TISSUES
An English visitor to Japan in 1637 was stunned to see Japanese people “blow their noses with a certain soft paper which they carry about them in small pieces, which having been used, they fling away as a filthy thing.” What the Japanese called hanagami (“sneezing paper”) was ordinary rice paper crumpled repeatedly to make it soft.
If you think August 13th is National Left-Hander’s Day, you’re right. Get it? Right!
SURVIVAL STORIES
Here are some amazing stories of people who survived near-death experiences—some by their own wits and some by dumb luck.
SPIN CYCLE
In May 2011, a tornado was roaring through Lenox, Iowa, when 11-year-old Austin Miller got a call from his mother, Jessica, who was at work: “Get in the laundry room NOW!” Jessica tried to drive home, but her way was blocked by a wall of debris, so she took shelter in her mother-in-law’s cellar. After the tornado passed, she ran to her own house. The roof had collapsed, and there was no sign of Austin. Just then, the clothes-dryer door popped open and out he came. He had squeezed in just in time to ride out the storm.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
In May 2010, a Canadian man (unidentified in press reports) broke his leg and got lost in a remote forest near Wollaston Lake in Saskatchewan. After four days, no rescuers came, so the desperate man crawled through the forest with his ax until he found a power-line pole and chopped it down. A helicopter was dispatched by SaskPower to investigate the incident and found the man “in a very distressed state.” He later made a full recovery.
GREAT WHITE FLOSSER
Martin Kane, 62, was paddling his surf-ski (a type of sea kayak) off the coast of Perth, Western Australia, in June 2012, when he felt a big BUMP—which is not something you want to feel in the middle of the ocean. At first he thought he’d been rammed by a Jet Ski, but then he saw the fin. It belonged to a Great White shark, and it was coming back for more. Before Kane knew it, his surf-ski had been bitten in half and he was in the water fighting off the shark with his paddle. Suddenly the shark stopped attacking but continued to thrash around. Another paddler came over and scooped Kane from the water. As they made their way back to shore, Kane figured out why the shark had let up: “Its teeth were caught up in the stringers that run down the length of the ski. It was too bothered trying to get rid of the ski to chase me.”
How the French say “lol” in text messages: mdr, short for mort de rive—“I died of laughter.”
DRINK PLENTY OF FLUIDS
Hank Miller, 84, of Anthem, Arizona, got lost in 2011 after he took the wrong highway exit and ended up 20 miles down a dirt road with his SUV stuck, unable to get back on the road. Miller used the floor mats as a blanket to stay warm at night, but ran out of food and water quickly. Days passed. With no other sustenance, he opened the truck’s hood and dipped a napkin into the windshield washer fluid basin to keep hydrated. After five days, a helicopter pilot found Miller; he was weak but in good spirits. His friends weren’t the least bit surprised he survived the ordeal. Said one, “That’s just Hank being Hank.”
TORRENTIAL DRAINS
Eight-year-old Kenny Markiewicz was playing in a big puddle in Proctor, Minnesota, the day after major flooding occurred in 2012. All of a sudden, he was gone. His mom, Amber, felt around for him when a powerful suction nearly pulled her into a small culvert opening barely 2½-feet wide. Sometime later, more than half a mile a way, a searcher heard crying in the forest. It was Kenny—bleeding and dazed. He’d been sucked into the storm drain and carried six blocks before being dumped out in the woods. “I hate that ride!” he said.
A WOMB WITH A VIEW
In 1992 Jessica Evers took a gunshot to the arm—and she hadn’t even been born. It was the second day of major rioting in Los Angeles. Jessica’s mother, Elvira—seven-months pregnant at the time—was shot in the stomach while trying to get to her apartment. With no ambulances available, a friend drove her to the hospital, where she fell into a coma. When she awoke a week later, she cried, “Oh my God, my baby!” But the nurse calmed her down and explained that an emergency C-section had saved the little girl. (The bullet was removed post-delivery.) In a way, the baby saved her mother’s life. “If Jessica hadn’t caught that bullet in her arm,” said Elvira, “we’d both be dead.” In 2012 MSNBC interviewed 20- year-old Jessica, who said her prenatal brush with death had impacted her entire life. “As each day goes by, I try to find out what I’m here for. I’m innocent, but then again there are other innocent people that got hurt, too. One thing’s for sure, I’m still here.”
Rule of thumb: The longer the bone in the finger or toe, the faster the nail will grow.
UNCLE JOHN’S CREATIVE TEACHING AWARDS
If schools handed out degrees for dumb, these teachers would have earned a Ph.D.
Subject: Math
Winner: An unnamed third-grade teacher at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in suburban Atlanta, Georgia
Approach: His students were studying slavery and the life of the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, so the teacher decided to give their math lessons a historical spin, too—he assigned 20 slavery-themed math questions for homework. “Each tree has 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, how much would each slave pick?” one question asked. (Answer: seven oranges.) “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in a week?” asked another. (Answer: 14 beatings.) Four different teachers used the questions as homework for their classes.
What Happened: When parents complained, the teacher who created the assignment resigned. The school district won’t say whether the other three teachers were disciplined. “Something like that shouldn’t be embedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade,” one parent told reporters. “I’m having to explain to my eight-year-old why slavery or beatings are in a math problem. That hurts.”
Subject: Conflict Resolution
Winner: Patrick Kocsis, 39, a science teacher at the McMillan Magnet Center middle school in Omaha, Nebraska
Approach: When two of his eighth-grade students got into a shoving match in August 2011, Kocsis broke up the fight and then escorted the boys from the classroom. But instead of taking them to the principal’s office, he brought them outside and told them to “slap it out” until they resolved their dispute. The boys were still going at it 20 minutes later when the principal and a school security officer intervened and ended the fight.
Garbage fact: 80% of the waste produced by humans ends up in the oceans.
What Happened: Both boys were suspended, but their suspensions were later removed from their records—the teacher told them to fight, after all. Kocsis was cited on two counts of misdemeanor child neglect (later dropped) and placed on leave. Two weeks later, the school board voted 11–1 to fire him. (No word on whether Kocsis plans to fight his dismissal.)
Subject: Religious Studies
Winner: Harlan Porter, 31, a teacher at the B.C. Haynie Elementary School in Morrow, Georgia
Approach: One afternoon in April 2011, not long after the school day ended (and he learned his contract wasn’t being renewed), Porter attained what he called “a new level of enlightenment” and acknowledged it by stripping off his clothes and wandering the halls naked. He did it, he later explained, so that everyone would know “that his third eye was open.”
What Happened: A teacher who saw Porter called police, who found him—still nude—hanging out in the teachers’ lounge. “I explained the obvious problem with his third eye being open in public. He readily agreed that his decision to remove his clothing caused a problem,” the officer noted in the police report. Porter was charged with misdemeanor public indecency. Had any children seen him naked, he would have been charged with child molestation, a felony. According to the report, Porter admitted that his days as an elementary-school teacher were over, but that he hoped to continue teaching “on a new level, with hands in the earth, gathering the essence and learning how to love one another and fully appreciate the spiritu
al realm.”
Subject: Anatomy and cinematography
Winner: Benedict Garrett, 31, the head of “Personal, Social, and Health Education” (in other words, sex education) at Beal High School in southern England
Approach: You can’t accuse Garrett of not knowing the material. In July 2010, administrators learned he was moonlighting as both a stripper and a nude butler, and starring in adult films under the alias “Johnny Anglais.” He got caught when his pupils found the trailers for European Honeyz 4 and other movies online.
Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, is now spoken only in three remote villages in Syria.
What Happened: Garrett was suspended from teaching and later resigned. At his disciplinary hearing, he argued that 1) stripping and appearing in adult films was not incompatible with teaching high school, and 2) he was being discriminated against and punished unjustly. “While a teacher working in the sex industry must be banned, teachers who publicly indulge in activities that are linked to thousands of deaths each and every year—such as smoking, drinking, and overeating—are tolerated,” he wrote. Believe it or not, Garrett’s explanation worked…sort of. The investigating committee reprimanded him for “unacceptable professional conduct,” but did not take away his teaching license. “The committee is content that you would not repeat this behavior should you resume teaching and considers it unlikely that you will seek to return to the teaching profession whilst working as a stripper or in pornographic films,” it concluded in its report. If and when Garrett retires from his adult-themed work, he’s free to return to teaching. “Whether any school will employ me, that is another question,” he said.
* * *
REDUNDANT REDUNDANCIES
Why say in one word what you can say in two or more?
Proceed forward
Evolve over time
Mental telepathy
Cacophony of sound
Unexpected surprise
Visible to the eye
Splice together
Past memories
Kitty cat
Reply back
Basic fundamentals
Surrounded on all sides
Two equal halves
Complete stop
Same exact
Reason why
Kneel down
Live studio audience
Adequate enough
Eliminate altogether
Very unique
Over exaggerate
Major breakthrough
Filled to capacity
PIN number
ATM machine
Unintended mistake
Final outcome
Cease and desist
Raid Kills Bugs Dead
Hard boiled? An ostrich egg could support the weight of a 250 lb. man.
SILVER MEDAL SHOCKER, PART II
Here’s the next part of the story about the U.S. Olympic team that wouldn’t accept being #2. (Part I is on page 211.)
GROUNDHOG DAY
William Jones may not have had the authority to overrule the official scorer, but that’s exactly what he did. The clock started ticking off those three seconds again. The Soviets in-bounded the ball and went for a long pass. The pass failed, and the buzzer sounded to end the game. The Americans celebrated wildly.
Then, suddenly, officials stopped the celebration, cleared the floor, and ordered three seconds showing on the clock again. Apparently the time keepers had still been fiddling around with the clock trying to reset it when play resumed. U.S. players stood in shock. “We couldn’t believe that they were giving them all these chances,” said forward Mike Bantom. “It was like they were going to let them do it until they got it right.”
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
When play continued, Ivan Edeshko threw a full-court pass to Aleksandr Belov, the player who’d made the bad pass moments earlier. Belov caught it and laid the ball into the hoop just as the clock expired again. Final score at the horn: 51–50, in favor of the Soviet team. Belov raced back to his teammates with his arms held high, a newly minted hero, while the U.S. men’s team lost an Olympic basketball game…for the first time ever.
“It was sort of like being on top of the Sears Tower in Chicago celebrating and then being thrown off and falling 100 floors to the ground,” said Doug Collins.
AND THE WINNER IS…THE COLD WAR!
Referee Righetto would not sign the official scorebook until the word PROTEST had been stamped on it, and the U.S. team filed an immediate formal protest with the International Basketball Federation. The next day, a five-member FIBA Jury of Appeals met to decide the winner. On the panel: three jurors from Communist countries Cuba, Poland, and Hungary, one from Puerto Rico, and one from Italy.
A woman’s brain shrinks by almost 8% during pregnancy.
According to Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith, “Everything progressed according to strictly Cold War politics. There were three Communist Bloc judges. It was a three to two vote. America loses. The Soviet Union wins the gold medal, and at that point the American players are facing a stark reality. Do they accept the silver medal?”
The U.S. team voted to reject the silver. “We do not feel like accepting the silver medal because we feel we are worth the gold,” said Bill Summers, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Basketball Committee and manager of the U.S. team.
BEAT…OR CHEAT
Forty years later, team members still won’t accept second place. Their silver medals remain in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland, and none of the players wants them. In fact, team captain Kenny Davis said, “I have placed it in my will that my wife and my children can never, ever receive that medal from the ’72 Olympic Games. I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it. And I want nothing to do with it.” U.S. forward Mike Bantom agreed: “If we had gotten beat, I would be proud to display my silver medal. But, we didn’t get beat, we got cheated.”
As for the Soviets, Edeshko—the player who threw the game-winning pass for his team—voiced the opposite viewpoint: “It was the Cold War. Americans, out of their own natural pride and love of country, didn’t want to lose and admit loss. They didn’t want to lose in anything, especially basketball.”
The last word goes to lead referee Renato Righetto. In a signed affidavit to the International Olympic Committee, he wrote, “I consider what happened as completely illegal and an infraction to the rules of a Basketball game.”
That’s not quite the whole story. For some basic background and poignant postscripts, turn to page 421.
Karl Marx, the father of communism, never visited Russia.
IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE THAT COUNTS
Thrift shops and yard sales teem with dusty old stuff that doesn’t look very valuable. Sometimes that stuff is more valuable than you’d think, and sometimes the real treasure is the stuff inside the stuff.
CASE STUDY
Find: A purple suitcase
Where It Was Found: In a Salvation Army store in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
Story: In 2009 Tonya Ritchie and her husband traveled to a wedding in Newfoundland. They wanted to bring some frozen fish back home to Shelburne, Ontario, and rather than risk ruining their luggage, Tonya bought an old suitcase at the Salvation Army thrift store in St. John’s for $5. When they got home, Tonya put the suitcase away in the attic, where it remained until she took it down to use it again in early 2012. While packing, she found three reels of 8mm film—the kind used in home-movie cameras in the 1960s and ’70s—in one of the pockets.
The rolls were labeled “James Brander, Glen Williams, Ontario.” Tonya knew someone from the town of Glen Williams—her friend Janet Piper, who lived three doors down. When Tonya’s husband showed Janet’s husband the films and asked if the couple knew anyone by that name, he gasped—James Brander, who’d died nine years earlier, was Janet’s father. The reels were home movies of Janet’s childhood. No one can explain how the films ended up in Newfoundland, a place that Brander had never visited. No one recognized the purple suitcase, either. �
��It’s just bizarre, the chances of me picking it up is crazy,” Tonya Ritchie said. “It’s the best five bucks I’ve ever spent.”
WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Find: An old Polaroid camera
Where It Was Found: At a garage sale in Wichita, Kansas
Story: One Thursday in May 2012, 13-year-old Addison Logan tagged along with his grandmother Lois as she made the rounds of Wichita garage sales. At their third stop, he bought an old Polaroid camera for $1, then when he got it home he looked it up online to see how it worked. He opened the camera, removed the film cartridge inside…and saw that it contained a photograph of a young man and woman sitting on a sofa. The picture looked like it had been taken 30 or 40 years earlier. Addison didn’t recognize the people in the photograph, but when he showed it to his grandmother she was stunned. “That’s your uncle,” Lois Logan said. The man in the picture was her son Scott, who’d died in a car accident in 1989. The woman was his high school girlfriend, Susan Ely.
Male gorillas prefer to sleep on the ground; females nest in trees.
The Logans returned to the garage sale to find out more about the camera, but the seller, who buys things at other garage sales to sell at his, could not remember when or where he bought it. “I’m just shocked,” Addison’s dad (and Scott’s brother) told The Wichita Eagle. “The more time that passes, the more in disbelief I am. So many things have to come together for that to happen. It just seems supernatural.”
INNER CHILD
Find: An old painting
Where It Was Found: At a garage sale in Las Vegas
Story: English businessman Andy Fields, 48, was visiting Las Vegas in 2010 when he decided to check out some local garage sales. At one of them, he bought five framed sketches. Price: $5. The man selling them bragged that his aunt babysat for Andy Warhol when he was a child, but Fields didn’t pay much attention until he decided to reframe one of the sketches in 2012…and found a second sketch hidden inside the frame. “I took the backing off and saw a picture looking back at me,” he told the BBC. The sketch, signed by Warhol, is of the 1930s singer Rudy Vallee (with bright red lips), and is believed to date back to when Warhol was just 10 or 11 years old. Estimated value: between $1 and $2 million.
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 34