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  Tallest Miss America contestant: 6'2" Jeanne Robertson, Miss N. Carolina, 1963. (She lost.)

  AWARD WINNER: Mavis Blakey, of Durban, South Africa

  POSITION: Secretary of Durban’s Central Gymnastics Club

  YEARS ON THE JOB: 73

  STORY: Blakely began studying gymnastics in Durban in 1926 at the age of 13. Ten years later, in 1936, she became secretary of the local gymnastics club. She was still organizing fundraising drives, helping set up competitions, and even coaching kids—all part of her duties as secretary—seven decades later. “Marvelous Mavis,” as she was known, remained the club’s secretary for nearly 73 years, until shortly before her death in 2009 at the age of 96.

  AWARD WINNER: John Netherland Heiskell

  POSITION: Editor-in-Chief, the Arkansas Gazette

  YEARS ON THE JOB: 70

  STORY: Heiskell graduated from the University of Knoxville in 1893, and for the next nine years worked as a reporter for various newspapers in Tennessee and Kentucky. Then in 1902 his family bought the Arkansas Gazette, a paper based in Little Rock, and Heiskell—29 at the time—was appointed editor-in-chief, a position he retained...for a very long time. Among the stories covered during his tenure: the first successful sustained flight of an airplane (by the Wright Brothers), the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, desegregation, the Vietnam War, and the Apollo moon landing. Heiskell never retired: Although he stopped actually going to the office when he was 99, he remained the paper’s editor-in-chief until December 1972...and only stopped then because he died. He was 100 years old.

  Okapi, a species of antelope, are the only mammals whose females are taller than the males.

  FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES

  It’s our latest installment based on Andy Warhol’s observation, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Here’s how some people have used their allotted quarter hour.

  THE STAR: Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 35, a plumber from Holland, Ohio

  THE HEADLINE: Plumber Makes Waves in Presidential Race

  WHAT HAPPENED: On October 12, 2008, Wurzelbacher was playing catch with his son in his front yard when Senator Barack Obama’s campaign bus rolled through the neighborhood. While cameras rolled, the bald, brawny plumber asked Obama, “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?” Obama explained the nuances of his proposed tax plan, and how it wouldn’t affect 90 percent of small businesses. But the media repeatedly ran a comment that Obama made at the end of his answer: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Three days later during the presidential debate, Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, equated the statement with socialism, and mentioned “Joe the Plumber” 20 times, at one point referring to him as “my old buddy.”

  AFTERMATH: Many pundits on the left accused Wurzelbacher of being a plant for the right (he wasn’t); many on the right tried to turn him into a folk hero. McCain’s camp asked him to appear at rallies, and an Ohio Young Republicans chapter tried to recruit him to run for Congress. But when the press went digging into Wurzelbacher’s personal life, they discovered that he didn’t have a valid Ohio plumbing license, that he owed back taxes, and that he really didn’t plan to buy the company he worked for. (And he goes by Sam, not Joe.) For his part, Wurzelbacher didn’t have many nice things to say about either candidate. Obama, he said, doesn’t hold true to American values, and he thought McCain tried to use him for his political gain, calling him “the lesser of two evils.” After the election, Wurzelbacher wrote a book about his experiences and became a public speaker, appearing at several Tea Party political rallies. (And he still hasn’t ruled out a run for office.)

  Highest legal drinking age in the world: 21, in the United States.

  THE STAR: Steven Slater, 38, a flight attendant from New York

  THE HEADLINE: JetBlue Gets the Blues after Attendant Grabs a Beer and Says, “Take This Job and Shove It!”

  WHAT HAPPENED: On August 9, 2010, Slater had a rough flight from Pittsburgh to New York. According to him, he got in a squabble with a passenger whose carry-on was too big and had to be checked. Allegedly, she hit Slater in the head with her bag—so hard that he started bleeding. At the end of the flight, just as the plane finished taxiing to the gate at JFK Airport, the woman demanded her bag “now!” Slater told her it would be in the baggage claim area. She started yelling, and then she slapped him. Slater snapped. With the intercom microphone in his hand, he announced to the cabin, “To those of you who have shown dignity and respect these last 20 years, thanks for a great ride.” Then he told the lady and the rest of the passengers to go f*** themselves. He put down the mic, grabbed two bottles of Blue Moon beer from the galley, opened the emergency slide, and deplaned onto the tarmac. He then walked through two secure areas, got into his car, and drove home.

  AFTERMATH: Slater’s dramatic exit landed him in jail for reckless endangerment. His standing as a “working-class folk hero” was knocked down a peg when passengers didn’t corroborate his version of events. Slater was fined $10,000 and ordered to get treatment for substance abuse. He made the rounds on the talk show circuit and was even offered a part on a reality show, which he turned down. One of the strangest parodies came in a Republican National Committee attack ad against Democrats in which they are shown “sliding off the emergency chute” to escape from President Obama’s bad policies. Not laughing was JetBlue CEO David Barger. He was slammed by the press, who blamed the high tension on his baggage fee policy. Barger called Slater a “coward” and admonished the press for treating the slide deployment as a joke. “Slides can be as dangerous as a gun,” he said, also noting that Slater’s stunt cost the airline $25,000 in delays (and a replacement slide). At last report, Slater, still unemployed, was writing a book about his years as a flight attendant called Cabin Pressure.

  THE STAR: Michael Brown, 49, head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 2003 to ’05

  When the Prince of Wales visited the White House in 1860, he brought so many guests that President Buchanan had to sleep in the hall.

  THE HEADLINE: Dubious Endorsement from Dubya Leaves FEMA Head Treading Water

  WHAT HAPPENED: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” That’s what President Bush said to Brown on September 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina caused major devastation along the Gulf Coast. Because the federal government was facing criticism for its slow response to the catastrophe, Brown became an example of the cronyism in the Bush administration. The administration was accused of appointing friends and business associates to positions for which they were unqualified. Case in point: Before being hired to run the nation’s disaster response team, Brown was chairman of the International Arabian Horse Association, a post he resigned in 2001 amid allegations of corruption. Even more damning for Brown: His e-mails to staffers were leaked to the press. On the day Katrina made landfall, Brown wrote, “Can I quit now? Can I go home?” In another e-mail (sent while there were still corpses floating in New Orleans), he complained about the tacky suit he had to wear. “Call the fashion police!” Dozens of other petty e-mails were sent, all while his office took four days to respond to an urgent request for medical supplies.

  AFTERMATH: Brown resigned from his FEMA post on September 12, stating that all the attention was hindering his agency from doing their job. He accused the press of making him a scapegoat for the administration’s botched response, and added that most of the blame lay on the shoulders of local Louisiana officials. His biggest mistake, he claimed, was “underestimating” their incompetence. Brown made news again in 2007 when he was hired by Cold Creek Solutions, a company that specializes in data storage for big businesses, as their “Disaster and Contingency Planning Consultant.” Said the company’s CEO, “With Michael’s experience and his unique view into what possibly could go wrong when looking at a plan, we can truly
help clients be prepared for the unexpected.” Brown is currently hosting a radio talk show in Colorado.

  “He who angers you conquers you.”

  —Elizabeth Kenny

  STAND-UP FOLKS

  Comedian quips to pass the time.

  “My husband thinks I’m crazy, but I’m not the one who married me.”

  —Wendy Liebman

  “‘Employee of the Month’ is a good example of how somebody can be both a winner and a loser at the same time.”

  —Demetri Martin

  “I wonder if deaf people have a sign for ‘Talk to the hand.’”

  —Zach Galifianakis

  “My brothers would never let me play with them, so to get back at them I put Vaseline on the Twister mat. Left arm, BROKEN!”

  —Brian Regan

  “I realized I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.”

  —Marcus Brigstocke

  “There’s a metal train that’s a mile long, and a lightning bolt strikes the back. How long until it reaches and kills the driver, provided that he’s a good conductor?”

  —Bo Burnham

  “I was decorating, so I got out my step-ladder. I don’t get along with my real ladder.”

  —Peter Kay

  “I’ve never really thought of myself as depressed so much as I am paralyzed with hope.”

  —Maria Bamford

  “Before birds get sucked into jet engines, do they ever think, ‘Is that Rod Stewart in first class?’”

  —Eddie Izzard

  “I enjoy using the comedy technique of self-deprecation, but I’m not very good at it.”

  —Arnold Brown

  “A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, ‘Can you spare a few minutes for cancer research?’ I said, ‘All right, but we’re not going to get much done.’”

  —Jimmy Carr

  “I was on the toilet for so long, I finally said to myself, ‘I’m getting too old for this s***.’”

  —Doug Benson

  Cold-weather tip: Wearing a hat will help keep your feet warm.

  FABULOUS FLOPS

  Some innovative products, like the Ford Model T and the Sony Walkman, change the world forever. Others fail miserably and give us something to laugh at.

  Product: OK Soda, introduced by Coca-Cola in 1993

  What it Was: The cola giant’s attempt to market a drink to the teens and twenty-somethings known as “Generation X”

  Details: If looks were all that mattered, OK Soda probably would have done OK. Coca-Cola hired indie comic-book artists like Daniel Clowse (Ghost World) to illustrate the cans. Clowse’s cans featured vacant-eyed slackers staring into space; others had similarly edgy images. “OK” was chosen as the brand name because it’s the most recognized word across all of the world’s languages. (Second most recognizable: “Coca-Cola.”)

  Flop: What made OK not OK, aside from the fact that Generation Xers resisted being pandered to, was the taste. Because the target consumers drank everything from Starbucks to Snapple to Mountain Dew, product developers at Coke decided to mix multiple flavors to create what it called a “unique fruity soda.” Generation Xers who tasted the reddish-brown stuff in test markets had other names for it: “carbonated tree sap” was one description; “a mix of all this crappy stuff” was another. The soda reminded tasters of “suicides,” a term for the do-it-yourself drinks that result when kids mix all the flavors of a soft-drink dispenser together. OK Cola lasted just over a year on store shelves before Coca-Cola canned it for good.

  Product: Thirsty Dog!

  What It Was: A soft drink for dogs, introduced by the Original Pet Drink Company in 1994

  Details: Thirsty Dog! was a carbonated, “crispy beef” flavored soda sweetened with fructose and glucose. Original Pet pitched Thirsty Dog! as a superior alternative to tap water, even advocating eliminating water from dog diets entirely in favor of Thirsty Dog!

  Company president Marc Duke predicted pet sodas would be a $500 million market by 2004.

  A single teaspoon of seawater contains about 5 million living creatures.

  Flop: He was off by $500 million. At 200 calories per bottle, the sugary soda made one of the most common pet health problems—obesity—even worse. And when pet owners tallied up the cost of replacing free tap water with Thirsty Dog! at $1.79 a liter, drinking out of the toilet didn’t seem so bad after all. (Thirsty Cat!, the company’s fish-flavored carbonated soda for cats, also bombed.)

  Product: Persil Power

  What it Was: A laundry detergent created by Unilever and introduced to the European market in 1994

  Details: Persil Power contained a new active ingredient that regular Persil didn’t—a patented manganese “accelerator” that cleaned clothes more quickly, and in cooler water, than regular detergent, which Unilever claimed would save consumers energy and money.

  Flop: Consumers actually lost money, and lots of it, when Persil Power dissolved clothes into tattered rags in as few as a dozen washes. Unilever’s rival, Proctor & Gamble, discovered the problem before Unilever did. P&G went public with the information out of fear that consumers who switched detergents would blame P&G products for damage caused by Persil Power. But Unilever ignored the warning, convinced that P&G was trying to kill a perfectly good product to avoid having to compete against it. By the time Unilever finally admitted the error eight months later and pulled the defective detergent from store shelves, Persil Power had dissolved more than $200 million of the company’s money, along with all those ruined clothes.

  THREE UNDERWATER RECORDS

  • Most attendees at an underwater wedding: 261, at the nuptials of Italians Francesca Colombi and Giampiero Giannoccaro at Morcone Beach, Elba Island, Italy, on June 12, 2010.

  • Longest time juggling three objects underwater on a single breath: 1 minute, 20 seconds, set by Merlin Cadogan in London, England, in November 2010.

  • Most people playing checkers underwater: 52, at Valtu Sportshouse in Kaerepere, Estonia, on January 16, 2011.

  Winter lasts 21 years on Uranus.

  CRAIGSLIST ODDITIES

  A lot of newspapers are closing down in part due to revenue lost to Craigslist—more and more people are using the free online classified site to post their “room for rent,” “for sale,” and “help wanted” ads. It also tends to attract a lot of kooks. Here are some real Craigslist ads we found.

  ROOMS FOR RENT

  • “I have a bedroom available for a male or female roommate. The apartment is spacious and well lit. I work as a researcher and I’m also pursuing a Master’s Degree. One more thing. On our bathroom door is a checklist. I like to keep a record of my bowel movements and I expect you to do the same.”

  • “I recently acquired a decommissioned Chinese nuclear submarine and am renting it out. The ‘crew member’ price is a low $120 per month and includes a bunk in the sleeping quarters, access to the mess hall, and a shared bathroom. Utilities included. We have enough uranium to power us through the 2060s.”

  FREE STUFF

  • “Toilet: could be fixed up. A little dirty, and it leaked and overflowed last time it was used. My son stuffed an action figure down it, so if anyone picks this up and fixes it, can you drop the action figure back off at my house?”

  • “One right New Balance shoe (never been worn). I broke my right foot and only used the left shoe, so now I have this new right shoe. Great gift for a one-footed person, or if you know anyone with a broken left foot.”

  • “Giving away absolutely free of charge, with no lien, mortgage, or other encumbrance of any sort, the undisputed world-record holder in the ‘loudest vacuum cleaner on the face of the Earth’ category! Act now to take advantage of this truly unique opportunity!”

  • “Left-handed vintage air guitar for free. All that’s needed is new strings and a good dusting.”

  If September 1st falls on a Monday, December 1st will, too.

  FOR SALE

  �
� “Fart Jar for sale: My hot girlfriend’s fart in a mason jar. Need cash to pay the rent.”

  • “I have some banana slugs. I will lease them out for $1 per day. You just come and catch them, and keep sliding dollar bills under my front door. I am trying to save up for a flat screen TV.”

  • “I found four cockroaches in a box of Triscuits a few months back. I hate to have to get rid of them but I’m moving to a smaller place and won’t really have the room for them anymore. Re-homing fee of $15 each or $50 for all four.”

  • “I have more than 1,300 pope hat replicas that I really need to get rid of. They are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the real pope). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat would wear one.”

  HELP WANTED

  • “Looking for an assistant to help in texting duties—replies, deleting texts, alerting of new texts, reading texts, filtering texts. I get 40–50 texts an hour. I can’t handle my workload plus texting responsibilities. My phone gets too full and needs to be deleted every couple of hours. This is a full-time position and you must be wherever I am, because my phone is always with me.”

  • “We have a complete business plan that aims to yield investors 1,000% returns within only a five-year period. We have all the pieces in place; the only missing piece is YOU! We are looking for a very motivated scientist who has experience in teleportation research and/or technology. Send a resume and any other information that may set you apart from other teleportation scientists.”

  • “I need someone to hide Easter eggs in my apartment when I am not there. They are small and filled with candy.”