Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  •74% of people read in the bathroom (Go team!); 47% talk on the phone; 11% eat in there.

  •Top five pet peeves of sharing a bathroom:

  1) Not replacing the toilet paper when it runs out.

  2) Leaving the seat up (according to women). Too many cosmetics on the counter (according to men).

  3) Leaving toothpaste globs in the sink.

  4) Leaving spots on the mirror.

  5) Leaving dirty clothes on the floor.

  •When watching the Super Bowl, 38% of viewers go to the bathroom during the commercials, so they won’t miss the game; 23% go during the game, so they won’t miss the commercials.

  AWAY FROM HOME

  •74% perform some type of “maintenance” task—wiping the seat, flushing, putting down a seat cover—before using a public toilet. Nearly a third say they bring their own materials—Kleenex, sanitizing wipes, etc.—to perform the task.

  •7% suffer from paruresis—shy bladder syndrome.

  •40% flush restroom toilets with their feet instead of their hands.

  •38% of people say they’ve peeked into someone else’s medicine cabinet. (4% of these snoops say they were caught in the act.)

  PAPER TRAIL

  •Most valued quality in toilet paper: softness (absorbency is #2).

  •Survey respondents are almost equally divided on how they use toilet paper: 51% “crumple or wad” it; 49% “fold” it.

  •60% are annoyed by scratchy toilet paper in public restrooms.

  Jack Nicholson has a rattlesnake embedded in his toilet seat.

  ABBEY-NORMAL

  Holy cow! Strange news from the church!

  DELIVER US FROM CLOTHING

  St. Martin’s Church in Gloucestershire, England, published a fund-raising calendar in 2004—an all-nude calendar featuring 13 of the church’s female parishioners posing in the buff. They hope to raise $75,000 to aid women’s groups in Rwanda.

  CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST?

  A 22-year-old man broke into Bethel Moravian Church in North Dakota and set up a methamphetamine lab in the kitchen. He was caught and arrested just as he had all the supplies and paraphernalia set up and ready to go. “A church almost makes sense,” said Sheriff Lieutenant Rick Majerus. “If nobody is using the church during the week, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the possibilities.” Pastor Dave Sobek took a slightly more cynical view, noting, “I’d prefer that our kitchen be used for bake sales.”

  SPECIAL DISPENSATION

  In 2004 the Croatian Church officially requested that priests be exempt from certain laws—drunk-driving laws. At the time, the Croatian government was considering lowering drivers’ legal blood-alcohol limit from 0.05% to zero. Church officials protested that many priests had to drive home or to parishioners’ homes directly after drinking small amounts of wine while giving mass. “If this law goes ahead,” said one incredulous official, “a huge number of priests will soon be behind bars.”

  AN INSULT TO GOD (AND MY ACCOUNTANT)

  Guests at a June 2004 wedding in North Yorkshire, Australia, were surprised to see a sign next to the collection plate, reading: “Paper Money Only.” The Reverend Mark Sowerby explained that anything less than $10 would be an “insult to God.” But it was the bride who was insulted. “It was my big day,” said 20-year-old Anne-Marie Whitton. “It cost a lot of money, took a lot of organizing, and the vicar ruined it.” The reverend disagreed: “Christians worship a God who is to be praised and glorified, not tipped with less than the price of a pint.”

  A single snowflake is made of up to 200 separate snow crystals.

  HERE COMES PETER COTTONTAIL—WHACK!

  Several parents complained after the Glassport Assembly of God church in Pennsylvania put on an Easter show in 2004. It featured performers breaking Easter eggs and whipping the Easter Bunny. Melissa Salzmann, who took her four-year-old to the show, said the boy was traumatized. “He was crying and asking why the bunny was being whipped,” she said. Minister Patty Bickerton defended the performance, saying it was meant to be educational. “We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny, it is about Jesus Christ.” Said Salzmann, “It was a nightmare.”

  DOGMA?

  Every year thousands of tourists come to the 155-year-old Phe Chaung Buddhist monastery in a desolate part of Myanmar (formerly Burma). But they don’t travel all that way to see the six monks who live there—they go to see the jumping cats. The monks recently took in some stray cats and, out of boredom, decided to teach them to jump through hoops. Videos of the cats—named Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Diana—have been shown on TV and have made them famous around the world. “Nobody ever asks about Buddhism,” complained one of the monks. “They just want to see the cats.”

  MIXED MESSAGE

  The 12th century Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach, Florida (it was disassembled and moved to the U.S. in 1925), is known for its stark gothic architecture and is often rented out for commercials, music videos, and films (parts of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective were shot there). But in 1998 the monastery’s staff accidentally allowed filmmaker Ron Atkins to shoot parts of Dark Night of the Soul there. What’s wrong with that? The film contains scenes of opium-smoking zombies in bizarre sex scenes spouting anti-religious dialogue—with the monastery in the background. After the movie came out, the staff announced that its filmmaking rules would be reviewed. “We probably missed that one,” said spokeswoman Tonya Witten.

  Starlight bends as it passes near the sun, tugged by its gravity.

  WHO WAS DEEP THROAT?

  Thirty years after Watergate, Washington’s best-kept secret is still a secret. Only four people know the answer—and they aren’t telling. (Hint: It wasn’t Uncle John...or was it?)

  BACKGROUND

  The Crime: In the early morning of June 17, 1972, a team of five burglars were arrested in the act of breaking into the Democratic Party’s National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C.

  The Burglars: The break-in, it turned out, was not a random burglary—it was led by the security director for President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee, a former CIA agent named James McCord. McCord and the other four burglars, one a soldier of fortune and the other three Miami Cubans, had all been CIA operatives in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

  The Masterminds: The people behind what Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler later called a “third-rate burglary” were former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt (another Bay of Pigs veteran). They were part of a group known as the “Plumbers,” a secret White House team assembled to stop “leaks” after defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg revealed classified documents to the press in 1971.

  The Reason: Exactly what the burglars were after remains a mystery. One possibility: They were trying to photograph financial documents or plant listening devices in hopes of obtaining information damaging to the Democrats. But G. Gordon Liddy has claimed publicly that the burglars were sent by White House counsel John Dean on a very specific counterintelligence mission: to retrieve a photo of Dean’s fiancée that was in a package of information about call girls the Democratic committee used to entertain guests. (Dean dismisses Liddy, who is now a talk-show host, as a man who “earns his living making a jackass of himself.”)

  The Aftermath: As bad as the bungled break-in was, the White House compounded the problem by trying to cover it up. What followed were two years of FBI investigations and Senate hearings, which led to more than 40 criminal convictions and culminated with the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

  Grass guzzler: In 1986 Ben Garcia rode his lawnmower from Maine to California.

  The Reporters: None of it would have come to light if it hadn’t been for a fledgling Washington Post reporter on the night shift. Bob Woodward had been assigned to cover the break-in, which looked like a routine burglary. But at the arraignment, Woodward heard one of the men arrested admit that he worked for the CIA
and realized that the bungled burglary might not be so routine after all. Over the next two years, Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein wrote some 400 Watergate-related stories that implicated many in the Nixon administration, including the president himself, in a wide-ranging attempt to cover up not only the Watergate break-in, but numerous other politically motivated dirty tricks as well. That work made Woodward and Bernstein famous, and changed the political landscape of America.

  The Source: The pair interviewed hundreds of sources and sorted through conflicting and often misleading information. But they had help: Woodward claims he was guided by a mysterious informant, dubbed “Deep Throat” by Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons (a reference to an X-rated movie of that name).

  As Deep Throat put it, the Watergate burglary was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

  MAN OF MYSTERY

  Deep Throat demanded anonymity, so Woodward promised his identity would remain a secret as long as he was alive or until he released Woodward from his promise. But Woodward did tell two other people: his partner, Carl Bernstein, and Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. After Nixon’s resignation, Bradlee insisted that Woodward tell him Deep Throat’s identity, and Woodward did. Ever since, those four—Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and Deep Throat—have kept the secret safe, which has led to intense speculation about Deep Throat’s identity.

  In June 2002, the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, brought a renewed flurry of speculation as to the identity of Deep Throat. A journalism class at the University of Illinois, led by former Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist William Gaines, narrowed the field to seven likely candidates after extensive research.

  Only seven women have ever made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

  Former White House counsel John Dean published an e-book at Salon.com that revealed his best guess after 25 years of research—a list of five. (But Dean has publicly named Deep Throat twice before and admits he was wrong both times.)

  In two books about Watergate and in numerous public appearances, Woodward has dropped some intriguing clues. The University of Illinois journalism class, Dean, and others have used these clues, as well as travel records, personality profiles, and speculation as to who knew what when, to try to solve the 30-year mystery. But first, the questions:

  •Was Deep Throat someone who worked in the White House? Because of the extensive and accurate inside information Deep Throat gave Woodward about Nixon’s White House, some think he must have worked for the president. John Dean insists that only someone on the inside could have known all the information Deep Throat gave to Woodward. The university journalism class agrees.

  •Was Deep Throat in the CIA? The clandestine nature of the relationship between Woodward and Deep Throat seems to suggest a skill at what the spy community calls “tradecraft”—tricks of the trade taught to CIA agents. According to Woodward, he and Deep Throat would meet in an underground parking garage. Woodward would put a flower pot with a red flag in it on the balcony of his apartment when he wanted Deep Throat to contact him. Deep Throat contacted Woodward by marking the copy of the morning New York Times delivered to Woodward’s door.

  •Was a disgruntled FBI officer getting revenge on Nixon by passing classified info to Woodward? Much of Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage seemed to parallel the FBI’s findings, and the Bureau’s discoveries found their way into Washington Post stories with remarkable speed. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died just seven weeks before the Watergate break-in, and it shocked many within the Bureau when Nixon appointed an outsider, Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray, to become the FBI’s acting director. What about Gray? Did Nixon misjudge his loyalty?

  THE BEST GUESSES

  The White House? The FBI? The CIA?

  Burger King and Pizza Hut both opened franchises for U.S. troops in Iraq.

  •Patrick Buchanan, Nixon speechwriter. Voted “most likely” by the University of Illinois journalism class and one of the five named by John Dean, Buchanan was in a position to know all of the information Deep Throat passed on to Woodward. Though he was perceived as a Nixon loyalist, the staunch right-winger was upset with Nixon for recognizing Communist China.

  •Ron Ziegler, Nixon press secretary. Another person suspected by John Dean, Ziegler was privy to what was going on inside the Nixon White House. Ziegler was in Washington on all the dates Woodward says he met with Deep Throat.

  •Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state. Paradoxically, Kissinger was perhaps Nixon’s closest confidant. Though Jewish, Kissinger seemed to tolerate Nixon’s anti-Semitic views, even endorsing them on occasion. However, Kissinger’s support for Nixon served his own quest for power; he could have used the Watergate debacle to take care of some personal scores.

  •General Alexander Haig, military aid to Henry Kissinger and later Nixon’s chief of staff. Haig has strongly denied that he was Deep Throat, particularly during his unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Uncharacteristically, Woodward confirmed that Haig was not Deep Throat. Denials aside, Haig remains, in the opinion of many, a leading contender because of his access to White House secrets.

  •Leonard Garment, special counsel to Richard Nixon. Garment was known to be friendly with the press, and before joining the Nixon team he had been a liberal Democrat. Garment not only denies he was Deep Throat, but in a recent book, In Search of Deep Throat, he names his pick—John Sears.

  •John Sears, deputy counsel to President Nixon. Leonard Garment says he favors Sears because he fits the partial description Woodward has given of Deep Throat as being a cigarette-smoking Scotch drinker who was fascinated by the rumors and scheming of the Nixon White House. Sears claims he didn’t know Woodward until after Watergate and has threatened to sue Garment.

  •L. Patrick Gray, FBI Director. Gray has been cited as a prime suspect because of his access to information about both the FBI and the White House. A 1992 CBS documentary said Gray was in Washington on all the dates Woodward gives for his clandestine meetings with the informant. Gray lived just four blocks from Woodward in a building with an underground parking garage. He was an early morning jogger and could have easily marked Wood-ward’s copy of the New York Times and seen the flower pot with the red flag on Woodward’s balcony.

  The Greek temple of Aphrodite, goddess of love, was discovered by archeologist Iris Love.

  Gray reportedly became disillusioned with the Nixon White House as the Watergate scandal unfolded. In spite of being a Nixon appointee, Gray provided testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that was instrumental in pointing to White House involvement in the break-in.

  •Mark Felt, FBI Deputy Associate Director. In July 1999, the Hartford Courant ran a story that quoted a 19-year-old named Chase Culeman-Beckman, who claimed that Carl Bernstein’s son Jacob had told him at summer camp in 1988 that Felt was Deep Throat. Bernstein says he and Woodward never told their family members Deep Throat’s identity.

  Agents in the FBI also thought Felt was Deep Throat, according to former Washington Post investigative reporter Ronald Kessler in a recent book, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. Felt clearly had reason to try to influence the course of the investigation. He had protested White House interference and may have resented not being appointed FBI director after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. But in a 1979 book, The FBI Pyramid: Inside the FBI, he denied that he had ever leaked information to Woodward.

  STILL A MYSTERY

  In spite of the long list of suspects, we may never know Deep Throat’s identity. Many believe Deep Throat was a composite of several sources, or a fabrication. Bob Woodward insists that Deep Throat was real, and just one person. After Deep Throat dies, Woodward says, he will be released from his promise of secrecy and will reveal all. Will he? Perhaps...but one of the lessons of Watergate is that truth sometimes falls victim to other motives.

  “The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody’s out to ge
t you. Nobody cares whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?”

  —Dennis Miller

  Eyelashes are typically the darkest hairs on the body.

  FUNNY MONEY

  Years ago, Uncle John owned a toy store. One day a customer tried to pay him with a photocopy of a $20 bill. Did Uncle John fall for it? Well, let’s just say he doesn’t think these stories are funny.

  TRUST ME—IT’S REAL MONEY

  In 2004, 35-year-old Alice Pike tried to pay for $1,671.55 worth of merchandise at a Covington, Georgia, Wal-Mart with a $1 million bill. The clerk sensibly refused it ($1 million bills don’t exist). Unfazed, Pike offered to pay with a Wal-Mart gift card worth $2.32...plus the $1 million bill. The clerk then pretended to take it, and while Pike was waiting for her $998,331.17 change, Wal-Mart called the cops. When they arrested her on forgery charges, they found two more $1 million bills on her.

  TRUST ME—IT’S REAL MONEY. REALLY.

  Police in Saitama, Japan, discovered more than 400 phony 1,000-yen bills in vending machines, but they don’t know who made them—or why. Real 1,000-yen bills have three colored strips. On the fake bills, one strip is a photocopy, but the other two are real, lifted from real currency. In other words, the counterfeiter cut up real 1,000-yen bills to make fake ones. Police can’t figure out why someone would make counterfeit money that cost more to produce than it was worth.

  TRUST ME—IT’S REALLY REAL MONEY. REALLY.

  During World War II, the German government recruited prisoners with experience in typography, printing, and forgery for a special assignment: to make counterfeit British money. The Nazis planned to flood the world market with it, hoping to devalue the pound and cripple the British economy. They made £134 million ($377 million) in phony £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes and then dropped them over London. But they didn’t count on one thing: the honesty of the Brits. Most people picked the cash up off the street...and turned it over to the police. The Bank of England quickly changed the design of its bills, and an economic crisis was averted. (All’s fair: At the same time, the United States and England were counterfeiting German currency.)