Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Nineteenth-century slang for sex: “horizontal refreshment.”

  INSPECTOR MONTALBANO (Italy)

  Salvo Montalbano, played by Luca Zingaretti, is the chief inspector of police in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta. Inspector Montalbano is hot-tempered and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but he’s a friend to the people he trusts—and that’s a good thing, because he often needs their help solving crimes. The show is so popular in Italy that it inspired a spinoff show, The Young Montalbano. (30 episodes so far, 1999–2017)

  ANDY BARKER, P.I. (U.S.)

  Conan O’Brien’s talk show sidekick Andy Richter stars as Andy Barker, a certified public accountant who rents office space vacated by a retiring private detective. When a prospective client who’s looking for the detective agency mistakes Barker for the detective, he decides to take the case. Barker gets help from the retired detective, a video store owner who’s seen too many detective films, and other characters. The show won praise from critics but never found an audience, and was canceled after just four weeks. (6 episodes, 2007)

  THE SNIFFER (Ukraine)

  Kirill Käro stars as Nyukhach “the Sniffer,” a man with a sense of smell so powerful that he can use it to assist his childhood friend, Major Victor Lebedev of the Special Bureau of Investigations, in solving crimes. One of the most popular television shows ever to come out of Ukraine, The Sniffer airs in 60 different countries, including the United States, where it has been available on demand from both Amazon Prime and Netflix. (24 Russian-language episodes so far, 2013–2017)

  THE UNDERTAKER (Switzerland)

  Luc Conrad, played by Mike Müller, was a police detective until his father’s death forced him to take over his family’s funeral home…just as he’s being investigated for murder. Conrad’s police background enables him to notice things that other undertakers don’t, and soon he’s investigating the deaths of his funeral home’s clients, to the exasperation of his former colleagues on the force. (34 episodes so far, 2013–2018)

  Bird is the word: In Spanish, paloma means both “dove” and “pigeon.”

  MIRACLE FEET

  Ever heard of “clubfoot”? Probably not, thanks mostly to this guy.

  MADE IN SPAIN

  In 1944 a 30-year-old Spanish physician named Dr. Ignacio Ponseti joined the faculty of orthopedic medicine at the University of Iowa’s medical school. One of his early assignments was to review the case histories of all the surgeries that had been performed to cure “clubfoot” at the university since 1921. That was the year that another faculty member, Dr. Arthur Steindler, developed a surgical procedure to treat the crippling birth defect, in which a child is born with a foot turned inward and upward. The condition gives the foot an appearance similar to a golf club. If left untreated, the child will be unable to stand with the foot flat on the ground; instead they must learn to walk on their ankle or on the side of the foot. In about half of all such cases, both feet are clubfooted.

  As Ponseti reviewed the case files, he made a startling discovery: In many cases, Dr. Steindler’s procedure hadn’t really cured the disability—the surgery just postponed it until later in the patient’s life. Clubfoot occurs in about one of every 800 births. It is caused when the tendons on the inward side of the foot and calf are too short, pulling the foot in an abnormal direction. Dr. Steindler’s procedure lengthened the tendons, restoring a more normal appearance to the foot. But the scar tissue that resulted often left the foot stiff and weak. Painful arthritis frequently set in when the patient reached their early twenties, making the disability far worse.

  A DIFFERENT APPROACH

  Ponseti had served as a medical officer in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. He spent much of his time treating traumatic injuries, including setting many broken bones. Under wartime conditions, surgery wasn’t always possible, but Ponseti found that he often got good results using only braces and plaster casts. He knew that the limbs of newborn babies are soft and flexible compared to those of adults, and he wondered if it might be possible to treat clubfoot the same way.

  He wasn’t the first person to think of treating clubfoot with plaster casts. But earlier physicians had not paid enough attention to the anatomical structure of an infant’s foot. “They did not know how the joints moved,” Ponseti explained to an interviewer in 2007. “They just tried to smash the bones into position.”

  STEP BY STEP

  Ponseti took a more careful approach when developing what became known as the “Ponseti method.” He carefully studied the anatomy of infant feet. When treating his tiny patients, he used this knowledge to gently straighten and rotate the affected foot to a more normal position, adjusting it only as much as the baby’s comfort would allow. Then he placed the leg in a plaster cast to hold the foot in that position.

  Light as a cloud? Heavier than you think: An “average” cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds.

  This “adjust-and-cast” process was repeated five to seven times over several weeks. After each new cast was removed, the foot was massaged and stretched to a new, more desirable position, then placed in another plaster cast to hold it there. In as little as a month, the tendons were stretched enough to return the foot to a completely normal position.

  To prevent the tendons from tightening back to their original shape, which would cause the clubfoot to return, the next step was to fit a patient with special shoes mounted on a metal bar that held the feet in the correct position. The shoes were worn 23 hours a day for three months, then overnight and during naps for four to five years.

  After the five years were up, 95 percent of the children Ponseti treated were completely cured of clubfoot, with no further action required. They went on to live full and active lives—and for some patients, such as Troy Aikman, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Mia Hamm, very athletic lives—with none of the negative outcomes that resulted from surgery.

  Some patients, such as Troy Aikman, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Mia Hamm, went on to live very athletic lives.

  THANKS…BUT NO THANKS

  The University of Iowa’s medical school soon adopted the Ponseti method, and not a single clubfoot surgery was performed anywhere in the state after 1948. But outside of Iowa the medical world was slower to adopt the procedure. Poor results from earlier attempts to cure clubfoot using plaster casts left many medical professionals wary of the Ponseti method, and orthopedic surgeons were suspicious of any technique that didn’t involve surgery. “Surgeons love their little knives,” Ponseti told the Chicago Tribune in 2006. People even joked that his method only worked on kids born in Iowa.

  As the years passed, Ponseti promoted his procedure by publishing articles in medical journals and training physicians in teaching clinics around the country. But by the time he retired in 1984 at the age of 70, surgical correction was still the preferred treatment everywhere except in Iowa.

  In the early 1990s, Ponseti came out of retirement and returned to treating clubfoot cases at the University of Iowa a few days a week. By this time the university had treated more than 2,000 cases of clubfoot dating back to the 1940s. “I have follow-ups of thirty, forty years, and those patients have normal feet,” Ponseti would tell anyone who would listen. “Often they don’t know which foot was the clubfoot.”

  Viagra added to the water in a vase of flowers will make them stand up and live an extra week.

  By that time Ponseti, nearing 90, had spent decades living with the knowledge that he’d found a simple, effective cure to a cause of considerable human suffering, but was being ignored. Thousands of people had gone through unnecessary, ineffective surgery over the years, and were living with the consequences. There was little he could do about it.

  WEBBED FEET

  It was at about this time that things finally began to change. Not because of anything Ponseti did, but because the parents whose children had been restored to full mobility without surgery were suddenly able to sing his praises far and wide, using the power of the internet.

  Before the
internet, parents of children with clubfoot could go to their doctor for information, get a second opinion from another physician, or go to the library. If they were lucky, they might know another family with a child who had clubfoot. That was it. Then in the early 1990s, the parents of one of Ponseti’s patients started an internet mailing list dedicated to clubfoot and the Ponseti method. Now anyone with an e-mail address had easy access to information. After the development of the World Wide Web and search engines in the mid-1990s, parents who searched for information about clubfoot quickly found their way to websites describing the Ponseti method, including many set up by parents of the kids he treated.

  TIME FOR A CHANGE

  Instead of showing up at their doctor’s office with little or no information of their own, parents now arrived well-informed and determined to use the Ponseti method, whether their physician liked it or not. If the physician refused, the parents went elsewhere—if necessary, to Iowa, where the number of children treated at Ponseti’s clinic increased tenfold over the next few years. As time passed and demand for Ponseti’s method continued to soar, interest in surgery plummeted. In 2006 the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed the Ponseti method as the standard of care in the United States; by 2010 the number of clubfoot surgeries performed in the United States had declined by more than 90 percent.

  Ponseti lived long enough to witness the revolution he created: He was still seeing clubfoot patients in 2009 when he suffered a stroke in his office and passed away at the age of 95. By then his method had been endorsed by the United Nations, and charities with names like MiracleFeet had sprung up, dedicated to bringing the Ponseti method to the developing world, where 80 percent of clubfoot cases occur, and where five out of six cases still go untreated.

  But not for much longer.

  Ancient rap battles: Vikings engaged in “flyting,” or exchanging insults rapidly in verse.

  THE FIRST VIRAL VIDEO?

  Even if you don’t recognize the video clip “badday.mpg” by name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it. It began circulating around the internet in the late 1990s, when circulating around the internet was not such an easy thing to do.

  YOU’VE GOT MAIL

  If you’re old enough to have had an e-mail account in 1997, you probably remember those dark, pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, and pre-Twitter days when the only way to share something odd and entertaining with your friends was to send it as an e-mail attachment. It’s also a pretty safe bet that back then someone e-mailed you a video called “badday.mpg attached.” (And in those innocent times, you would have felt perfectly comfortable opening an attachment titled “badday.mpg.”)

  The 26-second video appears to be security camera footage from an office filled with cubicles. In the cubicle nearest the camera, a chubby man with a mustache sits typing at his desktop computer. Suddenly he slaps the side of his computer monitor with his left hand. The person in the neighboring cubicle peeks over the divider to see what’s going on, then sits back down. A few seconds later the first man pounds repeatedly on the keyboard with his fists; then he gets up, grabs his keyboard like a baseball bat and swings it at the monitor, knocking it off the desk and onto the floor just outside the cubicle. Then, as his neighbor peeks up again, the man walks over to the monitor and kicks it some more.

  WORD OF MODEM

  By today’s standards, the video file wasn’t big—only five megabytes in size. But in 1997, five megabytes was a lot. On a dial-up computer modem it could take 20 minutes—or longer—to download such a file. But when people received it as an e-mail attachment sent by a friend, they took the time to download it. Then after watching it, they were so entertained that they sent it to other friends, who sent it to their friends.

  “Badday.mpg” was one of the first videos to spread around the world this way. When people saw it, they must have wondered who the man was, and where and when the footage was taken. But hardly anyone wondered why the man was so angry. Who hasn’t wanted to kill their computer at one time or another? Especially their work computer? This guy appeared to be actually doing what so many office workers have fantasized about doing during their careers. That’s why the video spread virally—it spoke to people and provided them with a sense of catharsis. And it was funny.

  P. T. Barnum asked a NY paper to run his obit before he died so he could read it. (They did.)

  OFF THE HOOK

  Some fans of badday.mpg built websites devoted to it; others studied it frame by frame, zooming in carefully to study any detail that caught their interest. And when they did, they began to notice things about the video that seemed a little fishy. The monitor did not appear to be connected to the computer, for one thing. When the man knocked it off the desk, the monitor’s cable should have pulled the computer off the desk with it. But it didn’t…so was it really attached? If not, why was the man working on a computer that wasn’t even hooked up?

  Also, when the man walks over to kick the monitor, he pauses briefly and appears to look directly at the camera. Some people thought it looked like he was smirking or smiling. If he really was as angry as he appeared, why was he smiling?

  Lots of people had questions, but no one had answers, at least not for about a year. Then in 1998, someone must have forwarded “badday.mpg” to a friend who worked at Loronix Information Systems, a company in Durango, Colorado. They had all the answers, because it was their video.

  REVELATION

  Loronix sells video surveillance systems and the software that’s needed to operate them. When they were preparing marketing materials in the mid-1990s, they decided they needed a few short videos that demonstrated the kinds of activities the security cameras were designed to detect. Rather than go to the trouble of hiring actors, the company’s chief technology officer, Peter Jankowski, made the videos in-house. He filmed his shipping manager, Vinny Licciardi, in various scenes, such as getting cash from an ATM, stealing inventory from a warehouse, and—of course—attacking the computer in his cubicle. And just as some viewers had noticed, he didn’t destroy an actual working computer. Instead, Jankowski set a defective monitor on top of an empty computer case, then put a broken keyboard in front and let Vinny go to town. (The video you see is the second take: the first take was unusable because everyone burst out laughing.)

  The videos were never intended to be seen by the public. They were distributed on CDs at trade shows along with a brochure promoting Loronix’s product line. Someone must have enjoyed the video so much that they pulled it off of the CD and e-mailed it to a friend, who forwarded it to their friend, and so on, starting a ball rolling that continues rolling to this day. “Badday.mpg” may be the very first video to spread virally via e-mail, and it certainly is one of the longest-lived. It still pops up on Facebook, Twitter, and other places from time to time. “I’m kind of amazed it’s still going around as much as it is, but I think everyone can relate to that moment,” Vinny Licciardi told Wired magazine in 2018. “They’re so ticked off because their software is not working, or there’s some glitch, and everybody’s wanted to do that at one point in their life.”

  There is no official language of the United States.

  “KEEP PANICKING”

  You’ve probably seen an inspirational poster hanging in an office cubicle or behind a guidance counselor’s desk. It’s usually a quote about following one’s dreams or aiming higher, superimposed over a powerful image of nature, like a sunset or a waterfall. Well, someone designed a program called InspiroBot that generates “inspirational” phrases and pairs them with stock photos to create an endless series of robot-designed—and very bizarre—inspirational posters. It doesn’t seem like the bots will replace humans any time soon. Here are a few of InspiroBot’s stranger (and funnier) creations.

  “If you open your heart to respect, you cannot open your heart to victims.”

  “Thou shalt attract what idiots think of as unattractable.”

  “Artists lost their inspirations.”

  “Tragedy creates
empathy for the elitists.”

  “Before inspiration comes the slaughter.”

  “If you want to get somewhere in life, you have to try to be dead.”

  “Basing your everyday on science creates loneliness.”

  “Make yesterday your rival.”

  “When you understand how to steal her, you understand how to talk about her.”

  “Fearful men hide boredom.”

  “Quality time and collective deception are two sides of the same coin.”

  “Knowing what you are is what makes you feminine.”

  “Every day can be as beautiful as a princess in the morning.”

  “The decline of civilization kills the snake in the garden.”

  “Forget the art. Remember the player.”

  “There’s a connection between popularity and simply being annoying.”

  “Try to be yourself or stick a finger in the back of your throat.”

  “Life is what we do when we’re not dying.”

  “Pregnancy is just a word.”

  “Don’t blame the abuse. Blame the abuse.”

  “Get embraced.”

  “Lie about what you know.”

  “A chicken kills you.”

  “Now. Now.”

  “Keep panicking.”

  “Try to tell yourself that you are horrible.”