Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

—Liam Gallagher, to a group of schoolkids

  “It detoxes you, and it’s good for your skin.”

  —Jessica Simpson, on drinking cow urine

  “You get clean kitty litter, mix it up with hot water, apply it for 10 minutes, and your face will be as smooth as a baby’s butt.”

  —Snooki

  “It’s okay to have beliefs, just don’t believe in them.”

  —Guy Ritchie

  “We’re human beings and the sun is the sun—how can it be bad for you? I don’t think anything that’s natural can be bad for you.”

  —Gwyneth Paltrow

  “I think the more positive approach you have to smoking, the less harmful it is.”

  —Sienna Miller

  “You don’t want to show it all off on the first date, you know? Dress fancy, but go to McDonald’s. Her world will be so rocked.”

  —Adam Levine

  “Parenting Tip: If your child is crying, hold it close and whisper, ‘You don’t have a clue what horrors this world holds.’ ”

  —Rob Delaney

  RUN, GOBI, RUN!

  Once an animal lover forms a bond with a critter, they’ll do almost anything for it. Don’t believe it? Check out this unlikely story of a man and his furry little friend.

  ON YOUR MARK

  In March 2016, Dion Leonard, a 41-year-old ultramarathon runner from Edinburgh, Scotland, flew to western China to participate in a long-distance race known as the Gobi March. It is one of four annual endurance races set in the world’s most inhospitable locations—the Gobi Desert of China, the Sahara Desert of North Africa, the Atacama Desert of South America, and the “desert” of Antarctica, parts of which are so dry that they receive less than an inch of snow a year.

  The Gobi March is divided into six daylong stages, each of which is so grueling that only the most serious long-distance runners make their way to this remote, barren part of western China to compete in it. The starting line of the 2016 race was located near a village outside of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, and as the runners and race officials gathered before the race, a pack of stray dogs showed up to see what the fuss was about and to scrounge for food.

  GET SET…GO!

  When the race started, a number of the dogs chased after the runners. Usually in races like this, the dogs lose interest after a short distance and go back to wherever they came from. And that was the case this day, with one exception: a light brown female dog, apparently a terrier mix of some kind and only a year or two old, ran the entire course. She kept pace with the runners all day, and when the first leg of the race was over she followed them into camp. She sat with the runners into the evening, sharing their dinner, and remained in the camp after they went to bed.

  The next morning, the little dog was still there, and ready to run again. And her interest had focused on a particular runner: Dion Leonard. To this day, Leonard is not sure why she chose him, because he didn’t give her any more attention than the other runners did. Maybe the dog was attracted to the gaiters that he wore over his running shoes to keep out the dust, or perhaps she liked the way he smelled. Whatever the case, as he stood near the starting line waiting for the race to begin, the dog ran up to him. Then when the race started, she chased after him, nipping playfully at his gaiters some of the time, and running ahead or falling back at other times, but never straying too far. Just as she had the day before, the little dog ran the entire 23-mile leg of the race, which included a climb of more than 20,000 feet into the Tian Shan mountains before dropping down into the desert. That night, Leonard said, “she came into camp, she followed me straight into my tent, laid down next to me and that was that—a bond had been developed.” From then on the two were inseparable. The dog needed a name, so Leonard named her after the desert they were running through: Gobi.

  The 1911 Reeves OctoAuto was 20 feet long with eight wheels. It flopped. So did a six-wheeled version.

  TAKING A BREAK

  The following morning Gobi was ready to go again. Just as she had before, she ran the entire course with the runners, except for the parts of the course where the runners had to wade across rivers in waist-deep water. On those stretches, Leonard carried her across the water. But three days of long-distance running had taken their toll: Gobi was limping by the time she crossed the finish line, and shortly after crossing it, she barfed. The race doctors found nothing seriously wrong with her, but it was clear that she needed a rest. Leonard decided she would sit out the next two stages of the race, when the daytime temperature was expected to climb as high as 125°F. On these days Gobi hitched a ride to the end of the course in a race officials’ vehicle and was there, tail wagging, to greet Leonard as he crossed the finish line.

  Three days later, Gobi joined Leonard again as he ran the sixth and final stretch of the 155-mile race; Leonard estimates that the pup ran about 80 miles of it over the four days that she’d been allowed to run. Leonard came in second overall in the Gobi March. By the time the race was over, Gobi had become its unofficial mascot, and when she and Leonard crossed the finish line, race officials had a surprise for her: after they placed the silver second-place medal around Leonard’s neck, they produced an identical medal and placed it around Gobi’s neck.

  GRAND PRIZE

  The biggest prize was yet to come. There was little doubt that Gobi was a stray, and Leonard was distressed at the thought of leaving the little dog to fend for herself after he returned home to Scotland. “As soon as I got back to the hotel after the race, I rang my wife and said to her, ‘Do you think our cat will mind if I bring Gobi home?’ ”

  It’s not easy bringing stray dogs into the United Kingdom: cases of rabies are so rare on the British Isles that dogs and cats are not vaccinated against the disease, which leaves them vulnerable if rabies ever does appear. To prevent this from happening, the British government places very strict restrictions on bringing animals into the country. For Gobi, this meant months of quarantine in China under veterinary supervision to ensure that the dog was healthy. It also meant at least £5,000 ($6,300) in expenses for Leonard, plus mountains of paperwork that would have to be completed before Gobi would be allowed to enter the UK. He made arrangements to board Gobi in China with a race official who had taken a liking to the dog, and then he flew home to begin the arduous task of bringing his new friend to live with him in Scotland.

  Good news, bro! A fist-bump spreads one-twentieth the bacteria that a handshake does.

  A few days later, Gobi’s keeper called Leonard with bad news: Gobi was gone. She’d slipped out a door that had been left ajar, and had disappeared into the streets of Urumqi, which is home to three million people. There’s a good chance that she’d run off in search of Leonard.

  Leonard flew to Urumqi the very next day and began to search for Gobi. He used the Chinese equivalents of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to circulate information and photos of Gobi to the citizens of Urumqi and to recruit volunteers to help in the search. Then, working from 6:00 a.m. until midnight, he and the volunteers canvased the city, distributing flyers, visiting dog shelters, public parks, and other places they thought Gobi might have gone.

  Leonard admits now that he didn’t hold out much hope of ever finding Gobi. The city was too big, Gobi was too small, and time was too short—he only had about a week to look for the dog before he would have to return to the UK. But he felt he had to try.

  DOG-LE-GANGERS

  After several days of searching, Leonard and his volunteers found no trace of Gobi. They did receive numerous calls from people who’d seen dogs that looked like Gobi, but none of them were her. Then on about the fifth day of the search, they received a call from a man who’d seen one of the “missing dog” flyers, and while he and his son were walking their own dog in a park in Urumqi, they found a stray dog that kind of looked like Gobi. The man brought the dog home with him and texted a photo to Leonard. The picture wasn’t great: it had been taken in dim light and Leonard didn’t think the dog lo
oked much like Gobi. But he couldn’t tell for sure, so he drove out to the man’s house to see for himself. He had little hope that it was Gobi, and with only a day or two left before he had to return to the UK, he was preparing for the worst.

  When Leonard arrived at the man’s house, he never got a chance to look the dog over to see if it was Gobi, because “Gobi spotted me as soon as I walked in,” he recounted in the Washington Post. “Literally, she was running up my leg and jumping all over me and squealing with delight. It was just mind-blowing to think that we had found her.”

  HOME RUN

  Gobi had a nasty gash on her head and she walked with a limp, but after a trip to a veterinarian she was on the mend. The rest of her quarantine period, which she spent at a kennel in Beijing, passed without incident. When the four months were up, Leonard flew out to Beijing and brought her home. “The whole journey took 41 hours and throughout the whole thing it was like it was us back at the race,” Leonard told the BBC in January 2017. “I kept saying to her, ‘Just believe in me, we’re going to have a great life when we get to Edinburgh.’ And I’m looking forward to sharing that with her.”

  Botanist and “plant wizard” Luther Burbank (1849–1926) developed white blackberries.

  BIG SCREEN

  LITTLE SCREEN

  Some movies, such as M*A*S*H, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Fargo, have been successfully adapted into long-running TV series. Others, like these, didn’t fare as well.

  WORKING GIRL

  In the 1988 movie version of Working Girl, Melanie Griffith played Tess McGill, a woman with a “head for business and a bod for sin.” The satire of 1980s corporate culture earned Griffith an Oscar nomination, and in 1990 NBC execs felt it could easily be adapted into a workplace sitcom. Even though Griffith wouldn’t reprise her role as McGill, the network went ahead with the series, even after they couldn’t get Nancy McKeon from The Facts of Life to star. Instead, producers cast Sandra Bullock in one of her first major roles. Working Girl was canceled after just eight episodes.

  PARENTHOOD

  The bittersweet 1989 comedy film starring Steve Martin, Keanu Reeves, Joaquin Phoenix, and others as members of a multigenerational family enduring the trials and tribulations of life was successfully adapted into a prime-time soap opera that ran on NBC from 2010 to 2015. But that was NBC’s second attempt. Twenty years earlier, the network had tried to turn it into a sitcom starring Ed Begley Jr. in the Martin role, and David Arquette and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Reeves and Phoenix roles. The show had good writers—Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (who’d written the movie), and Joss Whedon—and it earned critical raves, with USA Today and the New York Post calling it the best movie-to-TV adaptation since M*A*S*H. NBC executives were so excited that they almost ran it two nights a week. Viewers apparently didn’t read the reviews. Low ratings doomed Parenthood to just 12 episodes.

  A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

  A League of Their Own entertained and educated moviegoers in the summer of 1992. It told the little-known story of the World War II–era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, starring Oscar winner Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, and Tom Hanks as the team’s drunkard coach who whined that there was “no crying in baseball.” CBS had a TV version ready for the start of baseball season in the spring of 1993. But despite looking just like the movie—thanks to the involvement of the film’s director, Penny Marshall—the cast of mostly unknown actors didn’t bring in much of an audience. (They also ran out of ideas pretty quickly—one of the first episodes was about a wacky chimp that becomes the baseball team’s mascot.) League was benched after five episodes.

  During his career with the Who, Pete Townshend smashed 136 guitars.

  FERRIS BUELLER

  When NBC brought the classic Matthew Broderick teen movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to TV in 1990, it came with the complicated premise that the series was actually about the “real life” people that the 1986 movie had been about—clever, smarmy Chicago teen Ferris Bueller and his family. It wasn’t a reality show, of course, but a comedy shot like a documentary, with characters addressing the camera (sort of like Modern Family or The Office). Beyond that set-up, the show was a standard sitcom about a cool teenager (Charlie Schlatter) and his antagonistic sister, Jeannie (portrayed in the movie by Jennifer Grey; future superstar Jennifer Aniston got the part on TV, one of her first roles). Ferris Bueller the show was not as well-received as Ferris Bueller the movie and lasted just 13 episodes.

  DELTA HOUSE

  Nationals Lampoon’s Animal House was a hugely popular movie in 1978. Not only did it make a movie star out of Saturday Night Live cast member John Belushi, it also turned the humor magazine National Lampoon into a brand name for films. But more important for Hollywood, Animal House cost $3 million to make, and took in over $141 million at the box office—more than half a billion in 2018 dollars. All three TV networks promptly came to the conclusion that a ribald comedy set in a college fraternity would make a fine premise for a weekly sitcom. ABC and National Lampoon collaborated on Delta House, which hit the air in January 1979. Stephen Furst (Flounder), Bruce McGill (D-Day), and John Vernon (Dean Wormer) all reprised their movie roles, while Josh Mostel got the difficult job of replacing John Belushi, portraying “Blotto,” the brother of Belushi’s character, “Bluto.” A few weeks later, NBC and CBS debuted Animal House knockoffs: Brothers and Sisters and Co-Ed Fever, respectively. Audiences didn’t like any of them. Delta House and Brothers and Sisters lasted half a season; Co-Ed Fever was canceled after a single airing.

  RANDOM ORIGIN: THE SPIKED DOG COLLAR

  Adding sharp spikes to a dog collar goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Why spikes? To protect the dog from attacks by wolves… which went straight for the neck first.

  An adult male giraffe weighs about as much as a Toyota Prius (3,000 pounds).

  CLASSROOM ORIGINS

  Close your eyes and think back on your school days. Picture that chalkboard and the hand-cranked pencil sharpener, and that soft pink eraser in your desk. Here’s where all that stuff came from.

  PENCIL SHARPENER

  What’s the old-fashioned way to sharpen a pencil? Whittling away at the tip with a knife until it was fine. That was time-consuming, inexact, and, for children, potentially dangerous. In 1828 a French mathematician named Bernard Lassimone received a patent for the taille-crayon—literally, “pencil cutter.” A system of tiny metal files was ensconced in a block of wood, a pencil was inserted, and, as the pencil was slowly turned, the files whittled away at the pencil tip’s sides. It was safer than a knife, but apparently not much faster or cleaner. Inventors in Europe and North America kept trying to improve on Lassimone’s design until the 1840s when French inventor Therry des Estwaux came up with the idea to make the “pencil insertion chamber” conical and lined with blades—that way, when a pencil went in and was turned, every side was shaved down equally and all at the same time.

  PINK ERASERS

  The Faber-Castell Company had been making pencils in Bavaria since the 1760s. Fourth-generation operator John Eberhard Faber took over in the 1850s and moved the company to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he opened America’s first pencil factory in 1861. Soon after, the company secured a contract to make a line of pencils to be sold at Woolworth department stores. Marketed under the name Pearl Pencil, they were topped with erasers that combined rubber and pink pumice—volcanic ash imported from Italy. The erasers worked so well that Faber started making stand-alone erasers (for all those mistake-prone kids who wore out their pencil erasers before they wore out their pencils).

  BLACKBOARD

  There’s archaeological evidence that students used something akin to individual blackboards as far back as ancient Babylonia. They didn’t have paper and pencils (or pens), so they took notes and wrote lessons on smooth clay tablets with a clay stylus. They’d erase the tablets by wiping them down with water, or writing could be made permanent with a simple bake in a kiln. Over the centuries and around the w
orld, by the 18th century, clay tablets had evolved into “slates” in the West—tablet-sized writing surfaces made out of either actual slate or wood painted with slick, washable paint. Pro: They were cheap and reusable. Con: Teachers had no way to demonstrate a group lesson—they had to go from student to student to show them, for example, a math problem. In 1801 James Pillans, the headmaster of Old High School in Edinburgh, Scotland, came up with a solution: He hung a very large piece of slate on the wall at the front of his classroom and wrote on it with a piece of chalk. The idea spread through Europe and then to the United States, where black slate was especially cheap and plentiful thanks to slate mining operations across the Eastern seaboard. The blackboard remained mostly unchanged until the 1960s, when a green-colored board—a steel plate coated with green porcelain enamel paint—was introduced. The new green boards were easier to read than blackboards from the back of a classroom, and chalk dust erased more efficiently. (But they were still called blackboards.)

  First “smart” appliance: a Carnegie Mellon University Coke machine that could be checked…

  BLACKBOARD ERASER

  All those blackboards had to be wiped clean with something. At one time, teachers used an old damp rag. But there were some downsides to that method: 1) it took the board a long time to dry, 2) it was messy, and 3) it left behind a lot of chalk dust. In the early 1860s, John Hammett, the owner of a Rhode Island school supply store that sold mostly slates and chalk, figured out a better way. A piece of cheap, dry felt was much more efficient than a wet rag. He commissioned an easy-to-handle, felt-wrapped item, and the first eraser that his team came up with is pretty much unchanged today.

  AN APPLE FOR THE TEACHER