Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Read online

  PRODUCT: The “CWS Best CleanSeat” self-cleaning toilet seat

  BACKGROUND: Designed for high-traffic public restrooms, these seats have been clinically tested to kill such microorganisms as staph, E. coli, hepatitis A, and strep.

  HOW IT WORKS: After every use, the seat automatically spins in a circle. The sensor-activated rotation takes it through a washing device—located on the back of the seat—that cleans and disinfects the seat in 15 seconds. Not satisfied with the first cleaning? Simply signal the sensor (wave your hand in front of it) for another sanitizing round and you’re good to...er...go.

  PRODUCT: Self-cleaning clothes

  BACKGROUND: Scientists at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University discovered that titanium dioxide—the same stuff that’s used for self-cleaning windows—can be used for clothes, too.

  HOW IT WORKS: The titanium dioxide, when applied to cotton (no other fabric will work) breaks down dirt and other pollutants into smaller and smaller particles, the same way it does on glass. Sunlight and movement, they hope, will eliminate the dirt.

  The Chinese have been painting their fingernails for 5,000 years.

  RESEARCH RIVAL: Alex Fowler of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth is trying a different approach. He’s working on a technique that impregnates fabric fibers with various bacteria engineered to consume organic materials. If he’s successful, your clothes would eat their own dirt...and even your sweat. The only problem: you have to keep the bacteria alive by wearing the shirt a lot. Or, as Fowler puts it, “You could end up having to feed your shirt instead of washing it.”

  PRODUCT: Self-cleaning house

  BACKGROUND: By 1952 a 37-year-old designer and professional builder named Frances Gabe of Newberg, Oregon, had had enough of the “thankless, unending, and nerve-twangling bore” of housework. So she designed and built a self-cleaning house.

  HOW IT WORKS: The house is built of cinder block to avoid termites and other wood-burrowing insects, and each room is fitted with a ceiling-mounted cleaning, drying, heating, and cooling device. The inside of the house is covered with resin to make it waterproof. The furniture is made entirely from waterproof composites. There are no carpets. The beds are covered automatically with waterproof material that rolls out from the foot of the bed. Easily damaged objects are protected under glass.

  At the push of a few buttons, soapy water jets out from the ceiling to power-wash the rooms like an automatic car wash. The same jets then rinse off the water, and a huge built-in blower dries everything. The floors are sloped slightly at the corners so that any excess water can run into a drain. The sink, shower, toilet, and tub clean themselves, too. So do the bookshelves and fireplace. The clothes closet serves as a washer and dryer, and the kitchen cabinets are also dishwashers. The house can be cleaned all at once or one room at a time, as often as needed.

  Gabe’s been living in her prototype for the past 50 years (she’s 89) and only cleans the entire house two or three times a year (unless her grandchildren are coming to visit).

  “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” —English proverb

  “Cleanliness is next to impossible.” —Pigpen

  Eeww! Eyes change color after death, usually to a greenish-brown.

  STALLED CARS

  The old saying that there’s nothing new under the sun is especially true in the auto industry. Ideas that seem new today may have been floating around for years, but for some reason didn’t succeed the first time around. Here are a few examples.

  B & S HYBRID (1980)

  Ignition: Milwaukee-based engine maker Briggs & Stratton is best known for its lawn mower engines. But in 1980 B & S introduced a unique vehicle: a “hybrid” car—one that improves fuel economy and reduces air pollution by having both an electric and a standard gasoline-powered engine. Today hybrids made by Toyota, Honda, and Ford are common, but at the time this was a strange and exotic concept. The company did not plan on selling the cars itself. Instead, it hoped that by building and demonstrating a prototype, it could interest major automakers in using Briggs & Stratton engines to power their own hybrid cars.

  Car Trouble: The idea looked good on paper, but it was more than 20 years ahead of its time—the battery technology that was necessary to make hybrid cars practical didn’t exist. The 12 rechargeable batteries the B & S hybrid carried in its trunk added so much weight to the car (about half a ton) that it needed a second set of rear wheels just to hold them up. The car had only a 60-mile range, after which the batteries needed a full eight hours to recharge. Even when both the gasoline and the electric engine were firing at the same time, it took 22 seconds for the car to accelerate to 40 mph. Top speed: a paltry 68 mph.

  Out of Gas: GM, Ford, and Chrysler weren’t interested. Briggs & Stratton went back to making engines for lawn mowers. The first practical hybrid sold in the United States, the Honda Insight, didn’t arrive in American showrooms until 1999.

  FORD CAROUSEL (1970s)

  Ignition: In the early 1970s, a group of Ford Motor Company executives had an innovative idea: create a van large enough to hold seven passengers, yet small enough to handle like a car and park in an ordinary garage. They were convinced that it would be a big seller and might even replace the station wagon as the suburban family car. In 1972 the company created a full-size clay model of the concept, which it called the Carousel, and the following year commissioned a consumer survey to gauge public interest. Their findings: Demand was so high that Ford commissioned a second survey out of fear that the results of the first study were too good to be true. The results of the second survey were identical—so Ford set to work designing a prototype and made plans to introduce the car during the 1975 model year.

  Bad car-ma? 40% of car theft victims admit they left their keys in the ignition.

  Out of Gas: Ford president Lee Iacocca liked the Carousel, but his boss, Henry Ford II, hated it and didn’t care how well the car tested. “I’m not a big survey man,” he explained years later. “I think that if you’re in the business you ought to know what the hell you want to do and you can’t rely on a survey to pull your bacon out of the frying pan.” On his orders, the Carousel was shelved.

  Aftermath: Henry II fired Iacocca in 1978, and when Iacocca went to work for Chrysler, a lot of Ford execs went with him, including several who had worked on the Carousel. Chrysler commissioned its own consumer survey to see if a Carousel-type van would still be popular. It was, and in 1983 the first Dodge Caravan—which looked virtually identical to the clay model Ford created in 1972—rolled off the assembly line. By 1988 Chrysler was selling more than 450,000 minivans a year, making it one of the most successful automobile launches in history.

  LINCOLN FUTURA (1955)

  Ignition: If ever there was a concept car that was appropriately named, it was the Lincoln Futura. The car looked like something out of The Jetsons: it was a two-seater like the classic Ford Thunderbird, except that it had sharklike headlights, long tail fins and a “double-bubble” windshield—the driver and the passenger each sat inside their own glass bubble, just like a spaceship from a 1950s science fiction movie.

  Out of Gas: As with most concept cars, Lincoln never planned to put the Futura into production; they just built it to test some design ideas and then put it on tour in the car show circuit. The Futura also made a prominent appearance in the 1959 movie It Started with a Kiss, starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford. Then, when Lincoln was done with it, they sold it to a custom car designer in Los Angeles named George Barris.

  Q: What do California, Delaware, Florida, Oregon, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wyoming all have in common? A: They are all cities in Ohio.

  Aftermath: The Futura might never again have seen the light of day, had 20th Century Fox not hired Barris to design a car for their new Batman TV series—and given him only three weeks to do it. It wasn’t enough time to build a Batmobile from scratch, so Barris gave the Futura a Bat-makeover instead, putting a bat-like snout in the front, installing a rocket “a
fterburner” in the back, and adding lots of other bat features in between. Reborn as the Batmobile, the Futura has gone on to become one of the most recognizable cars in the world.

  THE CHRYSLER D’ELEGANCE (1952)

  Ignition: In 1952 Virgil Exner, the head of Chrysler’s styling department, came up with a design for a two-seater fastback coupe with beautiful, curvy lines. To save costs Exner sent his sketches and a plaster scale-model to Carrozzeria Ghia, an auto design firm headquartered in Turin, Italy. They built a full-sized prototype and sent it back to Chrysler.

  Out of Gas: At the time Chrysler was in a financial crunch. Exner thought a two-seater sports car like the D’Elegance would be a popular seller...but Chrysler didn’t want to spend the money to put the car into production. Big mistake—in 1953 Chevrolet introduced the Corvette, and the following year Ford rolled out the Thunderbird. Both cars were huge sellers; Chrysler had nothing like them.

  Aftermath: What happened to the D’Elegance? Although it never made it into production, if you saw a picture of it, the lines might look familiar. While Carrozzeria Ghia was building the full-scale model of the D’Elegance, they were also working on a sports car for Volkswagen. Ghia claims the new design was totally original, but the car’s resemblance to the Chrysler D’Elegance is remarkable. Did they “borrow” the design? Car buffs still argue over exactly what happened—all anybody knows for sure is that Ghia raced out the design for VW’s prototype sports car in a record five months and VW arranged for Karmann Coachwerks, a specialty German body maker, to assemble the car. Introduced in 1955, the VW Karmann-Ghia sold more than 485,000 units before it was discontinued in 1974...and Chrysler didn’t make another two-seater sports car until it introduced the Dodge Viper in 1992.

  LOVE...AND MARRIAGE

  Someone once called marriage a “souvenir of love.” Here are some other observations about this blissful institution.

  “I love being married. I was single for a long time, and I just got so sick of finishing my own sentences.”

  —Brian Kiley

  “They say marriage is a contract. No, it’s not. Contracts come with warranties.”

  —Wanda Sykes

  “My husband and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. You know, I finally realized that if I had killed that man the first time I thought about it, I’d have been out of jail by now.”

  —Anita Milner

  “The only thing that keeps me from being happily married ...is my husband.”

  —Andra Douglas

  “Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water. After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.”

  —Minnie Pearl

  “We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.”

  —Nick Faldo

  “Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.”

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  “Before we got engaged, he never farted. Now it’s like a second language.”

  —Caroline Rhea

  “There is so little difference between husbands, you might as well keep the first.”

  —Adela Rogers St. Johns

  “Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up.”

  —Evelyn Hendrickson

  “Why can’t someone invent something for us to marry besides women?”

  —Fred Flintstone

  “The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.”

  —Heinrich Heine

  “Never get married in the morning—you never know who you might meet that night.”

  —Paul Hornung

  Now you know: Room temperature is 68° F.

  INSTANT JUSTICE

  Sometimes crooks get a dose of instant karma—and sometimes that’s just funny.

  CRIME: In September 2003, two men attempted to break into a bank in Kansas City.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: Cops in a police cruiser saw the two thieves running down a street with crowbars in their hands and chased them into a grassy field. When they lost sight of the fleeing suspects, the officers stopped and got out of the car—and then heard moans. It turned out that one of the robbers was hiding in the tall grass and the cops drove over him. The lucky thief suffered only a scrape on his forehead.

  CRIME: Wanton Beckwith, 27, stole a car in Monrovia, California, in May 2003. After a high-speed chase by police, he exited the car and ran into a house to hide.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: Somebody was home—and that somebody had a samurai sword. He pointed it at the intruder’s face, led him back outside and held him—at swords length—until police arrived.

  CRIME: In September 2003, 18-year-old Michael Watt walked into a health food store in Uttoxeter, England, pulled out a knife, and demanded money.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: The sole employee, 48-year-old Lorraine Avery, refused. “I thought, ‘He’s not having our money, I’ve worked hard for it.’” She looked for something to hit the thief with but couldn’t find anything. So she grabbed an industrial-sized bottle of salad dressing, pointed it at him, and told him to get out of the store. Watt wouldn’t go—so she started squirting him with the dressing. “He kept coming at me with the knife,” Avery told reporters, “and I kept squirting him.” It worked! The would-be robber left the store, and police were able to track him down...by following the trail of salad dressing.

  CRIME: In January 2004, an unknown man grabbed a bag out of a car stopped at a stoplight in Sydney, Australia.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: The car belonged to Bradley McDonald, a local snake catcher. In the bag was the snake he had just caught—a four-foot-long, venomous, red-bellied black snake. “It might teach him a lesson,” McDonald said.

  The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

  CRIME: Roy A. Gendron, 45, broke into a home in rural Alabama.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: The homeowner’s son, Richard Bussey, caught Gendron loading furniture and other items onto his truck. Bussey had a gun in his car, so he pulled it on Gendron. But he didn’t have a telephone and didn’t know what to do next, so he made the burglar mow the lawn—with a push mower—while he thought about it. He eventually took Gendron’s driver’s license, which the police used to track down and arrest the thief a short time later. Assistant D.A. Brian McVeigh told reporters that if he ever found himself in a similar situation, “I’ll try to get some yard work out of the guy.”

  CRIME: An inmate at the county jail in St. Charles, Missouri, attempted to escape.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: The escapee ran into the prison’s darkened parking garage and headed for an open door marked “Fire Exit.” Sensing that freedom was about to be his, he turned around, gave the approaching deputies a salute, and dashed through the door...running smack into the brick wall behind it. Deputies took the unconscious man to a nearby hospital.

  CRIME: In July 1996, 37-year-old Willie King snatched a wallet from the coat of an old woman on a street in Greenwich Village, New York City.

  INSTANT JUSTICE: The woman was 94-year-old Yolanda Gigante. Who’s that? The mother of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, reputed head of the Genovese crime family, one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations. King was caught a short time later, and as soon as he realized who he’d mugged he agreed to plead guilty to grand larceny. Sentence: 1-1/2 to 3 years in prison. “My client admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity, because he wants to put this incident behind him,” King’s lawyer told the judge. “He hopes the Gigante family will, too.”

  Elvis Presley shared a bed with his mom until he reached puberty.

  UPSTANDING CITIZENS

  Before this page became a Bathroom Reader page, it was a tree. While we can’t bring back the poor tree that sacrificed its life for your reading pleasure, we can honor these other special trees.

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ WHITE OAK

  In 1877 Frederick Douglass, former slave, author, pu
blic speaker, presidential advisor, minister, and antislavery activist, purchased one of the most beautiful and desirable homes in the Washington D.C. area. He called it Cedar Hill. In front of the house stood a towering white oak tree. On February 20, 1895, Douglass left a women’s rights conference and walked home, feeling ill. Once home, Douglass sat beneath his white oak, suffered a heart attack, and passed away. Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site and on a clear day, the immense oak can still be seen from downtown Washington.

  THE “SMOKEY” ROOSA SYCAMORE

  In 1969 NASA announced its third trip to the moon for January 1971. One of the Apollo 14 astronauts, Stuart Roosa, had been a smoke jumper for the U.S. Forest Service before joining the space program (he was nicknamed “Smokey”). When Ed Cliff, Management Research Director for the Forest Service, heard about the lunar mission he asked his friend Smokey Roosa to take a variety of seeds (pine, sweet gum, fir, sycamore, and redwood) to the moon so that they could be planted on Earth as “moon trees.” Roosa liked the idea and took the seeds into space. But they were subjected to a post-return decontamination process that appeared to have killed them. Undaunted, Cliff planted them anyway...and a few actually grew. One of them, a sycamore, still stands in front of the Forestry Science Building at Mississippi State University.

  THE BUDDHA BODHI TREE

  The Bodhi, or peepul, is a species of fig tree that is native to India. The most famous one grows in the town of Bodh Gaya. It is there, Buddhists believe, that while the monk Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a Bodhi tree in 528 B.C., he gained enlightenment and became the Buddha. A descendant of that same tree still stands at the site. Another famous Bodhi: In the third century B.C., a cutting from the “Buddha” tree was planted in Sri Lanka, where it has been protected ever since and still flourishes today—2,300 years later.