Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader
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The House That Crack Built, by Clark Taylor
The Night Dad Went to Jail, by Melissa Higgins
I Love You Better than Boogers: A Silly Bedtime Book, by Paullina Schiavenato
Who Cares About Disabled People?, by Pam Adams
Good Touch, Bad Touch, by Robert Kahn
The Long Journey of Mister Poop, by Angèle Delaunois
Where Willy Went: The BIG Story of a Little Sperm!, by Nicholas Allan
All My Friends Are Dead, by Avery Monsen and Jory John
Pooh Gets Stuck, by Isabel Gaines
My Monster Farts, by Kate Clary
Hair in Funny Places, by Babette Cole
Gross Gus and the Time Out Chair, by Kally Mayer
The Loneliest Ho in the World, by Travis Heaten and Gary Andrews (a Christmas tale)
Scouts in Bondage, by Geoffrey Prout
Titanic Turds of the Animal Kingdom, by Anthony Sievers
It’s You and Me Against the Pee…and the Poop, Too, by Julia Cook and Laura Jana, MD
Melanie’s Marvelous Measles, by Stephanie Messenger
I Found a Dead Bird, by Jan Thornhill
First words said on Skype (2003): “Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?” (“Hello, can you hear me?” in Estonian.)
STRANGE CRIME
Featuring an ugly sweater, poisonous cheesecake, twin peaks, and a crook who scans the obits. (Shameless plug: For more bizarre crime stories like these, check out Portable Press’s Strange Crime.)
THE ZEN BURGLAR
February 9, 2018, was a strange Friday night for Siosifa Lolohea. It’s unclear how the Utah man started the evening, but it ended with him throwing two empty vodka bottles through the doors of the Orem Public Safety Building, breaking in, and then lying down on the floor “to meditate.” Several police officers were in that very building typing up the day’s reports, so they responded quickly. “He was a little upset that we were messing up his meditation period,” said the arresting officer, “disturbing him while he was just trying to get some inner peace.” The officer also pointed out that Lolohea didn’t have to break the glass—if he had simply rung the bell, they would have been happy to let him in.
THE CHEESECAKE MURDERESS
A 42-year-old Brooklyn, New York, woman named Viktoria Nasyrova met a 35-year-old woman who happened to look a lot like her. The two women, both being from Russia, struck up a friendship. But Nasyrova had ulterior motives. In August 2016, she baked her doppelganger a cheesecake laced with a strong tranquilizer called phenazepam. After the unsuspecting woman had a few bites, she said she didn’t feel well and went to lie down. While she was unconscious, Nasyrova carefully arranged the empty bottle and remaining pills to make it look like a suicide. Then she stole her friend’s cash, jewelry, passport, and employment authorization card. Nasyrova’s scheme might have worked…except the victim didn’t die. She was found unconscious a day later and taken to the hospital, where she later told doctors the last thing she remembered was Nasyrova watching her eat the cheesecake. The attempted murderer faces up to 25 years in prison.
THE OBIT BANDIT
Bad: Losing a loved one. Worse: Having your home burglarized while you’re at the funeral. In the 2010s, several grieving families in southern Massachusetts were faced with that predicament until police finally apprehended Randy Brunelle, 35, whom the press dubbed the “Obit Bandit.” His first known funeral burglary was in 2012, when he robbed the home of a police officer who was attending his mother’s wake. Brunelle spent 18 months in prison for that crime, but soon after he was released, more people’s homes started getting ransacked while they were attending funerals. Suspecting that Brunelle was scanning the obituaries in order to find potential victims, detectives set up a sting operation. On a Saturday in February 2018, they patrolled the homes of people whose funerals were announced in the paper, and lo and behold, there was Brunelle’s Honda Civic parked outside one of the houses. Caught red-handed, the Obit Bandit is again behind bars.
NFL quarterback Tom Brady didn’t taste his first strawberry until 2018, when he was 40 years old.
THE VALLEY OF DEATH
Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley has seen a lot of odd, grisly crimes over the years. For example, in 1999 a dog ran up to a house on Southeast Reinig Road carrying a human hand that was later linked to a homicide. That’s not uncommon—because the remote, wooded area is only about 30 miles from Seattle, it’s become a notorious dumping ground for dead bodies. Then there’s the tragic account of a Snoqualmie man who murdered his wife and two stepdaughters. According to the Guardian, “He kept a third stepdaughter captive in his bedroom for hours, dragging her out occasionally so he could refill his wine glass.” (She later escaped.) It seems that every few years, another odd, grisly crime shakes Snoqualmie Valley residents, especially along Southeast Reinig Road. That happens to be the road where they filmed the opening of the cult TV show Twin Peaks, which centers around odd, grisly crimes.
THE THUMB THIEF
On January 8, 2018, a museum staffer at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia made an alarming discovery: a terra-cotta warrior was missing his left thumb! The 2,000 year-old-statue, known as “the Cavalryman,” was one of ten on loan from China, and is valued at $4.5 million (the thumb alone is worth five grand). News of the crime sparked outrage in China; the FBI took over the case. Agents reviewed several weeks’ worth of CCTV footage until they found a suspect. On the night of December 21, 2017, a man wearing an ugly sweater entered the exhibit and then left a few minutes later. Thus began the manhunt. It turned out that, on the night in question, there’d been an “ugly sweater” themed party at the museum, which didn’t help narrow it down. But FBI agents were finally able to track down 24-year-old Michael Rohana, who lived in Delaware. That night, he had left the party, broken into the exhibit, put his arm around the life-size clay soldier, taken a selfie, snapped off the warrior’s thumb, and exited the room. (The next day, he posted a pic of the thumb on Snapchat.) A month later, Rohana received a visit from the FBI, who asked if he had anything he wanted to turn over to them. He sheepishly retrieved the artifact from his desk drawer. Rohana was arrested, and the Cavalryman got his thumb back.
Over your lifetime, your mouth will make enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
THE END
No matter how we start, it all comes out in the end.
IN THE BEGINNING. What do you think is the very first human body part to form at conception? The brain? The heart? The spinal column? Nope—it’s farther down. The moment the father’s sperm pierces the mother’s egg, a single cell forms, containing all the genetic information needed to make a baby. That cell quickly divides, and keeps dividing until it forms a hollow ball of cells called a blastula, which is so small that it can fit on the head of a pin. The blastula then folds in on itself and forms an opening called a blastopore. This tiny opening becomes the baby’s first body part: the anus. Then the embryonic butthole turns itself inside out to form the second organ—the mouth, which explains why human beings belong to the subclassification of animals known as deuterostomes, or “second mouth.”
BOTTOMS UP. It used to be the custom for royal women to give birth in front of witnesses. Reason: they needed to guarantee that the true royal offspring hadn’t been switched with an impostor. In December 1778, more than 200 people of the court gathered at Versailles to await the delivery of Marie Antoinette’s baby. After eight hours of labor, the queen’s doctor announced, “The queen is about to give birth!” A stampede of courtiers quickly entered the royal bedchamber, shimmying up the curtains, jumping on the couch, and climbing onto the windowsills to get a good view of the queen’s royal rear. The mob pressed so closely they nearly suffocated the queen. And as little Princess Marie Theresa made her first appearance in court, the queen passed out. The experience was so traumatic that King Louis XVI banned all future public viewings of royal births, limiting witnesses to a dozen or so close family members.
END RUN. Soon after Germany occupied Norw
ay during World War II, the Nazis announced they were confiscating all of the sardines from the Norwegians’ factories to feed their troops in the field and on U-boats. The Norwegians got angry…and the Norwegian resistance got even. They sent a message to their British contacts asking them to send a laxative that could be added to vegetable oil without detection. The Brits sent as much as they could get their hands on. The Norwegians then sneaked into sardine-canning factories at night and filled the sardine cans with croton oil, which is a very powerful laxative. When the Nazis shipped the tins of sardines to the U-boat bases across the continent, the sailors were in for a big surprise. Painful diarrhea can be horrible for anyone, but imagine being packed into a tiny submarine where every single member of the crew is suffering from “Norway’s Revenge.”
If bees were paid the minimum wage, a jar of honey would cost $182,000.
VIDEO GAME LAWSUITS
What’s more exciting than a video game? The legal battles that ensue when video game companies sue each other.
THE PLAINTIFF
Rock band No Doubt
THE DEFENDANT
Activision
THE LAWSUIT
Before she was a pop star and a judge on The Voice, Gwen Stefani was the lead singer of the successful band No Doubt, with hits like “Just a Girl,” “Don’t Speak,” and “Ex-Girlfriend.” The band’s music was a logical choice to include in Band Hero, Activision’s 2009 entry in its best-selling Guitar Hero interactive video game franchise. The members of No Doubt licensed their music and their likenesses to Activision, but claimed they were unaware that the video game characters could be used to play non–No Doubt songs. For example, a player could use a “Gwen Stefani” avatar to sing and play a Taylor Swift song, or one by the cheesy 1980s hair metal band Poison. The day after Band Hero was released, No Doubt sued Activision for using their images in what the filing called “a virtual karaoke circus act.”
THE VERDICT
The case never made it to court. After their lawyers negotiated for three years, the band and the video game company reached a (sealed) settlement that didn’t require the game to be pulled from store shelves.
THE PLAINTIFF
Magnavox
THE DEFENDANT
Atari
THE LAWSUIT
Pong (1972) was the first famous video game, but it wasn’t the first electronic game played on a TV screen with a joystick. Nor was it the first video game in which play was a simplified presentation of table tennis—two lines representing paddles, and a white dot for a ball. Magnavox gave public demonstrations of a table tennis game for its home video game system Odyssey, at department stores in early 1972. Nolan Bushnell had just started a software company called Atari. (He and engineer Allan Alcorn had been contracted by a casino chain to develop a driving simulator.) After he played Magnavox’s table tennis game at a demo in a Burlingame, California, department store, Bushnell asked Alcorn to develop a coin-operated electronic table tennis game as a test of his programming abilities. But Alcorn did such a good job, Bushnell released it commercially. When Pong became a sensation, Ralph Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, sued Atari, alleging that the company had stolen his creation.
Deadliest Disney character: Mulan. She killed about 2,000 people in the 1998 movie Mulan.
THE VERDICT
Bushnell’s attorney advised him to take the case to trial, but Atari settled out of court in 1976 because Bushnell estimated that his legal costs were going to be more than all the money Atari had on hand at the time. As part of the settlement, Atari continued to produce Pong for arcades and home video game consoles, but Magnavox received licensing fees and a royalty for every game sold.
THE PLAINTIFF
Former college athletes Sam Keller and Ed O’Bannon
THE DEFENDANT
Electronic Arts and the Collegiate Licensing Company
THE LAWSUIT
Despite massive TV and merchandising deals that generate billions of dollars for companies and universities, the athletes who actually play college football, basketball, and other sports don’t get paid a cent (other than scholarships)—they’re amateurs. In 2009 former college basketball player Ed O’Bannon and former college football player Sam Keller sued EA, maker of the popular NCAA Basketball and NCAA Football video game franchises, and Collegiate Licensing, the firm that sets up all those college sports deals.
REASON
They didn’t believe that their amateur athlete status applied to exploitation of their images that made other people rich. On behalf of all former athletes, they wanted royalties for allowing their likenesses to be used in those successful games.
THE VERDICT
After a long legal battle, Keller and O’Bannon settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. However, their lawsuit changed the way the video game industry operated and how the business of college sports work. After the suit was settled in 2013, EA permanently discontinued all NCAA-branded games. Not only that, but the company started writing checks. In early 2016, athletes whose faces were used in certain EA Sports collegiate titles started getting checks in the mail in the range of $1,200–$7,200.
First U.S. territory to grant women the vote: Wyoming, in 1869. First U.S. state to elect a female governor: Wyoming (Nellie Tayloe Ross, in 1924).
THE PLAINTIFF
Atari
THE DEFENDANT
Philips
THE LAWSUIT
Developed in Japan by Namco and released to the rest of the world by Bally/Midway, Pac-Man was a global sensation in the early 1980s. Within 18 months of its release, the game about a yellow pie that eats white dots and avoids ghosts earned $1 billion in revenues. And that’s just at arcades—in 1981 Namco and Bally/Midway were in the process of adapting or “porting” Pac-Man to home video game consoles, particularly the Atari 2600. But before Pac-Man could hit homes, Philips Electronics came out with a game called K.C. Munchkin for its Odyssey 2 console. It wasn’t an exact clone of Pac-Man, but it looked like developers tried to make it just different enough from Pac-Man to avoid a lawsuit—the maze walls move around the screen, and the villains are monsters, not ghosts. But it was also a game about a circle that ate dots. Atari, which owned the home gaming rights to Pac-Man, sued Philips for copyright infringement.
THE VERDICT
Atari lost its initial case—it wanted an injunction to stop the sale of K.C. Munchkin—but the company appealed, and in 1982 an appellate court ruled that Philips had ripped off Pac-Man. Later that year, Atari released its home version of Pac-Man…and sold seven million copies.
…AND NOW A FEW WORDS ABOUT PIE
“Pie makes everybody happy.”
—Laurie Halse Anderson
“Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.”
—Jane Austen
“Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
—David Mamet
“Pie fills the cracks of the heart.”
—Kevin James (as Paul Blart, Mall Cop)
“Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken.”
—Jonathan Swift
Black Sabbath, one of the first heavy metal bands, was from Birmingham, England, a city known for…
STALL OF FAME:
THE “SHADY LADY”
Tombstone, Arizona, is famous for the 1881 “gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” where Wyatt Earp and his brothers shot it out with the Ike Clanton gang. But it’s another town resident that has made it into the Stall of Fame.
TRANSPLANTS
In 1885 two Scottish newlyweds named Henry and Mary Gee arrived in the burgeoning town of Tombstone, Arizona, where Henry found work as an engineer with the Vizina Mining Company. The company ran a boardinghouse, and the Gees stayed there until they finished building their own house in town.
While they were living in the boardinghouse, Mary Gee struck up a friendship with Amelia Adamson, the woman who ran it. The two women remained friends even after the Gees moved into their new hom
e. And when a box from Mary’s family arrived all the way from Scotland, filled with seeds, bulbs, and cuttings collected from the family garden, Mary gave one of the cuttings from a white Lady Banksia rosebush to Adamson. She planted it behind the boardinghouse.
DOWN UNDER
The climate of the Arizona desert has little in common with that of Scotland, which is as far north as Juneau, Alaska, and surrounded by the sea on three sides. It’s not clear how many of the seeds and bulbs that Mary Gee planted in her garden survived. But the Banksia rosebush that Adamson planted in the sandy soil behind the boardinghouse thrived. That it survived at all is not due to what was in the soil, but rather what was under it. And what was under it had a lot to do with Tombstone’s history as a mining boomtown.
When the town was founded in 1879, following what turned out to be the richest silver strike in the history of the Arizona Territory, only about 100 people lived in Tombstone, mostly in tents and shacks built around the opening of the Tough Nut Mine. But word of the discovery spread, and over the next several years Tombstone’s population exploded to nearly 15,000 people. By the time the Gees arrived in 1885, the town was home to more than a hundred saloons and casinos, three newspapers, four churches, an opera house, a bowling alley, and French, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese restaurants. About the only thing it lacked was a sewer system. Not that it really needed one: the warren of mine shafts that had been dug beneath the town proved to be more than adequate to the task of “disposing” of Tombstone’s sewage, so the townspeople never bothered to install a better system.
…its metal fabrication factories. (Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers working in a sheet metal factory.)