Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader®

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Phil Gilbert’s claim to fame: His shoe parlor in Vicksburg, Mississippi was the first to sell left and right shoes, as a pair, in a box (1884).

  It Chore Was Fun

  “Life wasn’t all work. If it snowed, Dewey and I would take our guitars and head over the mountain to play music at my Uncle’s in Spring Creek. In the fall, we’d have bean shellings, quilting bees, and corn husking parties. The first person to find a red ear of corn would get $5.00.

  “Those were the good days. I was happy as a lark. We all were. Life was simpler then; you just worked hard and slept sound. We all got along and worked together. I don’t even remember being tired. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything in the world!”

  REAL (FUNNY) FLYERS

  You see them on telephone poles and bulletin boards at the grocery store. Here are some lines we’ve collected from actual flyers.

  “Do not take this flyer down. There is a very angry hornet hiding behind it who will sting you in the neck. See that bulge right there? That’s him.”

  “Found: a nice pile of dog poop. If you’ve lost a pile of dog poop and this photo looks like your dog’s poop, then please come by and get it.”

  “Lost cloud. Last seen in the sky above my house. Looks white, fluffy, drifty. May or may not repond to ‘Mr. Wispies.’”

  “Missing unicorn. If you see it, you are probably high.”

  “Missing: my imaginary friend Steve.”

  SURREAL VIDEO GAMES

  Not all video games are about scoring points or saving princesses.

  Super PSTW Action RPG (2009). The player controls a knight as he runs through the countryside, fighting enemies and collecting gold. But you have to do it fast—you’ll lose points the longer you wait. But how do you get the knight to do all those things? It’s ridiculously simple: Press the space bar. In fact, the “PSTW” in the title stands for “press space to win.”

  Don’t Shoot the Puppy (2006). Unlike most games, where the object is to do something, the object of this game is to not do something. On one end of the screen is a huge gun; on the other is an animated puppy. If the player presses a key or moves the mouse even slightly, the cannon fires and blows off the puppy’s head, killing it. Game over. But if the player can go 10 seconds without lifting a finger, the puppy lives, and the game is won.

  Desert Bus (1995). Created by the comedy duo Penn and Teller, this game has the player drive a tour bus through the uneventful desert from Tucson to Las Vegas. In real time. That takes eight continuous hours. (You can’t pause the game.) If you veer off the road, you crash, and the bus gets towed back to Tucson, also in real time. Each successful trip earns the player...one point.

  4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (2009). The object is to be the only person on the Internet playing the game for 4 minutes, 33 seconds. The actual “game” consists of a black-and-white screen counting up to 4:33.

  You Only Live Once (2009). It’s not very realistic that video game characters get to come back and try again over and over after they “die.” This game takes death more seriously. If “Jemaine,” the game’s lead character, dies trying to rescue his girlfriend from the evil lizard who kidnapped her, he stays dead. The girlfriend mourns the death, the lizard is arrested, and a memorial is built. The game then places a data file on the player’s computer that prevents them from ever playing it again.

  Pilot slang: The moment it becomes too dark to see the horizon is called “the twilight zone.”

  THE _____ OF CANADA

  Everyone compares themselves to something. Whether it’s the “Paris of the South” or the “Beethoven of TV Jingles,” it’s an easy way to communicate who you are.

  “The California of Canada”: Okanagan Valley is located in the interior of British Columbia. Like California, the days there are warm and dry, and the nights are cool. Like California, there’s a desert to the south, skiing to the north. And like California, it has dozens of vineyards and wineries.

  “The Provence of Canada”: Provence is a coastal region of France known for its food and wine. Cowichan Valley (45 minutes north of Victoria, British Columbia) is home to lots of farm-to-table restaurants, wineries, and artisan cheesemakers, attracting food tourists and earning its nickname.

  “The Thomas Edison of Canada”: In 1882 Thomas Ahearn, a 27-year-old inventor and a native of Ottawa, founded a company to experiment with electricity and manufacture electric products when the technology was still in its infancy. Ahearn brought electric lights and electric street cars to Ottawa, and he invented the electric water heater, flatiron, and range.

  “The Manchester of Canada”: Galt, Ontario, was an agricultural community until the 1830s, when it switched to industrial production. That’s when it earned its nickname, borrowed from the smog-choked English city that boomed in the Industrial Revolution. (Unlike Manchester, Galt is no longer an independent city. In 1973 it was absorbed into the city of Cambridge, Ontario.)

  “The Carrie Bradshaw of Canada”: Josey Vogels writes three sex and relationship columns syndicated to Canadian newspapers: “My Messy Bedroom,” “Dating Girl,” and “The J Spot.” She’s advertised as Canada’s Carrie Bradshaw, after the sex-columnist character on the HBO series Sex and the City. But Bradshaw is based on real-life American sex columnist Candace Bushnell, so Vogels should probably be called “the Candace Bushnell of Canada.”

  The music on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was written by his brother-in-law, Johnny Costa.

  “The Bing Crosby of Canada”: Montreal-born Dick Todd was a 1930s–40s crooner who sang in the style of Bing Crosby. He was one of the biggest Canadian music stars of the era, although his biggest hit was “Pennsylvania Turnpike, I Love You So.”

  “The Bohemian Grove of Canada”: The Bohemian Club is a group of powerful international political and economic leaders who meet annually for a retreat at a camp in northern California called the Bohemian Grove. (Many conspiracy theorists believe the group is an insidious secret society). The Club now meets in Canada too, in the Toronto suburb of King City, at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Leadership Center.

  “The Bermuda Triangle of Canada”: Over the past few decades, police have been baffled by mysterious deaths, unsolved disappearances, and the sudden appearances of headless corpses in the South Nahanni River valley in the Northwest Territories, leading some people to give the area this nickname.

  “The MIT and Harvard of Canada”: As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the United States’ most exclusive and prestigious technical and scientific training school, the University of Waterloo is Canada’s. In the U.S., Harvard is one of the nation’s oldest and best universities. In Canada, that honor goes to McGill University, founded in Montreal in 1821.

  “The Birmingham of Canada”: Entrepreneur Hiram Walker founded Walkerville, Ontario, in 1858 as a planned community: He established a whiskey distillery and built up the farming and factories necessary to manufacture the beverage. And it worked. By the turn of the century, the home of Canadian Club whiskey had become one of Canada’s biggest industrial and farming centers, mirroring Birmingham, England. (Walkerville is now part of the city of Windsor.)

  “The Wire of Canada”: The Wire was a cerebral—and critically acclaimed—HBO series from 2002 to 2008. It detailed the intricate dynamics of newspapers, politicians, and drug dealers in Baltimore. The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Intelligence took a similar approach to the underbelly of Vancouver. Some critics called it “The Wire of Canada,” but that didn’t bring in many viewers. It was canceled in 2008, after only 25 episodes.

  The actors who played zombies in Night of the Living Dead (1968) were paid $1 and a T-shirt.

  KNOW YOUR BOATS

  See if you can match these fictional skippers’ names to their fictional ships and the stories they came from. (Answers on page 539.)

  1. Jason

  a) St. Vitus’ Dance

  2. Ahab

  b) Revenge

  3. Nemo

  c) Yellow
Submarine

  4. Charlie Allnut

  d) Pequod

  5. Steve Zissou

  e) African Queen

  6. Hook

  f) Walrus

  7. Jack Sparrow

  g) Nautilus

  8. Horatio Hornblower

  h) Lydia

  9. Quint

  i) Black Pearl

  10. Charon

  j) Argo

  11. Sonny Crockett

  k) Red October

  12. Old Fred

  l) Erebus

  13. J. Flint

  m) Dawn Treader

  14. Forrest Gump

  n) We’re Here

  15. Austin Powers

  o) Belafonte

  16. Lord Drinian

  p) Orca

  17. Disko Troop

  q) Jenny

  18. Mr. Burns

  r) Gone Fission

  19. Quinton McHale

  s) PT-73

  20. Dread Pirate Roberts

  t) Jolly Roger

  21. Marko Alexandrovich Ramius

  u) Shag at Sea

  22. George “Chief” Phillips

  v) The Ferry of the Dead

  World’s largest jack-o’-lantern: 17 feet in circumference, carved from a 1,469-lb. pumpkin.

  MACGYVER ESCAPES!

  On the ’80s TV show, MacGyver (played by Richard Dean Anderson) was a secret agent who never used a gun—he used whatever he found lying around to create weapons and tools to get out of whatever dangerous predicament he happened to find himself in. MacGyver’s innovations may seem improbable, but the show’s writers were careful to use sound scientific principles as the basis for the “MacGyverism.” Besides—it made for fun TV. Here are a few examples of how MacGyver did what he did.

  TRAPPED IN A TOILET-BOWL FACTORY...

  ...MacGyver breaks open a gas line and places a rubber glove over the leak. While it inflates with noxious gas, he hangs an electric lightbulb (on a cord) over the glove. When the villain threatens to shoot him, MacGyver throws chunks of a broken toilet bowl at the bulb. On his second try, he hits the bulb. Sparks fly and ignite the gas-filled glove. It explodes. MacGyver escapes!

  TRAPPED IN A BOOBY-TRAPPED MANSION...

  ...MacGyver fastens the head and shoulders of a suit of armor to the top shelf of a wheeled kitchen cart. He then uses a rubber band to attach an electric mixer to the cart’s front wheel and plugs it in. The mixer turns the wheel, which propels the cart across the floor and out of the kitchen, triggering automatic motion-detecting guns. The cart takes the hit. MacGyver escapes!

  TRAPPED IN A LIQUOR-STORE WAREHOUSE...

  ...MacGyver removes a length of heating duct and straps it to a wooden crate. Into the duct he places a small, sealed keg of beer. Behind that he places a garbage can full of wood, douses it with an available flammable substance—whiskey—and lights a fire with some matches he conveniently finds lying around. The flames heat the keg, which ignites the alcohol inside, propelling the keg through the pipe, breaking a door open. MacGyver escapes!

  TRAPPED IN A DIFFERENT WAREHOUSE...

  ...MacGyver has been tied up by bad guys, and has just four minutes before a time bomb is set to explode. Just then, a very friendly dog wanders into the warehouse. Somehow, MacGyver gets the dog to fetch a bottle of sulfuric acid that just happens to be sitting on a nearby table. He then convinces the dog to place the bottle on one end of a seesaw contraption that MacGyver made out of a yardstick and an empty bottle that he was able to reach with his feet. MacGyver slams his feet down on the makeshift catapult, which launches the bottle of acid into his hands, which he uses to dissolve the ropes binding his hands and feet. MacGyver (and the dog) escape!

  Aloha, good lookin’! The hula was originally performed as a fertility rite.

  TRAPPED IN A CRASHED PLANE...

  ...and buried under an avalanche somewhere in Russia, MacGyver wraps the plane’s emergency oxygen tank in a piece of fabric that he tears off a sleeping bag. He then puts the bundle in a bucket of vodka, buries the bucket in the snow just outside the plane’s door, and lights the fabric on fire. The vodka and the oxygen tank combust and blow a hole out of the snow. MacGyver escapes!

  TRAPPED ON A TRAIN...

  ...MacGyver has to figure out who on board sold tainted medicine to a tribe of Middle Eastern nomads before the train stops and they can escape. So he runs a wire from the cuff of a blood-pressure monitor into a mechanical, wind-up alarm clock. When somebody wears the cuff, and they lie, their pulse quickens and the alarm clock goes off. MacGyver nails the bad guy with it. The bad guy doesn’t escape!

  TRAPPED ON A CRUISE SHIP FULL OF SOULS...

  ...is the premise of a 1990 episode. MacGyver gets into an accident, falls into a coma, and dreams he meets up with his deceased grandfather. The two get trapped by Anubis, the Egyptian god who is the keeper of the afterlife, in the engine room of a cruise ship full of souls. Anubis has jammed an axe in the ship’s lock wheel as an extra precaution. Fortunately, even when he’s dreaming, MacGyver can get out of any sticky situation. He wraps one end of a fire hose around his side of the lock wheel, and the other around the propeller shaft of the ship. As the propellor turns, tension builds from the hose, eventually snapping the door’s lock and the axe handle. MacGyver escapes!

  Only U.S. president who did not represent any political party: George Washington.

  STRANGE LAWSUITS

  We’re back with a BRI favorite: unusual legal battles.

  THE PLAINTIFF: A Polish hunter named Waldemar

  THE DEFENDANT: Jaworski Jagdreisen, a German travel agency that specializes in African hunting expeditions

  THE LAWSUIT: Waldemar really wanted to shoot an elephant, so in 2010 he booked a vacation with Jaworski Jagdreisen, which sent him to a game reserve in Zimbabwe (one of the few countries where it’s still legal to hunt elephants). Waldemar was told that if he found an elephant’s excrement, he could pick up the animal’s trail and shoot it. But he found neither excrement nor elephants, and went home empty-handed. After he complained, the agency gave him a free trip back to Zimbabwe, and this time, he shot and killed an elephant. Nevertheless, Waldemar sued the travel agency for $130,000 for failing to provide him with an elephant to kill on the first trip.

  THE VERDICT: Case dismissed. The judge remarked, “The fact that elephants were not encountered during the hunt does not testify that elephants were not there.”

  THE PLAINTIFFS: David Jonathan Winkelman and his stepson, Richard Goddard

  THE DEFENDANT: KORB, an Indiana hard-rock radio station

  THE LAWSUIT: In 2000 DJ Ben Stone announced on the air that any listener who had the station’s call letters tattooed on their forehead would receive $150,000. Winkelman and Goddard decided to take them up on the offer. But first they went to the station and asked if the deal was legitimate. They were told it was, so they went to a tattoo parlor and got their foreheads inked with the station’s slogan: “93 Rock, the Quad City Rocker.” When the two men went to the station to claim their prize, Stone photographed them and then informed them it was just a practical joke. Winkelman and Goddard received no money, but their pictures were displayed on the station’s website. Winkelman lost his job, and neither man could find work because of the big tattoos on their foreheads. Winkelman and Goddard sued, claiming that the radio station set out to “publicly scorn and ridicule them for their greed and lack of common good sense.”

  Some fireflies lay glowing eggs.

  THE VERDICT: Goddard’s case was dismissed when he didn’t show up at court. Winkelman later dropped his suit. Not long afterward, the station changed its format to easy listening.

  THE PLAINTIFF: Robin Brown, 48, amateur birdwatcher and employee at Massage Envy in Weston, Florida

  THE DEFENDANT: Mark Horn, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida

  THE LAWSUIT: One day in 2009, Brown was birdwatching in a patch of woods in Weston. As she often did, Brown said a prayer for peace and burned a small bu
ndle of sage, a Native American purification ritual known as “smudging.” When she returned to her car, Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Dominic Raimondi was waiting for her. Suspecting that she was smoking marijuana, he searched her bag and found the sage. Although sage and marijuana don’t look (or smell) anything alike, Raimondi put the sage into a field testing kit, which is known for giving false positives. The substance tested positive for marijuana, but Raimondi let Brown go and sent the sage to the crime lab for a proper test.

  Three months passed. Brown forgot about the incident... until the police entered her workplace, arrested her on felony drug charges, handcuffed her, and marched her out in front of her customers and coworkers. At the station, Brown was strip-searched, cavity-searched, and put in jail for the night. “I tried to act tough,” she later said, “but inside I was quaking.” The next day, Brown hired a lawyer, Bill Ullman, to find out why she had been arrested. The answer: Assistant State Attorney Mark Horn was supposed to have had the sage tested; for some reason, he didn’t do it, but he ordered her arrest anyway. Ullman demanded that the substance be tested; when it finally was, it was indeed sage. The charges were dropped. Brown then filed a civil suit against Horn.

  THE VERDICT: The judge dismissed the case. “Prosecutors are given immunity from lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs,” he said. Ullman disagreed. “Horn wasn’t doing his job. He filed a false statement swearing she had marijuana, and she didn’t.” At last report, the case was under appeal.