THE VERDICT: Judges don’t like it when litigants change their story. Olson not only lost the case, she was ordered to pay Cohen’s court costs, $17,000. The bingo scene was cut from the final film.
THE PLAINTIFF: 1980s New Wave band Devo
THE DEFENDANT: McDonald’s restaurants
THE LAWSUIT: Who knew Devo’s red “Energy Dome” hats were copyrighted? McDonald’s apparently didn’t...until the band tried to sue the company in 2008. Reason for the suit: Devo was upset about a Happy Meal toy that promoted Fox’s American Idol. The toys included Disco Dave, Country Clay, Rockin’ Riley, Soulful Selma, and the subject of this lawsuit, New Wave Nigel, who wears a Devo-style red hat that looks like a futuristic flower pot. According to Devo member Jerry Casale, “They didn’t ask us for permission. Plus, we don’t like McDonald’s or American Idol, so we’re doubly offended.” He added that it’s “ironic” that a giant corporation would use a hat that was designed to “mock industrial and consumer culture.”
Over 60% of all home computers are infected with malicious software, or “malware.”
THE VERDICT: The suit was dropped...by Devo. In a 2009 interview, Casale said he wasn’t allowed to talk about the case, but then added, “McDonald’s was so frightening with the legal process that I realized how true power works: What they say goes.”
THE PLAINTIFF: Lindsay Lohan, actress and former child star
THE DEFENDANT: E-Trade Financial Corp.
THE LAWSUIT: E-Trade’s popular ad campaign features babies who talk like adults about how easy it is to trade stocks online. In its 2010 Super Bowl commercial, seen by 100 million people, a male baby is arguing with a female baby over another female baby named Lindsay, who is called a “milkaholic.” The ad aired at a time when Lohan’s struggles with substance abuse were well-covered in the tabloids. Lohan accused E-Trade of capitalizing on her “infamy” without her permission. Her lawyer said, “These babies weren’t just cute babies but were actually portraying Lohan and her friends.” An E-Trade official called the suit “without merit,” adding that there are “a lot of people named Lindsay.” THE VERDICT: Despite what the company said, it was pretty obvious to all concerned that E-Trade was in fact referencing Lohan. The case was settled out of court, and although it wasn’t reported how much Lohan received from E-Trade, her publicist said she was “very happy” with the amount.
4 REAL SCHOOL NAMES
Butts Road Primary School
Goodenough College
Universidad de Moron
Pansy Kidd Middle School
Like father, like son: John Wilkes Booth’s father sent a death threat to Pres. Andrew Jackson.
BATHROOM FINDS
If you’re reading this in the bathroom right now, look carefully around the room. There may be something very valuable within reach, and we’re not just talking about this fabulous book in your hands....
Found in the bathroom: A Chinese brush pot
what it was doing there: Holding toothbrushes
Story: Gordon Murray was a pretty savvy antiques collector. He’d started buying antiques as a boy in Aberdeen, Scotland, in the 1950s, and even owned his own shop. Still, even he slipped up now and again. For example, he ran across a small unremarkable Chinese brush pot, used by scribes to hold their writing implements. Not knowing what else to do with it, he put it in the bathroom and used it as a toothbrush holder, where it did service for years. In 2010 Murray decided to put some of his curio collection up for auction, and tossed his Chinese pot into the mix, figuring it was good for maybe a few hundred dollars. He was way off. Buyers kept bidding the price up...and up...and up. How much did Murray’s antique toothbrush holder ultimately bring? £30,000 ($49,000).
Found in the bathroom: A diamond
What it was doing there: Hiding
Story: In 2007 guards at Theo Branch Jail in Orange, California, removed a drain screen in the prisoners’ shower and found a 2-karat diamond. They weren’t surprised: A prisoner told them they’d find it there. And the prisoner, Bret Langford, knew what he was talking about: He was in prison on suspicion of stealing it.
The story begins two years earlier. Langford matched the description of a guy who, according to the owner of a mall jewelry store, strolled into his store and grabbed the $25,000 diamond, then dashed out. When police searched Langford’s car, they discovered the diamond’s certificate of authenticity stuffed inside the gas tank flap. They assumed they’d find the diamond, too—maybe in the gas tank—but the search revealed nothing. It turned out that when the cops pulled him over, Langford had swallowed the diamond, and after he was taken to jail, he regurgitated it. During the following 10 months, he’d played a cat-and-mouth game, keeping the diamond tucked in the layers of his prison wristband and swallowing it whenever he knew he was going to be searched. One day, however, as Langford was preparing for a shower, guards staged a surprise inspection, allowing him just enough time to toss the gem into a shower stall, where it rolled right into the drain.
Scientists have discovered how to make diamonds out of tequila.
As with many things in a prison, the drain was very securely attached to the floor, and after 14 months Langford realized he’d never be able to retrieve the diamond. But maybe he could use it to make a deal for a lesser penalty in his upcoming trial and avoid a “Three Strikes” sentence of 25 years to life for his third conviction. (At 18, he’d been convicted of stealing $250,000 worth of gold from the dental supply house he worked for; not long after that, he was convicted of domestic violence.)
Langford, now offering his services to the government, claimed that the owner of the jewelry shop owed him $75,000 and that he’d taken the loose diamond as partial payment. When the store’s video-surveillance footage didn’t support the police’s grab-and-dash scenario, the district attorney cut a deal: Tell them where to find the diamond and get a reduction on the charges. Langford sang, the jeweler got his diamond back, and the judge sentenced Langford to time already served.
Found in the bathroom: A very rare book
What it was doing there: Bathroom reading
Story: In 1859 naturalist Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking On the Origin of Species after decades of observation and reflection on the process of evolution and natural selection. His publisher, John Murray III, cautiously printed only 1,250 copies. Although understandable, considering that the cover price was 15 shillings (the equivalent of $83 in today’s money), his reticence was unwarranted: Buyers depleted the publisher’s entire stock within a few days. Fast-forward to 2009. A man, fresh from a commemorative exhibit of the book’s 150th anniversary, stepped into his father-in-law’s bathroom and perused a shelf stocked with an assortment of bathroom reading. His heart nearly stopped when he saw a familiar cover and discovered that his wife’s dad owned one of Darwin’s first editions. He asked how his father-in-law had gotten it and why it was in the loo. The man shrugged, saying he bought it for a few shillings in a rural used bookstore back in the 1950s. They immediately took it to Christie’s auction house, and were stunned to find out that the few shillings purchase was now worth “maybe as much as 60,000 pounds” (about $100,000). But even the experts at Christie’s were stunned when the bathroom book brought in nearly twice that. (One more surprise: The word “evolution” never appears in the first edition. Darwin didn’t use the term until he revised the text for its sixth printing, in 1872.)
Lichens are actually two living creatures in one: a green plant and a fungus.
Found in the bathroom: $182,000 in Depression-era currency
What it was doing there: Being stored for safekeeping.
Story: Finding treasures in the bathroom doesn’t always work out well. Take the case of contractor Bob Kitts and his former classmate, Amanda Reece. In 2006 Reece hired Kitts to remodel a bathroom in her 83-year-old house near Cleveland, Ohio. While Kitts was ripping out the old walls, he discovered two lockboxes filled with envelopes of cash—$135,000 in one, $22,000 in the other—hidden beh
ind the medicine cabinet. Two days later, he found a cardboard box with $25,000 in the wall behind the bathtub. He immediately called Reece and after a giddy interval of unwrapping and counting bills, things quickly soured between the two. She offered to Kitts 10 percent of the money; he wanted 40 percent. She refused, so he went to a lawyer, who told him that the law favored him. Then things got worse. The story was picked up by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and descendants of Patrick Dunne, the man who had owned the house until his death, saw it. They noted that the envelopes were labeled “The P. Dunne News Agency” and sued Reece for the money. Too late: By the time the case got to court, the money had dwindled dramatically. Reece testified that she’d spent around $25,000 on herself and $14,000 on a trip to Hawaii with her mother, sold $54,600 of the rare bills to a coin dealer, and lost $60,000. (She claimed it was stolen from her closet.) What was left? $25,230. The court ruled that 86.3% of it should go to Patrick Dunne’s 21 heirs and the rest should go to Kitts. In the aftermath, Reece lost the home in foreclosure and filed for bankruptcy. And Kitts, who had to split his share of the money with his lawyer, ended up with only $2,700 and complained that he’d lost business because he had been portrayed as a greedy “bad guy” in news reports.
Wrap artists: It took ancient Egyptian embalmers 15 days to wrap a mummy.
ROBOTS IN THE NEWS
Robots are getting smarter and more advanced every day. Familiarize yourself with these recent developments, puny human.
CASHIER-BOT
Since the 1980s, UPC codes and cash register scanners have automated most of the checkout process. So why not replace the cashier with a robot? In 2011 a Stanford University team unveiled PR2 (for “Personal Robot 2”), a robot that can scan and bag groceries. It uses a high-speed articulated hand to pick up and rotate each item until it finds and carefully scans the barcode. A computer then looks up the pricing data and the PR2 tosses the item into a sack. (The Stanford team is still working on the robot’s bagging skills.)
BABBLE-BOT
In May 2011, Scientists at the University of Queensland in Australia gave robots one of the tools they need to become sentient: They taught them how to develop their own language, independent of what they are programmed to know by humans. The “lingo-droids” wander around a room and make up words for things, then relay that information to other lingodroids. Choosing from a set of programmed syllables, such as “ku,” “rey,” “za,” and “la,” a robot that finds itself in an unfamiliar area will pick an unused syllable combination, then point to the place and say the word to the other robots. Then the information is reinforced with games. For example, one robot will say “ku-zo,” then two other robots will race to where they think “ku-zo” is. At that point, all three robots have learned a new word they made up themselves.
DISMEM-BOT
If giving robots the ability to speak without humans knowing what they’re talking about sounds scary, it’s nothing compared to the robot that’s outfitted with so many motors and sharp knives that it can completely debone a chicken in 2.5 seconds. The Japanese-built Mayekawa Automatic Chicken Deboner butchers 1,500 birds in an hour and costs $560,000. (It’s for commercial processing plants, not home cooks.) Another feature: It accounts for variations from chicken to chicken—in milliseconds. It photo-scans each one, then processes the data and adjust its blades slightly to realign the depth and location of each cut. Then it grabs hold of the chicken’s wings and rips the meat off of the rib cage.
Q: How many first ladies have visited Sesame Street? A: Four (so far)—Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama.
BUM-BOT
British artist Tim Pryde designed a robot that solicits donations for charity. It’s name: DON-8r. (Get it?) A waist-high, white, pod-shaped droid that resembles EVE from Wall-E, DON-8r detects when humans are nearby, and then calls out to them in a traditionally mechanical “robot” voice to ask for money. If the human obliges and inserts a few coins into DON-8r’s donation slot, it leaves them alone and retreats...a few feet, then returns to ask for more.
NURSE-BOT
For the past decade or so, robots have played an increasing role in healthcare, be it robotic cameras that explore inside the human body or robotic arms that assist in surgery. But what about nursing? Researchers at Georgia Tech were curious to know whether people are ready for a robot to do the job that’s usually done by a nurturing human. So they did a study. A nurse-robot named Cody would touch a human subject on the arm. Intent seemed to matter most: If told Cody was cleaning their arm, the test subjects reacted favorably. If told Cody was attempting to comfort them, the subjects responded negatively.
PIRATE-BOT
After the wave of pirate attacks off the coast of Africa, an American company called Recon Robotics is developing a remote-controlled robot that can help rescue trapped ships and hostages. About the size of a soda can, the ship-boarding bot is fired from a distance (out of a cannon) and attaches itself to the enemy ship’s hull with magnetic wheels. Then it “walks” up and over the side of the ship. Once on board, it sends video images back to the controller. Recon is working in cooperation with the U.S. Navy. They want to keep the anti-pirate robot out of the private sector so it doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people...specifically, real pirates who would use it to raid other ships.
EDIFICE COMPLEX
Think the old woman who lived in a shoe had weird taste in housing? It turns out she was just ahead of her time. Buildings can look like all sorts of things. Even...
AN IGLOO
Crouched on the Parks Highway about 180 miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska, is a hulking four-story igloo. Its dome can be spotted from an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. Built in the 1970s, the igloo was meant to give tourists a chance to visit a “real” Alaskan igloo. Igloo City, as it’s known, has been a convenience store, a gas station, a makeshift triage clinic for a man attacked by a grizzly bear, and an emergency airplane refueling stop (a small plane once landed on the highway and taxied in for gas). But other than part of the ground floor, the igloo itself has never been used. It was supposed to be a motel, but the couple who built it forgot something important: building codes. The structure never passed inspection, and its owners went broke.
...THE WORLD’S LARGEST CHEST
In the 1920s, the High Point, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce built its first building-sized chest of drawers. Twenty feet tall, the giant chest served as the chamber’s Bureau of Information and helped to promote the city’s image as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” In 1996 the chest was augmented, making it 38 feet tall. In 2010, upset with the city’s refusal to help with the upkeep of the landmark, Pam Stern, the building’s owner, had the chest measured for a giant bra: 20 feet of silk, spandex, and underwiring. (Get it? A chest of drawers.) HanesBrands Inc., maker of Playtex bras, sent engineers over to take the chest’s measurements. Whether the city will permit the chest to wear the bra remains unknown at this time.
...A CHICKEN
A 56-foot-tall chicken head juts from the roof of the Kentucky Fried Chicken at the corner of Roswell Street and Cobb Parkway in Marietta, Georgia. Locals use it as a landmark when giving directions: “Turn right, after you pass the Big Chicken.” The architectural whimsy, built in 1963, was a Johnny Reb’s Chick, Chuck and Shakes fried-chicken restaurant until 1966, when the owner, Tubby Davis, sold it to his brother, who turned it into a KFC. In 1993 the chicken suffered wind damage and might have been demolished were it not considered too important to be axed. Reason: Pilots use the building as a reference point when approaching Atlanta and nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base.
What were Chewco, Obi-1 Holdings, and Kenobe? The names of Enron subsidiaries.
...A NAUTILUS SHELL
In 2006 a young family in Mexico City decided to ditch their conventional home and build one more in harmony with nature. From above, their new house looks like the perfect spiral of a nautilus shell. From the front lawn, it looks like a soft-serve ice cream sund
ae. The frame for the building consists of steel-reinforced chicken wire that’s covered in a two-inch layer of stucco, inside and out. Stained-glass bubbles in the walls sparkle like sunlight on water. A stone walkway spirals from room to room on a bed of live plants, creating the sensation of floating above the ocean floor. The bathroom’s sandy walls and blue tiles offer users the illusion of being underwater. Family memebers say the Nautilus House makes them feel “like a mollusk in its shell, moving from one chamber to another.”
...MR. ROBOTO
In 1986 Thai architect Sumet Jumsai designed the new Bank of Asia in Bangkok to reflect the computerization of banking going on at the time. Result: The $10 million, 20-story building looks like a giant LEGO robot. The “robot” has two antennae that serve as lightning rods, and glass eyes with louvered metallic lids that serve as windows. Jumsai wanted the building to “free the spirit from the present architectural intellectual impasse and propel it forward into the next century.” The inspiration for what has been called a post-high-tech marvel? His son’s toy robot.
If you’re average, you’ll spend 25 years of your life working and 2 years socializing.
...AN EGG
The owner of a European ad agency wanted to add an office next to her lakeside house in Belgium, and hired the design firm dmvA to come up with something organic-looking that could be built without cutting down a single tree. Local authorities refused to issue a building permit because city council members thought the design was too weird: The building—nicknamed “the blob”—looked like a giant white egg. To get around the council, the designer turned the egg into a mobile unit so it would qualify as a work of art, not a building. The structure consists of a wooden frame with a polyester skin and an ultra-modern grid of niches molded into the interior for storage. The interior features lighting, a sleeping shelf, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The pointy end of the egg (the egg is on its side) opens up to create a porch. After the project, known as the Blob VB3, was completed, the unique structure appeared in a Belgian newspaper under the heading “Art skirts building regulations.” The next day, someone at the building council showed up to warn the owner that if the egg was placed near the house, there would be consequences. Dubbed the “rovin’ ovum” by its fans, the Blob VB3 went on the auction block in 2010. (No word as to whether anyone had the huevos to buy it.)
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