Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader®

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  TEEN TALK BARBIE

  When dolls with voice chips inside them, such as Teddy Ruxpin and G.I. Joe, became big hits in the early 1990s, Mattel decided to give Barbie a voice too. Embedded in every 1992 Teen Talk Barbie was a computer chip that held four spoken phrases. The toymaker compiled and recorded 270 phrases, and gave each doll four at random. Examples: “I love shopping!” and “Let’s have a pizza party!” But a troublesome phrase ended up in approximately 1 percent of the dolls: “Math class is tough!” Many women’s groups, especially the American Association of University Women, felt it perpetuated the stereotype that women are bad at math and could make young girls think they would never be good at it. In response, Mattel offered to replace any math-averse Barbie at no charge. But their efforts came too late. When the controversy erupted, a satirical group called the Barbie Liberation Organization (B.L.O.) covertly bought hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies (regardless of whether they said “Math class is tough!” or not) and swapped the Barbie voice chips with chips taken from Talking Duke G.I. Joe action figures. The B.L.O. then put all the dolls back on store shelves, where they were purchased by some very confused children who ended up with G.I. Joes that exclaimed, “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” and Barbies that screamed, “Vengeance is mine!”

  Most phobias cause blood pressure to rise. Hemophobia, the fear of blood, causes it to drop.

  UNCLE JOHN’S

  STALL OF FAME

  Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the unusual ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, and so on. That’s why he created the “Stall of Fame.”

  Honoree: Florence Welch, who performs with backing musicians as Florence + the Machine

  Notable Achievement: Finding fame in a public restroom

  True Story: In 2006 Welch was an aspiring singer and recent art-school dropout. The closest she’d come to a performing career was singing, usually drunk, at open-mike nights in small clubs around London. One night, at just such a club, in just such a state of intoxication, Welch spotted Mairead Nash, the host of a BBC radio show that showcases new talent. Welch followed Nash into the restroom, introduced herself, and then sang the Etta James song “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” right there in the bathroom. “I’d never heard anyone sing like that,” says Nash. She’d never managed a singer before either, but she agreed to manage Welch’s career. A recording contract soon followed, and in 2009 Welch’s first album, Lungs, debuted at #2 on the U.K. charts, second only to Michael Jackson, whose recent death had sent sales of his music soaring. Lungs bounced around the charts for 28 weeks, then hit #1, making it the bestselling debut album of 2009. “It’s such a funny fluke that I started, quite literally, in the toilet,” says Welch. (Her bestselling single in the U.S.: “Dog Days Are Over.”)

  Honoree: Dan Colen, 32, an artist living in New York

  Notable Achievement: Making a splash in the New York art scene by making a splash in an important bathroom

  True Story: Colen was an up-and-coming artist when he attended an exhibition opening in New York in 2006. Also there: Sam Orlofsky, director of the Gagosian Gallery, one of the most exclusive art galleries in the city. A newcomer like Colen should have had a hard time getting a gallery like the Gagosian to show his work, but Orlofsky thought Colen had promise. “I suggested he do a show with us. He said, ‘Yeah, right, where am I going to show, in the bathrooms?’” Orlofsky told The New York Times. Actually, Orlofsky thought it sounded like a good idea, so he talked his boss, gallery owner Larry Gagosian, into hanging six of Colen’s paintings in the gallery bathrooms. They were priced at around $10,000 each, and they all sold immediately. (Colen had a second show at the Gagosian in 2010. This time they displayed his work in the main gallery, not in the bathrooms.)

  In 2003 the South Pacific nation of Niue became the first country to have free, nationwide Wi-Fi.

  Honoree: Stephan Bischof, 24, of Honor Oak, England

  Notable Achievement: Retrofitting a wheeled trash can (a “wheelie bin,” as the British call them) to accept a more personal form of waste. Why? “I want to raise awareness of the fact that public toilets are closing,” Bischof says.

  True Story: If you’ve ever received the call of nature after a long night of pub crawling, you probably understand how the lack of available restrooms after closing time can lead to, shall we say, “outbursts” of antisocial behavior. That’s why Bischof converted his wheelie bin into a portable outdoor urinal—and an environmentally friendly one at that. The plastic pissoir “has a funnel on one side and liquid flows into a base, separate from the bin. The urine is mixed with dry grass to turn it into a bio-fertilizer,” reports London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

  Update: Bischof is on the hunt for investors. If he finds them, someday his wheelie urinals may appear outside of pubs all over Britain. (So is that a good thing?)

  Honoree: Laszlo and Andrea Csrefko, a married couple living in Bekasmegyer, Hungary

  Notable Achievement: Receiving an unusual visitor in their brand-new bathroom...and living to tell the tale

  True Story: We’ve all read news accounts of people seeing the face of Jesus on a piece of French toast. Andrea Csrefko had a similar experience, but she didn’t see Jesus. Not long after Laszlo finished installing a new shower, tub, and ceramic tiles in their bathroom in 2010, Andrea took the first shower. It ended in horror when she saw the face of Satan in one of the tiles on the wall. “I was naked and coming out of the shower and I could suddenly see his eyes staring into me! I just screamed and ran,” she told the Sun newspaper. (“It wasn’t there when we put the tiles up. It just appeared overnight,” says Laszlo.) Repeated attempts to scrub Beelzebub off the bathroom wall have failed; ordinary household cleansers are apparently no match for Satan’s power. Neither is the Csrefko’s bathroom heater: “The room is always ice cold no matter how high we turn the heat,” Laszlo says. “We’ve stopped using the bathroom. It’s too spooky. We wash in the sink downstairs now.”

  Food for thought: Human breast milk contains more lactose than cow’s milk.

  Update: The Csrefkos have called in a professional exorcist to drive Lucifer from their lavatory, with no luck so far: “We need help from God or from the spirit world or we’re going to seal up the room forever,” Laszlo says.

  Honoree: Koji Suzuki, bestselling Japanese horror writer and author of the novels Ring and Dark Water, both of which were made into Hollywood motion pictures

  Notable Achievement: Rolling out one of his horror stories

  ” printed on rolls of toilet paper. The terrifying tale of a goblin who lives in a public restroom, “Drop” plays on traditional Japanese superstitions about evil spirits who hide in toilets. (Did your folks ever tell you about the Boogie Man? In Japan it’s customary for parents to warn naughty children that a hairy hand will rise up out of the toilet bowl and drag them down into the abyss it if they continue to misbehave.) “Drop” is printed on the toilet paper in blue ink interspersed by red, blood-like splatters. The story takes up only three feet of toilet paper and is meant to be read in a single sitting. Priced at 210 yen (about $2.00), each roll contains several copies of the story so that more than one person gets to read it. “I’ve read the story and it’s very scary,” says Takaki Hayashi, vice president of Hayashi Paper, which markets the rolls as “Japan’s scariest toilet paper” and “a horror experience in the toilet.”True Story: In 2009 Suzuki partnered with the Hayashi Paper Corporation to have his short story “Drop

  Most shark species have been around longer than trees have.

  THE GARBAGE SATELLITE

  They don’t have used clothing stores in space, so what’s an astronaut to do when his spacesuit wears out? Here’s the story of the spacesuit that talked back after it was thrown over the side.

  THE WELL-DRESSED ASTRONAUT

  If you’re like Uncle John, you like to wear your old jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts until they’re tattered and riddled with holes. You can get away with that on Earth, but not in
space: The spacesuits that NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts use can’t be worn until they’re full of holes, because their not having holes is what keeps the astronauts alive. Millions of dollars are spent designing and building the suits used on the International Space Station, yet most are used only a dozen times before they need to be completely refurbished or retired from service.

  Then what? During the space shuttle era, NASA spacesuits could be returned to Earth aboard the shuttle and overhauled; now they’re discarded the same way that the Russian Orlan spacesuits are: via the unmanned Progress spacecraft that resupply the ISS three or four times a year. After supplies are unloaded from the Progress capsule, it’s stuffed with space garbage from the ISS: empty food containers, dirty clothes (the ISS doesn’t have a washing machine), old spacesuits, and other refuse. Then the capsule is set adrift in orbit, where it will eventually burn up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. That shooting star you saw the other night? It might have been a flaming ISS garbage can.

  TALKING TRASH

  On more than one occasion, astronauts have used the spacesuits themselves as trash cans, cramming them full of garbage, hauling them out the airlock, and shoving them off the back of the ISS into space. In 2004 a Russian research team led by engineer Sergei Samburov took the concept a little further: Since anything tossed out of the ISS will orbit the Earth for a few months until it reenters the atmosphere, they decided to turn an old Orlan spacesuit into a cheap communications satellite by outfitting it with a microprocessor and an amateur (“ham”) radio walkie-talkie.

  According to The Joy of Cooking, one ostrich egg will serve 24 people.

  ARISS-TED DEVELOPMENT

  Samburov and his colleagues were members of the Russian chapter of Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS). The group was responsible for getting a ham radio station installed on the ISS. Members train astronauts to use the station before they leave Earth, and then arrange for space-to-Earth contacts with school assemblies, science museums, scouting organizations, and other community groups on the ground. It’s all done with the purpose of encouraging people—especially young people—to take an interest in science, engineering, and mathematics.

  Working out the details of what the spacesuit satellite would do fell to the Russian and American sections of ARISS. (The Russians nicknamed it “Ivan Ivanov,” the Americans called it “Mr. Smith,” but its official name was “SuitSat-1.”) Here’s what they decided:

  • After identifying itself and giving its call sign (“This is SuitSat-1, RS0RS”), the satellite would play one of five different prerecorded greetings made by students from Russia, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany.

  • This would be followed either by a digital voice stating the satellite’s temperature, battery power, and elapsed mission time, or by the transmission of a single digital photograph (stored in the microprocessor) that could be downloaded onto any computer.

  • Then SuitSat-1 would pause for 30 seconds and begin transmitting again. The transmissions would repeat continuously, cycling through the five recorded greetings until the batteries finally died.

  • Each greeting contained a “secret” word that students were encouraged to translate into their own language by exchanging information with students from other parts of the world.

  • The subject of the digital photograph was also secret; to find out what it was, the photograph had to be downloaded.

  Any student who succeeded in receiving the SuitSat-1 transmissions was eligible to receive a commemorative certificate, with special recognition going to students who translated the secret words or downloaded the digital image. SuitSat-1 broadcast its signal over a ham radio frequency, 145.990 MHz. And because the signal would be coming from directly overhead, the transmission would be strong enough to give anyone with even the simplest police scanner or walkie-talkie tunable to ham radio frequencies a good chance of receiving the signal. The only trick was figuring out when SuitSat-1 was passing overhead, but that information was easy to get online.

  When you’re born, your body contains only about one cup of blood.

  MAN OF THE HOUR

  On September 10, 2005, a Progress resupply ship blasted off from Kazakhstan bound for the International Space Station. Among its cargo were the walkie-talkie and other components for SuitSat-1. After Progress arrived at the ISS, the astronauts assembled the components and placed them inside the body of the spacesuit. They attached an antenna and a control panel to the suit’s helmet, then stuffed the suit full of dirty clothes to give it a more human form (and to get rid of the clothes).

  Then on February 3, 2006, at the start of a six-hour spacewalk, Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarey eased SuitSat-1 out of the ISS airlock, switched it on, and gave it a final shove. “Goodbye Mr. Smith,” he said as the spacesuit slowly floated away. Footage of the launch of SuitSat-1 can be found online, as can photographs of SuitSat-1 floating above the earth. The images are beautiful, but they’re also kind of disturbing: SuitSat-1 looks like a dead astronaut drifting off into space.

  HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

  SuitSat-1 only completed a couple of orbits around Earth before it started to malfunction. Tokarey and his partner on the spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bill McArthur, weren’t even back inside the space station before Mission Control in Houston reported that no more transmissions were being received from SuitSat-1.

  It seemed like the satellite was dead...until ham radio enthusiasts all over the world began picking up faint signals. They were much weaker than expected, but the SuitSat-1 was still on the air. There are different theories to account for SuitSat’s troubles. The batteries may not have functioned properly in the intense cold of space. Or the radio might somehow have switched to a low power setting. Or the antenna, scrounged from parts on the ISS, may not have performed as well as expected, a problem made worse by the uncontrolled tumbling of the spacesuit.

  Shortest U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice ever: Melville W. Fuller (1888–1910). He was 5’3”.

  Amazingly, instead of dying out in two or three days as expected, SuitSat-1 stayed on the air for a full two weeks before finally falling silent on February 18 as it passed over North America. SuitSat-1 drifted in orbit for another seven months before burning up on re-entry on September 7, 2006.

  EMPTY SUIT

  SuitSat-1 was successful enough for ARISS to want to try the idea again. The group made plans for a much-improved SuitSat-2, this time with rechargeable batteries (powered by solar panels attached to the legs of the spacesuit), cameras transmitting live images to Earth instead of a single digital photograph, and a transponder that would allow ham radio enthusiasts in different parts of the world to talk to each other using SuitSat-2 as a relay.

  But this was a SuitSat that would have no suit: In July 2009, the retired Orlan spacesuit that was set aside for the project had to be disposed of to free up room on the ISS for more important projects. Rather than wait for another suit to become available, ARISS built a metal box large enough to hold all of the SuitSat-2 components and used it instead. Renamed ARISSat-1, the satellite arrived at the ISS in January 2011 and was deployed during a spacewalk on August 3, 2011. It almost certainly won’t be the last such satellite tossed out the back of the International Space Station: ARISS has a few more ARISSats assembled and ready to go for the next time an opportunity arises; “tossing” may one day be a common (and cheap) method of putting satellites in orbit.

  5 NON-HANDPRINTS IN

  THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME

  1. Groucho Marx’s cigar

  2. John Wayne’s fist

  3. Al Jolson’s knee

  4. Jimmy Durante’s nose

  5. Whoopi Goldberg’s braids

  Big mouth: The Australian Pelican’s bill can grow to 19 inches, the longest beak of any bird.

  WHEN LIFE

  WAS “SIMPLER”

  We came across this piece in Barbara Swell’s book Secrets of the Great Old-Timey Cooks (shameless plug for the pub
lisher: nativeground.com) and it made us think. The next time you think you’re too tired to cook dinner, consider a day in the life of Effie Price, who lived in a log cabin in a remote mountain cove in the Big Pine section of Madison County, North Carolina. Here’s her tale of a typical day as a 14-year-old in 1928.

  THE DAY BEGINS

  “I got up at 5:00 a.m. to feed the hogs and chickens and gather the eggs by lantern-light. Then I helped my mother cook breakfast (in the wood cookstove). After eating, Mommy would wash the dishes while my brother Dewey and I milked the cows and put the milk in the spring box to cool. In spring, summer, and fall we’d go to the field with Poppy and work ’til dinner. We’d plant and hoe corn, dig ’taters (sweet and white), and tend the tobacco. We grew wheat and vegetables, too. After dinner and a 10-minute rest, we’d return to the fields and work ’til dark. Then it was time to milk the cows again by lantern-light. At night, we’d have a little supper, then quilt or sew before going to bed.

  “Saturday was ‘washin’ day.’ We’d build a fire under the big iron pot that hung in the yard and haul water from the spring to heat. When the clothes dried we’d iron them with irons kept hot by the fire. Then we’d sweep the house and yard. (Back then, folks didn’t plant grass in their yards like they do now.) Sundays, we’d hitch up the horses to the wagon and give a ride to whomever we came across walking down the road to the Baptist church. If it was a school day, chores were done before and after school.

  Sew What Else Is New

  “My mother sewed all our clothes from cloth she bought on her monthly outing to Marshall, the nearest town. As a kid I tried sewing, but my mother thought I’d tear up the machine running it backwards and didn’t want me to mess with it. So when she’d go to town, I’d have Dewey be lookout, and I learned to sew on my own. I stashed fabric under the bed, and one day I took out a pretty dress I’d sewed and sure surprised my mother. I sewed my first quilt at 13, made of feed sacks. The quilt I sleep under now is one my mother made from smoking-tobacco sacks. She’d keep some white, and dye some red, then sew them up. We made all our own sheets; we’d embroider the edges at night.