Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Read online

  Life is half spent before one knows what life is.

  —French proverb

  Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy foods.

  BOUNCING BABIES

  Call it luck, call it divine intervention, or just chalk it up to the fact that infants and toddlers are a lot tougher than meets the eye. Here are some incredible stories of survival.

  BABY GOES ROUND AND ROUND

  Three-month-old Ayden Robinson of Dunn, North Carolina, was unaware of the threat of the impending tornado, but his babysitter, Jonathan Robinson (also his cousin), was terrified. They were inside a mobile home, a notoriously unsafe place to be caught in a twister. But it was bearing down on them, and even though Robinson was holding onto Ayden as tight as he could, it wasn’t tight enough. “The wind just took him straight out of my arms,” said Robinson. After the storm passed, the trailer was in tatters. Robinson looked for Ayden but couldn’t find him. Then he heard the faint sound of crying. He followed the sound and found the baby, unharmed, lying on a pile of debris, almost as if he were carefully placed there. “He’s not supposed to be here now,” said his mother, “but he is!”

  BABY NEEDS A NEW CRIB

  “All of a sudden, the house just shook,” said Kenneth Enright, after a Toyota 4-Runner crashed into his Richmond, Kentucky, home in 2011. The truck had plowed into his 10-month-old daughter’s bedroom while she was taking a nap. “We ran in, and we didn’t see Aylinia,” said Enright. “All I saw was the vehicle actually on top of her crib!” Enright shimmied under the truck but still couldn’t see or hear any sign of his baby. But then, “She let out a cry, and there she was. She had her hands up, like, ‘Get me out of here!’” The driver of the SUV, who’d simply lost control, was “extremely apologetic.” Given that Aylinia was fine, the Enrights weren’t too concerned about the gaping hole in the side of their house.

  BABY BOUNCES

  A couple in Paris went for a walk one day in 2010 and left their two children—a three-year-old girl and an eighteen-month-old boy—alone in their 7th-floor apartment. (The parents were later charged with reckless endangerment.) Both kids climbed through an open window onto the balcony. People on the ground yelled at them to go inside, and the girl did, but the boy climbed through the railing...and fell from 80 feet up. Thankfully, Dr. Philippe Bensignor was positioned just right. The boy bounced off a restaurant awning and landed softly in the doctor’s arms. “He didn’t have a scratch,” said Bensignor. Making this truly lucky was that on just about any other day, the awning over the seating area would have been retracted, but because it was a bank holiday, the restaurant was closed and the awning was there.

  First college to issue degrees: the University of Bologna, in 1088.

  BABY GOES FOR A SWIM

  When three-year-old Demetrius Jones’s grandmother awoke from her nap, the boy was missing. So was his battery-operated ride-on-top Chevy Silverado toy truck. After a frantic search, there seemed to be only one place the boy and the truck could have gone—into the Peace River next to the British Columbia campground where the family was staying. Family, neighbors, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police immediately started to hunt for Demetrius. “After three hours, we spotted what looked like some rocks or an eagle,” neighbor Don Loewen recalled. “The ‘rocks’ were the black tires of the overturned toy sticking out of the water. And what we thought was an eagle was the little boy’s blond head.” And he was alive. When they plucked Demetrius from the water, eight miles downriver, “He wasn’t even fazed,” said Loewen, “although he seemed pretty excited to be dealing with the police.”

  BABY TAKES THE TRAIN

  In 2009 just one day after Australian safety officials issued public service announcements warning parents at train stations to keep a close watch on their children, a mother at a Melbourne train station took her eye off her 15-month-old son’s baby carriage. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew the carriage forward; it rolled over the ledge, flipped over, and landed upside down on the tracks. The mother lunged for the child, but it was too late—the train came along a split second later, forcing her back. The train ran over the carriage and dragged it 30 feet before rolling to a stop. No one wanted to look underneath, but someone had to. To everyone’s amazement, the little boy was there, alive and okay. His only injury: a slight bump on the head.

  June 21 is International Gnome Day.

  BABY MAKES WAVES

  Two Japanese parents had their worst fears realized when the March 2011 tsunami swept through their home and ripped their four-month-old daughter out of her mother’s arms. Mom and Dad survived but were told there was little hope for their baby girl. Two agonizing days passed with no word. Then, on the third day, a military search-and-rescue worker heard what sounded like a crying baby. He thought his ears were playing tricks on him; all they had found so far were corpses. But when he heard more cries, he yelled for his team. They began digging furiously, lifting away hundreds of pounds of rock, glass, and debris until they finally found the baby, still in her pink woolen bear suit—and there was hardly a scratch on her. No one knows how the girl didn’t drown or get crushed to death. Rescue workers called her a “tiny miracle.”

  FANCY BATHS

  • Milk Bath. Roman scholar Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (A.D. 77) notes that emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea, traveled with a herd of lactating female donkeys so that she could bathe in their milk (with oils, lavender, and honey added in). Cleopatra was said to bathe regularly in milk, too. As it turns out, the ancients were on to something: The lactic acid in donkey milk contains alpha hydroxy, a known exfoliant that is believed to improve the skin’s appearance. Milk baths aren’t used much anymore, but hundreds of modern beauty and bath products contain alpha hydroxy acids.

  • Bubble Bath. Products that made baths burst with soapy bubbles appeared on the market not long after soap flakes were invented by the Lever Brothers in 1899. In the 1950s, ads suggested that a bubble bath could soak bathers clean—with no scrubbing needed—so their popularity for children took off. Sold as either dry flakes or liquid, bubble bath isn’t much different from liquid soap, except for whatever scents are added in. All-time bestselling bubble bath: Mr. Bubble, sold in bright pink bottles since 1961.

  The only place a naked mole rat has hair: inside its mouth.

  FLUBBED HEADLINES

  Whether silly, naughty, obvious, or just plain bizarre, they’re all real.

  Chick Accuses Some of Her Male Colleagues of Sexism

  Westinghouse Gives Robot Rights to Firm

  How to Combat That Feeling of Helplessness With Illegal Drugs

  World’s Largest Stove Destroyed by Fire

  Deaf College Opens Doors to Hearing

  Young Marines Make Tasty Christmas Treats

  Students cook & serve grandparents

  Butts arrested in Boob murder case

  Parents keep kids home to protest school closure

  Hispanics ace Spanish tests

  Self Help Network asks businesses for assistance

  Most doctors agree that breathing regularly is good for you

  Academics to dissect Bob Dylan at NY conference

  EXPERTS: FEWER BLOWS TO HEAD WOULD REDUCE BRAIN DAMAGE

  Tiger Woods plays with own balls, Nike says

  Threat disrupts plan to meet about threats

  Mayor Parris to homeless: Go home

  Police seeking man handcuffed to chair

  Doobie tickets on sale for Joint show

  DENVER: A CITY FULL OF BRIANIACS?

  Dead man found in graveyard

  Rangers’ Hamilton to get shot for sore knee

  NASA’s original calculations predicted a 5% chance for a successful moon landing.

  I SPY...AT

  THE MOVIES

  You probably remember the kids’ game “I Spy, With My Little Eye...” Filmmakers have been playing it for years. Here are some in-jokes and gags you can look for the next time you see these movies.

  THE HANGOVER (2009)
/>
  I Spy...a character from Rain Man

  Where to Find Her: When the main characters approach a craps table, one of the women sitting there is played by Lucinda Jenney. She was reprising her role as the prostitute who tried to pick up Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character, Raymond Babbit, in 1988’s Rain Man. She was even wearing the same blue dress.

  MAMMA MIA! (2008)

  I Spy...two members of ABBA

  Where to Find Them: The Swedish pop stars have cameos in the hit movie musical based on their music. Benny Andersson shows up as a piano-playing fisherman during “Dancing Queen”; Björn Ulvaeus appears at the end dressed as a Greek god.

  ON GOLDEN POND (1981)

  I Spy...Spencer Tracy’s hat

  Where to Find It: On Henry Fonda’s head. The fishing cap that he wore in the film (his last) was a gift from co-star Katharine Hepburn. It was the first time the two legends had worked together. Spencer Tracy, who’d died in 1967, was Hepburn’s longtime lover. On the first day of filming On Golden Pond, Hepburn told Fonda that she wanted him to have “Spencer’s lucky hat.”

  TRUE GRIT (2010)

  I Spy...the Boston Red Sox logo

  Where to Find It: On Matt Damon’s head. He tries to work in a nod to his favorite team in all his movies. But how could he do that in a Western set 20 years before the Sox formed? In the two buckles on his cowboy hat—they form the familiar Red Sox “B.”

  It takes 5 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.

  ROCKY BALBOA (2006)

  I Spy...Sylvester Stallone

  Where to Find Him: Ringside. Background footage from real boxing matches was used for the climactic fight scene. Stallone—who wrote, directed, and starred in the film—had attended one of those fights. If you look closely you can spot him watching his fictional alter-ego battle it out in the ring.

  PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987)

  I Spy...the airplane from Airplane!

  Where to Find It: In the exterior shot of the passenger jet where Steve Martin and John Candy meet. In a nod to the classic comedy film, director John Hughes used the same footage from the 1980 disaster spoof.

  1408 (2007)

  I Spy...a famous axe

  Where to Find It: In a fireman’s hands. In Stephen King’s story about a malevolent hotel room, a firefighter uses an axe to break down a door. It’s the same axe used in 1980’s The Shining (another King story about an evil hotel), with which Jack Nicholson tried to kill his family after yelling, “Heeere’s Johnny!” (Both films were made at London’s Elstree Studios, where the axe lived in a prop closet.)

  APOCALYPTO (2006)

  I Spy...Waldo

  Where to Find Him: In a pile of corpses. Remember the Where’s Waldo picture-book series in which Waldo’s tiny image is hidden among hundreds of other people? For some reason, in Apocalypto, a bloody epic about the final days of the Mayan civilization, director Mel Gibson inserted a single frame of a real man dressed like Waldo—blue jeans, red-and-white striped shirt, and red cap. (He appeared only in the theatrical release; Gibson took him out of the DVD version.)

  T-ant-T? Some species of ants explode when attacked.

  FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS

  Lots of cities are named after people, but sometimes who those people were gets lost to history.

  BURBANK, CALIFORNIA

  Home to many TV networks and TV studios (most famously the “beautiful downtown Burbank” where Johnny Carson made The Tonight Show), the former Spanish ranch land was incorporated in 1887. The town began as 4,600 acres purchased by David Burbank, a dentist from New Hampshire.

  LARAMIE, WYOMING

  Wyoming conjures up images of plains and cowboys, but the state’s third-largest city was named after a French-Canadian fur trapper. Jacques La Ramée settled there in 1815. In 1821 he went on a trapping expedition and disappeared. He’s believed to have been killed by the Arapaho, but evidence was never found. Nevertheless, he was such an economic influence that the village he lived in and the nearby Laramie River were named after him.

  RENO, NEVADA

  Jessie Reno was a war hero in both the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, where he served as a general in the Union army, and died at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. Reno was from Virginia, but he was such a popular military figure that a number of emerging towns were named after him, including Reno, Pennsylvania; El Reno, Oklahoma; and Reno, Nevada.

  SEDONA, ARIZONA

  In the American West, towns were often “put on the map” when they got mail service. Postal employees settled in unnamed, unincorporated towns and helped organize governments in addition to mail service. That’s what happened in the early 20th century with Sedona, Arizona, named after Sedona Schnebly, wife of the town’s first postmaster.

  Most commonly reported UFO shapes: hat-shaped, oval-shaped, and cigar-shaped.

  YONKERS, NEW YORK

  One of the town’s first settlers in the 17th century was Adriaen van der Donck, a landowner who in his native Netherlands was a jonkheer (“yonk-ear”), the Dutch equivalent of “esquire” or “lord.” In the New World, “Jonkeer” became his nickname. Yonkers is a corruption of that, and the New York City suburb was named after him.

  PROVO, UTAH

  Like many cities in Utah, Provo began as a Mormon settlement. They called it Fort Utah when they arrived in 1849, but a year later the town was officially incorporated and renamed Provo, after French-Canadian trapper and trader Etienne Provost, who’d helped settle the area in 1825.

  MODESTO, CALIFORNIA

  William Chapman Ralston founded the Bank of California and helped finance much of the settlement of Northern California in the late 1800s. He was so influential that a local government council decided to name a town after him. But at the naming ceremony for “Ralston, California,” Ralston declined the offer. One of the Spanish-speaking workers there reportedly said that Ralston was “muy modesto,” or very modest, to turn down the name. So Modesto it was.

  ORLANDO, FLORIDA

  Fort Gatlin was built near what is now Orlando in order to protect white settlers from the resident Seminole Indians. Skirmishes between the natives and the Europeans resulted, culminating in several conflicts known as the Seminole Wars, the first occurring in 1817. There, it’s said, a soldier named Orlando Reeves was struck down in battle, and the city is named after him. Historians now believe that story was invented to explain the mysterious carving of the name “Orlando” into a tree as a grave marker. Or maybe it was named after Orlando Rees, a sugar mill owner who had lived nearby. A third origin story: It’s named after Orlando, the lead character in William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. It makes sense—in the play Orlando was in love with Rosalind, and one of the city’s main streets is Rosalind Avenue.

  Was Sydney called Robinia? Melbourne, Australia, was originally named Batmania.

  POLI-TALKS

  When walking the halls of power, remember: Walls (and reporters) have ears.

  “No sane person in the country likes a war in Vietnam, and neither does President Johnson.”

  —Hubert Humphrey

  “Sure, there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.”

  —Richard Nixon

  “Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.”

  —Charles De Gaulle

  “If I were a Democrat, I suspect I’d feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America.”

  —Rep. Dick Armey

  “What does an actor know about politics?”

  —Ronald Reagan, former actor, to SAG president Ed Asner

  “Machismo gracias.”

  —Al Gore, thanking Hispanic students at a school

  “We see nothing but increasingly brighter clouds every month.”

  —Gerald Ford

  “I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dolla
rs in a beautiful painting.”

  —Jacqueline Kennedy

  “Political skill is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, and to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn’t happen.”

  —Winston Churchill

  “I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish that goal.”

  —Bill Clinton

  “This is a great day for France.”

  —Richard Nixon, at French president de Gaulle’s funeral

  “I’ve been subject to quite a lot of illegal leaking.”

  —Hillary Clinton

  The Iron Pillar of Delhi, made of 98% pure wrought iron, hasn’t rusted in 1,600 years.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL

  We all hope to rest in peace after we die, and most of us will. But an unlucky few of us...well, read on and see for yourself.

  OLIVER CROMWELL (1599–1658)

  Claim to Fame: Puritan, Member of Parliament, and leader of the forces that won the English Civil War in the 1640s, Cromwell presided over the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649, then ruled England until his death in 1658.

  After the Funeral: You can’t kill a king without making enemies. By 1660 Charles I’s son, Charles II, was back on the throne, and the royalists were ready for revenge. On January 30, 1661, Cromwell’s body was removed from its burial vault in Westminster Abbey, hanged in a posthumous “execution,” and decapitated. The body was then dumped in a pit; the head was impaled on a 20-foot spike and displayed for more than 20 years above Westminster Hall, the same building in which Charles I was tried and condemned to death. In 1685 the spike came down during a storm, and the weather-beaten head passed from one private collector to another for nearly three centuries. In 1960 the last owner arranged for it to be buried in a secret location at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, England, where it remains to this day.