Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader®

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  SORRY, FINLAND

  Question: What is Scandinavia?

  Answer: It’s a region in northern Europe. The name is usually used to describe the area encompassing Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Technically, however, Finland is not part of Scandinavia because Scandinavia is the landmass of the Scandinavian Peninsula, comprising Norway and Sweden. Finland is attached to mainland Europe, and historically and culturally has more in common with its Russian neighbors than its Scandinavian neighbors. Denmark is included because true Scandinavia is the ancestral home of the people who founded Denmark, and because Denmark once controlled the Scandinavian Peninsula.

  Record for most balloon animals made in one hour: 747, or about 1 every 5 seconds.

  ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

  Question: What is Kaliningrad?

  Answer: Nestled in between Lithuania and the Baltic Sea is a 5,080-square-mile swath of land that, on most maps, is probably unlabeled and colored the same shade as Russia. This is Kaliningrad, an exclave oblast. That means it’s a non-connected (exclave, the opposite of an enclave) district (oblast) of another country, in this case Russia. It’s fully run by the Russian government, even though it isn’t directly connected by land. It used to be...sort of. Before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, mutual neighbor Lithuania was a Soviet republic. But Lithuania became an independent nation, while Kaliningrad, which was a Russian district rather than a Soviet republic, remained in Russian hands.

  RANDOM ODDITIES

  Not quite exclaves, these are places where countries ceded small plots of land to foreign entities for various reasons.

  • French author Victor Hugo lived on Guernsey, a British island in the English Channel, off the coast of France. In 1927 the house in which Hugo lived and the land on which it stands were ceded not only to France, but to the landlocked city of Paris, which is more than 215 miles away.

  • The Vimy Memorial in France commemorates the Battle of Vimy Ridge in World War I. In 1922 France ceded the memorial (and the land beneath it) to Canada, in tribute to that nation’s contributions to the Allied effort in World War I.

  • The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial commemorates the massive storming of the beaches in far-northern France during World War II, and is the final resting place of more than 9,000 American troops who died in the battle. The land is officially United States territory.

  • Two cemeteries off the coast of North Carolina—one on Ocracoke Island, the other on Hatteras Island—are the final resting places for British sailors killed in German U-Boat attacks during World War II. Both were ceded to the United Kingdom.

  Makes sense: The term “brain freeze” was invented by 7-Eleven.

  18 WHEELS OF TERROR

  Whether you’re driving a big rig, driving next to a big rig, or even walking around on top of a big rig, you’re never far from danger. Here are some harrowing stories of survival.

  BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

  Colin Tandy was driving his truck up the appropriately named Tumbledown Bay Road in Marlborough, New Zealand, in 2011. It was dawn, and he was just coming around a curve when the rising sun blasted him in the eyes. He slammed on the brakes, but the truck slipped off the edge of the road and started falling down the heavily forested cliffside. “I actually remember rolling about four times,” he said. “I knew the sea was down there, so I ripped off my seatbelt as I didn’t want to drown.” Tandy was thrown from the cab, which turned out to be a good thing because it was crushed. He didn’t fare much better than the cab, though: He tore all of his lower back muscles, pulled five vertebrae, broke eight ribs and both hips, and split his pelvis. And he couldn’t feel a thing below his waist. Doctors informed Tandy that he’d never walk again. They were wrong. Only a few days later, and before the first of many scheduled operations, he could feel his toes tingling. A few weeks later, he walked out of the hospital and has since made a full recovery. (Upon his release, he announced that he would compete on the World’s Toughest Trucker reality TV show in his native England.)

  FLAT ON THE FREEWAY

  A rainy day in Los Angeles led to a horrific accident on a highway overpass. When rescue crews arrived, a semi that had skidded on the freeway was lying on its side. Witnesses shouted that there was a car stuck under the truck’s trailer. With little hope for survivors, firefighters began emptying the trailer’s heavy load while a crane was brought in to lift it up. When it finally did, the car’s driver was still alive. After rescuers used the jaws of life to free him, to everyone’s amazement, he actually climbed out of the crushed car on his own and started walking around. He didn’t have a scratch. According to his doctor, “He’s done remarkably well for somebody who spent that much time under a truck.”

  A pill bug can drink through its rear end.

  TWIST AND SHOUT

  Jeremiah Morrison saw the tornado on the road ahead of him. He pulled his truck over on I-40 in central Oklahoma, and was about to get out and look for a ditch to take shelter in. Then Morrison lost sight of the tornado. Thinking it was gone, he reached for his seatbelt. All of a sudden the twister was right on top of him, lifting the truck off the ground and tearing it apart. “I felt myself bouncing around in the cab and somehow or other I went out the window,” he recalled. His rig was demolished. Had Morrison succeeded in fastening his seatbelt, he most likely would have been demolished, too. Instead, all he received were a few bruises and a fractured shoulder.

  FRUIT OF THE DOOM

  While driving his big rig on a Pennsylvania highway in 2011, Richard Paylor, 55, started choking on an apple. He blacked out and then plowed into the concrete center divide. On impact, he was thrown forward into his steering wheel with such force that it dislodged the apple from his throat. Paylor’s amazing story was confirmed when police found a chunk of regurgitated apple stuck to the semi’s dashboard. “I guess it wasn’t my time,” he said.

  BLOWUP

  In 2011 Steven McCormack, a 48-year-old New Zealand truck driver, was getting his rig ready for a job. While climbing in between the cab and the trailer, he lost his footing and fell backward onto the hose that feeds compressed air into the brakes. The hose dislodged, and the nozzle pierced McCormack’s left buttock. To his horror, he started filling up with pressurized air at 100 pounds per square inch! Unable to move, he screamed for help, but his workmates had a tough time reaching him. As his neck, hands, chest, and face were balling up to twice their normal size, he knew he was about to pop. Finally, someone shut off the air valve. McCormack was rushed to a hospital, where doctors were amazed to discover that many of his muscles had actually separated from the fat they were connected to. In addition, McCormack’s skin was full of tiny bubbles. Doctors drained fluid from one of his lungs, but it took three days for him to return to his normal size. How? “I had to do a lot of burping and farting,” he said.

  Tallest actress to win an Oscar: 6'0" Geena Davis. (The Accidental Tourist, 1988.)

  NAMED FOR A SHIP

  Turns out there are a lot of places around the world named after ships. (We didn’t sea that coming.)

  AJAX, ONTARIO

  During World War II, the area this town now inhabits was an unnamed region outside of Toronto known for its massive artillery plant—which manufactured more than 40 million shells for the Allies during the war. When the town was incorporated in 1955, a naming contest was held among the plant’s employees. Winner: Ajax, after the HMS Ajax, a British warship that had played an important role in the first major naval victory of World War II—the Battle of River Plate (off Uruguay) in December 1939. (The plant made shells that were used in the battle.) When the ship was finally scrapped in 1988, the British government presented the Ajax’s anchor to the town of Ajax. It sits in front of a Royal Canadian Legion headquarters there today.

  FRANKLIN POINT, CALIFORNIA

  On January 17, 1865, the clipper ship Sir John Franklin, named after a famed British explorer, was headed up the California coast with a load of lumber, pianos, and 300 barrels of liquor, boun
d for San Francisco. Just 50 miles south of her destination, and after 24 hours in dense fog, the ship smashed into rocks and sank. The skipper and 11 crewmembers were lost. Just six bodies were recovered: Two were buried in San Francisco, and four were buried on the point where the ship went down. It had been called “Middle Point” up to that time, but after the wreck the name was changed to Franklin Point in honor of the stricken ship.

  KWINANA, AUSTRALIA

  The Australian ship SS Kwinana had an awful streak of luck between 1920 and 1922. On Christmas Day, 1920, the ship was severely damaged by a fire off the southwest Australia coast. While being towed to Perth for repairs, it collided with another ship and was badly damaged again. The ship was anchored offshore while its owners tried to figure out what to do with it...until the anchor line snapped during a gale and the ship was blown onto a nearby beach. The beach became associated with the wreck, and when the area around it became a town in the mid-1930s, they named the town in honor of the ship. (The word kwinana comes from an Australian Aboriginal language and means “pretty woman.”)

  Household tip: Wood smoke is a good skunk-odor remover.

  ORACLE, ARIZONA

  Albert Weldon left New Brunswick, Canada, in 1878 and sailed around South America to the west coast of America, hoping to strike it rich prospecting for silver and gold. He named his first successful mine, located in southern Arizona, after the ship that had brought him from New Brunswick. A community grew around that mine, and a post office opened there in 1880. The name of the new town was taken from the mine, which had been taken from the ship: the Oracle.

  ARNISTON, SOUTH AFRICA

  In May 1815, the Arniston, a ship licensed by the British East India Company, was returning to England when a navigational error by the captain drove it toward rocks off a barren strip of the southern coast of Africa. Three anchors were dropped to halt the ship; two snapped immediately. The skipper ordered the last line cut so they could at least wreck in daylight, which they did, less than a mile offshore. Just six of the 378 people onboard survived. The spot became known as Arniston, and it is the official name of the South African tourist town located there today. (The underwater remains of the Arniston were discovered in 1982. The shipwreck is now a South African national monument.)

  COLLAROY, AUSTRALIA

  The SS Collaroy was an English-built, iron-clad, coal-powered paddle ship, the first of its kind in Australia when it arrived there in 1854. After nearly three decades of service, the ship was making its regular 100-mile run between Newcastle and Sydney along Australia’s southeast coast when, on January 20, 1881, it got lost in deep fog and ran straight onto a beach. All 40 people onboard, along with 30 sheep and 40 pigs, simply walked off the boat onto the beach. Tugs were unable to free the ship—so there she sat for the next three years. The beached ship became such an attraction that businesses sprang up in the area to accommodate the visitors, and when the region finally became a town in 1906, it was named in honor of the ship that had drawn it so much attention. The SS Collaroy was removed from the beach in 1884, refitted, and put out to sea again...only to sink off California in 1889.

  You emit half a ton of carbon each year just by breathing.

  OTHER BOAT-RELATED PLACES

  • Cannon Beach, Oregon, is so named because a cannon was found there in 1898. It came from the USS Shark, a U.S. Navy ship that had wrecked in the vicinity 52 years earlier.

  • Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, is named after the Mary Sachs, one of the three ships purchased by the government for the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913.

  • Monitor, California, a Sierra Nevada Mountain town near Lake Tahoe, was named in 1863 after the iron-clad Civil War battleship USS Monitor. (Monitor no longer exists—it’s a ghost town.)

  • Heart’s Desire, Newfoundland and Labrador, according to celebrated Canadian author Harold Horwood, was named after a pirate ship that wreaked havoc all over the North Atlantic in the early 1600s.

  • Port Oneida, Michigan, on the northwest shore of Lake Michigan, was named after the first boat known to have docked in the region, a New York-based steamship called the SS Oneida.

  • The Columbia River, in the United States’ Pacific Northwest, was named by explorer Robert Gray, who sailed into its mouth in 1792, the first person of European origin known to have ever done so. He named the river after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva.

  POLITICAL TRIVIA

  Q: More Americans voted for this man than any other man in the nation’s history. Who?

  A: Richard M. Nixon. In his 30-year political career, he received several hundred millions of votes. How? He ran for Congress twice, vice president twice, governor of California once, and president three times, winning the final election in a landslide.

  New York drifts about 1 inch farther from London every year.

  ODD JOBS

  You think you hate your job? At least you’re not a bodily fluid collection squeezer. (If you are, our apologies—now get back to squeezing!)

  TICK DRAGGER. Yale epidemiologist Durland Fish hires students to collect ticks. The job requires dragging a white corduroy sheet through overgrown forests. Every 20 yards, tick draggers must stop, use tweezers to pluck the ticks they’ve collected from the sheet—up to 1,000 per day—and drop them into a jar. Though they wear protective clothing from head to toe, the tick draggers do get bitten, which makes them susceptible to tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease. (Ironically, the purpose of this endeavor is to study Lyme disease.)

  RAISIN WATCHER. Workers at a British cake factory sit all day, watching raisins pass by on a conveyor belt. Their task? To ensure that no two raisins go by stuck together. When the raisins get to the end of the belt, they all fall into a single bin.

  BODILY FLUID COLLECTION SQUEEZER. (Warning: This is a little gross.) At the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria, Australia, microbiologists are studying the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in large populations. The best collection medium they’ve found so far: used tampons. Turns out that women are statistically more apt to participate in such studies when they collect specimens themselves, rather than submitting to an invasive procedure done by a doctor. The biggest problem for the microbiologists comes at the extraction stage. Normally, a centrifuge would be used to extract fluids for testing, but tampons are designed to retain fluids. According to Dr. Suzanne Garland, “Optimal recovery requires manual squeezing.”

  ANT HUNTER. These people spend their days sticking straws into the tops of anthills and blowing into them until ants—5,000 to 50,000 at a time—swarm out. They capture the agitated insects in a tin scoop and then quickly transfer them to mason jars and move on to the next hill. Why do they hunt ants? Ant farms. Uncle Milton’s Ant Farms are popular science-based toys—more than 20 million farms have sold since 1956—but they don’t come with ants. Without water, ants can survive for only three days, so each farm includes a certificate for live ants. (You send in the certificate, and Uncle Milton sends you a vial of 20 to 30 ants that come from the ant hunter.) If you get an ant farm for Christmas, you might have to wait, though. When it’s too cold where the ants are headed, the shipment is delayed. “No sense in having a child disappointed by a vial of frozen ants,” says professional ant wrangler Afton Fawcett.

  In a take-out container? Scientists have discovered 4,000-year-old noodles in China.

  SUPER REPO MAN. When the economy goes down, the super repo business picks up. “Super repo” men repossess items worth millions—747s from Sri Lankan airlines, speedboats from Wall Street titans, helicopters from failed flight schools, and so on. The pay is good, too. Firms such as Citibank, Transamerica, and Credit Suisse pay super repo men $600,000 to $900,000 per snatch. The catch: These deadbeats aren’t the typical ticked-off Toyota owners. They employ guards, police, even military units to protect their investments. Nick Popovich, president of Sage-Popovich, Inc., an Indiana airplane repossession company, has been in the business for 30 years. And during that time h
e’s been jailed and beaten in Haiti, threatened by Neo-Nazis with shotguns in South Carolina, and arrested by gendarmes in France. Popovich once flew out of the Congo with its president’s personal plane. “There’s still a death warrant out for me,” he told the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine.

  AN INSTANT CONNECTION

  In March 2011, Sara Kemp, 42, and George Bentley, 47, both from England, met in a London bar after chatting on an online dating site. They talked about their pasts...and quickly made a startling realization: They were brother and sister. They’d been separated as kids when their parents divorced, and hadn’t seen each other in 36 years. The reunited siblings got over their embarrassment, and now visit each other on a regular basis.

  A mouse can fit through a hole the diameter of a ballpoint pen.

  “WORDS ON A SHIRT”