Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  JAKE GYLLENHAAL AS JAKE SULLY (Avatar, 2009) James Cameron’s first choice was the little-known Australian actor Sam Worthington, but because 20th Century Fox was spending nearly half a billion dollars on the film, they told Cameron to audition Gyllenhaal and Matt Damon, both of whom were bigger boxoffice draws. “Honestly, did I go out and try to woo them? No,” admitted Cameron. “I had my heart set on Sam. Maybe Jake and Matt sensed my lack of 100% commitment.” Neither Damon nor Gyllenhaal wanted the role, so Cameron got Worthington, and Fox still made its half a billion back…and then some.

  ROB LOWE AS REN McCORMACK (Footloose, 1984) Tom Cruise and John Travolta both turned down the role of the highschool kid who dares to dance in a town where dancing is banned, so Rob Lowe was cast. When Lowe injured his knee while dancing and had to quit, the producers asked Kevin Bacon to audition, based on his work in Diner. Bacon said no—he’d already accepted the lead in the Stephen King horror movie Christine. “If you get Footloose,” they told Bacon, “it will make you a star.” One minute into the audition, Bacon got the part (and it did make him a star).

  FRANK SINATRA AND ANTHONY PERKINS AS JERRY AND JOE (Some Like It Hot, 1959) Named by the American Film Institute as the “best comedy of all time,” this classic stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians who dress in drag and join an all-girl orchestra to hide from the Mob. Director Billy Wilder wanted Lemmon and Curtis, but the studio wanted bigger stars. Sinatra didn’t show up to a lunch meeting, and Perkins just “wasn’t right.” (Jerry Lewis declined because he didn’t want to wear women’s clothes.) Wilder got his first choices. A year later, Perkins starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the AFI’s “best thriller of all time.”

  SANDRA BULLOCK AS MAGGIE FITZGERALD (Million Dollar Baby, 2004) Bullock tried for several years to get this short story made into a film so she could star in it, but no studio wanted to finance a movie about a female boxer. Bullock gave up due to a contractual obligation to film Miss Congeniality 2. Director Clint Eastwood took over the project and secured some financing, but had to come up with half of the money himself. With Bullock unavailable, he hired Hilary Swank and shot the film on a shoestring budget in just 37 days. Result: The movie that no studio wanted ended up winning four Oscars, including Best Picture.

  KEVIN KLINE AS SAM WHEAT (Ghost, 1990) Writer Bruce J. Rubin told director Jerry Zucker (Airplane!) that Patrick Swayze should star. “You mean the Dirty Dancing guy?” asked Zucker. Zucker’s first choice was Kevin Kline, who declined. So did Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon, Al Pacino, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, Mickey Rourke, David Duchovny, Johnny Depp, Chevy Chase, and Alec Baldwin. None of them believed in the ghostly love story. But Swayze did: “The script made me cry.” So Zucker reluctantly gave him an audition. Swayze got the part, and Ghost became 1990’s top-grossing movie worldwide.

  More than 125 women are known to have posed as men and fought in the Civil War.

  THE LLOYDS BANK TURD

  It may sound gross, but it’s real and it’s considered a national “treasure.” And although we might wish we did, we didn’t make up the name—that’s really what it’s called. Get ready to learn about bathroom archaeology.

  BEAUTY, SKIN DEEP

  If you’ve ever been to the English city of York, you already know that it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the United Kingdom. Situated at the junction of the Ouse and Foss rivers, this onetime capital of the kingdom of Northumbria is home to picturesque cobblestone streets, elegant Tudor architecture, and York Minster Cathedral, one of the finest churches in England. York was one of the nation’s largest cities until the Industrial Revolution, when it was eclipsed by manufacturing centers like Sheffield and Birmingham. That may not have been good for the local economy, but it did preserve the city’s charm.

  Alas, York wasn’t always the sparkling jewel that it is today. In the Middle Ages it was positively filthy, something King Edward III observed when he visited in the 14th century. He ordered that the streets be cleaned at once, noting that the “abominable smell abounding in the city…from dung and manure and filth and dirt,” was worse “than any other city in the realm.”

  DOWN UNDER

  Edward’s observation wasn’t unfounded. There have been settlements at York for more than 2,000 years, and one result of the continuous occupation of the site is that the modern city sits on a layer of densely compacted rubbish and filth that archaeologists estimate is about 10 feet deep.

  Portions of this mass are remarkably well preserved, thanks to the fact that the soil in some parts of the city is waterlogged and largely oxygen free, preserving for more than 1,000 years things like wood, leather, cloth, and bone, most of which normally would have biodegraded completely in just a decade or two. Modern archaeologists got their first inkling of how much lay beneath York in 1972, when the foundation for a Lloyds Bank branch was dug on Pavement Street and artifacts from the city’s Viking period were discovered in the muck. (Viking raiders captured York—then known as Jorvik—in 866 A.D. and held it for nearly a century before they were finally driven off in 954.)

  The Beatles still receive more radio airplay than any other band.

  HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE

  An even bigger discovery of Viking artifacts was made down the road in 1976, when an old candy factory on Coppergate Street was torn down to make way for a shopping center. There excavators discovered the remains of a cluster of Viking buildings, complete with animal enclosures, wells, refuse pits, and latrines. Working from 1976 until 1981, archaeologists sifted through 36,000 individual layers of debris—more than eight tons of material in all—to recover more than 40,000 objects, including glass beads, knives, combs, shoes, bowls, keys, locks, dice, fish hooks, even a leather ice skate with a blade carved from bone. Many of these items had been discarded by the Vikings in their rubbish pits.

  The artifacts recovered from the Coppergate site were impressive enough that a Viking museum was added to the shopping center so that the artifacts could be displayed right where they’d been found, in a reproduction of the Viking village unearthed at the site. The Jorvik Viking Center opened in April 1984; since then, more than 20 million people from all over the world have passed though its doors.

  But many visitors come not to see the treasures unearthed at Coppergate Street—not the Viking coins, shoes, or jewelry, or the dice, the knives, or even the leather-and-bone ice skate. They come to see a much more humble and earthy “treasure” recovered from a lowly Viking latrine at the Lloyds Bank site on Pavement Street. The crowds come to see the 1,200-year-old Lloyds Bank Coprolite—or Lloyds Bank Turd, as it is affectionately known—one of the oldest, largest, most intact fossilized pieces of human excrement ever found on Earth.

  It’s the only artifact that visitors ask for by name.

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF BANK DEPOSIT

  The Lloyds Bank Turd isn’t valued just by naughty schoolchildren, either: Serious scientists assign great weight to the discovery, because finding a single, intact human turd from a thousand years ago is so unlikely.

  Picky eaters: Of the 5,400 known mammal species, humans have domesticated only 16 for food.

  Finding large deposits of biodegraded human waste at a settled site like Jorvik isn’t unusual; indeed, it’s estimated that a third of the entire 10-foot-deep mass of debris beneath York is made up of human and animal waste. Scientists can distinguish between the human poop and the animal poop, which makes it possible to look for clues about the diet and health of the populations that created it.

  But such waste is usually found only in large masses, such as at the bottom of latrine pits, and archaeologists can draw only general conclusions about the people that used the latrines, since it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one pooper’s poop from another’s. The value of a single, fossilized poop like the Lloyd’s Bank Turd is that it provides a snapshot of a single person at a single point in time.

  GETTING TO KNOW YOU

  So what do we know about the anonymous
Viking who made the most famous deposit that Lloyds Bank is ever likely to see? His or her diet consisted largely of meat and grains, but not much in the way of fruits or vegetables, which may help explain why the sample is nine inches long and weighs half a pound. “Whoever passed it probably hadn’t ‘performed’ for a few days,” says student conservator Gill Snape. Considering the large number of fruit pits and vegetable seeds found at the site but not in this particular Viking’s stool, this was likely not the healthiest or the most regular person in the village.

  Like a lot of Vikings, this one suffered from at least two types of intestinal parasites: The remains of hundreds of whipworm and maw-worm eggs were found in the stool. The presence of worms in the stool is indicative of the filthy conditions and poor hygiene in Viking settlements. Wells were dug too close to latrines, making the availability of clean, uncontaminated water a hit-or-miss (usually miss) proposition. The dirt floors of the Viking dwellings teemed with fly larvae (maggots) and mouse and rat droppings, with plenty of dog, pig, cow, and horse droppings just outside the door. It was virtually inevitable that residents of such settlements would be infested with intestinal parasites.

  HISTORICALLY ACCURATE (MOSTLY)

  If you get a chance to visit York, be sure to go to the Jorvik Viking Center and view the Lloyds Bank Turd in all its glory. Take the entire tour. The Viking village was painstakingly created using the most up-to-date information available when it was built in the early 1980s. And in 2001, when the exhibit underwent a $7.5 million facelift, 25 years of studying the artifacts was used to make the exhibit even more historically accurate. How accurate? The Lloyds Bank Turd was chemically analyzed to create a “fecal odorgram”—a best-guess estimate of what it smelled like when it was first created 1,000 years ago, and that smell has been artificially reproduced to give the latrine display a level of olfactory authenticity unheard of—and unsmelt of—in other museums.

  Odds that a member of the United States Congress is a millionaire: 1 in 2.

  About the only thing that isn’t accurate about the latrine display is that the Viking figure depicted in mid-squat is partially hidden behind a screen. That’s to protect the visitors’ modesty, not the Viking’s. According to the best available evidence, a real Viking latrine wouldn’t have had such a screen. Vikings of that period had little or no squeamishness regarding bathroom functions. They were perfectly comfortable pooping out in the open, even when there were other people around.

  THE CROWN STOOLS

  So how much is a treasure like the Lloyds Bank Turd worth? More than 20 years ago, Dr. Andrew Jones, the director of the Jorvik Viking Center and a leading “paleo-scatologist” (a scientist who studies ancient fecal matter), had the turd appraised for insurance purposes. The verdict: It was valued at $39,000, an amount that Jones said was way too little. “It’s insulting, really,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1991. “This is the most exciting piece of excrement I’ve ever seen. In its own way it’s as irreplaceable as the Crown jewels.”

  Irreplaceable, but not irreparable, as the world learned in 2003 when a teacher on a class trip to the Viking Center dropped the poop and it broke into three pieces. So did the center cash in its insurance policy? Nope—they just had student curator Gill Snape glue the poop back together and put it back out on display.

  “I heard I may be doing some unusual things while I was here,” Snape says, “but I never imagined it would include this.”

  One in nine middle-aged Americans live with their parents or in-laws.

  SMART AND TALENTED

  Many people have dedicated their lives to a trade, science, or art to the point of mastery. But even geniuses need a hobby.

  JEAN AUGUSTE DOMINIQUE INGRES

  Genius: Nicknamed “the Napoleon of Painting” for his dominance of the French art world in the 19th century, Ingres’s talent emerged fully formed at age nine and didn’t change much after that. He was a neoclassicist who painted primarily portraits, including Napoleon’s.

  He had a hobby, too: Ingres was a master violinist. His father started him on lessons almost from birth, and he studied under some of the greatest violinists in Europe. By his 14th birthday, he was already the second violinist for the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, a major French orchestra. Today, “Ingres’ Violin” is a French expression for a secondary talent totally unrelated to one’s true calling in life.

  CLAUDE SHANNON

  Genius: In his 1937 graduate thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 21-year-old Shannon proved that electrical circuits could be used to solve any complex algebra problem. Later, he proposed that these same circuits could be used to store and transmit information—essentially the basis for the technology behind the modern computer. For this, and other work, Shannon is referred to as “the father of information theory.”

  He had a hobby, too: Shannon taught at MIT and was known as an eccentric who traveled around campus on a unicycle, sometimes juggling as he rode. Shannon amassed a collection of exotic unicycles from around the world, a passion that overlapped with his technological genius: He devised a juggling robot as well as several mathematical proofs for an ideal juggling method.

  H.G. WELLS

  Genius: Wells is best known for writing the science-fiction novels The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He was one of the first writers to take sci-fi seriously, using it to express complex philosophical concepts about world peace and human potential. Wells was a great visionary, foreseeing the United Nations, the military use of the airplane, and space travel. He also coined the terms “Martian” and “time machine.”

  Professional clowns register their makeup designs to prevent other clowns from copying them.

  He had a hobby, too: Wells enjoyed designing (and playing) military simulation games, notably one called “Little Wars.” While the game was made for children, it included complex rules for maneuvering infantry (mass-produced tin soldiers) and artillery (working miniature cannons that shot wooden dowels, popular in an age before safety regulations). “Little Wars” was the first modern tabletop game, and inspired hundreds of others. While games like “Warhammer” are now much more popular, Wells’s game was so well designed that it’s still played today.

  ISAAC NEWTON

  Genius: Newton, the father of modern physics and originator of the theory of universal gravitation and three laws of motion, was also the warden of Britain’s royal mint, responsible for regulating the coinage of the British Empire.

  He had a hobby, too: He liked to disguise himself as a drunkard. Reason: In 17th-century England, counterfeiting was a serious crime, equivalent to treason and punishable by death. However, counterfeiters were almost impossible to catch due to Britain’s complex legal code and stratified class system. So Newton occasionally took drastic measures, hanging out in bars and brothels—where counterfeiters gathered—to collect the evidence he needed firsthand. He was, by all accounts, pretty good at this, and managed to catch more than 20 big-time counterfeiters.

  TYCHO BRAHE

  Genius: Brahe was one of the 16th century’s most prominent scientists. Together with his student Johannes Kepler, he made observations which led to Galileo’s groundbreaking theory that the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Brahe was an excellent businessman too, and could afford to build and staff his own personal research facility for astronomical studies.

  He had a hobby, too: Brahe had a bad temper, which he relieved through fencing. On one occasion, he was involved in a duel with another intellectual of the Early Modern period, the Danish mathematician Manderup Parsbjerg. Unable to resolve a bitter dispute about who was the better mathematician, they decided to settle the matter with a duel. Brahe may have been good, but Parsbjerg was better: Brahe lost the bridge of his nose to a well-timed sword stroke. For the rest of his life, he wore a prosthetic nose made of metal (gold, silver, or perhaps copper—accounts vary) and held in place with paste.

  Eating too much
licorice can raise your blood pressure.

  RICHARD FEYNMAN

  Genius: Theoretical physicist Feynman was the very definition of a genius. His first job after graduating from Princeton and MIT: nuclear physicist in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. Later, he made several groundbreaking contributions to particle physics, and even won a Nobel Prize.

  He had a hobby, too: Feynman had numerous interests that occupied his time: painting, Meso-American history…and the bongo drums. Feynman’s drumming talents were overshadowed by his achievements as a physicist, but in some circles he was known only for his musical abilities. As Feynman himself said, “On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

  He had another hobby, too: As if that wasn’t enough, Feynman was also an expert safecracker. He was particularly adept at solving combination locks, and was so good that, amazingly, he could often deduce combinations to safes from the psychology of their owners. Feynman earned his reputation while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, where he easily—and routinely—cracked the safes containing classified nuclear secrets.

  ASIA IS LARGER THAN THE MOON

  The surface area of the moon is about 14,645,750 square miles. The area of the continent of Asia: about 17,212,000 square miles.

  Want one? You might have to move: It is illegal to own gerbils or ferrets in California.