Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader®

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • Three types of bridges: a beam bridge (a single beam, like a log over a brook), an arch bridge (the arch is below the roadway), and a suspension bridge (the road deck is hung on cables suspended from towers).

  • Oldest bridge still in use in the United States: the stone Frankford Avenue Bridge in Philadelphia. It was built for horse traffic in 1697; it’s used for car traffic today.

  • Japan’s Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge is the world’s longest cable suspension bridge. It took 10 years to build (at a cost of $6 billion) and has the world’s highest toll: $29.

  • Contrary to popular belief, covered bridges weren’t covered to protect travelers from the weather. Most covered bridges were built out of wood. The purpose of the roof was to protect the wooden deck from the elements.

  • World’s busiest bridge: India’s Howrah Bridge near Kolkata (Calcutta). A million travelers walk across it daily.

  • World’s saddest bridge: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. To date, more than 1,400 people have plunged to their deaths from it.

  • Gephyrophobia is the fear of crossing bridges.

  • The Maryland Transportation Authority, which operates the four-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge, offers a service for gephyrophobes: They’ll arrange for someone to drive you (and your car) over it for you.

  • The longest bridge in the world is the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, linking Shanghai and Nanjing in East China. The bridge is 102 miles long and almost a football field wide (260 feet). It runs mostly over land and was built to accommodate high-speed trains.

  • A week after the Brooklyn Bridge opened in May 1883, a panicked pedestrian shouted out that the bridge was collapsing. Hundreds of people on the bridge also panicked and fled, trampling 15 pedestrians to death.

  Giant tortoises never stop growing.

  HE SAID...

  Men think they’re sooooo funny.

  “Men are superior to women. For one thing, men can urinate from a speeding car.”

  —Will Durst

  “Women want to fight men for equal pay, but how often do they fight a man for the check?”

  —Bill Maher

  “Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.”

  —Arthur Schopenhauer

  “Charity is taking an ugly girl to lunch.”

  —Warren Beatty

  “I don’t think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing.”

  —Prince Philip

  “Henry VIII didn’t get divorced, he just had his wives’ heads chopped off when he got tired of them. That’s a good way to get rid of a woman—no alimony.”

  —Ted Turner

  “I hate pants. Neither my mother nor my wife is allowed to go out with me in pants.”

  —Arnold Schwarzenegger

  “Marriage is the most expensive way for the average man to get laundry done.”

  —Burt Reynolds

  “May there never be in my home a woman who knows more than a woman ought to know.”

  —Euripides

  “I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. These women just need a man in the house to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.”

  —Jerry Falwell

  “I love the women’s movement, especially when I’m walking behind it.”

  —Rush Limbaugh

  “Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them.”

  —Alexandre Dumas

  Bee-bee boomers: Honeybees can be trained to detect explosives.

  SHE SAID...

  Women think they’re sooooo smart.

  “Men should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, disposable.”

  —Cher

  “Don’t accept rides from strange men—and remember that all men are as strange as hell.”

  —Robin Morgan

  “Men are beasts, and even beasts don’t behave as they do.”

  —Brigitte Bardot

  “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”

  —Mary Daly

  “Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.”

  —Maryon Pearson

  “The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.”

  —Valerie Solanas

  “The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things.”

  —Jilly Cooper

  “Men know everything—all of them, all the time—no matter how stupid or inexperienced or ignorant they are.”

  —Andrea Dworkin

  “If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?”

  —Linda Ellerbee

  “A man’s home may seem to be castle on the outside. Inside it is more often his nursery.”

  —Claire Booth Luce

  “Men think monogamy is something you make dining tables out of.”

  —Kathy Lette

  “A man is like sitting in a bathtub. Once you get used to him, he’s not so hot.”

  —Kathryn Maye

  The Los Angeles coroner’s department has a gift shop.

  THAT SMARTS!

  According to the latest research, you may not be as smart as you think you are.

  SUPERIORITY COMPLEX

  “One of the painful things about our time,” observed 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, “is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” In 1999 Justin Kruger and David Dunning, two professors at Cornell University, became intrigued by this paradox. They took a personal and professional interest in the topic after running across a survey of fellow college professors. The survey’s finding: 94 percent believed they were “above average” when compared with their peers. (Statistically speaking, no more than half of any group can be above average.) Dunning and Kruger decided to test how some people—and often the wrong ones—arrive at a wildly inflated view of their own abilities.

  YOU HAVE BEEN TESTED...AND FOUND WANTING

  Dunning and Kruger started small with a sample that could be easily measured. They cornered Cornell students as they walked out of a class in which they’d just taken a test and asked them to estimate how well they’d scored and to what degree they felt they’d mastered the course material. When the professors compared the actual scores to the students’ predictions, they were floored. Not only had the lowest-performing students believed they’d done better than they actually had, they vastly overestimated themselves. In fact, those who had scored in the 12th percentile (that is, lower than 88 percent of their fellow students) believed they’d scored in the 60th percentile and beaten out nearly two-thirds of their classmates.

  Just as surprising, though, was that those who did the best underestimated how well they’d done. They weren’t as far off as their underachieving counterparts, but they knocked as much as 20 percentage points off their scores. It turned out that all of the groups thought they ranked in the range of the 60th to 70th percentile.

  Matt Damon refused to be involved in the Bourne Conspiracy video game. (It was too violent.)

  I CAN DO ANYTHING YOU CAN DO BETTER

  When Dunning and Kruger interviewed the students in depth, they discovered that those who were the least competent at mastering the subject matter were also the least able to define what it meant to be competent in a given subject. Judging their own performances without understanding the criteria for success, they had no idea how profoundly they’d missed the mark.

  But then why did the successful test takers underestimate their abilities? Well, it turned out that it wasn’t a matter of not recognizing what success looked like. Instead, they were tripped up by assuming that other students were in their league.

  The
two professors wondered if this perception/performance gap was unusually wide only among students, who might not have as much life experience as older adults, or if there was any chance they’d find it in other ages and situations as well. So they began testing other people on a variety of skills: the ability to think logically, for example, or the ability to judge how funny a joke would be to an audience. In almost every case, they found that the least competent people overestimated their abilities by 40 to 50 percentage points.

  This same principle tended to hold true in a variety of ages and situations, including sports and games such as tennis and chess, but most alarmingly in life-or-death skills like driving, medical proficiency, and laboratory work. They also identified a dynamic that allowed bad performers to remain bad: The less-talented are convinced they’re above average, so they tend to rest on their non-existent laurels instead of working toward a higher level of competence.

  There is hope, however. The researchers discovered that when the least-knowledgeable groups were taught what was considered “competent” in their field, they became substantially better at judging their abilities compared to others’. So, ironically, the smarter people became, the lower their self-regard became. The truth might hurt, but it can also set you free.

  THE GRAND ILLUSION

  Similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect is the “illusory superiority effect,” a delusion that leads large numbers of people to believe they’re above average. And it shows up in survey after survey.

  Leonardo da Vinci believed that working under a purple light increased concentration.

  • For example, 68 percent of University of Nebraska faculty believed themselves not only above average, but in the top 25 percent of the teaching profession.

  • At high-octane Stanford University, 87 percent of the students believed that they were above the general population average and better than the typical Stanford student.

  • According to a College Board survey of more than a million students, 70 percent believed they were made of superior leadership material. A whopping 85 percent believed that they were better than average at getting along with others, with 25 percent saying they were in the top 1 percent.

  • When estimating their own IQ, men and women guess wrong by the same average amount—five points. However, there’s one crucial difference: On average, men tend to overestimate their IQ by five points, while women tend to underestimate by the same amount.

  • It also turns out that North Americans are the group most susceptible to this false sense of superiority. Studies of East Asians found that the majority underestimate their abilities, which spurs them toward continuous self-improvement. And when Swedes and Americans were asked the same questions about their driving abilities, 69% of the Swedes believed they had above-average driving abilities compared to 93% of the Americans.

  SMARTY PANTS

  Illusory superiority is also known in the field as “the Lake Wobegon effect,” which refers to Garrison Keillor’s sign-off to A Prairie Home Companion, a radio program that features monologues about his fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children are above average.”

  Luckily, we can’t possibly be that deluded, right?

  “Relax. What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind!”

  —Homer Simpson

  During the Alaskan gold rush, potatoes were worth their weight in gold.

  RANDOM BITS ON

  MICHAEL JACKSON HITS

  If you find this page bad and not a thriller, Uncle John respectfully suggests that you beat it.

  “You Are Not Alone”: Released in 1995, it was the first song ever to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

  “Scream”: Jackson was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and steadfastly refused to use profanity. “Scream,” a duet with his sister Janet Jackson, is the only time he ever swore in a song: “Just stop messing with me / just stop f***ing with me / make me want to scream.”

  “Thriller”: Horror movie legend Vincent Price recorded his spoken-word interlude in just two takes. Songwriter Rod Temperton wrote it in a taxi on the way to Price’s recording session.

  “Bad”: Jackson planned it as a duet with Prince. Prince backed out over lyrical content. (He was reportedly uncomfortable with the song’s first line, “Your butt is mine.”)

  “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”: Another duet for the Bad album, which Jackson wrote to perform with Whitney Houston. She had recorded three hit duets with Jackson’s brother Jermaine, but turned this one down. So did Barbra Streisand. Who got the gig? An unknown backup singer named Siedah Garrett, who also co-wrote “Man in the Mirror” with Jackson.

  “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”: Jackson was sued for stealing the song’s African-influenced chorus from the 1972 landmark disco song “Soul Makossa” by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango. (They settled out of court.)

  “Beat It”: Eddie Van Halen played the song’s guitar solo as a favor to producer Quincy Jones. He was uncredited and unpaid for his work, apart from the two six-packs of beer Jones gave him during the recording session.

  What’s rhinorrhea? The medical term for snot. (What’s rhinorhinorrhea? Rhino snot.)

  JUST PLANE WEIRD:

  BATHROOM EDITION

  If you happen to be reading this page in an airplane restroom, you might want to save it for when you’re in a bathroom on the ground.

  MUCH BETTER NOW, THANKS

  Not long after the Air Antilles flight lifted off from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe bound for St. Martin in March 2011, one of the passengers complained of feeling ill and spent the rest of the flight in the bathroom. When the plane was about to land, he asked for an ambulance to meet him at the airport. The plane landed, the ambulance pulled up...and the man said he suddenly felt better and didn’t need medical assistance after all. He walked out of the airport, bypassing all the usual security and immigration checks, and disappeared. The first sign that something was amiss came when airplane cleaners found a bundle of money in the bathroom; the second sign came when one of the other passengers, a Brink’s guard transporting $1.6 million in cash (stored in a cargo hold next to the bathroom), noticed that some of it was missing. The “sick” man had spent the entire flight taking apart the bathroom to get to the cash, and had walked off the plane $238,000 richer. He hasn’t been seen since.

  A BATHROOM BREAK TO REMEMBER

  In May 2010, an Air India Express 737 was flying from Dubai to India when the pilot left the cabin for a bathroom break. While he was gone, the co-pilot tried to adjust his seat. In the process he accidentally struck the control column and sent the plane into a steep dive. The panicked co-pilot couldn’t pull the plane out of the dive. Not only that—he couldn’t unlock the cockpit door to let the pilot back in, so that he could pull the plane out of the dive. The pilot gained access by entering an emergency code, and then saved the plane. (“We hit an air pocket,” he told the terrified passengers.) An investigation later determined that had the pilot not taken control when he did, the plane likely would have broken apart in midair.

  Theory of Relativity fact: Clocks run slightly faster on mountaintops than at sea level.

  PRE-FLIGHT PIT STOP

  In January 2009, two Southwest Airlines passengers were going through security at Ohio’s Port Columbus Airport when they noticed that the pilot just ahead of them “looked and smelled drunk.” Worried that he might be their pilot (he wasn’t), they confronted him—and he ran off. A few minutes later, airport police found him hiding in an airport bathroom. By then he’d already ditched his pilot’s uniform and called in sick from inside the bathroom. Too late. Southwest suspended him with pay and launched an investigation into the incident. (The pilot admitted to police that he’d “partied hard” in his hotel room the night before, but said he had not had anything to drink that morning.)

  BREATHLESS

  In February 2011, the Federal Aviation Agency ordered every U.S. airline to dismantle the oxygen generators (those thin
gs that drop out of the ceiling if the plane loses cabin pressure) in airplane bathrooms. Apparently, the government is worried that terrorists might be able to use the equipment to start a fire or set off a bomb in the bathroom. So are you doomed if the plane loses pressure while you’re on the pot? No, but you may be embarrassed: As soon as the flight attendants put on their own oxygen masks, they will unlock the bathrooms and pass bottles of oxygen in to anyone caught with their pants down. The FAA is working with airplane manufacturers to come up with a safer oxygen system...just for bathrooms.

  COOKIE MONSTER

  A San Francisco man named Kinman Chan was on a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in early 2010 when he locked himself in the bathroom and started screaming. When he came out of the bathroom (with his pants around his ankles) he elbowed a flight attendant. Bad move: She was a black belt in tae kwon do. She restrained Chan in a choke hold and then handcuffed him for the rest of the flight. The plane was diverted to Pittsburgh and Chan was turned over to the FBI. He blames his bizarre behavior on the marijuana cookies he eats to treat a medical condition. “Chan advised me he has a medical marijuana card and he took double his normal dose,” an FBI agent noted in an affidavit.

  There’s enough copper on the roof of Arizona’s capitol building to make 4.8 million pennies.

  NAKED NEWS

  All the nudes that’s fit to print.

  In the Ruff. Streaking was a strange fad in the ’70s. Naked, running people interrupted all sorts of things, from the 1975 Academy Awards to football, baseball, and basketball games. In 2010, Mark Roberts of Liverpool, England, became the first person to streak a dog show. He showed up at the 2010 Crufts Dog Show in Birmingham, England wearing nothing but a cat face painted over his private parts. Roberts had previously streaked a benefit for poor children and a morning TV weather report.

  Just the Facts, Ma’am. Fort Pierce, Florida, police pulled over Ellena Lucia Barron late one night in 2009 for a routine traffic stop. Barron had nothing to hide and wasn’t carrying anything illegal, but she still panicked. She told the officer she had to get something out of her trunk, and emerged from the car with her shirt off. “I thought that’s what you wanted to see,” Barron told the officer. He didn’t. She was charged with indecent exposure.