Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  CELEBRITY: Russell Crowe

  INCIDENT: In 1999, while spending some time on his 560-acre ranch in Australia, Crowe and his brother Terry went out for a drink and wound up in a brawl. Crowe spied radio DJ Andrew White at a local bar, approached him, and said, “I’ve listened to your program, and it’s crap.” White quickly replied, “So are most of your movies,” prompting Crowe to turn to the DJ’s wife and exclaim, “I’m going to belt the crap out of your husband!” The gladiator then went after White and several other bar-goers. Security cameras captured him in three separate fights kicking, punching, and biting like a wild man; during the melee Crowe even took a swing at his brother before biting a bouncer in the neck and fleeing the bar.

  NOTE: Crowe once attacked the director of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards show for editing a four-line poem out of Crowe’s Best Actor acceptance speech. Witnesses said Crowe’s own security had to remove him, kicking and cursing.

  Robert Mitchum once served time on a chain gang.

  BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT

  Science seems to have all the answers. We know certain things absolutely, definitely, and positively...until something happens that science can’t explain.

  WHAT’S NEW AT THE ZOO?

  In January 2002, a bonnethead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, had a baby. What’s so unusual about that? The shark lived only with other females and hadn’t had contact with males since she was a baby herself. The story of the “virgin birth” quickly appeared in newspapers around the world. Zoo officials and shark experts were perplexed—no one could explain it.

  One person who read the stories was Doug Sweet, a curator at the Belle Isle Aquarium in Detroit. Sweet had a tank with two female bamboo sharks living in it, and one of them had recently laid some eggs (bamboo sharks don’t give birth to live young like bonnetheads do—they lay eggs). That shark hadn’t had any contact with males, either, and in such cases the eggs are thought to be sterile and are thrown away. But Sweet had read about the shark in Omaha, so he saved the eggs and put them in an incubator. Fifteen weeks later, the eggs began to hatch.

  LONE SHARK

  Until then scientists had always believed that sharks could only reproduce when a male fertilized a female, but the experiences of these two sharks forced them to think again. One possibility: Some species of sharks may have both male and female reproductive organs and can fertilize their own eggs. Another possibility: The eggs are able to develop into embryos without being fertilized, in a process known as parthenogenesis. Many species of reptiles and even one species of turkey can reproduce through parthenogenesis, but nobody thought that sharks could do it.

  One thing is for certain: Sweet isn’t throwing his shark’s eggs away anymore. “We’re definitely holding them now and incubating them,” he told National Geographic magazine. “If you have one parthenogenetic shark, you may as well have a whole tank of them.”

  Shark babies are called “pups.”

  GRANDMA CELIA, CARD SHARK

  Never play poker with Grandma Celia—you’ll lose your shirt. But if she offers to show you some card tricks, prepare to be entertained. Here are a few of her favorites.

  SPLIT PERSONALITY

  “While I’m shuffling the cards, see if you can answer this one question,” Grandma Celia told me. “Dave had some cards and dealt them to his three brothers.

  •“To the oldest brother, he gave half the cards plus half a card.

  •“Then he gave half the cards he had left, plus half a card, to the middle brother.

  •“Then he gave half the cards he had left, plus half a card, to his youngest brother.

  “After that he had no cards left. And he did all of this without cutting or tearing up any cards. How many cards did Dave start out with, and how many cards did he give to each brother?”

  BY THE NUMBERS

  Grandma Celia handed me the deck. “For this trick,” she explained, “you get to pick 1 numbered card (no jacks, queens, or kings), and I get to pick 1. Aces count as ones. Don’t show me yours, and I won’t show you mine.” I picked the 8 of clubs and set it face down on the table. She picked her card and put it face down next to mine. Next, Grandma handed me a pencil and a piece of paper.

  •“Multiply your card’s number by 2,” Grandma Celia said. I multiplied 8 by 2 to get 16.

  •“Now add 2 to the total.” I added 2 and got 18.

  •“Multiply that number by 5, then subtract 7 to get your final number.” 18 times 5 is 90. 90 minus 7 is 83. “What did you get?” she asked.

  “Eighty-three,” I said.

  No babies have ever been born within the Vatican City limits.

  “Now turn over both of our cards,” Grandma Celia said. I turned over my 8 of clubs...and her 3 of diamonds.

  “An 8 and a 3,” she said. “83.”

  “How did you do that?!”

  TURNING 30

  Grandma Celia dealt 30 cards onto the table. “Pick up at least 1 card, but don’t pick up any more than 6,” she said. “Then I’ll do the same thing, and we’ll take turns picking them up until all the cards are gone. Whoever picks up the last card wins.”

  We played the game seven times. Sometimes I got to go first, and sometimes Grandma Celia did. Not that it mattered—Grandma Celia won every time. How did she do that?

  “It’s easier than you think,” she said.

  ELEVENSES

  Grandma Celia selected 3 cards from the deck—the 3 of spades, the 7 of hearts, and the 4 of spades—and slapped them down on the table like lightning.

  “Three-seven-four. Three hundred seventy-four. That’s evenly divisible by 11,” she said quickly. “Check it and see for yourself.” I did the math: 374 divided by 11 equals 34. No remainder, just like she said.

  “How’d you do tha...”

  Grandma Celia slapped 3 more cards on the table: the 5 of diamonds, the 8 of spades, and the 3 of hearts. “Five-eight-three. Five hundred eighty-three,” she said. “That’s divisible by 11, too. No remainder,” she said. Before I could say anything, she slapped down the 2 of diamonds, the 8 of clubs, and the 6 of clubs. “Two-eight-six. Two hundred eighty-six. Divisible by 11,” she said.

  She was right. 583 divided by 11 equals 53; 286 divided by 11 equals 26. No remainders. Grandma Celia hates math—it was her worst subject in school. So how’d she do it?

  For the solutions to these tricky puzzles, turn to page 515.

  Actual Bathroom Graffiti: “Beauty is only a light switch away.”

  A Boy Scout must earn 21 badges before he is eligible to become an Eagle Scout.

  A SPY? NOT I!

  A story of intrigue, from our “Famous for 15 Minutes” file.

  SETTING: The bar in the Hotel Meurice in Paris

  CHARACTERS: 1) Felix Bloch, a senior U.S. diplomat living in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s. 2) A Russian spy for the KGB, real name unknown—most of the time he posed as a Finnish businessman named Reino Gikman, but Bloch says he knew him as Pierre Bart, and thought he was French.

  PROLOGUE

  On April 27, 1989, the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted a transatlantic phone call between Gikman and Bloch. The two men were making plans to meet in Paris while Bloch was there on government business. U.S. State Department officials aren’t supposed to meet with KGB agents, so when NSA agents heard that, they figured they had stumbled onto something big. They passed the information on to the CIA, which gave it to the FBI, which immediately launched a classified investigation. They asked French counterintelligence to observe and videotape the Paris meeting, hoping to catch a spy.

  CLOAK AND DAGGER (AND BAG)

  On the evening of May 14, Bloch met Gikman at the Hotel Meurice. They had a drink at the bar, then went down to the restaurant and had dinner. To the untrained eye, nothing about the meeting seemed out of the ordinary. To the eyes of the French intelligence agents posing as diners at a nearby table, however, something was definitely up: Bloch entered the restaurant carryi
ng a black shoulder bag, and placed it under the table. When dinner was over, he left without it. Gikman, who left a few minutes later, took the bag.

  By the time Bloch returned to Washington, the investigation into his activities was well underway. His phone line was tapped, his house was bugged, and so was his car. Three teams of FBI agents were watching him in shifts 24 hours a day.

  Why go to the trouble, when the government already knew that Bloch had given something to a KGB agent? Because they didn’t know what that “something” was—only Bloch and Gikman knew what was in the bag. Espionage charges are hard to prove: to win a conviction, you have to be able to prove the spy handed over classified information, and the only way to do that, other than getting them to confess, is to catch them in the act. The FBI wasn’t about to pin its hopes on Bloch confessing, so it made plans to follow him constantly until the next rendezvous.

  World’s fastest computer: the Earth Simulator. (35.86 trillion calculations per second.)

  BEST-MADE PLANS

  Everything went according to plan for about a month—the FBI felt it was only a matter of time until they could close in. Then on June 11, Gikman suddenly returned to Moscow and disappeared. Eleven days later, Bloch received a strange early-morning phone call from a man who identified himself as “Ferdinand Paul,” who said he was calling on behalf of “Pierre Bart” (Gikman).

  Pierre “cannot see you in the near future,” Paul said, because “he is sick,” and that “a contagious disease is expected.” Paul then added, “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.” There was no mystery about what the caller was really saying: somehow the KGB had figured out that Gikman had been compromised, and now they were calling to tell Bloch he might be under investigation, too.

  DEAD END

  Once Bloch had been alerted, there was no point in keeping the investigation secret. That same day, FBI agents went to the State Department and confronted Bloch directly, but he denied everything—he wasn’t a spy, he insisted, and he was shocked to learn that “Pierre Bart” was a KGB agent. When the agents showed Bloch still photographs of the meeting in the Paris restaurant and asked about the shoulder bag, he shrugged it off. He and Gikman were both stamp collectors, Bloch explained. The shoulder bag contained stamp albums.

  State Department officials trading stamps with KGB agents? The FBI agents didn’t believe a word of it. But since they couldn’t prove anything, they were stuck. One of the agents tried to bluff Bloch by pointing to a stack of documents and claiming that they were recovered from Bloch’s shoulder bag. It didn’t work—Bloch flatly denied it, and the FBI was left with nothing.

  The indentation on the bottom of an apple is called the calyx basin.

  The next day the FBI interviewed Bloch again and then searched his apartment, carting away several boxes filled with financial documents, address books, and other personal items. Again, nothing. “Bloch denied he had engaged in espionage,” the FBI later wrote, “and ultimately declined to answer any further questions.” But they kept the pressure on, subjecting Bloch to round-the-clock “obvious surveillance.”

  THE SPY AND HIS ENTOURAGE

  That’s when Bloch, the highest State Department official accused of spying since the 1940s, became an international media star. It started on July 21, 1989, when ABC News broke the story that he was under investigation. From that moment on, whenever Bloch walked his dog, took his clothes to the cleaners, or did his grocery shopping, he was followed by as many as seven cars filled with FBI agents, who were, in turn, followed by hordes of reporters and TV camera crews. When Bloch visited relatives in New York, his unofficial motorcade tailed him up the interstate. When he went on a 22-mile hike in the Maryland countryside, scores of out-of-shape reporters and FBI agents huffed and puffed to keep up with him. Bloch made the evening news night after night after night.

  Usually when someone is accused of criminal activity, they keep quiet and try to stay out of sight. Bloch was just the opposite: He wouldn’t talk about the government’s suspicions against him, but he was happy to talk about anything else, and reporters followed him around for weeks, hoping he’d eventually crack and start talking about the case. But he never did. Over time the media’s interest in him waned, and soon it was just him and the FBI again.

  Then in early December on a trip to visit relatives in New York, Bloch looked around and suddenly realized that for the first time in nearly six months nobody was following him. The FBI had called off its surveillance. The case was still open, but the investigation had ended without Bloch ever being formally accused of anything.

  ALL OVER NOW

  Whether or not he was guilty of spying, Bloch’s diplomatic career was over. In November 1990, the State Department fired him on the grounds of making “deliberate false statements or misrepresentations to the FBI in the course of a national security investigation.” In August 1993, it stripped him of his pension.

  The construction of the Titanic in 1909 cost the equivalent of $400,000,000 today.

  Bloch’s fall was swift: In 1989 he had been one step away from becoming an ambassador; a year later he was bagging groceries and driving a city bus in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 1993 he was arrested for stealing $100 worth of groceries from the store where he worked and was fired from his job. In 1994 he was arrested again, this time for stealing $21 worth of merchandise from another store. Bloch has never been charged with spying, but he has paid $160 in fines and spent a night in jail...for shoplifting.

  That might have been the end of the story, had the feds not arrested an FBI agent named Robert Hanssen in February 2001. The charge: spying for the Soviet Union. How the FBI caught him was unique—it paid $7 million to a retired KGB agent who had stolen Hanssen’s entire file from the Russian archives—including a tape of a telephone conversation between Hanssen and his handlers.

  The Hanssen file shed new light on the Felix Bloch affair: It was Hanssen who alerted the KGB that both Gikman and Bloch were being watched. The KGB warned Gikman, who returned to Moscow on June 11. Eleven days later, Bloch got his mysterious phone call. Hanssen even mentions Bloch in a letter. “Bloch was such a shnook,” he wrote, “I hated protecting him, but he was your friend, and there was your illegal [Gikman] I wanted to protect.”

  UPDATE

  So was Felix Bloch a spy for the KGB? No one knows for sure... except Bloch and the KGB. More than 15 years have passed since the FBI launched its investigation, and after all that time the agency still hasn’t been able to put together a strong enough case to formally accuse him or bring him up on charges. Bloch is still a free man, and at last report was still a bus driver in North Carolina. If he was a spy for the KGB in the 1980s, the Russians probably still have a file on him. Maybe someday it will find its way into the hands of the United States, as Hanssen’s did. Maybe not.

  In any event, the case will probably remain open until it is solved or Bloch dies...and that may be a while. “Longevity runs in my family,” Bloch said. “This could go on another 35 years.”

  Your eyeballs are 3.5% salt.

  IT’S THE WRONG SONG

  National anthems played at sporting events are a sign of respect by the host country and a source of pride for competitors. But when the wrong anthem is played it provides a great source of bathroom reading.

  COUNTRY HONORED: Ethiopia

  SPORTING EVENT: 1964 Olympics in Tokyo

  WRONG SONG: Ethiopian Abebe Bikila had won the gold medal for the 26-mile marathon in 1960, becoming the first black African to win a gold medal in any event. But his chances didn’t look very good for the 1964 games: he’d had an emergency appendectomy just 40 days before the race. He ran anyway and captured the world’s attention when 75,000 screaming fans greeted him as he entered into Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium—four minutes ahead of the second-place runner. He set a world record time and became the first person ever to win two marathon golds. As he stood for the medals ceremony, expecting to sing along with his country’s song, Bikila got a s
urprise: the Japanese orchestra didn’t know the Ethiopian national anthem (no one ever dreamed Bikila would win)—so it played Japan’s anthem instead.

  COUNTRY HONORED: Spain

  SPORTING EVENT: 2003 Davis Cup (tennis) in Melbourne

  WRONG SONG: Before the finals match between Spain and Australia, trumpeter James Morrison was called upon to play the Spanish national anthem. As soon as Morrison started playing, though, the Spaniards reacted with outrage. Why? He was playing “Himno de Riego,” the long-defunct anthem of a regime that had deposed King Alfonso XIII in 1931. (One version of the song has a verse about a man wiping his bottom on the king.) And Alfonso was the grandfather of Spain’s current monarch, the hugely popular King Juan Carlos I. When the team threatened to pull out of the competition, the organizer quickly apologized.

  COUNTRY HONORED: Philippines

  SPORTING EVENT: 2003 Southeast Asian Games in Ho Chi Minh City

  Mosquitoes can get athlete’s foot.

  WRONG SONG: After the Philippine judo team won two gold medals, the winners were confused during the awards ceremony to hear an anthem they didn’t recognize. “We didn’t know which one it was, but it wasn’t ours,” said Bong Pedralvez of the Philippine consulate. Response: The entire delegation ignored the music and sang the correct anthem a cappella.

  BONUS BLUNDER: That wasn’t the only slip-up. During the volleyball competition, the Philippine team noticed that their flag was upside down. The red stripe was on top and the blue was on the bottom. The error had more meaning than most knew: “If we put red on top,” Pedralvez explained, “that means we’re at war.”

  COUNTRY HONORED: Italy

  SPORTING EVENT: 2002 World Cup in Japan