Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Read online

Greetings From Oz

  Childhood Wisdom

  MOUTHING OFF

  Short

  Ol’ Blood ’n’ Guts

  Give ’em Hell, Harry

  Malcolm X Speaks

  Wise Guy

  Free Advice

  More Free Advice

  Wilde About Oscar

  Oh, Kate!

  According to Shaw

  Miss Piggy

  Sandburgisms

  By George!

  By George, Too

  Shakespeare Sayeth

  Dorothy Parker Sez

  Oh No, It’s Mr Bill

  Here’s Johnny

  Hellman’s Laws

  A Wild and Crazy Guy

  Zap!

  Bombeckisms

  Robin’s Raving

  Rosanne Sez

  Sheer Shandling

  Dear Abby

  No Respect

  Thurberisms

  Dave’s World

  Here’s Jay

  Twain’s Thoughts

  Long

  Meet the Beatles

  ASK THE EXPERTS

  Q & A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  Q& A: Ask the Experts

  HISTORICAL TIDBITS

  Short

  It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

  Food Fight!

  Medium

  What Really Happened in 1000 AD (Part I)?

  What Really Happened in 1000 AD (Part II)?

  Pirate Lore

  Missed It by That Much

  Monumental Mistakes

  Long

  The Truth About Pearl Harbor

  SUSPICIOUS DEATHS

  Medium

  The Death of Jim Morrison

  The Death of Warren G. Harding

  Long

  Elvis Lives

  The Search for Amelia Earhart

  The Curse of King Tut

  The Death of Vicki Morgan

  AMUSEMENTS

  Short

  April Fools!

  Medium

  Secrets of Disneyland

  On a Carousel

  It’s in the Cards

  The Secrets of a Harlequin Romance

  DIRTY TRICKS

  Short

  Dirty Tricks

  Medium

  Carnival Tricks

  More Carnival Tricks

  Long

  On the Line

  BEHIND THE HITS

  Short

  Familiar Melodies

  Medium

  Real-Life Songs

  The “Wild Thing” Story

  One-Hit Wonders

  The Singing Chipmunks

  Translated Hits

  TV OR NOT TV?

  Short

  TV Theme Song Trivia

  Medium

  Inside “Cheers”

  Inside “Jeopardy!”

  A Family Affair

  “The Adventures of Superman”

  “The Honeymooners”

  Opening Lines

  “And Now for Something Completely Different”

  Long

  “The Avengers”

  Welcome to “The Outer Limits”

  Dumb TV: The Flying Nun Quiz

  FILM

  Short

  Box-Office Bloopers

  The Duke

  Box-Office Bloopers II

  Coolest Movie Lines Ever

  First Films

  Sound Effects

  Medium

  Inside Citizen Kane

  The Godzilla Quiz

  I Was a Teenage Monster Movie

  Disaster Films

  Disaster Films II

  Accidentally X-Rated

  The Dumbest Western Ever Made

  Uncle John’s Golden Turkeys

  Long

  Star Wars

  POLITICS

  Short

  That Was No Lady

  Presidential Trivia

  Democracy in Action

  Medium

  The TV Speech That Made a President (Reagan)

  Senate Fights

  The TV Speech That Made a President (JFK)

  Meet Your Commie Masters

  J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Menace

  Other Presidential Firsts

  First Ladies of Politics

  Presidential Quiz

  Joe McCarthy’s Joke

  Politically Correct Nightmares

  Long

  The TV Speech That Made a President (Nixon)

  JFK’s Presidential Affairs

  FOREIGN LANGUAGE

  Short

  Bow-wow or Wang-wang?

  Let Me Write Sign, I Speak English

  Medium

  It Loses Something in Translation

  It Loses Something in Translation

  ANIMAL LORE

  Short

  Feline Facts

  The Truth About Lemmings

  A Breed Apart

  Medium

  The Birds and the Bees

  Long

  A Natural History of the Unicorn

  ON LOCATION

  Medium

  Hooray for Hollywood

  The Story of Wall Street

  The Story of Las Vegas

  TIPS FOR TEENS

  Medium

  Tips for Teens

  Tips for Teens

  Tips for Teens

  THEY WENT THAT-A-WAY

  Short

  The Last Laugh: Epitaphs

  Last Wishes

  More Epitaphs

  Medium

  They Went That-a-Way

  ANSWERS

  What Does It Say?

  The Godzilla Quiz

  Aunt Lenna’s Puzzles

  Acronymania

  Test Your “Beverly Hillbillies” IQ

  Presidential Quiz

  The Numbers Game

  Monumental Mistakes

  RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE MILLENNIUM...

  Patriotic Effort

  “America must do more than the minimum on the millennium...I believe it should be celebrated with all the grandiosity, excess and overkill that we can muster. Our national pride is at stake. There is much planning to do. Why, just the logistics of recruiting and training enough Elvis impersonators boggles the mind.”

  —Lewis Grossberger,

  New York Times, Aug. 14, 1989

  In 2000...

  “Authors of self-help books will be required to provide proof that they have actually helped themselves.”

  —Jane Wagner,

  Ms. magazine, 1990

  Big Whoop

  “A lot of Chinese feel rather patronizing toward the millennium. The idea of a calendar with only 2000 years is rather charming.”

  —Charlie Chin,

  New York Chinatown History Project

  Uncle John’s

  FIFTH

  BATHROOM

  READER

  First published October 1992

  UNCLE JOHN’S NOTES:

  This was the first book we ever published.

  Reading it over now, I like the ideas and information but think the writing is still a little rough. This book clearly needed more editing—but frankly, we didn’t know how to do it back then.

  Still, you can see the BRI style developing. Compare the section called “Order in the Court,” for example, with the “Court Transquips” in our current work. It’s clearly on it’s way to becoming a viable format.

  We were also just starting to figure out that the length of the articles in a BR should vary. There are a few longer-than-average pieces (e.g., “The TV Speech that Made a President”) here—but not enough. A number of articles would have been much better longer. For example: compare the section on Citizen Kane in this book (2 pages) with the one in Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader (6 pages). It’s night and day.
But, then, we had to start somewhere.

  Some of our favorites in this volume:

  • Carnival Tricks

  • The Myth-Adventures of Christopher Columbus

  • Meet Dr. Seuss

  FELINE FACTS

  Cats are America’s most popular pet. Here are six things you may not know about them.

  THE INSIDE POOP

  Nearly all domestic cats bury their feces—but in the wild, only timid cats do. Aggressive cats in the wild actually leave their droppings on tiny “advertising hills” that they create. This leads researchers to believe that domestic cats see themselves as submissive members of their human families and environments.

  FAMILY FLAVOR

  Does your cat lick its fur clean after it rubs against you? That’s its way of “tasting” you—becoming familiar with the taste and scent of the people in its life.

  CAT & MOUSE

  Why do cats play “cat and mouse” with their victims? Experts believe it’s because they’re not hungry. Wild cats, who eat nothing but the food they catch, rarely, if ever, play cat and mouse.

  PURR-FECT

  Do cats purr because they are happy? Probably not, researchers say; even dying cats and cats in pain purr. The researchers think a cat’s purr is a sign it is receptive to “social interaction.”

  THE BETTER TO SEE YOU WITH

  Unlike human eyes, a cat’s eyes have pupils that are shaped like vertical slits. These vertical slits work together with the horizontal slits of the cat’s eyelid to give it greater control over how much light it allows into its eyes.

  WHISKED AWAY

  Because a cat’s whiskers are sensitive to the slight air currents that form around solid objects (such as furniture and trees), they help it to “see” in the dark. This is especially helpful when the cat hunts at night.

  Elvis Presley’s favorite amusement park ride was the bumper cars.

  WHERE-ING CLOTHES

  Ever wonder how fabric designs and clothing styles get their names? Some are named after the places they were created or worn. Far example...

  CALICO. In the early 1700s, a fabric from India became so popular with the British public that they stopped buying English cloth and English weavers began losing their jobs. The weavers rioted. (In fact, they started attacking people wearing the cloth.) The result: Parliament banned imports of the fabric, and English weavers began making it themselves. They named it after the place it was originally made, the Indian town of Calicut. Eventually, Calicut cloth evolved into calico cloth.

  PAISLEY. These amoebalike patterns were originally found on shawls imported into England from India in the 1800s. Scottish weavers in the town of Paisley began producing their own versions of the design.

  BIKINI. Daring two-piece swimsuits were introduced at end-of-the-world parties inspired by America’s 1946 A-bomb tests on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

  BERMUDA SHORTS. Bermuda, an island in the Atlantic, was a popular warm-weather tourist resort in the 1940s. But female vacationers had to use caution when they relaxed—a law on the island prohibited them from walking around with bare legs. The fashion solution: knee-length shorts, worn with kneesocks.

  CAPRI PANTS. Fashion designer Emilio Pucci met a beautiful woman while vacationing on the Isle of Capri in the 1950s. The encounter inspired a line of beach fashions that featured these skintight pants.

  JODHPURS. These riding pants were created by English horsemen living in Jodhpur, India.

  Batter up: An estimated 41 million Americans play softball in their free time.

  FAMOUS

  FOR 15 MINUTES

  We’ve included this feature—based on Andy Warhol’s comment that “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”—in almost every Bathroom Reader. Here it is again, with new stars.

  THE STAR: Oliver Sipple, an ex-marine living in San Francisco

  THE HEADLINE: “Man Saves President Ford’s Life by Deflecting Assassin’s Gun”

  WHAT HAPPENED: President Gerald R. Ford was visiting San Francisco on September 22, 1975. As he crossed the street, a woman in the crowd, Sara Jane Moore, pulled out a gun and tried to shoot him. Fortunately, a bystander spotted Moore and managed to tackle her just as the gun went off. The bullet missed the president by only a few feet.

  Oliver Sipple, the bystander, was an instant hero—which was about the last thing he wanted. Reporters investigating his private life discovered that he was gay—a fact he’d hidden from his family in Detroit. Sipple pleaded with journalists not to write about his sexual orientation, but they ignored him. The next day, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story headlined “Hero in Ford Shooting Active Among S.E Gays.”

  THE AFTERMATH: The incident ruined Sipple’s life. When his mother learned that he was gay, she stopped speaking to him. And when she died in 1979, Sipple’s father would not let him attend the funeral. Sipple became an alcoholic. In 1989, he was found dead of “natural causes” in his apartment. He was 47.

  THE STAR: Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese army lieutenant during World War II

  THE HEADLINE: “Japanese Soldier Finally Surrenders...29 Years After the War”

  WHAT HAPPENED: In February 1945, Allied forces overran Lubang Island in the Philippines. Most of the occupying Japanese soldiers were captured, but a few escaped into the hills. There they waited to be “liberated,” unaware that Japan had surrendered. They survived by living off the forest and raiding native villages for food. Villagers called them “the mountain devils.”

  Q: What cable TV channel is available to the most American viewers? A: C-SPAN.

  The U.S. and Japanese governments knew there were holdouts on the island, and for more than 25 years they tried to reach them by dropping leaflets, organizing search parties, and bringing relatives to coax them out of hiding. But nothing worked.

  By 1974, there was only one soldier left: 53-year-old Hiroo Onoda. One day, he spotted a young Japanese man drinking from a stream in the hills. The stranger turned out to be Norio Suzuki, a university dropout who’d come to the island specifically to find Onoda. Suzuki explained that the war had been over for 27 years and asked Onoda to return with him to Japan. But Onoda refused—unless his commanding officer came to the island and delivered the order personally. Suzuki returned to Japan, found the commanding officer, and brought him back to Lubang Island, where Onoda finally agreed.

  THE AFTERMATH: Onoda was regarded as a curiosity in the world press, but in Japan he was a national hero. More than 4,000 people greeted him at the airport when he returned to Japan. He sold his memoirs for enough money to buy a 2,870-acre farm in Brazil, stocked with 1,700 head of cattle.

  THE STAR: Roy Riegels, captain of the football team at the University at California, Berkeley during the 1929 season

  THE HEADLINE: “Blooper of the Century: Cal Captain Runs Wrong Way, Gives Away Rose Bowl Game”

  WHAT HAPPENED: It was the 1929 Rose Bowl game: U.C. Berkeley was playing Georgia Tech, and the score was 0-0 in the second quarter. Cal had the ball deep in Georgia Tech territory, but in four attempts, they failed to score. Now Tech took over the ball...but on first down, the Georgia quarterback fumbled. In the confusion, Roy Riegels recovered the ball and started running for a touchdown. The only problem was, he was running the wrong way.

  Benny Lom, Cal’s center, realized what was happening and chased Riegels, shouting and screaming. But Riegels outran him, carrying the ball 69½ yards down the field. Lom finally tackled him—six inches from the California goal line.

  Heavy fact: Pound for pound, earthworms make up half of all animal life.

  THE AFTERMATH: On the next play, Tech nailed Cal for a safety, making the score Georgia 2, California 0. They added a touchdown in the third quarter, but failed to make the extra point. Now the score was Georgia 8, California 0. In the fourth quarter, California scored a touchdown and made the extra point—but that was it. Final score: Georgia Tech 8, California 7. Riegels’s blunder had cost Cal the game. The next day, Riegels was the mo
st celebrated sports figure in the country. In fact, he’s still known as “Wrong Way” Riegels.

  THE STAR: William Figueroa, a 12-year-old student

  THE HEADLINE: “New Jersey Student Makes Vice President Look Like a Foole”

  WHAT HAPPENED: In June 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle visited a Trenton, New Jersey, elementary school where a spelling bee was being held. Quayle took over. Reading from a cue card, Quayle asked Figueroa, a sixth-grader, to spell the word “potato.” The boy spelled the word correctly, but Quayle insisted that he change it, because “potato” was spelled with an ‘e’ at the end. “I knew he was wrong,” Figueroa later told reporters, “but since he’s the vice president, I went and put the ‘e’ on and he said, ‘That’s right, now go and sit down.’ Afterward, I went to a dictionary and there was potato like I spelled it. I showed the reporters the book and they were all laughing about what a fool he was.”

  THE AFTERMATH: Figueroa became an instant celebrity. “Late Night with David Letterman” had him on as a guest, and he was asked to lead the pledge of allegiance at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Afterwards, an AM radio station paid him $50 a day to provide political commentary on the Republican National Convention. He was also hired as spokesperson for a company that makes a computer spelling program.

  TV QUIZ: THE ADDAMS FAMILY

  1. What language drove Gomez crazy?

  2. What did Gomez called Morticia?

  3. How did Uncle Fester produce electric light?

  4. What kind of creature was Wednesday’s pet, Homer?

  5. How was Itt, the four-foot ball of hair, related to Gomez?

  Answers: 1. French; 2. Tish; 3. He put a bulb in his mouth; 4. Black widow spider; 5. Cousin.

  FAMOUS PHRASES

  Here’s another of our regular Bathroom Reader features—the origins of familiar phrases.

  NOT UP TO SCRATCH

  Meaning: Inadequate, subpar

  Background: In the early days of boxing, there was no bell to signal the beginning of a round. Instead, the referee would scratch a line on the ground between the fighters, and the round began when both men stepped over it. When a boxer couldn’t (or wouldn’t) cross the line to keep a match going, people said he was “not up to the scratch.”

  CAUGHT RED-HANDED

  Meaning: Caught in the act