Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader)

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Sport: Figure skating

  Details: Tonya Harding is one of the most famous figure skaters ever, but not for skating—rather for conspiring to injure her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, in order to clear a path to victory in the 1994 Winter Olympics. Despite getting whacked on the knee with a police baton by Harding’s hired hitman, Kerrigan still won silver; Harding finished eighth. Kerrigan hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live and bowed out of the limelight gracefully. Harding, meanwhile, became a tabloid fixture, mired in domestic disputes, leaked sex tapes, and a TV special called Celebrity Boxing, in which she fought fellow tabloid fixture Paula Jones. In 1996 she starred in her only dramatic role, a direct-to-video crime drama called Breakaway, about a drug mule who wants to retire after one last job. Harding plays “Gina,” one of the mule’s accomplices.

  1.6 million people live in Manhattan…and 6.7 million people commute to work there daily.

  WHAT’S ANOTHER WORD FOR “THESAURUS”?

  Once there was a man, a biographer noted, “more interested in words than people.” That turned out to be a great thing for BRI writers and other wordsmiths. It gave us a book that is of great use, utility, value, help, worth, and functionality.

  THE LIST MAKER

  Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) was an unusual kid. In our time he would probably be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or classified as having high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome, and if he’d been born in the twenty-first century, an early intervention would have been put in place. But in the late eighteenth century, the London-born son of a clergyman had to find his own way to cope: He obsessively counted things and made lists. He recorded, for example, the total number of stair steps he climbed up each day, and kept a separate count of the steps he went down. Before age 8, he had already filled notebooks with lists of words grouped by categories: for example, all the animals he could think of, all the parts of the body, and even “Things Found in the Garden.”

  TAKE MY FAMILY, PLEASE

  The young Roget was phobic about dirt and easily upset by a world he saw as random, messy, unpredictable, and disorderly. Worse, some of his loved ones were far more dysfunctional, filling his life with instability, insanity, and tragedy. His grandmother was a lifelong depressive and possibly a schizophrenic. His mother became psychotic after his father died. His sister suffered from depression and nervous breakdowns. But perhaps the worst experience of Roget’s young life was having a grieving uncle slash his own throat and bleed to death right in the middle of a conversation they were having.

  In the midst of such horror, Roget’s ritualistic sorting practices must have calmed him and given him a sense of order, helping him to stay functional while those around him were not. In fact, young Roget managed to keep his idiosyncracies so well in check that he was invited to study medicine and the classics at Edinburgh University when he was 14 years old.

  High society: Each member of a Swiss household may legally grow 4 cannabis plants.

  NO LAUGHING MATTER

  Roget earned his MD from Edinburgh in 1798. He was nineteen at the time, and perhaps it was this youthfulness that caused him to drift a bit. He hung out with scientific luminaries including Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus (the young Roget found the elder Darwin to be fat and sloppy). He worked for awhile with Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the “frigidarium” (a device for keeping food cool and fresh), but was reportedly appalled by the “filthiness of his equipment.” He moved on to participate as a subject in experiments with nitrous oxide but, Roget being Roget, he took the whole thing too seriously: After his first laughing gas exposure, he wrote that while others were laughing and acting giddy, “I experienced no pleasurable sensations of any kind.”

  After six weeks working on ways to repurpose London’s sewage (we have no idea what he had in mind), Roget spent two years as a tutor and guide for two wealthy young gentlemen doing their “Grand Tour” of Europe (Paris: dirty. Napoleon’s soldiers: pleasingly precise). At the ripe old age of 25, Roget was made a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He settled into a career and went to work introducing much-needed public-health reforms.

  When Roget arrived in Manchester in 1804, the city’s streets literally swam with garbage. “The town is horrible,” he wrote, “dirty and black…the air always heavy by the smoke of the factories.” Roget found the city so filthy and disorderly that he refused to go out for trivial reasons and spent most evenings and off-days indoors, tinkering and…making lists.

  MOVING PICTURES & SLIDING RULES

  While peering through the window blinds one day, Roget noticed something odd: The spokes of a cart’s spinning wheels looked curved as they passed by. Roget ran outside and asked the cart driver to go back and forth in front of his home so he could study the effect. He decided that this optical allusion was due to what he called “the persistence of vision.” In simpler words, the eye’s retina sees movement not as a continuous flow but as a series of split-second still images that it projects to the brain, which interprets them as movement. This discovery led, in time, to the magic of movies. (More than a century later, movie executive Will H. Hays would credit Roget as being one of the fathers of the motion picture.)

  Can you find them all? There are 376 hidden Mickey Mouse silhouettes around Disneyland.

  Roget’s biggest breakthrough, however, was inventing the “loglog scale” for slide rules. Adding a sliding piece of wood with precise numbers along its edges to the basic ruler allowed engineers, architects, and mathematicians to do complicated computations without spending hours working them out on paper.

  Dr. Roget was something of a joiner: He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (made up of the world’s most distinguished scientists), and a member of the Zoological Society of London, the Geological Society, and the Medical and Chirurgical (surgical) Society, among others. Despite his comfort with groups, he was less comfortable working one-on-one. His bedside manner was awkward at best, so he spent much of his career as a researcher and lecturer (and kept making list after list of words).

  In 1840 Roget retired from medicine. He was 61 years old and could have justly rested on his laurels and gone down in history as a scientific footnote for his contributions to the slide rule and motion pictures. But a book by another compulsive list maker sent him back to his lists with a vengeance.

  NOT A LISTLESS RETIREMENT

  Enter the competition: Hester Lynch Piozzi. Piozzi had been interested in words and their usage all her life. In 1794 she wrote a guidebook of synonyms, titled (in the long-winded style of the time) British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation. Twenty-four years after her death, a publisher reprinted the volume and Roget got his hands on a copy.

  He was appalled. To Roget, Piozzi’s lists were not only haphazard, they were based on a faulty premise: that words could actually be synonymous. He believed that no two words were ever truly synonyms—each word had subtle differences in meaning and connotation. He also believed that the best word guide would provide a system of “verbal classification.”

  He dug up the lists of words organized by categories he’d started as a young doctor and set to work with new vigor, refining his categories and subcategories, carefully fitting each word into its proper place. For example, in the very long category of “Individual Volition,” he included a subcategory called “Cleanness” that starts with words related to perfection (“pure, spotless”), works its way through medium clean words (“untainted, like a cat in pattens”), and then tackles words related to extreme uncleanness (“rotten as cheese, crapulous”). Roget’s way of classifying words would allow a wordsmith to pick just the right word to use when comparing, say, a well-maintained restaurant kitchen (“hygienic”) with a teenager’s bedroom (“foul”).

  Thanks to thinner air, airports at higher altitudes need longer runways than those at sea level.

  ONE CLASSY BOOK

  At age 73, Roget brought to his publisher a book that separated words int
o 1,000 categories and sorted them by class, division, and section (similar to the way natural historians sort animal species by phylum, class, and order). He saw it as a kind of “reverse dictionary” that would enable someone to find the word by which “an idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed.”

  It was an invaluable resource with one big problem: While Roget’s method of organizing was brilliant (and fun to browse) it was extremely difficult to use as a reference tool. Luckily, his publisher convinced him to add an index, changing the book from an exhaustively fascinating oddity to a genuinely useful reference tool. It became a true thesaurus, which Roget would have been quick to point out means “treasury” and not, as most people believe, “a list of synonyms.”

  Published in 1852, Roget’s book had a wordily worthy title: Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged So As To Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. It was a huge hit with the British public, and was an immediate success. A “bowdlerized” American edition (they took out the vulgar bits) came out two years later. Roget continued correcting and adding to subsequent editions until his death at age 90, and his heirs continued the task for another century by which time the name Roget’s became so generic it was (sorry Mr. R.) synonymous with the word thesaurus.

  * * *

  “A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.”

  —Burt Bacharach

  An Egyptian man named his newborn daughter “Facebook” to commemorate the role the social network played in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

  GANGRENE EXPLAINED

  The BRI staff was sitting around talking about old Western movies, when Thom pointed out that it seemed like there was always someone in danger of getting “gangrene.” There was a long pause, and then someone said, “What the heck is gangrene anyway?” And so an article was born. (Warning: Uncle John found this article especially creepy, but let us include it because, he said, “Science is fascinating…even when it makes you retch.”)

  WHAT IT IS: Gangrene is a medical condition in which body tissue dies due to loss of blood supply or bacterial infection. Many things can cause a loss of blood supply, including trauma and complications due to disease.

  HISTORY: Before the modern era of medicine, gangrene was a common cause of death for people who had suffered some kind of injury, especially those resulting in an open wound. This was especially true of soldiers wounded in combat. During World War I, for example, it is believed that at least 100,000 wounded soldiers—and probably many more—died not directly due to their wounds, but due to the gangrene that set in afterwards. Since the development of antibiotics, which attack infection, wartime gangrene deaths have been almost nil.

  WHERE IT STRIKES: Gangrene can occur anywhere on the body, even in internal organs, but it usually occurs at the extremities—hands, fingers, feet, toes—where conditions leading to compromised blood supply are much more common. There are two major types:

  • Wet gangrene occurs when an area of the body already suffering from depleted blood supply—due to an artery being severed, for example—becomes infected which leads to: 1) swelling, which can further impede blood supply, 2) the production of foulsmelling pus, 3) change in skin color in the affected region from red, to brown, to black, 4) the loss of the dead tissue. Wet gangrene is by far the more dangerous type, as it can quickly lead to sepsis (a body-wide infection), which can lead to death in hours. The most common condition that causes wet gangrene is serious trauma, such as that suffered via gunshot, car accident, or fire.

  An especially deadly form of wet gangrene is gas gangrene. It’s caused when a strain of bacteria known as Clostridium perfringens enters the body, most commonly through an open wound. As the bacteria multiply, they produce toxins, which cause further tissue damage, plus gas, which causes intense swelling. Both speed the spread of infection, and, if untreated, will quickly lead to death. Textbook symptoms of gas gangrene are massive swelling, dark purplish skin, and large, tight bubble-blisters on the skin. (That’s from the gas.)

  • Dry gangrene develops much more slowly—it can actually take years to develop. It is the result of a gradual reduction of blood flow to an area. Affected tissue becomes cold, skin slowly becomes purplish, then black, and, if untreated, there can be loss of tissue. The most common cause of dry gangrene is vascular disease (such as arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries) due to high cholesterol levels, diabetes, or cigarette smoking.

  TREATMENT: Gangrene is always treated with antibiotics to fight infection, and with removal of dead tissue, as it is a breeding ground for bacteria. You may have heard of the use of maggots—fly larvae—to treat wounds. That’s all about gangrene: Maggots eat dead tissue—and actually kill bacteria—and in so doing prevent the infection that can lead to gas gangrene. “Maggot therapy,” as it’s called, has been around since ancient times and was approved by the FDA in 2004. Treatment also may also include operations to return blood supply to affected areas, or in extreme cases, amputation.

  PREVENTION: People with diabetes and people with chronic vascular problems should regularly check extremities for cuts, sores, swelling, or discoloration, and if any are found, should see a doctor.

  FAMOUS VICTIMS:

  • King Herod of Judea. He is believed to have died from a rare form of gangrene that affects the private parts.

  • President William McKinley. He was shot twice in the abdomen on September 6, 1901, by Leon Czolgosz. McKinley survived the attack, and over the first few days doctors thought he was on the mend. But then he took a turn for the worse and died on September 14. Until an autopsy was performed, doctors were unaware that gangrene had set in all along the tracks of the bullets, from the entry wounds, through internal tissue, and turning the walls of the stomach, pancreas, and one kidney gangrenous.

  Person who owned the most dogs in history: Kublai Khan. He had 5,000 Mastiffs.

  • Sarah Bernhardt. The international stage star injured her right knee during a play in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1905. The knee never healed. Bernhardt was plagued by pain, and, more significantly, circulation problems, and over the years dry gangrene developed in her leg. In 1916, fully eleven years after the accident, Bernhardt, by this time 71 years old, ordered doctors to amputate the leg above the knee. She continued acting, mostly in a wheelchair (she never liked her wooden leg) until her death in 1923 at the age of 78.

  FINAL NOTE: In the year 944, an estimated 20,000 people (some historians put it as high as 40,000) died in an epidemic that struck southern France. Experts who have studied the numerous writings about the outbreak say that although the people didn’t know it at the time, their grain supply—especially rye—had become infected with a fungus known as Claviceps purpurea. This fungus contains toxins which build up in the bodies of those who consume it, eventually leading to a medical condition known as ergotism, which causes vomiting, seizures, hallucinations, discoloration of the skin, loss of fingers, toes, and even limbs, and, in almost all cases before the days of modern medicine, death. How? Chemicals in the toxins restrict blood vessels, which leads to loss of blood supply. That means that many of the 20,000 (or 40,000) people who died in southern France in 944—and the hundreds of thousands more in the many other ergotism outbreaks throughout history—actually died of dry gangrene.

  * * *

  6 REAL WRESTLER NAMES FROM THE WWF

  1. Akeem the African Dream

  2. Isaac Yankem, D.D.S.

  3. Doinks the Clown

  4. Johnny Attitude

  5. Disco Inferno

  6. Xanta Claus

  Canada has the world’s longest coastline, but only a 9,000-person navy. The US: 300,000.

  LIFE BEFORE SPELL-CHECK

  How did people remember how to spell tricky words before computers? With the aid of mnemonic (memory) devices. Once you learn them, you’ll never again forget how to spell these words.

  Word: Opposite

  Memory Trick: “O
ften prosperous people open stores in the east.”

  Word: Illegible. (Does it have one l or two? Does it end in –gible or –gable?)

  Memory Trick: “Ill on gin? Your writing will be illegible.”

  Word: Pneumonia

  Memory Trick: “People never expected us to get pneumonia.”

  Word: Exaggerate. (Is it spelled with one g or two?)

  Memory Trick: “If you’re bragging, you’re exaggerating.”

  Word: Champagne

  Memory Trick: “Agnes loves to drink champagne.”

  Word: Lightning. (Is it spelled with or without an e?)

  Memory Trick: “Leaving off the e lightens lightning’s load.”

  Word: Grammar. (Is it spelled with one m or two?)

  Memory Trick: “Tom marred his paper with bad grammar.”

  Word: Wednesday

  Memory Trick: “We do not eat soup on Wednesdays.”

  Word: Embarrass. (One r or two? One s or two?)

  Memory Trick: “People get really red and smile shyly when they’re embarrassed.”

  Word: Marshmallow. (Is it spelled –mello or –mallo?)

  Memory Trick: “They sell marshmallows at the mall.”

  Word: Indispensable. (Is it spelled –ible or –able?)

  Memory Trick: “Only the most able are indispensable.”

  Word: Colonel

  Memory Trick: “The colonel was lonely.”

  Word: Overrated. (One r or two?)

  Memory Trick: “Cherries are overrated.”

  Word: Lovely. (Spelled with an e? If so, where does it go?)

  Memory Trick: “I love to get lovely gifts.”

  Heavyweight boxing champ Gene Tunney once lectured at Yale. Subject: Shakespeare.

  SINGING ATHLETES

  These days, it seems as if every basketball star or boxer is making a music video. Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, and Chris Webber are on the long list of NBA stars who’ve cut rap songs, while Oscar De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., and Manny Pacquiao have all stepped out of the boxing ring to show their tender sides through song. Here’s a look at a few of the best—and worst—musical athletes.