Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The victim eventually escaped. By that time, however, Meza had broken into the victim’s apartment (he got the keys from the kidnapper), stole the man’s hardware wallet, and transferred $1.8 million worth of cryptocurrency into his own bitcoin account. His plan was to pull off the heist without the victim even suspecting him. But Meza made three crucial errors that led detectives right to him. Goof #1: Meza didn’t hide his face from security cameras in the victim’s apartment building, placing him at the scene of the crime. Goof #2: The next day, he bragged to several people that he was now a “cryptocurrency player.” Goof #3: According to Fortune, Meza “transferred the stolen funds to an account under his own name at a well-known U.S. digital currency exchange.” If he had transferred the currency to his own digital wallet, it would have been nearly impossible to trace back to him. “Instead, he sent them to the cryptocurrency world’s version of Chase Bank, making it possible for the DA’s office to locate and seize him.”

  PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. In March 2016, police in Granite Shoals, Texas, posted an urgent message on their Facebook page:

  BREAKING NEWS ALERT: If you have recently purchased meth or heroin in Central Texas, please take it to the local police or sheriff department so it can be screened with a special device. DO NOT use it until it has been properly checked for possible Ebola contamination! Contact any Granite Shoals PD officer for testing.

  A few days later, the police posted the mug shot of Chasity Eugina Hopson, 29, and named her “winner of the Facebook challenge.” She actually showed up at the station with her meth. Good news: no Ebola! Bad news: she was arrested.

  …Her name was Pollyanna, and she was a gift from Russia.

  ANIMAL INVADERS

  Probably the most famous “invasive species” is the cane toad. In the 1930s, when native cane beetles were ravaging Australia’s sugarcane plantations, authorities brought in the toads, which ate up the beetles…and then reproduced until they numbered in the millions and overran the country. Here are some stories of other animals that wound up where they didn’t belong.

  Animal: European starling

  Emigration: In the 1870s, New York pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin was the chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, a group whose mission was to bring plants and animals that were native to Europe to the New World. Schieffelin wanted to be more specific, and introduce all of the birds named in the works of Shakespeare to the United States, including the starling, which is mentioned—just once—in Henry IV Part 1, when the character Hotspur quips, “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.” In 1890 Schieffelin arranged for 60 starlings to be shipped to his country home outside New York City…and then he let them loose in Central Park.

  Result: Each year the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services exterminates about four million nuisance animals—mostly starlings. Today the starling population is estimated to be about 200 million, all descendants of Schieffelin’s original 60. These aggressive foragers travel in flocks as large as 3,000 that descend on farms and swarm over (and eat) the crops, at a cost of $800 million annually. They live in pretty much every corner of the country, where they’ll push other, native birds out of their nests.

  Animal: Burmese python

  Emigration: Exotic pets are popular in Florida, and in the 1980s one of the hottest exotic pets was the Burmese python. They’re nonvenomous, but can grow up to 20 feet long, weigh 140 pounds, and they have extremely sharp teeth, so they’re quite intimidating (and attractive to people who like snakes). In 1992 Hurricane Andrew destroyed a Burmese python breeding facility, sending hundreds of the gigantic Asian snakes slithering into the Everglades.

  Result: An estimated 100,000 Burmese pythons now live in Florida’s swamps. Not only do the reptiles have no natural predators, they’ll hunt and eat just about anything (except humans), wrapping themselves around prey, squeezing it to death, and then swallowing the unlucky creature whole. A Burmese python can devour an alligator this way, as well as deer, raccoons, marsh rabbits, bobcats, and opossums. In some areas of the Everglades, populations of those animals have declined by 99 percent since 1992. Since establishing an eradication program in 2002, state agencies have captured and killed 2,000 pythons, which isn’t very many. The South Florida Water Management District pays hunters about $8.10 an hour to search for pythons in the region and grants a $50 bonus for every python at least four feet long, with $25 for each foot beyond.

  Adorably gross: Pandas poop out about 60 pounds of waste every day.

  DID YOU KNOW?

  Burmese pythons are very adaptable. Young ones live in trees; mature ones live on the ground. But they’ll also try water (such as Floridian swampland). Turns out they can stay underwater for up to half an hour without needing a gulp of air.

  Animal: Emerald ash borer

  Emigration: Shipments of wood packing-crate materials from Asia arrived in Michigan in the 1990s (the region did a lot of trade with China), and unbeknownst to anyone, those crates held emerald ash borer larvae. Those larvae grow into metallic-green beetles that are no bigger than a dime, but they feast on ash trees and burrow their way through…which ultimately kills the trees.

  Result: Ash used to be big business in southeastern Michigan, with millions of trees being used to make flooring, church pews, baseball bats, and guitars. In a little over 20 years, emerald ash borers have killed tens of millions of ash trees in that region alone. Result: the ash industry in Michigan is essentially over. And thanks to ash firewood that’s been shipped to other parts of the United States and Canada, the bug has killed about 100 million ash trees. So far.

  Animal: Indian mongoose

  Emigration: In the same way that cane toads were brought to Australia to eliminate cane beetle infestations, the Indian mongoose was brought to Puerto Rico and Jamaica in the 1870s. The cute creature, about two feet long, was tasked with patrolling sugarcane plantations, protecting the crop against rats and snakes—by killing and eating those rats and snakes.

  Result: The mongoose dutifully killed those pests, but then started killing what wasn’t on the preapproved list—native species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. In total, the mongoose has caused the local extinction of 12 reptile and amphibian species. Which is to say nothing of the millions of dollars in annual damage they cause to farms, where they attack chickens, killing some and spreading rabies to others.

  Animal: Asian citrus psyllid

  Emigration: This Asian insect was spotted in Florida for the first time in 1998. Within two years, it was present in 31 counties in the Sunshine State. Scientists think larvae found its way from Asia to the United States on imported ornamental plants.

  IRS Publication 17 states that if you steal something, you must report it as income (unless you give it back).

  Result: The psyllid feeds on citrus tree sap and leaves, particularly orange trees, but carries bacteria that destroys the tree and its fruit. Once infected with the bacteria, the plant malfunctions. Roots and leaves grow deformed, and oranges drop from branches well before they’re ripe. Then the tree dies. Florida orange growers have called the psyllid infestation a “cancer”—half of all citrus trees in Florida have been infected over the last two decades. Eighty percent of American not-from-concentrate orange juice comes from Florida, so if something isn’t done soon, Florida orange juice could become a thing of the past.

  Animal: Brown tree snake

  Emigration: Ironically, when American forces liberated the Pacific island of Guam from Japanese occupation in 1944, military ships that came from Papua New Guinea inadvertently brought along a few venomous brown tree snakes. The snakes quickly began to thrive in the island’s forests, rich with a diversity of animals that they could devour.

  Result: Today Guam is infested with more than two million snakes in its 210 square miles; some forested areas boast a snake density of 13,000 serpents per square mile. And they sure are hungry. By the mid-1
980s, the snakes had eradicated 10 of Guam’s 12 native bird species, including a kingfisher that was found nowhere else in the world. The delicate ecosystem has been so thoroughly destroyed that tree growth on Guam is down by 92 percent since the arrival of the snakes. They even wrap themselves around power lines and have caused $4.5 million worth of electrical damage over the past seven years, in addition to triggering blackouts. Authorities have been working on getting rid of the snakes, and have come up with one novel solution: Tylenol. Turns out acetaminophen is deadly to brown tree snakes. In 2010 animal-control groups tried implanting the over-the-counter pain reliever into dead mice, putting tiny parachutes on them, and dropping them over forested areas from a helicopter. (Really.) The parachutes then snag on tree branches, where they dangle enticingly for brown tree snakes…who take the bait and quickly die.

  PHRASE ORIGIN: PRECIOUS LITTLE SNOWFLAKE

  This insult—a retort to self-help books that say that everyone is a precious snowflake—was popularized by Chuck Palahniuk in his 1996 book Fight Club: “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

  Watch your step: The surface of Saturn’s moon Titan is covered in electrified sand.

  THE KID WHO STAYED UP

  REALLY LATE

  If you’ve ever had to cram for a test or had an unfinished paper that was due the next day, you probably know what it’s like to pull an all-nighter. Now try to imagine having to pull an 11-nighter. That’s what this high-schooler tried to do. Did he make it? Read on (and please try not to fall asleep before the end).

  GOING TO THE FAIR

  In the fall of 1963, two San Diego high school kids named Randy Gardner and Bruce McAllister decided to enter the local science fair. One of the first ideas they came up with for their entry was a test of the effect of sleeplessness on paranormal ability—abilities that are outside the normal senses, such as mind-reading or seeing the future. Then they had second thoughts. “We realized there was no way we could do that, so we decided on the effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities, like performance on the basketball court, or whatever we could come up with,” McAllister told the BBC in 2018.

  The boys had read that the world record for sleeplessness was set by a Honolulu disc jockey named Tom Rounds, who’d stayed awake for 260 hours during a radio station “wake-a-thon” to raise money for charity. That’s just four hours shy of eleven days, so Gardner and McAllister decided to try and stay up for 264 hours, or eleven days straight. They flipped a coin to see which one of them would be the guinea pig, and Gardner won: he would make the record-breaking attempt, while McAllister observed and documented his activities in a journal.

  SURE, GO AHEAD

  Gardner probably wasn’t the first kid to try to stay up for days on end just to see if he could, but he may have been the first one to obtain his parents’ permission. Perhaps assuming that their son would doze off after just a night or two without sleep, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner gave their consent, but they did insist that Randy be monitored by a doctor to ensure that he wasn’t endangering his health. Because Gardner’s father served in the military, the medical professional who observed the boy was Dr. John J. Ross, a physician assigned to the U.S. Navy’s Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego.

  Three days after Christmas on December 28, 1963, the boys started their experiment at McAllister’s house. They soon realized they were going to need some more help, because the only way that McAllister could be sure that Gardner stayed awake was to stay awake with him. “After three nights of sleeplessness myself, I woke up tipped against the wall writing notes on the wall itself,” McAllister recalled. So he and Gardner recruited Joe Marciano, a schoolmate from Point Loma High School, to help. For the rest of the experiment, McAllister and Marciano worked in shifts, with one of them sleeping while the other stayed up with Gardner.

  What are supernumerary teeth? Extra teeth that grow in alongside normal teeth. (It’s not uncommon in humans.)

  Each day McAllister and Marciano tested Gardner in every way they could think of, so that they could document how his physical and cognitive abilities, as well as his sense of hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch changed over time.

  Gardner stayed active to keep from falling asleep. He and his friends played basketball and pinball for hours at a time and went for lots of drives. “At night we’d go to Winchell’s Donuts or down to the local jail—just for something to do. When we were at my house, we listened to a lot of surfer music: the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the Surfaris,” Gardner told Esquire magazine in 2007. “It was fun for the first few days. Then it got to be a real bummer.” (How did McAllister and Marciano keep Gardner from dozing off during bathroom breaks? They made him talk through the closed bathroom door the entire time he did his “business.”)

  ONE DAY AT A TIME

  The first 24 hours were tiring but uneventful. The second day was a more difficult. After examining Gardner, Dr. Ross reported that the young man had difficulty focusing his eyes at times, and he struggled to recognize objects just by touch, one of the tests he took to measure his mental alertness. By the third day he was becoming moody, and struggling to repeat tongue twisters, another measure of alertness.

  On Gardner’s fourth day without sleep, his moodiness increased and he became paranoid: He was convinced that people were staring at him and talking about him. He had trouble with concentration and memory, and he began hallucinating. At one point he imagined he was pro football player Paul Lowe, who played for the San Diego Chargers. “My friends thought that was hilarious, because I weighed like 130 pounds,” Gardner said. Later, when Gardner and his friends drove past a street sign, he imagined it was a person.

  MEET THE PRESS

  By now Gardner was beginning to attract the attention of the news media. The sleep experiment took place barely a month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and perhaps because of this, it received a lot of media attention. Much of the coverage treated it as just another silly teenage fad, like swallowing goldfish or cramming people into a phone booth, but the public was hungry for light news stories, and this tale of a teenager staying up for days fit the bill perfectly.

  One person who took the story seriously was a Stanford University sleep researcher named William C. Dement. As soon as he learned the experiment was underway, he flew to San Diego to observe it. While he found Gardner to be tired (no surprise), the boy didn’t seem particularly impaired. Dr. Dement drove Gardner, McAllister, and Marciano around town in a rented convertible, took them out to eat, and played pinball with Gardner to test his skill. Dr. Dement observed that Gardner played well and beat him several times. Another skill that seemed unaffected by sleep loss was his ability to play basketball: Bruce McAllister says Gardner played as well without sleep as he did when he was well rested.

  If you drilled a hole through the center of the earth and out the other side, then jumped into…

  One thing that had changed noticeably was Gardner’s sense of smell. “Don’t make me smell that, I can’t stand the smell,” he told McAllister when presented various items during his daily sniff tests.

  STILL GOING

  On his fifth day awake, Gardner’s hallucinations increased. Once, when staring at a wall, he saw it dissolve and turn into a forest with a path running through it.

  On the sixth and seventh days, Gardner’s speech began to slur as if he were drunk, and he struggled to complete sentences or even name simple objects. The hallucinations continued.

  On the seventh and eighth days, “everything basically went in the toilet,” he told Esquire magazine. “There were no more highs, just lows and lower lows. It was like someone was taking sandpaper to my brain. My body was dragging along okay, but my mind was shot.” He struggled mightily to remember what he said from one moment to the next. Luckily for him, he was a 17-year-old and in great shape;
anytime he seemed close to nodding off, all McAllister or Marciano had to do was get him to play basketball or pinball, or walk around the neighborhood. He also took lots of showers.

  On the ninth day Gardner was battling harder than ever to stay awake. Nights were more difficult than days, because there was less to do. The hours before daybreak were worst of all.

  ON THE (PIN)BALL

  On the tenth day Gardner gave a radio interview, but had trouble focusing enough to answer the interviewer’s questions. The experience triggered more paranoid thoughts: he believed that the interviewer was trying to make him look bad.

  On the eleventh and final day, Gardner really had to struggle to remain awake. His speech was badly slurred now, he spoke in a monotone, and his face had lost all expression. His attention span was extremely short. When he was given a “serial sevens test,” where the subject counts down from 100 by subtracting 7 repeatedly (100, 93, 86, etc.), Gardner only made it five rounds to 65 before he forgot what he had been asked to do.