It was while trekking across more than 600 miles of this forbidding territory that Freuchen got caught out in the open in a blizzard. He took what shelter he could beneath his dogsled, but was soon buried under several feet of snow that had frozen into hard ice.
Freuchen didn’t have any sharp tools on him that he could use to dig his way out, and he had to go to the bathroom. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Freuchen pooped, waited for the poop to freeze, then used it as a “dagger” to dig his way to freedom. By the time he made it back to base camp, his left leg was so badly frostbitten that it had to be amputated, but he completed the expedition and proved that Peary Land is not separate from the rest of Greenland.
Freuchen didn’t have any sharp tools on him that he could use to dig his way out, and he had to go to the bathroom. Why not kill two birds with one stone?
HONOREE: Jumpy, a border collie–blue heeler mix owned by Omar von Muller, who bills himself as a “dog trainer to the stars”
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: Knowing a bathroom trick that many human males have yet to master.
TRUE STORY: Jumpy is very talented. He knows how to paint, do backflips, ride skateboards and wakeboards, and has more than 30 acting credits to his name. But the thing that lands him in the Stall of Fame is a YouTube video titled “Jumpy Leaving His Mark at the Chandler Valley Center Studios.” In it, Jumpy lifts his leg and pees into a men’s room urinal without spilling a drop onto the floor, then stands on his hind legs and flushes the urinal. The video has been viewed more than 166,000 times. Bonus: When von Muller isn’t busy with training dogs for TV and the movies, he makes his services available to the public. So if you live in L.A. “or you are willing to get on a plane with your pup,” he says, he may be able to teach your dog (or the man in your life) the same trick.
Thirsty? When you were born, you were 78% water. Now you’re 50% to 65% water.
HONOREE: Nina Katchadourian, a Brooklyn-based artist
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: She makes artistic self-portraits in airplane bathrooms using paper towels, toilet paper, seat covers, and other items found in airplane bathrooms.
TRUE STORY: Katchadourian says she stumbled across her odd form of portraiture by chance. “While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in 2011, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror using my cellphone.” The resulting image reminded her of 15th-century Flemish portraits, she writes on her website.
Why stop at one? Katchadourian had a long-haul flight from San Francisco to New Zealand coming up in a few weeks, and she decided to spend much of that flight in the restroom, posing for as many portraits as she could. (The other passengers slept for long stretches on the 14-hour flight, so the restrooms were unoccupied.) “By the time we landed,” Katchadourian writes, “I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. There is no special illumination other than the lavatory’s own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone.” See for yourself: Katchadourian has posted her self-portraits on her website, ninakatchadourian.com, and in some of them she really does look like a woman from the 15th century.
HONOREE: YoYo Li, a Los Angeles restaurateur
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: Bringing toilet-themed cuisine to the United States.
TRUE STORY: When Li decided to go into business in L.A., the two options she considered were opening a “bubble tea” shop, or opening a toilet-themed Chinese restaurant. We’ve written in the past about the thriving Modern Toilet restaurant chain in Taiwan: Customers sit on toilets, eat toilet-themed foods out of bowls shaped like Western- and squat-style toilets, and drink beverages from glasses that look like urinals.
L.A. already had plenty of bubble tea joints, so Li settled on her second option. She copied the Modern Toilet concept and opened the Magic Restroom Cafe in the City of Industry suburb of Los Angeles in 2013. Menu items included “Smells Like Poop” (braised pork on rice), “Constipation” (noodles with soybean paste), “Black Poop” (chocolate sundae), and “Stinky Tofu” (stinky tofu). Want to go? If you haven’t gone already, you waited too long—the restaurant closed its doors in May 2014 after just eight months. “Magic Restroom Cafe Goes Down the Toilet,” read the headline in Los Angeles Magazine.
The Pop Tart is based on a Danish homemade dessert called hindbaersnitter.
IRONIC, ISN’T IT?
There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into proper perspective.
BURNING IRONY. A devastating wildfire tore through Santa Rosa, California, in October 2017. In one particularly hard-hit area, a local Carl’s Jr. was the only restaurant left standing. That’s why, on October 9, dozens of hungry firefighters showed up at the fast-food joint and ordered 165 cheeseburgers. The line cooks tried to get the burgers out as fast as they could. Unfortunately, all that charbroiling made the exhaust vents extremely hot, and a grease fire broke out and quickly caused around $75,000 worth of damage. Within 15 minutes, the firefighters—who were at that restaurant only because all the others had burned down—extinguished the fire that started because they had ordered so many burgers at once.
IRONY TAKES A PASS. In August 2017, officials at the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority in St. Petersburg, Florida, decided to give one of their most loyal customers, Barbara Rygiel, a lifetime bus pass. Rygiel is 103 years old.
ISN’T IT IRONIC? (IT IS NOW.) Alanis Morissette has taken a lot of flak over the years for her 1996 hit song “Ironic” because the lyrics aren’t really ironic. Like this one: “An old man turned 98 / He won the lottery and died the next day.” It’s unfortunate, but it’s not ironic. (In Morissette’s defense: she was 19 when she wrote the song.) In 2013 two musicians, sisters named Eliza and Rachael Hurwitz, decided to give Morissette a helping hand by writing a corrected version of the song. Now called “It’s Finally Ironic,” here’s that same lyric, corrected: “An old man turned 98 / He won the lottery and died the next day / from a severe paper cut from his lottery ticket.”
Update: In 2016 Morissette finally copped to her linguistic faux pas while performing a parody version of the song on The Late Late Show with James Corden. She updated the lyrics for the social media era: “An old friend sends you a Facebook request / and you find out he’s a racist after you accept.” Still not ironic. But then Morissette ended the song with this line: “It’s singing ‘Ironic’ / when there are no ironies. / And who would have thought? / It figures.”
Morissette ended the song with: “It’s singing ‘Ironic’ when there are no ironies. And who would have thought? It figures.”
IRONY GOES NIGHTY-NIGHT. In 1953 Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, discovered REM sleep, and went on to become one the world’s most renowned sleep experts. In 2003 Aserinksy, 77, was killed when he hit a tree after falling asleep at the wheel.
IHOP CEO Julia Stewart’s first job: IHOP server.
IRONY ON THE SIDELINES
•Vincent T. Lombardi Middle School in Green Bay, Wisconsin—named after the NFL’s most revered head coach of all time—had to cancel its football season in the fall of 2017. Reason: they couldn’t find anyone willing to coach the team.
•One of college basketball’s best teams, the University of Kansas Jayhawks have amassed an impressive .750 winning percentage in the 120 years since their debut season in 1898. Only one head coach in the history of the team has even had a losing record: James Naismith. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Naismith is the man who invented the game of basketball. (His coaching motto may shed light on why he lost so many games: “You can’t coach basketball; you just play it.”)
WARNING: IRONY AHEAD. Of all the road signs for a drunk driver to hit, none would be more ironic than one that says “REPORT DRUNK DRIVERS. CALL 911.” That’s the sign that a 57-year-old Aptos, California, man hit in his Jeep Wrangler one night in 2017. After demolishing the sign, the Jeep “careened up an embankment, flipped, a
nd landed on its roof.” According to the arresting officer, “He was quite intoxicated.”
IRONY THAT EATS ITS OWN TAIL. Is irony dead? Some people claim it is. Who are those people? Ironic hipsters—the very same group that helped propel irony into the mainstream. They’ve now declared it dead because of the popularity of the phrase “hipster irony.” Or, as a hipster named Peter Furia put it to NPR, “The ironic part is that hipsters’ opposition to pop culture has become pop culture.”
“The ironic part is that hipsters’ opposition to pop culture has become pop culture.”
THERE’S AN IRONY FOR THAT. A smartphone app called The Hold is available for people who are addicted to…smartphones. It “allows users to earn rewards such as cinema tickets for not using their phone.” Unfortunately, the only way to access the app is with your phone.
’TIL IRONY DO WE PART. For a Valentine’s promotion in 2018, a law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, held a contest for married couples to enter. The prize: a free divorce (a $985 value!). No word on who the lucky “winners” were.
About 50 coffee beans are used to make a single shot of espresso.
“PRINCESS TAKES
A BALLET CLASS”
Movie prequels get released all the time, but songs never do. Can you guess the name of the famous song if we tell you the artist and the made-up “prequel” to that song? The answers are on page 501.
1.Ray Charles, “Now, Listen Carefully”
2.The Beatles, “Two Days Ago”
3.Elton John “I Bet We’ll Be Together Forever”
4.Al Green, “Maybe We Should Break Up”
5.Elvis Presley, “Please Don’t Arrest Me, Officer”
6.James Brown, “Papa Went to the Bag Store”
7.The Who, “I Hope This Fog Clears Soon”
8.Prince, “The Day the Red Clouds Met the Blue Clouds”
9.Blondie, “I Just Bought a Phone”
10.The Doors, “Two-Thirds of the Way Through”
11.Carole King, “Don’t Worry, There’s Plenty of Time”
12.Ramones, “I’m Uncomfortably Agitated”
13.David Bowie, “Interplanetary Travel?”
14.Eddie Cochran, “Spring Fever”
15.ABBA, “Princess Takes a Ballet Class”
16.Billy Joel, “I Need a New Apartment”
17.Cheap Trick, “You’re Surrounded!”
18.Fleetwood Mac, “Heavy Rains”
19.Queen, “We Are Contestants”
20.Steely Dan, “Do It”
21.U2, “A Week After Christmas”
22.Madonna, “A Prolonged Period of Work”
23.Guns N’ Roses, “An Autumnal Change of Barometric Pressure”
24.Rolling Stones, “Prime It White”
25.Talking Heads, “Pouring Gasoline on the Kitchen Floor”
26.Tom Petty, “Whoops!
Forgot My Parachute!”
In the 1928 Olympics, Australian rower Bobby Pearce stopped his boat to let some ducks pass. He still won the gold medal.
MOUTHING OFF
MEAT-FREE
Words of wisdom—and advice on going vegetarian—from vegetarians.
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarian.”
—Paul McCartney
“I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.”
—George Bernard Shaw
“THOSE WHO EAT FLESH ARE BUT EATING GRAINS AND VEGETABLES AT SECOND HAND.”
—Ellen G. White
“I wouldn’t touch a hot dog unless you put a condom on it.”
—Bill Maher
“Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.”
—I. L. Peretz
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
—Samuel Butler
“We all love animals. Why do we call some ‘pets’ and others ‘dinner’?”
—k. d. lang
“Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow.”
—Milan Kundera
MOUTHING OFF
VEGETABLES, SCHMEGETABLES
Then again, there are some people out there who think it’s absurd to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.
“VEGETARIANISM: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, AND WHO WANTS TO BE A LETTUCE?”
—Peter Burns
“IS A VEGETARIAN PERMITTED TO EAT ANIMAL CRACKERS?”
—George Carlin
“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
—Anthony Bourdain
“Meat isn’t murder. It’s delicious.”
—Johnny Rotten
“I love animals, especially with barbeque sauce.”
—J. Richard Singleton
“I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.”
—Rita Rudner
“Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”
—Fran Lebowitz
“There are two types of vegetarians: Those who have beef with chicken, and those who are too chicken to have beef.”
—Mokokoma Mokhonoana
NEVER EVENTS
It’s an unfortunate fact of life: even skilled professionals who hold the lives of others in their hands can and do make really dumb mistakes. Warning: you may find these stories slightly gruesome.
BACKGROUND: DO NO WRONG…MOST OF THE TIME
Fifty-three million surgeries are performed each year in the United States. Of these, it’s estimated that some 4,000 of them—less than 0.0001 percent—involve “never events.” That’s the term for mistakes like performing the wrong procedure, operating on the wrong body part or the wrong patient, or leaving a foreign object (such as a sponge or a surgical instrument) inside the patient. The good news (if it can be called that) is that such mistakes are rare. The bad news is that they’re called “never events” because they’re never supposed to happen. Numerous controls are put in place to prevent them from happening, but sometimes they do. Here are some examples:
Spare(d) rib. In May 2015, Deborah Craven was having a section of her eighth rib removed at Yale New Haven Hospital because a precancerous lesion on the bone was causing her pain. In preparation for the surgery, radiologists marked the rib by attaching metallic coils to it and injecting dye into the surrounding tissue to indicate to Dr. Anthony Kim, the surgeon, and Dr. Ricardo Quarrie, a surgeon-in-training, which rib needed to be removed. But Craven was still in pain after the surgery, so an X-ray was performed. It revealed that the eighth rib and the metal coils were still in place. Translation: the doctors had removed the wrong rib. Kim admitted his mistake, but according to Craven, Quarrie tried to cover it up by telling her she needed a second surgery because not enough of the rib had been removed. “Making the patient undergo another surgery the same day, without owning up to the real medical reason for the repeat surgery,” Craven’s lawyer, Joel Faxon, said after filing a lawsuit, “is just plain deceitful.”
It is brain surgery. In December 2014, Michael Krabbe checked into St. Mary’s Health Center in St. Louis, Missouri, to have a “very large” brain tumor removed and biopsied. The surgery was performed, but when Krabbe woke up from the operation, he was unable to speak or move his right arm and leg. Krabbe alleges that the surgeon, Dr. George Bailey, told him he’d removed the tumor, but had to perform an additional surgery to insert chemotherapy wafers near the tumor site. That’s when Krabbe decided it was time for a second opinion. An MRI—at a different hospital—revealed that Bailey had operated on the left frontal lobe of the brain (above the eye), not the left temporal lobe (above the ear), where the tumor was located. He had removed healthy brain tissue and left the brain tumor in place. �
�We have complete confidence in Dr. Bailey and the care he delivers to our patients,” a spokesperson for St. Mary’s Health Center said after Krabbe filed a lawsuit against Dr. Bailey and the hospital.
“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.” —William E. Gladstone
Anyone seen my scalpel? In 2013 Glenford Turner had his prostate removed at the West Haven Veterans Affairs Hospital in Connecticut. The procedure, which was performed by fifth-year urology trainee Dr. Jaimin Shah under the supervision of the chief of urology, Dr. Preston Sprenkle, left Turner with severe abdominal pain. But the U.S. Army veteran toughed it out…for four years. Finally, in 2017, the pain became unbearable and he returned to the hospital for answers. That’s when X-rays revealed that a five-inch scalpel had been left inside Turner’s pelvis during the surgery. Somehow both doctors failed to notice that they were one scalpel short after finishing the surgery. While Turner was recovering from surgery to remove the scalpel, Dr. Sprenkle, completely oblivious to the irony, noted that the patient “does notice the pelvic pain that has been present since his prostatectomy is now gone.”
In a pinch. In April 2017, a woman named Mary Harber had surgery at Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, California, to remove a benign tumor from her abdomen. Recovering at home afterward, Harber suffered from back, kidney, and abdominal pain for two weeks. By May 1, the pain was so great that she went to the emergency room, where X-rays revealed that a pair of eight-inch-long surgical forceps had been left in her abdomen. In a second procedure, surgeons removed the forceps plus 18 inches of Harber’s small intestine, which had “looped into one of the forceps’ finger holes.”
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 41