Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Read online

  IN HIS FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

  Thomas Park was only a boy when his father, Mungo Park, disappeared. Young Thomas refused to accept that his father was dead, believing instead that he must have been taken prisoner. In 1827 he led a rescue expedition from the coast of Guinea. He had traveled only a few days inland when he came down with a fever and died. As for Mungo Park, no trace of him—clothing, personal effects, skeletal remains—was ever found.

  COCONUCTOPUS

  A strange defense mechanism of the octopus is to wrap six of its legs around its body so it resembles a coconut. Then it uses its other two legs to slowly walk backward, out of danger.

  More than 50% of the world’s population owns a mobile phone.

  GOVERN-MENTAL

  Politicians do the strangest things.

  SENDING A MESSAGE—GODFATHER STYLE

  Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was trying to convince lawmakers in 2010 to vote for his proposed natural gas extraction tax. When Rep. Tim Solobay, a fellow Democrat, said he was against the tax, Rendell purchased a Tim Solobay bobble-head doll, removed the head, placed it inside a small box along with a note that urged Solobay’s support, and sent it to the Representative’s office. Solobay got the message—and the joke—and promised to reconsider his position. He also said the gesture was a “big hit” among Democrats. Pennsylvania Republicans, however, were less amused. A spokesman for House Minority Leader Rep. Sam Smith said, “Personally I don’t see the humor in sending any sort of head to anyone. I think it is kind of sickening.”

  BUT NOT A DROP TO DRINK

  In 2003 officials in Hudson, New York, were ordered by the Americans with Disabilities Act to install handicapped-accessible water fountains in the county courthouse. Five years later, they finally got around to installing just one of the fountains…the one on the second floor. And there’s no elevator in the building. County Public Works Commissioner David Robinson defended the inaccessible handicap-accessible water fountain, saying it’s easier for people who have trouble bending (which makes no sense—the new water fountain is actually several inches shorter than the one on the first floor). Robinson pledged that there are “definite plans in the future” to install one of the new fountains on the ground floor.

  EXOPOLITICS

  In 2010 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the governor of the Russian region of Kalmykia, recounted this story on a Russian TV show: One day in 1997, he was reading a book at his Moscow apartment when a transparent tube appeared on his balcony. “Then I felt that someone was calling me.” The next thing he knew, Ilyumzhinov was taking a tour of an alien spaceship. The aliens spoke to him telepathically, he said, and they passed along a warning: “The day will come when they land on our planet and say: ‘You have behaved poorly. Why do you wage wars? Why do you destroy each other?’ Then they will pack us all into their spaceships and take us away from this place.” Most people just chalked the story up as an amusing antic by the eccentric millionaire businessman. However, Andrei Lebedev, a member of Russia’s parliament, didn’t think it was a joke. He immediately requested that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev interrogate the governor to ensure that he didn’t give the aliens any state secrets. (Results of the interrogation are unknown.)

  50 light years from Earth, there is a 2,600-mile-long asteroid made of diamond.

  TEXAS BANS MARRIAGE

  In 2005 Texas lawmakers passed a Constitutional amendment intended to outlaw gay marriage. In 2009 Texas Attorney General Barbara Ann Radnofsky pointed out a huge flaw in a 22-word phrase in Subsection B of the amendment, which reads: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.” Basically, said Radnofsky, one thing that’s identical to marriage is marriage itself, so in effect, no two people of any gender are legally allowed to be married in Texas. “You don’t have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says,” she said. Currently, there are no plans to correct the phrasing, but it does call into question whether any marriages that took place in Texas since 2005 are legal.

  NICE LEGS…NOT!

  Colin Hall, Lord Mayor of Leicester, England, was on a diet. He also wasn’t wearing a belt. Those two factors made for an embarrassing predicament one morning in June 2010 when Hall was speaking to dozens of schoolchildren at a local library. After he was done thanking them, he stood up from his chair. His pants, however, did not. They fell down to his ankles, leaving his underpants exposed to the kids, who all laughed. After being ridiculed in the press, the portly mayor apologized, but also said that it was a great way to publicize his new diet. As a show of support, Labour MP Keith Vaz presented Lord Mayor Hall with a brand-new belt.

  Odds that you will drown in a bathtub: 1 in 11,469. (In a shower: almost zero.)

  NASCAR-TASTROPHIES

  The Allison family has been burning rubber on the NASCAR circuit since 1965—and were involved in three of the most infamous scrape-ups in the sport’s checkered past.

  RACE TO THE FINISH LINE

  The first complete NASCAR race ever shown live on television was the 1979 Daytona 500, the circuit’s biggest annual event. Millions watched at home as star drivers Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough headed into the final lap, neck and neck in an extremely close race. The winner, whoever it turned out to be, would probably win by a nose—if that. The lead changed between Yarborough and Allison so slightly and so often that it was just a matter of who happened to be in front when they got to the finish line. The winner? Neither. Yarborough and Allison drove so close to each other that just before the final curve, as they gunned their engines for a final push, both drivers lost control of their cars, collided, and careened into the infield. A third driver, Bobby Allison—out of contention for the win, and also Donnie Allison’s brother—saw the wreckage ahead and pulled over to see if his brother was okay. (He was.) Blame it on the stress of the race or blame it on the spirit of competition, but within minutes, all three drivers were out of their cars and screaming at each other on the open raceway. Then tensions really boiled over and the screaming escalated into a two-against-one, Allisons vs. Yarborough fistfight. And as those three punched and shoved each other, another driver, Richard Petty, zoomed past the melee…and cruised across the finish line to win the race.

  SEARCH AND DESTROY

  Curtis “Pops” Turner was racing in the 1966 Myers Brothers Memorial, his first major event since returning to NASCAR after the league lifted a lifetime ban on him for starting a drivers’ union. Turner began in fourth place, just behind Bobby Allison. On the seventh lap, Turner attempted to tightly pass Allison, but instead crashed into him and spun him out. Allison dropped a lap behind Turner. But about 100 laps later, Allison finally caught up to him and was ready for vengeance. Allison smashed into Turner’s bumper, then drove up alongside and bumped him again, which caused Turner to spin out. Turner then made a quick pit stop and returned to on the track, but took it slow until Allison came back around, planning to ambush him. It didn’t work—Allison knew what was coming and smashed into Turner first, pinning him against a wall. Then Turner rammed Allison, and Allison rammed Turner. And so it went…for 10 full laps in what amounted to a demolition derby. It only ended when the smashed cars, dropping parts and debris onto the track in their wake, were so damaged that their engines finally sputtered out.

  If your cat is short-haired, its ancestors came from Egypt. Long-haired: from India.

  LAUNCH TIME

  In the 1987 Winston 500, held at the Talladega racetrack in Alabama, Bobby Allison managed to get his car up to more than 200 mph, a difficult task even for world-class, high-tech racecars. Bad move. One of Allison’s tires burst and ripped apart. The car (a Buick LeSabre) spun backward and then launched into the air. It flew about 20 feet and landed on top of the fence that separated the track from the fans. And it didn’t stop there: Allison’s car kept going, tearing through the protective netting as it went, for more than 150 yards. Amazingly, the car never veer
ed into the stands, and Allison was unhurt. Flying debris, however, did hit one woman who lost her eye as a result.

  Postscript: After that nearly catastrophic wreck, NASCAR decided that its racecars were too fast. The league then required all cars racing at superspeedways Talladega and Daytona (the fastest and most dangerous tracks) to be fitted with restrictor plates, which reduce the flow of air and fuel into the carburetor, making it difficult for a car to go over 200 mph…or fly.

  DADDY I$$UES

  Famous investor Warren Buffett’s largest-ever purchase was a $26 billion acquisition of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad in 2010. Why’d he buy it? “Because my father didn’t buy me a train set as a kid,” said Buffett.

  Water on the brain? 25% of the bottled water purchased in America is just filtered tap water.

  WHAT IT COST IN 1980

  In 1980 we were coming out of a gas crisis and a recession…just like today.

  • A Commodore VIC-20 computer cost $299.95. It boasted a maximum of 5 KB of memory and didn’t include a monitor.

  • Ticket for a Los Angeles Dodgers game featuring Mexican rookie pitching sensation (and future MVP) Fernando Valenzuela: $4.50.

  • Cost of one of the year’s most popular novels, Stephen King’s Firestarter: $13.95

  • A 1980 Chrysler Cordoba, memorably advertised by Ricardo Montalban as being upholstered in “rich Corinthian leather,” cost $6,745.

  • The price of a pack of cigarettes (people still smoked in 1980): about $1.00.

  • A ticket to see The Empire Strikes Back cost $2.75.

  • A gallon of leaded gasoline, which is now banned but was still available then, cost about $1.20.

  • In 1980 a new house cost, on average, just under $69,000. Barbie’s Dream House cost around $100.

  • This year, McDonald’s expanded its menu with the first fast food chicken sandwich, the McChicken (deep fried boneless patty on a bun). Price: 80 cents.

  • The Sears Catalog offered a UHF- and VHF-enabled 19-inch “big-screen” color TV with a hot feature—a wood-paneled remote control with four buttons—for just $485.

  • Irene Cara’s title song from the movie Fame won an Oscar for Best Original Song. The soundtrack LP cost about $6.

  • New in the candy aisle: Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum invented by a former minor-league pitcher as a chewing-tobacco substitute. A package cost 25 cents.

  • A state-of-the-art VHS machine—on which you could watch pre-recorded movies at home!—cost $699. Renting one of the few dozen titles Hollywood had released cost about $8 at one of the many new “video stores” around the country, some of which required membership fees or deposits of up to $50.

  1 in 10 golfers say they prefer golf to sex.

  A VIRUS WITH SHOES

  If you take a dim view of humanity, you’re not alone…

  “All men are intrinsical rascals, and I am only sorry that not being a dog I can’t bite them.”

  —Lord Byron

  “It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”

  —Charles Bukowski

  “To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn.”

  —Marcel Jouhandeau

  “I talk to myself because I like dealing with a better class of people.”

  —Jackie Mason

  “If the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “The human race is a virus with shoes.”

  —Bill Hicks

  “What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

  —Andre Malraux

  “It is no exaggeration to say that we misanthropes are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial.”

  —Florence King

  “The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  “I wish I loved the human race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I’m introduced to one, I wish I thought ‘What jolly fun!’”

  —Sir Walter Raleigh

  “No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.”

  —A. A. Milne

  “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”

  —James Boswell

  “We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.”

  —Thomas Fuller

  Meteor strikes that kill 100 or more people occur only once every 100,000 years.

  185 USES FOR A PIG

  Turns out that there’s a lot more to a pig than just meat. The reality is that almost every part of a livestock animal is put to commercial use—from the hair and the hide to the internal organs and the bones. Don’t be grossed out: This kind of recycling has been going on as long as humans have been domesticating animals. (Only now it’s a little more industrialized.)

  BACKGROUND

  In 2004 Dutch artist and author Christien Meindertsma began researching the fate of a single pig that was slaughtered on a commercial pig farm. She spent the next three years tracking down where every piece of that animal went and how it was used. It eventually went into 185 different products, which Meindertsma details in her book, Pig 05049. Here are just a few of the surprising places you might find a bit of a pig.

  BEER: One of the most widely used products from pigs (and other animals) is gelatin—a clear, flavorless substance made from hooves, bones, and connective tissues. In beermaking, a dry, powdered form of gelatin is mixed in near the end of the process. There it binds with and helps remove tannins—bitter substances found in the hulls of grains used to make beer. It does the same with agents that can make beer cloudy, such as yeast and proteins from malt.

  SHAMPOO: You know how some shampoos have a very shiny, pearly look? That’s often the result of adding fatty acids from pig bones. (It’s also used for this purpose in paint products.)

  FABRIC SOFTENER: Not only are pig by-products used in commercial fabric softeners, they’re actually one of the main ingredients. Static cling is caused when fabric fibers become negatively charged. Processed pig fats are positively charged, and therefore cling to fabric surfaces—effectively coating them in pig fat, making them feel soft and slippery, so your hand or your iron glides over the fabric easily. The process also makes it less prone to wrinkling.

  BRUSHES: Pig bristles are a huge business all over the world, especially in China. They’re used to make brushes of every kind imaginable, including hairbrushes, coat brushes, and paintbrushes. The bristles are gathered using special machines during the slaughtering process.

  John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was almost called Something That Happened.

  BREAD: L-cysteine is a naturally occurring amino acid (or protein) found in meat and dairy products. It is beneficial to the human body in several ways, especially in keeping our stomach linings healthy. Bread manufacturers use it because it reacts with wheat proteins in such a way that results in softer dough. Sometimes L-cysteine is made synthetically, but it’s still most often made from pigs’ bristles.

  HEPARIN: This widely used anticoagulant drug (it stops blood clots from forming) is derived from the mucus lining of pigs’ small intestines.

  CORK: Corks for wine bottles are traditionally made out of whole pieces from cork trees. But the manufacturing process generates a lot of cork waste. Rather than let all that waste go to waste, it’s reprocessed and reformed into new corks using a binding agent, such as gelatin from pig bone. (Because wine is often clarified with gelatin just as beer is, there can actually be bits of pig in a wine bottle’s cork—and in the wine itself.)

  CHEMICAL WEAPONS LABS: Because of its similarity to human tissue, pig flesh—usually the ears—is commonly used to test the physiological effects of chemical weapons.

  MATCHES: “Bone glue” is a typ
e of adhesive made from proteins found in pig bones. One of its many industrial uses is in matches: The strikable heads of friction matches are a combination of flammable chemicals (like phosphorus)—held together with bone glue.

  CIGARETTES: Meindertsma found that processed pig blood—yes, pig blood—is used in the manufacture of cigarette filters. In 2010 Dutch researchers confirmed this, saying, “The pig’s hemoglobin was found to be a fairly effective filter for cigarettes, but this information was not on cigarette labels because the tobacco industry was not required by law to disclose the ingredients of their products.” The news caused outrage, particularly among Muslim and Jewish smokers, who are proscribed from using pig products in any form.

  Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gained nearly a pound per day while eating his McDonald’s-only diet for the movie Super Size Me.

  TRAIN BRAKES: Like those of other livestock animals, such as cattle and sheep, pigs’ bones are useful, too, often in the form of bone ash: The bones are incinerated and processed to form a very fine powder of uniformly sized particles. Bone ash can be added to a vast number of products, including fine china, artists’ paints, polishing compounds, and fertilizers. Meindertsma even tracked Pig 05049’s bone ash to a factory in Germany that makes parts for train brakes.