Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader
Page 39
Knowledge box: A schoolhouse, where hobos sometimes sleep
Moniker: Nickname
Road kid: A young hobo who apprentices himself to an older hobo in order to learn the ways of the road
Rum dum: A drunkard
Snipes: Other people’s cigarette butts (O.P.C.B.); “snipe hunting” is to go looking for butts
Spear biscuits: To look for food in garbage cans
Yegg: The lowest form of hobo—he steals from other hobos
HOBO ROAD SIGNS
Wherever they went, hobos left simple drawings, or “marks,” chalked on fence posts, barns, and railroad buildings. These signs were a secret code giving fellow knights of the road helpful tips or warnings.
“Angel food” found here—you have to sit through a sermon to get it.
This homeowner has a gun—run!
Beware of the “bone polisher” (a mean dog).
It’s safe to camp here.
The people who live here are rich (a silk hat and a pile of gold).
Be prepared to defend yourself.
Townspeople don’t want you here—keep moving!
Police around here don’t like hoboes (handcuffs).
Can you taste them? The secret recipe for Dr Pepper is said to contain 23 fruit flavors.
TOILET TECH
Better living through bathroom technology.
INVASIVE ADVERTISING
Company: Captive View (Britain)
Product: Viewrinal, a “digital display for the washroom”
How It Works: It’s actually a urinal with a TV built into it—one that shows nothing but 30-second commercials. As of August 2003, the company had installed 150 Viewrinals in the men’s rooms of bars, clubs, and movie theaters all over Britain, serving an audience estimated at 400,000 viewers per month.
So why would any company want to pitch their product there? “Viewrinals offer a captive audience to advertisers,” the company explains, “and they have the ability to target the elusive 18–30 age group in a trendy environment using cutting-edge technology.”
Not to Be Confused With: Picturinal—the urinal billboard that talks. “The motion-activated picture frames are positioned above urinals in soccer stadiums. Once triggered, the frame speaks its message—to its now-captured audience.”
RISE TO THE OCCASION
Company: Urilift (Holland)
Product: The Urilift, the world’s first telescoping “pop-up” urinal
How It works: The Urilift is intended to address the problem of public urination without being too much of an eyesore. During the day when it’s in the closed position and not in use, the Urilift looks like a manhole cover built into the sidewalk. But at night, when the bars are open, all a city worker has to do is walk past the manhole cover with a remote control, and voila! Up out of the ground pops an open-air, pissoir-style urinal that’s about six feet tall and can accommodate three people at a time. Then in the morning when the bars are closed, drinkers have gone home, and respectable people don’t want to look at a public urinal, the Urilift sinks back into the ground and disappears out of sight.
SPIN CYCLE
Company: TheCleanSeat.com (United States)
A lifetime of bathroom reading: In the early 15th century, Chinese scholars compiled an 11,095-volume encyclopedia.
Product: Universal Clean Seat
How It Works: Picture a toilet seat that is perfectly circular instead of the traditional oval shape. If the Universal Clean Seat is dirty, you just wave your hand over a special sensor. A cleaning tool then pops out of the back of the seat, makes contact with the toilet seat ring and spins it like a phonograph record for 15 seconds, during which time it washes, disinfects, and dries the seat.
THE POT THICKENS
Company: TravelJohn Products, Inc. (United States)
Product: Personal Disposable Urinal Pouch
How It Works: “Our revolutionary patented Liqsorb pouch absorbs, deodorizes and disinfects while it solidifies liquids instantly into an odorless, spill-proof gel that won’t leak! A specially-designed spill guard prevents back flow, and a unisex adapter makes it perfect for that much needed relief—whether sitting or standing. Reusable until it’s full.”
OTHER ITEMS
• Hygen-A-Seat. Be sure you always have a clean restroom toilet seat when you need one—carry one with you! The Hygen-A-Seat looks just like a standard toilet seat, except that it folds in half and has luggage handles to make it easy to carry. Nonslip pads enable it to adhere safely to all toilet seats. Comes with sanitizing spray and sanitary storage envelopes. The toilet-seat-as-briefcase look isn’t for you? They also sell a “stylish shoulder bag for inconspicuous storage of your Hygen-A-Seat.”
• Flush Stopper. A simple adhesive cover that “blinds” the electric eye of an automatic-flush toilet, so that it won’t flush when little kids—who can be too small for the electric eye to “see”—are sitting on the toilet. “Our research shows that nearly 40% of all children develop some degree of stress associated with public restrooms due to a bad experience with an automatic-flush toilet,” says inventor Jeffrey Kay.
• Tilt-A-Roll. Puts an end to the age-old debate: Should the toilet paper roll over the roll, or under the roll? The Tilt-A-Roll lets you have it both ways: it’s a toilet paper holder mounted on a swivel so that if you don’t like the way the roll is rolled, spin it 180° and it’s just the way you like it.
CRÈME de la CRUD
Most really bad movies die a quick death in the theaters and then gather dust on video store shelves. But not this one.
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
• Take two A-list movie stars: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
• Add a torrid off-screen love affair that doesn’t translate into on-screen chemistry.
• Add a huge dollop of media hype about how great the movie’s going to be.
• Mix in a vulgar, inane script.
Stir it all together and you have Gigli (pronounced zheelie), a movie that rivals Ishtar and Battlefield Earth for the title of Holly-wood’s biggest flop. Good news: You don’t have to see the picture—you can be entertained just by reading the scathing reviews. Here are some samples.
“Looking for something to praise in Gigli is like digging for rhinestones in a dung heap.”
—Northwest Herald
“Larry and Ricki eventually climb between the sheets in a scene that is insulting to the sexuality of all living creatures, from plankton on up.”
—Boston Globe
“There is not one iota of dramatic weight to it, and so we just sit, slack-jawed, as Gigli unfolds, a cinematic train wreck of distinguished proportions.”
—Entertainment Today
“If you’re going to skip one film this year—make it Gigli.”
—Talking Pictures
“Gigli looks like a project that was intended for appreciation by precisely two people in the entire universe: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. For their sake, I hope they buy a lot of tickets.”
—EFilmCritic.com
“Gigli is a rigli, rigli bad movie.”
—Mercurynews.com
“This is a film that inspires hatred.”
—FilmThreat.com
No wonder they’re “big boned”—Elephants spend 18 hours a day eating.
“Fifty minutes into this bomb, one character yells, ‘I’m getting tired of this!’ In our theater, one audience member yelled back ‘Me too!’”
—CrankyCritic.com
“If miscasting was a crime, Gigli would be proof of a felony.”
—CNN
“The rare movie that never seems to take off, but also never seems to end.”
—USA Today
“Gigli is so unrelentingly bad that people may want to see it just as a bonding experience; viewers (read: victims) will want to talk and comfort each other afterwards.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“Lopez even gives a long, carefully detailed speech about how to not only g
ouge out someone’s eye, but to remove the memory of everything they’ve ever seen. Which, by the end of the movie, wasn’t starting to seem so bad.”
—The Star-Ledger
“Test audiences reportedly balked at the film’s happy ending and wanted Gigli and Ricki to die bloody deaths. And they say critics are harsh.”
—Rolling Stone
“Not helping things is Lopez’s Betsy-Wetsy lisp that transforms a line like ‘brutal street thug’ into ‘bruel threet fug.’”
—Film Freak Central
“How on Earth did director Martin Brest envision this film? As Chasing Amy meets Rain Man meets Pulp Fiction? Did anyone think that sounded like a winning combination?”
—Chicago Tribune
“Mr. Affleck and Ms. Lopez’s combined fees reportedly ran close to $25 million, and they earn their money by hogging as much screen time as possible and uttering some of the lamest dialogue ever committed to film.”
—The New York Times
“Gigli is as awkward as the word itself. I suggest you spell Gigli backwards so it sounds like ‘ill gig.’”
—Critic Doctor
“For two hours, not a single hair moved on Ben’s head—not even when every hair in the audience was on end and growing in the direction of the exit’s welcoming glow.”
—Movie Juice
“It wasn’t good, and we got buried.”
—Ben Affleck
Ted Danson once appeared in a TV commercial as a package of lemon chiffon pie mix.
“EXTREMISM IN THE DEFENSE OF LIBERTY”
On page 197 we brought you JFK’s 1961 inaugural speech. Now here’s one from the other side. On July 16, 1964, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona made this speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination. The Cuban missile crisis had just ended and the War in Vietnam was just beginning. In reading the speech today, it’s interesting to see how much of yesterday’s politics turn out to have been of passing importance, how much was of lasting importance…and how much the world is still the same.
IN THIS WORLD no party can guarantee anything, but what we can do and what we shall do is to deserve victory, and victory will be ours. The good Lord raised this mighty republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free—not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of communism.
During [the past] four futile years the current administration has distorted and lost that faith. It has talked and talked and talked the words of freedom, but it has failed and failed and failed in the works of freedom.
Now failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs; failures marked the slow death of freedom in Laos; failures infest the jungles of Vietnam; and failures haunt the houses of our once great alliances and undermine the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations, the NATO community. Failures proclaim lost leadership, obscure purpose, weakening wills, and the risk of inciting our sworn enemies to new aggressions and to new excesses.
I NEEDN’T REMIND YOU— but I will—that it’s been during Democratic years that our strength to deter war has been stilled and even gone into a planned decline. It has been during Democratic years that we have weakly stumbled into conflicts, timidly refusing to draw our own lines against aggression, deceitfully refusing to tell even our people of our full participation and tragically letting our finest men die on battlefields unmarked by purpose, unmarked by pride or the prospect of victory.
The temple of Siva in Madura, India, is adorned with 30 million separate carved idols.
Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it is Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don’t try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the president, who is the commander in chief of our forces, refuses to say—refuses to say, mind you—whether or not the objective is victory, and his secretary of defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by.
Now, the Republican cause demands that we brand communism as the principal disturber of peace in the world today. Indeed, we should brand it as the only significant disturber of the peace. And we must make clear that until its goals of conquest are absolutely renounced and its relations with all nations tempered, communism and the governments it now controls are enemies of every man on earth who is or wants to be free.
WE CAN KEEP THE PEACE only if we remain vigilant and strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. This is a party for free men, not for blind followers and not for conformists. In 1858 Lincoln said of the Republican Party that it was composed of “strange, discordant, and even hostile elements.” Yet all of the elements agreed on one paramount objective: to arrest the progress of slavery and place it in the course of ultimate extinction.
Today, as then, the task of preserving and enlarging freedom at home, and of safeguarding it from the forces of tyranny abroad, is enough to challenge all our resources and to require all our strength.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
OUR CAUSE IS TO FREE OUR PEOPLE and light the way for liberty throughout the world. Ours is a very human cause for very humane goals. This party, its good people, and its unquestionable devotion to freedom will not fulfill the purposes of this campaign which we launch here now until our cause has won the day, inspired the world, and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesteryears.
You’re both right: Bimonthly can mean 1) every other month, or 2) twice a month.
POKER LINGO
Ever watched rounders and fish splash the pot until they’re down to the felt? If so, you’ve seen some serious poker players. They have their own language, too. Ante up!
• All in: Bet all your chips
• Down to the felt: So broke all you see in front of you is the green felt of the poker table
• Tapioca, or Tap City: Tapped out; out of money
• Buy the pot: Make a bet so large that other players are unlikely to match it
• Tap: Bet as much as your opponents have on hand, forcing them to bet everything
• Catching cards: On a winning streak
• Railroad bible: Deck of cards
• Toke: The tip you give to the dealer
• Splash the pot: Toss your chips into the pot, instead of just placing them there. It’s considered bad form because other players can’t see how much you’re actually betting
• Rake: The house’s cut
• Cowboys: Kings
• Ladies: Queens
• Rock: A very conservative player, someone who doesn’t take big chances
• Paint: A face card
• Trips: Three of a kind
• Berry patch: A very easy game
• Underdog: A weak hand that’s likely to lose
• Rag: An upfacing card so low in value that it can’t affect the outcome of the hand
• Alligator blood: A player who keeps his cool under pressure has alligator (cold) blood
• Wheel: The best hand in lowball poker—6, 4, 3, 2, A
• Fish: A very bad poker player. They’re only in the game so that you can beat them out of their money
• George: A fish
• Rounder: A professional poker player. A rounder makes his living parting fishes and georges from their money
• Base deal: Dealing from the bottom of the deck
• In the hole: In stud poker, the cards dealt face down, so only you can see them
• Bullets: Aces in the hole
• Big slick: A king and an ace in the hole
• Boat: A full house
Emily Dickinson wrote 1,700 poems. Seven were published in her lifetime.
THE HOLLYWOOD QUIZ
So you think you know movies and celebrities like Uncle John does? Take this quiz and find out. (Answers on page 501.)
1. Actor Jack Lemmon once told this story: “In the early 197
0s I received an award, and I had a chauffeur who told me he wanted to be a comedian. He said, ‘Mr Lemmon, if I’m successful, I want to be your neighbor in Beverly Hills.’” Who was the chauffeur?
a) Rodney Dangerfield
b) Lemmon’s driver Bill Papp. “Kid,” Lemmon said. “You’re not funny. But if you work for me, at least you’ll pay the rent.”
c) Jay Leno
d) Dr. Phil (He decided nagging people was easier than comedy.)
2. When Bob Hope died in 2003 at age 100, what did he and his New York Times obituary writer Vincent Canby have in common?
a) They were stepbrothers: Hope’s dad married Canby’s mom.
b) Both men were dead.
c) Their first acting gig: co-stars in the same high school play.
3. Actress Salma Hayek likes which of the following snacks?
a) Half an Oreo and a Tic-Tac. “I don’t want to get fat,” she says.
b) Stir-fried rabbit over noodles. “It’s good!” she insists.
c) Bugs and guacamole on a tortilla. “They’re delicious!” she says.
4. What odd event took place after Charlie Chaplin died in 1977?
a) Kidnappers dug up his body and held it for ransom.
b) At the moment of death, his famous derby hat turned to dust.
c) The funeral home “lost” his ashes. They’ve never been found.
5. “Professor Marvel,” a character in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, wore a coat that the wardrobe department bought at an LA thrift store. Who turned out to be the coat’s original owner?
a) Abraham Lincoln
b) Mark Twain
c) L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
Per capita, the cities of Winnipeg and Calgary, Canada, drink the most Slurpees in the world.
THIS IS…UJNN
Introducing Uncle John’s News Network. We scour the globe looking for the strangest of the strange, the oddest of the odd.