Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  —Providence (Rhode Island) Journal

  POST POSTIES

  “Dogs chomping on mail carrier-shaped treats is no laughing matter for Canada Post. The unamused Canadian postal service, whose carriers endure more than their share of real dog bites, convinced Pet Valu Inc. stores to stop carrying Bark Bars, dog biscuits that come shaped like cats and letter carriers. ‘This is not in any way, shape, or form funny for us. I don’t see that as humorous at all, not even in the least,’ said John Caines, Canada Post’s media relations manager, adding that in the first half of 2004 there were 160 dog attacks on mail carriers across Canada.”

  —Reuters

  MAILDOG

  “Toby arrives at the post office at 9:30 every morning, even though he’s not allowed inside. The 12-year-old golden retriever has been delivering mail to his owner, Brad Sullivan, for the past two years. He makes the three-block trek to the post office with Gordon Lewis, Sullivan’s neighbor, and waits outside until Lewis puts the mail in a green pouch around his neck. Sullivan was laid up from a vehicle accident a couple of years ago, so he started sending Toby. ‘He’s just crazy to get the mail,’ Sullivan said. ‘We put that pouch on him and he’s a different dog. It’s something important for him to do.’”

  —The Beaufort (North Dakota) Gazette

  HOW MUCH IS THAT DOGGY IN THE WHEELCHAIR?

  “The Humane Society in Brookfield, Wisconsin, announced a ‘scratch-and-dent sale’ on disabled pets, offering half-off prices on animals such as a toothless cat and a blind dog.”

  —News Is Stranger Than Fiction

  79% of boys and 89% of girls list acne as one of their biggest worries.

  WHAT’D YOU McSAY?

  McDonald’s has the healthiest and best-tasting food in the world, and we support them in their effort to protect their good name and their attractive logo. (That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.)

  HE SAID: Edoardo Raspelli, one of Italy’s leading culinary critics, reviewed McDonald’s for the newspaper La Stampa in 2002. “The ambience was mechanical,” he wrote, “the potatoes were obscene and tasting of cardboard, and the bread poor. I found it alienating and vulgar.” The restaurant, he said, “symbolized oppression of the palate.”

  McTROUBLE: In 2003 the McDonald’s legal team heard about the article and filed a $25 million lawsuit against the critic. The unfavorable review, they said, amounted to defamation that “dented the company’s image and profits.”

  McOUTCOME: Pending. But Raspelli won’t back down. “I was only saying what I thought of fast food.” he said. “I find it repulsive.”

  THEY SAID: Steve Brown and Jenny Fraser wrote a play for a children’s theater in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1991. It was a satire of the hamburger industry called MacBurgers: Real Neat Scotch Fare, but it never mentioned the name “McDonald’s.”

  McTROUBLE: On the day it was scheduled to open, McDonald’s reviewed the script and promptly threatened legal action. “The play,” they charged, “is riddled with anti-McDonald’s propaganda.”

  McOUTCOME: The authors didn’t have the money to fight back, so they agreed to make script changes. They also had to promise that the play would be performed only twice—and then never again. (The original version of the play is still available online.)

  THEY SAID: In 1994 Vegan Action, an activist group in Berkeley, California, decided to sell “McVegan” T-shirts to promote their cause. The shirts had the famous golden arches logo, but instead of “Billions Served,” it said “Billions Saved.”

  McTROUBLE: McDonald’s demanded that Vegan Action halt production of the shirts and send them the receipts of every one sold. They also demanded that the University of California, Berkeley student store, where most of the shirts were sold, immediately stop selling them (they did). But Vegan Action didn’t give in so easily—they got pro-bono legal services and developed “a defense based on the First Amendment’s protection of parody.”

  The average human body contains 10 to 20 billion miles of DNA.

  McOUTCOME: The press turned it into a David-and-Goliath battle. Two weeks later, McDonald’s backed down.

  HE SAID: In 1983 German filmmaker Peter Heller made a documentary called Jungleburger, examining the impact of fast food on Third World countries. In one interview, one of McDonald’s Costa Rican suppliers implies that his beef comes from cattle farmed on ranches created by deforestation.

  McTROUBLE: American McDonald’s couldn’t do much about a German documentary...until it was released in England, where the laws make it much easier to win a libel suit. When British TV aired the film in 1990, the McLawyers sprang into action, threatening the network with a lawsuit for showing the film.

  McOUTCOME: The threat worked. Channel Four issued an apology for showing the film and promised never to air it again.

  THEY SAID: The 2003 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary had some new words in it. One of them was McJob. Definition: “A low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”

  McTROUBLE: McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo wrote Merriam-Webster an open letter calling the definition a “slap in the face” of all restaurant employees. “A more appropriate definition of a ‘McJob,’” he wrote, “might be ‘teaches responsibility.’” Bottom line: “We are confident Merriam-Webster will eliminate its inaccurate definition of restaurant employment in the next edition.”

  McOUTCOME: No dice. Merriam-Webster refused to be cowed, and the word will appear in the next edition. “We stand by the accuracy and appropriateness of our definition,” they said.

  (Note: Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary had planned to include McJob in 1997 but changed their minds when lawyers, fearing legal action from McDonald’s, advised them not to.)

  The average sedentary human burns 104 calories per hour.

  LITTLE WILLIE

  These morbid “Willie” poems were popular in the 1950s, although most were written in the 1890s. Either way, they’re still funny (if you have a sick sense of humor...like you-know-who).

  Little Willie hung his sister,

  She was dead before we missed her.

  Willie’s always up to tricks!

  Ain’t he cute? He’s only six!

  Willie poisoned Father’s tea.

  Father died in agony.

  Mother was extremely vexed.

  “Really, Will,” she said, “What next?”

  Into the family drinking well

  Willie pushed his sister Nell.

  She’s there yet because it kilt her.

  Now we have to buy a filter.

  Little Willie, on the track,

  Didn’t hear the engine squeal.

  Now the engine’s coming back,

  Scraping Willie off the wheel.

  The ice upon our pond’s so thin

  That Little Willie’s fallen in!

  We cannot reach him from the shore

  Until the surface freezes more.

  Ah me, my heart grows weary waiting—

  Besides, I want to do some skating.

  Willie saw some dynamite,

  Couldn’t understand it quite;

  Curiosity never pays:

  It rained Willie seven days.

  Willie with a thirst for gore

  Nailed his sister to the door.

  Mother said with humor quaint,

  “Willie dear, don’t scratch the paint.”

  Little Willie fell down a drain;

  Couldn’t scramble out again.

  Now he’s floating in the sewer

  The world is left one Willie fewer.

  Willie, in one of his nice new sashes,

  Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes.

  Now, although the room grows chilly,

  We haven’t the heart to poke poor Willie.

  Willie coming home from school,

  Spied a dollar near a mule.

  Stooped to get it,

  quiet as a mouse.

  Funeral tomorrow a
t Willie’s house.

  Dracula author Bram Stoker also wrote children’s stories. Critics called them “morbid.”

  TREE-MENDOUS

  How big are the world’s biggest trees? Imagine something as wide as a house and as tall as a football field.

  STRATOSPHERE GIANT & GENERAL SHERMAN

  One hundred forty million years ago, redwoods flourished throughout the northern hemisphere. Today only three species remain: the coast redwood, the giant redwood, and the dawn redwood. The coast redwood of Northern California and southern Oregon grows to heights of over 300 feet, aided by heavy rainfall and fog that condenses on the tree’s tallest branches (so it doesn’t have to move water the full length of its trunk). The tallest, named Stratosphere Giant, is located in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It stands 369 feet—five stories taller than the Statue of Liberty.

  Another of the three remaining species, the giant redwood, is found along the western side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The most famous of these giants is General Sherman, a mammoth tree 2,700 years old, 103 feet in circumference, and 274 feet tall. It weighs an estimated 4 million pounds and comprises more than 50,000 cubic feet of wood, making it the largest tree on the planet.

  EL ARBOR DEL TULE

  Just outside the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an ancient piece of Meso-American history known as El Tule. This Mexican cypress is believed to be between 2,000 and 4,000 years old. Long before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the Aztecs called the area surrounding the tree—now the village of Santa María del Tule—Tollin or Tullin, meaning “aquatic plants.” The cypress trees themselves were called ahuehuete, meaning “ancients of the water” (it is believed they once grew in the swamps of Mexico, which time has transformed into deserts).

  Early Spanish settlers documented the native Zapotec people as saying that, before it was struck by lightning in the 1400s, El Tule was so large that it could provide shade for 1,000 people. The bolt of lightning damaged the tree’s branches and left a hollow so large that there was “room inside for 12 horsemen.” Fortunately El Tule has since recovered and now has the second- or third-largest trunk in the world, with a circumference of an amazing 176 feet.

  World’s smallest tree: the dwarf willow of Greenland. It grows to about two inches in height.

  IN THE NEWS: THE BIRDS & THE BEES

  Some of the BRI staff bet Uncle John that he couldn’t put together this collection of real news stories without mentioning “s–e–x.” Uh-oh, he just lost!

  CAREER COUNSELING. A German woman filed a complaint after a federal employment office sent her for a job interview—with an “adult” telephone service. They told her she’d be applying for “telemarketing consumer interface relations.” But she got a surprise when the interviewer told her about the job: “He told me I had to answer the phone and moan a lot.” A spokesman for the agency said it was an honest mistake.

  HOLY...! A vicar in Lampoldshausen, Germany, distributed hundreds of videos about the life of Jesus to members of his congregation, only to find out there had been a mix-up at the factory: they were X-rated movies. The vicar, Father Frithjof, saw the bright side of the error: “God moves in mysterious ways,” he said. “The people who ordered these movies now have our religious films about Jesus in their video recorders.”

  HOT-HOT-HOT? NOT-NOT-NOT! A 28-year-old Bulgarian woman sued her local heating company for refusing to turn her heat on—claiming that it was too cold for her and her husband to be intimate. The couple had paid all their bills, but the company had cut off heat to the entire building because so many of their neighbors hadn’t paid theirs. The woman said that she and her husband were trying to have a second child, but the cold had frozen their attempts.

  TALL TALE. The singer Sting admitted that he “stretched” the truth when he once bragged that he and his wife Trudi Styler could make love for eight hours at a time. “What I didn’t say,” he told Britain’s ITV, “was that this included four hours of begging and then dinner and a movie.”

  When having a conversation, women make eye contact 15% more frequently than men.

  FOUR-ALARM PHONE CALLS. Firefighters at the Jawahar Fire Control in India complained to the local Mid-day newspaper that the fire station was getting too hot: they were getting up to 70 amorous calls a day “from bored housewives or barmaids.” The women were saying things like, “What kind of fires do you extinguish? How about dousing the fire in my heart?”

  THIRSTY. In 2001 the water supply system in the Turkish village of Sirt broke down, forcing local woman to walk miles—and stand in line for hours—to get their water. When their pleas to fix the system went unheard, they decided to get serious: they told their husbands, “Get us a proper water supply or no more sex.” And they meant it. A month later, after some serious pleading from the local men, government officials agreed to give the village five kilometers of piping. But the men had to lay all the pipe themselves—and the ban was still on. “They won’t be able to get into our bedrooms until the water actually runs through the taps,” a local woman told reporters. “The protest will continue.”

  FASHION POLICE. In Thailand more than 400 complaints a month came in from policemen. Why? Their new uniforms were too tight, which they claimed made them look “too sexy.” The officers were getting lewd comments from people in the street.

  HEY, IT WAS WORTH A TRY. A German man demanded a government grant to cover the cost of frequenting brothels and renting adult movies. The 35-year-old said that his wife had flown to Thailand and he was lonely. He wanted more than $2,000 a month, stating that, “I require the brothel visits for my physical and psychological well-being.” A German court turned down the request.

  NEWS OF THE OBVIOUS. In 2003 the European Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Society in Rome did a study with some not-so-surprising results. They tested the attention levels of 1,500 men as they watched a female newscaster that they found “attractive” deliver the news. Result: More than 1,100 of them couldn’t remember a single thing said in the first 30 seconds of the newscast.

  Longest flight on record for a flying squirrel: 2.5 miles.

  MORE “CREATIVE TEACHING” AWARDS

  More stories to make you scratch your head.

  SUBJECT: Fluid Mechanics

  WINNER: Christopher Ogbe, head of the Business Studies Department at Bexley Heath School in Kent, England

  CREATIVE APPROACH: Mr. Ogbe’s trouble started in an airport bar in 2001, while he was getting ready to accompany 29 of his students on a flight to America. He had a few drinks too many, and then on the plane had a few more. Many pints of beer, glasses of wine, and nearly a quart of whiskey later, Ogbe was running wild all over the airplane, throwing food, pinching people on the butt, and flashing the flight attendants. He repeatedly groped a female colleague and referred to one Asian passenger as “Gandhi.” Why’d he do it? Ogbe said he’s claustrophobic and afraid of flying, and thought a drink or two might help calm his nerves.

  REACTION: Ogbe’s claustrophobia might be a bigger problem in his next assignment. He was convicted of assaulting his colleague and sentenced to one year...in a tiny jail cell.

  SUBJECT: Police Procedures

  WINNER: Pat Conroy, dean of students and assistant principal at South Haven High School in Michigan

  CREATIVE APPROACH: In 2003 police brought in a drug-sniffing dog to search for drugs. None were found—not even in the locker of a student that Mr. Conroy strongly suspected of being a drug dealer. That came as a surprise, because as Conroy later admitted to the police, he had planted drugs in the locker himself, in the hope that they would be discovered during the search so that he could expel the student.

  REACTION: Police raided Conroy’s office and found drug paraphernalia and 10 bags of marijuana. He told officers he’d been collecting drugs seized from students to use as evidence during expulsion hearings. (According to the school board president, Conroy never brought drugs to any of the hearings the president had attended.) Charged with possession of marijuana, Conroy
resigned. The student he suspected of drug dealing was not charged.

  The average traffic light is green 22% of the time, yellow 12%, and red 66% of the time.

  SUBJECT: Good Sportsmanship

  WINNER: James Guillen, 24, a special ed teacher who also coaches basketball at Pleasantville Middle School in New Jersey

  CREATIVE APPROACH: Coach Guillen invited a 13-year-old boy on the team to attend the team’s annual banquet because he was getting a special award. The boy watched as other team members received certificates and trophies. Then the coach called him up...and presented him with a Crybaby Award—a trophy of a silver baby on a pedestal—because, the coach explained, the boy always “begged to get in the game, and all he did was whine.”

  REACTION: The boy—an honor student—was so humiliated that he stayed home the following Monday. Coach Guillen claimed he meant it as “a positive thing,” but the board of education wasn’t buying it—they banned him from ever coaching in the district again. Guillen also forfeited a $3,000 pay raise, was suspended for five days, and had to attend sensitivity training.

  SUBJECT: Physics

  WINNER: Randy Wilson, a high school science teacher in Colorado

  CREATIVE APPROACH: Mr. Wilson let a 17-year-old junior build a bomb for the science fair. It wasn’t a real bomb, just a test tube filled with a few ingredients that go into a live bomb, along with a list of other “key components” needed to finish the job.

  REACTION: Wilson was suspended. Was the student punished? No—after all, he had his teacher’s permission to build the bomb.

  HONORABLE MENTION

  SUBJECT: Music Appreciation