Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents

by Uncle John’s

  On March 10, 1876, he succeeded in transmitting speech, one week after his patent had been granted. Unfortunately, he used a technology described not in his application, but in Gray’s. Seeing the long legal battles ahead, and fearing for the future of an invention that still wasn’t complete, Bell offered to sell the telephone patents to Western Union—a company that at the time was worth tens of millions of dollars—for $100,000. A Western Union memo shows the logic of Western Union as it turned down Bell:

  The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. This device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.

  It wasn’t long before telegraphs were being removed from locations all over the country to make way for telephones. Western Union wasn’t immediately destroyed by the loss of the opportunity to rule the world’s communications systems. It continued in business, offering the first charge card for consumers in 1914, as well as the first candygrams in the 1960s, and even satellites in the 1970s. But mounting debts and falling profits led the company to begin divesting its telecommunications-based assets starting in the 1980s. In February 2006, the company announced the end of its telegram services.

  THESE STORIES SUCK

  Daniel Blackner is a performance artist. He’s also a little person, and he is best known as playing “Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf” in a show called Circus of Horrors at the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival of bizarre and avant-garde performances. During his 2007 performance, Blackner brought a vacuum cleaner onto the stage…attached to his penis. But the safe adhesive connecting man to machine came loose, so, thinking quickly, Blackner affixed the vacuum to his genitals with extra-strong glue. He got stuck. He was taken to a hospital, where it took nurses an hour to free him.

  •In 2008 a building contractor from Poland (unnamed in reports) was working in a hospital when he decided he needed to clean his underpants. So he went into the empty hospital cafeteria, lowered his pants, and went about cleaning his underwear…with a vacuum cleaner. A security guard caught him in the act with the cleaning machine, which was a “Henry Hoover,” a vacuum with a huge, smiling face painted on its front and a hose for a nose. The contractor was asked to leave the premises immediately (and to leave the vacuum).

  SHREDS UP!

  A Manhattan lawyer named Saul Finkelstein made an unsettling discovery during New York City’s 2012 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: Some of the pieces of confetti had decipherable words and numbers on them—the full names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and banking information of detectives from the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD), which serves nearby Long Island. Finkelstein even found strips of paper with legible details about presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s motorcade (which had been on Long Island a month earlier). Finkelstein and his son brought several handfuls of the confetti home and alerted the NCPD, who sent over an officer to take it away. The police promised to investigate the matter.

  But what’s to investigate? There are two ways to put documents into a shredder: the long way and the short way. Do it the long way, and the shredder shreds the paper perpendicular to the text lines, thus cutting it up into little, illegible pieces. But if the documents are loaded into the shredder the other way, the cuts are parallel, leading to entire lines of text being readable.

  Even more curious: How did Macy’s, the department store that runs the parade, obtain the sensitive confetti from a police department in another city? A Macy’s spokesperson said they didn’t—they use only “commercially manufactured, multi-colored confetti, not shredded, homemade, or printed paper of any kind.” But spectators often “bring their own confetti.” So that means someone who works at the NCPD had brought bagfuls of improperly shredded documents to America’s most popular parade. An internal investigation soon revealed the two officers who had brought the shreds, and they were reprimanded.

  THE CAMERA IS ON

  In October 2009, Australian ABC2 news anchor Virginia Trioli was in the middle of a program when she cut to an interview she had taped earlier with an Australian politician, Barnaby Joyce. While the segment played Trioli joked with someone in the studio, making a face, along with the universally understood circle movement of a finger at the side of her head—implying that Mr. Joyce was “crazy.” And…the camera cut away from the segment and back to her just as she was making the gestures. Trioli abruptly stopped what she doing, went back to her serious news face, and continued the broadcast. Trioli was forced to make a shamefaced on-air apology to viewers the next day.

  THE PUNKIEST OF PUNKS

  Stiv Bators was a major star in the late ’70s punk rock scene as the front man of the Dead Boys. After playing a murderous juvenile delinquent in John Waters’s cult comedy Polyester, Bators went to England to form the goth rock band the Lords of the New Church. Bators’s stage antics were brutal. He often stuck his head inside the bass drum during loud jams. One time, he banged his head on an amplifier so hard he cracked his skull. (After receiving a few stitches, he was back onstage for the second set.) Another time, Bators tossed his microphone cord over a rafter above the stage, wrapped it around his neck, and started pulling himself up. Some of the crowd members then “helped” him by pulling on the cord even more. Seeing the look of panic in Bators’s eyes, his bandmates quickly freed him, but he wasn’t breathing. Paramedics actually pronounced him dead before they were able to revive him.

  None of those antics killed Bators, but they increased his pain threshold so much that he literally didn’t feel much pain as the years went on. That’s why in 1990, while in Paris to record new music, Bators didn’t think he needed any medical attention when he got hit by a taxi while crossing the street. After leaving the hospital because it was “too busy,” he walked four miles in the rain to meet his girlfriend at their hotel room. He told her about the accident, but said he felt fine. Later that night he had trouble breathing, so his girlfriend called an ambulance. He was dead before it arrived.

  It turned out that Bators had suffered a concussion and severe internal injuries from the accident. Had he been in more pain, he might have allowed the doctors to treat him, and he may have survived.

  THREE DUMB DOCTORS

  •John Hunter was a preeminent research scientist in the 18th century. He injected himself with several different diseases to study their effects. That’s how, in 1793, he discovered that syphilis is fatal.

  •A smallpox epidemic struck France in 1715 and spared no one, not even the royal family. At their palace in Versailles, court doctor Guy Fagon prescribed purges, emetics, and bleeding. Within two weeks, the entire royal family was dead. All except for Louis XV, a baby, who was spared because his nurse didn’t trust Fagon and kept him hidden.

  •Harold Senby of Leeds, England, visited his doctor in 1978 to check on his hearing loss. His hearing instantly improved when the doctor removed his hearing aid—it had been made for his left ear, but installed in his right. In 1958.

  MEET YOUR NEW FAKE PRESIDENT

  In preparation for a victory in the 2012 presidential election, the Mitt Romney campaign created the Office of the President-Elect website to provide information about Romney’s administration.

  Either the campaign assumed it had the election in the bag, or it was set to go live on Election Night and nobody told it not to, but the site went live on Election Night 2012, just moments after major news outlets had called the election…for President Barack Obama. The Romney team pulled the site down in minutes, but several bloggers had already visited the site and saved screenshots. Among the highlights of the website from an alternate universe in which Romney won:

  •Romney’s welcome message: “I’m excited about our prospects as a nation. My priority is putting people back to work in America.”
Next to it was an image of a solemn Romney superimposed over an American flag.

  •Details about “The Inauguration: January 21, 2013, in Washington, D.C.”

  •How to apply for a job in the new administration.

  BIZARRE BASEBALL INJURIES

  Mickey Tettleton went on the disabled list for athlete’s foot, which he got from habitually tying his shoes too tight.

  Rickey Henderson missed several games because of frostbite— he fell asleep on an ice pack.

  Pitcher John Smoltz once burned his chest. He’d ironed a shirt…while still wearing it.

  Marty Cordova went on the injured list after burning his face in a tanning bed.

  Outfielder Terry Harper once high-fived a teammate. The act separated his shoulder.

  Pitcher Clarence Blethen took out his false teeth during a game and put them in his back pocket. Later, while he was sliding into second base, the teeth clamped down and bit him on the butt.

  During the 1985 National League Championship Series, St. Louis Cardinals out-fielder Vince Coleman was fooling around on the field and managed to get rolled up inside the stadium’s tarp-rolling machine.

  THE ROADSIDE BACHELOR PARTY

  In June 2001, a group of guys threw a weekendlong bachelor party for a friend in Wiltshire, England. Early on Sunday afternoon, a bunch of the men grabbed the groom and his best man—the whole lot of them drunk—stuffed them into a car, drove them several miles down a major highway until they got to a very rural area, pulled over, dragged the men out of the car, and stripped them both naked.

  They then covered the men with raw eggs, tomato sauce, and flour—and handcuffed their hands together. Then they drove off. Startled motorists called police some time later, when they saw the handcuffed accidental streakers stumbling along the side of the highway, coated in what looked like powdered vomit. After several hours the men were finally rescued—but not before they’d both gotten serious cases of sunburn on what was an uncharacteristically hot day. “They were very red,” a police officer said. “Some bits were redder than others…if you know what I mean.” Police got the men cleaned up, gave them paper gowns (like hospital gowns), and took them home. They said they would not be identifying the men…to spare them any further embarrassment.

  MILD ANIMALS

  Ah! “Coyote”! In spring 2009, a jogger in Sarnia, Ontario, got spooked when she encountered a coyote. She ran to a nearby construction site and told a worker that the coyote had barked at her, and that it looked like it was going to chase her. The construction worker called police, who found the coyote, surrounded it, and put the animal out of commission. It was quite easy—it was a cardboard, photo-realistic cutout of a coyote. Sarnia had not been aware that Sudbury, Ontario—a city 250 miles away—had installed the $30 cardboard coyote to scare away geese that were pooping all over a park. The coyote had worked well…until somebody stole it and dumped it in Sarnia.

  Ah! “Alligator”! Responding to a call of an alligator threatening kids in an Independence, Missouri, neighborhood in May 2011, police officers located the creature in a yard belonging to Rick Sheridan. They fired two rounds into the animal. That’s when Sheridan came running outside, yelling, “What are you doing? It’s made of concrete!” When asked why he had a concrete alligator in his yard, Sheridan explained that it works better than a “No Trespassing” sign, or at least it usually does.

  FAILED GOVERNMENT

  Fire bad. New Mexico fire officials started a prescribed burn in May 2000 on Cerro Grande Mountain, not far from the town of Los Alamos, intending to clear out underbrush in order to make the area more resistant to forest fires. The high winds and drought conditions should have given officials a clue that maybe it wasn’t the best time, but they were concerned that a worse fire might break out if they didn’t. But it quickly got out of control. The Cerro Grande Fire lasted four months, burned through 48,000 acres, and destroyed 235 homes in Los Alamos. Total cost of the disaster: $1 billion.

  Mind the gap. New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority officials were left red-faced in January 2009 when the opening of a new subway station had to be postponed. Reason: The gap between the platform and the train car was four inches wide. Although that distance wouldn’t pose a danger to most people, it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which specifies that the gap can be no larger than three inches. The goof was blamed on the engineers, who had failed to take into account the slight curve of the platform. Cost of the extra inch: a two-month delay in opening the station and $200,000 to extend the platform.

  LOVE HURTS

  LOVE AND DEATH

  A man and woman were visiting the grave of one of the woman’s relatives in Ahavath Israel Cemetery in Hamilton, New Jersey, in May 2011. Things took an amorous turn (as they do in cemeteries), and the two ended up engaging in what police called “extracurricular activities” up against a headstone. Not sexy: The headstone fell on the woman’s leg and broke it. Her partner called 911, and the woman was rushed to a hospital. Police investigated the matter and decided to not press charges against—or publicly identify—the duo.

  LOVE TAKES WORK

  In November 2007, an Australian woman was on a business trip in a rural Australian town, and one night while there she met up with a friend for dinner. Afterward, they went back to her hotel room, where they had sex. While having what was apparently quite a rambunctious time, a glass light fixture was knocked off the wall above the bed—and landed on the woman’s face and broke. She required treatment for facial lacerations at a local hospital. The case made international news because the woman filed for worker’s compensation for her out-of-town, after-hours, sex-related injury—and got it. Comcare, Australia’s worker’s compensation organization, initially refused the woman’s claim, but in April 2012, after more than four years of legal wrangling, a federal judge ordered them to pay. “If the applicant had been injured while playing a game of cards in her motel room, she would be entitled to compensation,” the judge said, and ruled it was the same for any other “legal recreational activity.”

  LOVE ON THE SILVER SCREEN

  An Egyptian man identified only as “Ramadan” visited an Internet café in April 2012 and watched some porn videos. One of them, he noticed, starred his wife. He ran home, and his wife angrily denied the scurrilous accusation…and then confessed when the man showed her the proof. (He had found her in no fewer than 11 different homemade porn videos, Egyptian newspapers reported.) The woman went on to tell her husband that she had never loved him (they had four children together) and that she had been having an affair with (and filming sex acts with) a boyfriend (whom she had known before her marriage) for years. At last report, the husband said he wasn’t sure if he’d be asking for a divorce. Bonus: The man told reporters that it was the very first time he had ever watched porn in his life. And that he’d only done it because he was “curious.”

  LOVE AND PROTECTION

  A Romanian couple with five children decided in September 2004 that they didn’t want to have any more kids—but they wanted to keep having sex. They decided that the husband, 43-year-old Nicolae Popovici, would start using condoms. Popovici secured his first prophylactic with Super Glue. When he was later unable to remove it, he went to a hospital where doctors spent several hours removing the condom. The couple told doctors that part of the reason they had glued the condom on was because it was a bit “roomy,” and the glue had helped it stay on. A nurse who had treated the man added that Mr. Popovici “thought the condom could be used several times, and he wanted it stuck on his penis so he could use it again later.”

  LOVE ON THE RUN

  One night in September 2012, Amanda Linscott engaged in sexual activity with a man she had met at a bar in Port Charlotte, Florida. The man was driving a car while said activity was occurring. Sometime during the encounter, Linscott demanded that the man give her money. The man said he didn’t have any, so Linscott pulled a revolver out of her purse and pressed it to the man’s head. The man grabbed t
he gun, punched Linscott, the two fought, the car careened into a palm tree, went airborne, and plowed through two yards before finally coming to a halt. Linscott jumped from the car and fled, but was arrested a short time later. She was charged with armed robbery. The man was not charged with a crime.

  YES, VIRGINIA…

  The Elf on the Shelf is a gift-shop staple and a modern-day Christmas tradition. Parents buy their kids a Santa’s elf doll and name it, thus imbuing it with magical powers. It then sits somewhere in the home and serves as Santa’s eyes and ears in the weeks leading up to Christmas, supposedly giving a report to the Man in Red each night before moving to a new perch in the child’s home. One big rule: Kids are not allowed to touch the elves, as it drains them of their elfin magic…and reflects poorly on the children when Santa is making his naughty-or-nice list.