child’s mother, Sakia David, saw it—and saw her one-year-old son Saimeir being put into a washing machine by a man she didn’t know.

  The woman in the video? She was the boy’s babysitter. And when she’d brought him home with bruises that day, she told Sakia that Saimeir had fallen down some stairs. Camden police investigated the incident and said that nothing criminal had occurred—the man was simply playing “peek-a-boo” with the boy—and said the man and woman in the video would not be facing charges.

  SPOILER ALERT!

  On the day it was set to air the seventh-season finale of Top Chef, Bravo posted on its website a clip featuring a reunion of that season’s contestants. It was meant to go up after the show, however, as the clip opens with host Andy Cohen saying, “Before we get into anything, we have to congratulate the winner of Top Chef: D.C., Kevin.” Bravo pulled the video
a few hours later, but it was too late, and the season-ruining scoop had already spread around the Internet.

  •In 2011, the second season of AMC’s zombie drama The Walking Dead featured a shocking twist in its second-to-last episode. (Shane, Sheriff Grimes’s best friend and an increasingly loose cannon, attempts to kill Grimes and take control over the group of survivors, forcing Grimes to kill Shane, who becomes a zombie soon thereafter and is then killed.) The show sells a ton of DVD sets, so AMC was already taking orders for Season 2 before the season was done airing. The fate of Shane had not yet been aired when The Walking Dead ad on AMC’s site appeared, listing special features such as a look at “Shane’s last episode.”

  “THE SEASON-RUINING SCOOP HAD ALREADY SPREAD AROUND THE INTERNET.”

  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  Not so long ago, the telegraph (a coded message of electrical pulses over a charged wire) was the dominant and only quick form of telecommunication. More than 50 different telegraph companies were operating within the U.S. by 1851, the year the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was founded. A decade later, only a handful were left, among them the New York and Mississippi company under its new name, Western Union Telegraph Company.

  In the 1870s, another major telecommunications innovation occurred: Alexander Graham Bell drew up plans for a new technology he called a “harmonic telegraph,” and his company, the Volta Laboratory, began filing patents. As the idea evolved, Bell began to consider a device that could transmit the human voice, though he couldn’t figure out how he would pull off such a feat. Luckily for Bell, patent law at the time allowed him to file for an invention for which there was not yet a working model. So Bell received a patent for the “telephone,” which he technically hadn’t invented yet. And he was granted it just before a competitor, Elisha Gray, filed his own notice of invention for a telephone.