Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

Wrestling could also be hard to understand, which made it even more boring. In baseball, an outfielder either caught a fly ball or they didn’t. In football, the person with the ball either got tackled or they didn’t. Wrestling was different—when two grapplers circled for hours, who could tell at any point in the match who was winning? Did anyone even care?

  Even by wrestling standards, 1915 was a particularly boring year because the world’s youngest and best wrestlers were all off fighting in World War I. Those that were left were often past their prime and not very entertaining. Not surprisingly, the organizers of the tournament at the Opera House were having trouble filling seats. For the first day or two it looked like they were going to lose a lot of money.

  For the first day or two.

  38% of American companies say they monitor their employees’ e-mails.

  MYSTERY MAN

  Things were about to change, thanks to one spectator. He was huge, but he didn’t stand out just because of his size—he stood out because he was wearing a black mask that covered his entire head. There was no explanation for what the man was doing there or why he was wearing the mask. He just sat there watching the matches each day, and when they ended he left as silently as he came.

  Then, a few days into the tournament, the masked man and a companion suddenly stood up and loudly accused the promotors of banning the masked man from the tournament. He was the best wrestler of all and the promoters knew it, they claimed. That was why he was being kept out of the tournament, and they demanded that he be let back in. Security guards quickly hustled the pair out of the building, but they came back each day and repeated their demands, generating newspaper headlines in the process. By the end of the week, much of New York City was demanding that the masked man be allowed into the tournament.

  OH, ALL RIGHT

  Finally, on Saturday, the promotors gave in to the pressure and agreed to let him compete. Just days earlier, some of the world’s most famous wrestlers had battled one another in a nearly empty Opera House. No one cared. Now throngs of New Yorkers ponied up the price of admission to watch the mysterious masked man fight, even though—or more likely because—they had no idea who he was or whether he even knew how to fight.

  Sure enough, the Masked Marvel delivered—although not quite as much as he promised, because he lost one match and only wrestled “Strangler” Lewis to a draw. But he whipped everyone else he wrestled, bringing the packed tournament to a thrilling end. Considering the amount of exitement that led up to those final bouts, it’s a good bet that the people who saw the masked man fight remembered the experience for the rest of their lives.

  MYSTERY REVEALED

  The following year, the Masked Marvel was officially unmasked after losing a match with a wrestler named Joe Stecher. He turned out to be…Mort Henderson, a railroad detective from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who made his living throwing hobos off trains when he wasn’t in the ring. Henderson had wrestled for years under his own name, but he lost many of his matches and had gone nowhere in the sport. Even when he wasn’t wearing a mask, nobody knew who he was.

  When kids were asked to name “the most important person in the world”…

  So how did Henderson do so well at the Opera House? The whole thing was a setup—the promoters planted him in the audience hoping that he would generate publicity and sell tickets. The other wrestlers were in on the scam, too; that was how he won so many fights.

  Many New Yorkers realized that they’d been had, but nobody seemed to mind. The Masked Marvel was fun.

  FROM SPECTACLE…TO SPORT…TO SPECTACLE

  Wrestling had long been full of colorful characters. After all, legitimate professional wrestling traced its roots back to the days when carnival strongmen traveled the country offering cash prizes to any locals who could pin them to the mat.

  By 1915 wrestling had matured into a legitimate sport, a test of strength and skill, not quite as exciting as boxing but still a sport that took itself seriously. Mort Henderson could not have realized it at the time, but on the day he donned his mask the first time in 1915, he changed professional wrestling forever. It was “at this point,” Keith Greenberg writes in Pro Wrestling: From Carnivals to Cable TV, “promoters began copying techniques from vaudeville to keep spectators interested.”

  PUTTING ON A SHOW

  A lot of the credit for changing pro wrestling into what it is today goes to a former vaudeville promoter named Joseph “Toots” Mondt. Mondt saw wrestlers as little different from theatrical performers, and their matches as just another act to be managed so that profits were maximized.

  Rather than let a match run on for hours, he set time limits, which allowed him to book more fights back to back. His traveling troupe of wrestlers fought the same fights—with the same rigged outcomes—in every town they visited. Since the wrestlers didn’t have to focus on winning, they were free to thrill audiences with moves like flying drop kicks, airplane spins, and leaps across the ring feet first to kick opponents in the chest.

  …God came in 19th place, just after Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling.

  Landing fake body blows like these—ones that appeared devastating without actually causing serious physical harm—was elevated to a fine art. “When a grappler threw a punch, he tried to connect using a forearm instead of a fist, softening the blow,” Greenberg writes. “A man diving on a foe from the ropes actually grazed the man with a knee or elbow, rather than landing on him directly and causing injury.”

  ONE-RING CIRCUS

  The next big wave of innovation came during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when dwindling ticket sales forced promoters to resort to even greater gimmickry to draw crowds. Wrestlers assumed false ethnic identities so that blue-collar immigrants could root for someone of their own ethnic group, and also to capitalize on whatever geopolitical goings-on might make for an interesting villian. Evil German counts and Japanese generals were popular during World War II; in peacetime, crazy hillbillies and snooty English lords filled the bill, grappling with the noble Indian chiefs and scrappy Irish brawlers that the audiences loved.

  Wrestlers fought tag-team matches. They battled it out in cages. They wrestled while chained together. They fought in rings filled with mud (of course) as well as ice cream, berries, molasses, and other gooey substances. Women wrestled. Midgets wrestled. Giants wrestled. Morbidly obese people wrestled, and so did people with disfiguring diseases. Maurice Tillet, the French Angel, suffered from a glandular disease called acromegaly that gave him enlarged, distorted facial features. He was such a successful villain that he spawned a host of imitators, including the Swedish Angel, the Golden Angel, the Polish Angel, and the Czech Angel, a number of whom suffered from the same disease.

  OLD SCHOOL

  What happened to the “genuine” professional wrestlers, the guys who refused to showboat and took their sport seriously? They continued to wrestle one another in honest matches for legitimate championship titles. In 1920, for example, Ed “Strangler” Lewis won a world championship match against Joe Stecher in a three-hour-long bout; he held the title off and on for the next 13 years. After that the title turned over several times before it passed to a wrestler named Lou Thesz, who would win and lose it several times into the 1950s.

  90% of all insects live in the soil for at least part of their lives.

  Not that anyone cared. Thesz wasn’t above a little showmanship—his specialty holds were the Kangaroo and the Airplane Spin—but “there was little interest in the championship among the public,” Graeme Kent writes in A Pictorial History of Wrestling. “This was mainly because Thesz scorned gimmicks, relying on his wrestling ability to carry him through.”

  STAY TUNED…

  Yet it was a gimmick at the end of World War II that would provide the biggest boost to professional wrestling. The emerging medium of TV—and a wrestling innovator called Gorgeous George—helped bring wrestling into American living rooms.

  The Masked Marvel was responsible for turning wrestling from a
sport into a spectacle, but Gorgeous George deserves the credit for bringing professional wrestling into full bloom. That story is on page 340.

  IT’S A WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD

  “Alain Robert, the French ‘spider-man’ famous for climbing the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building, walked away from China’s 88-story Jinmao Tower—too risky. In February 2001, Han Qizhi, a 31-year-old shoe salesman, just happened to be passing the popular landmark and was ‘struck by a rash impulse.’ When security guards weren’t looking, Han, who had never climbed before, launched himself upon the skyscraper and began to climb. ‘He walked around Jinmao a couple of times, told his colleague he was going up, dropped his jacket, and started climbing,’ said a police spokesman. Han, bare-handed and dressed in ordinary street clothes, was grabbed by policemen just short of the summit.”

  —Reuters

  What are a carapace and a plastron? The top and bottom parts of a turtle shell.

  KNOW YOUR OLOGIES

  You may have heard of psychology, biology, and ecology, but chances are you’ve never heard of any of these “ologies.”

  Rhinology: The study of noses

  Nosology: The study of the classification of diseases

  Hippology: The study of horses

  Dactylology: Communication using fingers (sign language)

  Ichthyology: The study of fish

  Myrmecology: The study of ants

  Potamology: The study of rivers

  Anemology: The study of wind

  Sinology: The study of Chinese culture

  Mycology: The study of fungi

  Glottochronology: The study of when two languages diverge from one common source

  Neology: The study of new words

  Oenology: The study of wines

  Conchology: The study of shells

  Otology: The study of ears

  Oneirology: The study of dreams

  Semiology: The study of signs and signaling

  Cetology: The study of whales and dolphins

  Vexillology: The study of flags

  Deontology: The study of moral responsibilities

  Axiology: The study of principles, ethics, and values

  Phantomology: The study of supernatural beings

  Histology: The study of tissues

  Trichology: The study of hair

  Malacology: The study of mollusks

  Dendrochronology: The study of trees’ ages by counting their rings

  Morphology: The study of the structure of organisms

  Oology: The study of eggs

  Eschatology: The study of final events as spoken of in the Bible

  Don’t let the name fool you: Mississippi Bay is off the coast of Yokohama, Japan.

  HOW THE PEOPLE GOT BEER

  How long have young men used beer to buck up their courage around young women? Longer than you think. Here’s the story that the Bura people of northern Nigeria used to explain where beer comes from.

  Long, long ago there was no such thing as beer. The people were happy. God had put people in the world, but he had not told them that there was such a thing as beer. God did not want them to know about beer.

  There was once a man who wanted to take a girl from a village far away to be his wife. He would go to talk with the girl, but her people would not give him a chance. He did not know what to say to them, for he was very bashful. Every day he would go, but they would not let him have her for his wife. He was getting very tired of going and not getting her.

  One day he started to visit the girl’s folks. Halfway between his village and their village, he met a devil. The devil said, “I see you go on this road very often, but I never see you bring anything back. I just wonder why you go. Do you want something over this way?” The man said, “Yes, I want to take a wife in a village over this way, but they will not give her to me. I do not know what to say to them for I am too bashful.” The devil said, “If I give you my advice, will you take it?” “Yes,” said the man excitedly, “I will. Tell me, please.”

  The devil said, “When you go home, thresh some corn and separate the male grains from the female grains. Put the male grains in water and leave them until they sprout. Grind the female grains into flour and pour this flour into a jar of water. When the male grains have been in the water a few days, take them out and let the sprouts grow a little more. Then put them in the sun to dry. Next, put a pot on the fire, and with the flour which has been soaking in the jar, make mush. When the mush is made, put it out to cool. When the mush is cold, put it back into the jar of water. Grind the sprouted grains of corn which have been drying, and put that flour into the same jar with the mush. Mix up the mush and corn flour and the water. When you have mixed them well, cover the jar and let it stand for a day. It will get sweet, and on the second day it will foam. Get a strainer and strain it. After you have strained it, drink some of it. After you have drunk all you can, go and get your wife. You will see then what this thing will do for you. The name of it is beer.”

  It takes (burp!) one can of hard cider to get a beaver drunk and (hiccup) 480 pints of beer to get an African elephant drunk.

  The man said, “Thank you, thank you very much, my father. You have given me very good advice.” And each went his way.

  The young man went home and threshed corn, and divided the male grains from the female grains. He did everything that the devil told him to do. He made beer, strained it, and drank all that he could. The beer made him drunk and he did not know what he was doing. His understanding became warped. He started off to see the girl’s people. They said, “Welcome,” and he went into the compound and saluted them.

  He began at once to ask for her, but he did not talk like a bashful man any more. He talked fast and loud. Her people were amazed. They said, “Always before, this young man was bashful, but today, he is not like he always was. What is the matter?”

  The man said, “No, no more chitchat. If you do not give me my wife today, you give me back my cotton which I have given in payment for her.

  I will not have small talk any longer. I have always been bashful, but now I am tired of it and I will not have it any longer. Our negotiations will finish today. If I take her, all right; if I do not take her, all right, and that is that.”

  Her people were amazed by what he said to them. They decided together that they had better give him his wife. They allowed him to take his wife home with him that day. The man said, “I tell you beer is something wonderful.”

  This is how the Bura people began to make beer. One man began first, and even until today, men still make it. Beer is of the devil, and there is no argument, for he told them how to make that which was his own.

  “I read about the evils of drinking, so I gave up reading.”

  —Henny Youngman

  HOMER VS. HOMER

  On the left we have the wisdom of Homer, Greek poet and philosopher, who lived 3,000 years ago. And on the right we have the other Homer.

  Homer the Greek

  Homer the Simpson

  “It is the bold man who every time does his best.”

  “I don’t know, Marge. Trying is the first step toward failure.”

  “The charity that is a trifle to us can be precious to others.”

  “You gave both dogs away? You know how I feel about giving!”

  “The fates have given mankind a patient soul.”

  “Give me some peace of mind or I’ll mop the floor with you!”

  “Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man’s accursed appetite.”

  “Ahh, beer…I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer.”

  “I detest he who hides one thing in his heart and means another.”

  “But, Marge, it takes two people to lie: one to lie, and one to listen.”

  “The man who acts the least, disrupts the most.”

  “It is better to watch things than to do them.”

  “A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.”

  “T
elevision—teacher, mother, secret lover!”

  “A multitude of rulers is not a good thing. Let there be one ruler, one king.”

  “I’d blow smoke in the president’s stupid monkey face and all he’d do is grooooove on it!”

  “Never, never was a wicked man wise.”

  “I am so smart! S-M-R-T, I mean S-M-A-R-T.”

  “How mortals take the gods to task! Yet their afflictions come from us.”

  “I’m not normally a religious man, but if you’re up there, save me, Superman!”

  Bad luck? The Confederate flag had 13 stars…but there were only 11 Confederate states.

  NUMBER TWO’S WILD RIDE

  Uncle John feels a responsibility to “eliminate bathroom ignorance.” So for this edition of the Bathroom Reader we’re going to answer the basic question: What happens after you flush? (It’s more complicated than you think.)

  READY, SET, GO!

  For you, the trip has ended. You’ve “done your business,” (hopefully you’ve also had a few minutes of quality reading time), you’ve flushed the toilet, and you’ve moved onto the next thing.

  But for your “business,” a.k.a. organic solid waste, a.k.a. “Number Two,” the trip is just beginning. Here’s a general idea of what happens next.

  CONNECTIONS

  If you live in a rural area, your house is probably hooked up to a septic tank. We’ll get to that later.

  Before the 20th century, “sanitary systems” typically dumped raw sewage directly into rivers, streams, and oceans. Today, if you live in an urban area or a suburb, chances are your toilet and all of the water fixtures in your house—the sinks, showers, bathtubs, dishwasher, washing machine, etc.—are all hooked into a sewer system that feeds into a wastewater treatment plant. So the journey begins when Number Two mixes with all of the rest of the wastewater leaving your house. Then it enters the sewer main that runs down the center of your street (usually about six feet beneath the road surface), and mixes with the wastewater coming from your neighbors’ homes.