Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Read online

  —Oprah Winfrey

  “As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don’t.”

  —Carrie Fisher

  “If you’re going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now.”

  —Marie Osmond

  “Oppressed groups are not, generally speaking, people who stand firmly together. No, sadly, they subdivide among themselves and fight like hell.”

  —J. K. Rowling

  “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

  —Tom Petty

  “Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.”

  —Mel Brooks

  “The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.”

  —Ann Landers

  “The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudices.”

  —Clint Eastwood

  “It’s all right letting yourself go as long as you can get yourself back.”

  —Mick Jagger

  “The most important things happen when you stop looking for them.”

  —Phil Donahue

  “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

  —Alice Walker

  “If everything is under control, you are going too slow.”

  —Mario Andretti

  “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

  —Tom Clancy

  Just going through a spell? Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling doesn’t believe in witchcraft.

  GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

  In past Bathroom Readers, we’ve written about bog snorkeling, cheese rolling, and pooh sticking. Here’s this year’s crop of crazy sports.

  MULLET TOSSING

  Where It Originated: The Florida/Alabama border

  How It’s Played: Every April, several thousand participants pay $18 each to throw a mullet (the fish, not the haircut) from a 10-foot circle on a beach in Alabama across the state line into Pensacola, Florida. “Most people take the fish and roll it up like a baseball, tight as they can,” explains Barbara Burns, a bartender at the FloraBama Package & Lounge, which has hosted the charity event—followed by a big party—since 1984. The record holder: Josh Serotum, who threw a mullet 189'8" in 2004. (After the competition, pelicans swoop in and eat all of the mullets.)

  PROFESSIONAL PILLOW FIGHTING

  Where It Originated: Toronto, Canada

  How It’s Played: It’s kind of like the sleepover variety of the game…only much more brutal. The Pillow Fight League (PFL) consists solely of women and resembles pro wrestling—except these fights aren’t staged, and the combatants hit each other with pillows. Wearing bizarre costumes (as well as mouth guards, knee pads, and elbow pads), fighters with names like “Betty Clock’er,” “Polly Esther,” “Mickey Dismantle,” and “Lady Die” duke it out in front of hundreds of spectators at clubs and ballrooms across the United States and Canada. If a five-minute bout ends without one fighter successfully pinning her opponent’s shoulders down (with a pillow), then a panel of three PFL judges chooses the winner based on “style, stamina, and the Eye of the Tiger.”

  SEPAK TAKRAW

  Where It Originated: Malaysia

  How It’s Played: The word sepak means “kick” in Malay; takraw means “ball” in Thai. And this 500-year-old kickball game is arguably the most difficult sport in the world to master. Resembling a combination of volleyball, soccer, and Cirque du Soleil, two teams of three players each face off on a court with a net in the middle. Like volleyball, they have to keep a ball in the air, scoring a point when the other team lets it hit the ground. Unlike volleyball, players may use only their heads, legs, and bodies—no hands. So at breakneck speeds they do front flips, backflips, and an array of amazing bodily contortions, just to get to the softball-size ball and keep it in the air. It’s a major sport in southeast Asia, and is becoming more popular in the Western world each year.

  During Prohibition, temperance activists tried to rewrite the Bible to remove all references to alcohol, including the fact that Jesus drank wine.

  BA’

  Where It Originated: Kirkwall, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands

  How It’s Played: Ba’ matches have taken place on Christmas and New Year’s Day every year since the 1600s. Starting from the center of town, 300 men divide into the “Uppies,” from the north side, who try to get the three-pound leather ball—or ba’—a mile away to a designated wall while the “Doonies,” from the south side, try to get it into the frigid sea. The jumble of men, called a scrum (taken from rugby), shove, punch, and kick each other until someone wins—often battling well into the night. There are no rules and no referees, and no such thing as “out of bounds.” The sport is so destructive that townies board up their doors and windows beforehand, as past scrums have laid waste to everything from cars to spectators to cemeteries. The winner hosts a giant party for both teams at his house (with beer donated by the local grocer) and gets to display the ba’ in his living-room window for the rest of his life.

  ZORBING

  Where It Originated: Auckland, New Zealand

  How It’s Played: This isn’t exactly a sport, just a dizzying outdoor activity. A person (the “Zorbonaut”) is strapped into a harness inside a 10-foot inflatable clear plastic sphere (the Zorb), which is then released from the top of a hill. The Zorb rolls and rolls until the green grass and blue sky meld into a blue-green blur. After reaching speeds of nearly 30 mph, the big ball gently rolls to a stop at the bottom of the ½-mile-long course, more of which are popping up around the world. As stomach-turning as the sport may seem, according to Zorb inventors Dwayne van der Sluis and Andrew Akers, out of the 100,000 Zorb rides they’ve witnessed over the past 15 years, no one’s ever thrown up…inside the ball.

  COURT TRANSQUIPS

  The verdict is in! Court transquips make for some of the best bathroom reading there is. These were actually spoken, word for word, in a court of law.

  Defense: Your Honor, I have a short witness.

  Judge: How short?

  Defense: It’s Mr. Long.

  Judge: Put Long on.

  Prosecutor: As long as he’s short.

  Lawyer: Where was the officer in relation to you when you were struck by the car?

  Witness: To my left.

  Lawyer: How far to your left?

  Witness: I don’t really remember. I was getting run over at the time.

  Clerk: Please state your name and spell your last name.

  Judge: She has already been sworn.

  Clerk: I am sorry, Your Honor. She looks different.

  Witness: I ate.

  Q: Do you drink alcohol?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Are you a teetotaler?

  A: Not really. Just coffee once in a while.

  Lawyer: Were you the lone ranger on duty that night?

  Witness: I was a park ranger on duty that night.

  Lawyer: I mean the only one, the lone—

  Witness: You mean alone?

  Lawyer: Alone.

  Witness: Yes, I was.

  Q: I notice from the rehabilitation reports that you were recently in Mexico, correct?

  A: I did not go to Mexico. I went to Tijuana.

  Lawyer: Did your son tell you what day it was?

  Witness: No, he didn’t tell me, but I myself knew.

  Lawyer: Did your granddaughter talk to you about it?

  Witness: No, sometimes when I’m sober and working around the house, I remember these things.

  Federal judge: This seems like a fairly simple problem. Let’s not make a federal case out of it.

  Sports quiz: Who made the very first Super Bowl touchdown? Max McGee (Green Bay Packers).

  CHEESEY DOES IT

  Random facts about the world’s favorite milk product.

  • Cheese is popular in most parts of the world. A notable exceptio
n: China. Invading Tatars and Mongols ate dairy products, so the Chinese associated cheese with the enemy.

  • Most-consumed cheese worldwide: Cheddar.

  • Six cheeses named after the European cities where they were first made: Parmesan (Parma, Italy), Romano (Rome), Gouda (Netherlands), Edam (Netherlands), Cheddar (England), and Camembert (France).

  • Cheddar is naturally white. It’s dyed orange with annatto seed, which comes from the tropical bixa tree.

  • At cheese tastings, testers freshen and neutralize their mouths with gingerbread.

  • According to the USDA, there are only 18 basic kinds of cheese: Brick, Edam, Whey, Camembert, Cheddar, Gouda, Cottage, Cream, Neufchatel, Hand, Limburger, Roquefort, Trappist, Romano, Parmesan, Swiss, Provolone, and Sapsago.

  • Cheese can be made from the milk of most mammals, including reindeer, buffalo, camels, llamas, horses, donkeys, zebras, and yak.

  • In 2007 a Dutch cheesemaker created the largest cheese wheel in history. It was six feet wide and weighed 1,323 pounds.

  • What causes milk to harden and form into cheese: rennet, an enzyme extracted from the abomasum, the cow’s fourth stomach.

  • The red wax casing used on Gouda cheese in the U.S. was invented by the grandfather of 1980s pop star Huey Lewis.

  • “Real” certified Brie cheese is made only in the Brie region of France and only by two companies: Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun.

  • Hard cheeses, like cheddar, have less moisture than soft cheeses, like brie. Result: Hard cheeses have more fat.

  • The blue stuff in blue cheese is a mold that’s actually a form of penicillin.

  That’s a lot of gobbling: The biggest turkey on record weighed 86 pounds.

  LOST ARTS

  Whether they were burned, disintegrated, stolen, blown to smithereens, or simply lost, countless works of art from ancient Greece, Shakespeare, and even the 20th century have been lost forever.

  ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA

  • Historians consider Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.) the “father of tragedy” because he invented that basic theatrical form and, thereby, all of Western theater. More than that, he wrote about Greek gods, Greek history, and Greek life. In fact, much of what we know about that era comes from Aeschylus’s plays. But we could have known even more. Records suggest that Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90 plays. While we know the titles, only the scripts for seven of those plays survive. Three of those (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) form The Oresteia, the only Greek tragic trilogy still in existence.

  • Aeschylus wasn’t the only Greek playwright whose work was lost. His successor as the leading playwright and documentarian of Athens, Sophocles, (496–406 B.C.), wrote 123 plays, but only seven still exist today, including Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Electra. His successor was Euripides (480–406 B.C.). Historical records indicate that he wrote as many as 80 tragedies, but the scripts of only 18 survive, including Medea, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae.

  SHAKESPEARE

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is widely regarded as history’s finest playwright, if not the most acclaimed writer in the entire English language. When Shakespeare wrote his plays in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, he wrote them quickly and in fragments, handing scraps of paper to the actors to memorize. The publication of his plays didn’t occur until after his death, and they were based on those script fragments. How many plays? A total of 36. But historians think there may have been two more Shakespeare plays.

  In 1221 Genghis Khan’s troops killed 1,748,000 people at Nishapur (now in Iran) in one hour.

  • Love’s Labor’s Won. In 1598 English author Francis Meres wrote one of the first books about Shakespeare, Palladis Tamia. It lists nearly all of Shakespeare’s known 36 plays…along with one called Love’s Labour’s Won, a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost. But Meres failed to include The Taming of the Shrew, leading scholars to believe for nearly 400 years that Shrew and Won were the same play. They were wrong. In 1953 a 1600-era list of Shakespeare’s plays was discovered that listed both The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labour’s Won.

  • Cardenio. Shakespeare often built his plays on previously existing works. For example, Hamlet is based on The Spanish Tragedy by playwright Thomas Kyd. Cardenio was an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel Don Quixote. There is a record of the play being produced in 1613 by The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater troupe. The script has never been found.

  MOVIES

  Today, hundreds of thousands of films are archived, many of them stored digitally, but it turns out that almost as many have been lost as have been saved. There are many reasons. From the birth of cinema in the 1890s until the late 1940s, the standard film stock was made of a nitrate base, which gave black-and-white movies sharp contrast and crisp images. But nitrate is highly combustible. What’s worse, it disintegrates quickly if it’s not stored in a special low-oxygen, low-humidity, climate-controlled vault. But that’s an incredibly expensive storage system for films that, when they were made, weren’t considered to have any lasting value—they were worth more for their raw materials. Low-budget movie producers (and Universal Studios in a 1948 vault-clearing measure) melted down their old movies for their silver content.

  Another reason films were lost: Every major studio experienced vault fires, most of them started by the very same combustible nitrate films, which in turn burned thousands of other films. More than 95% of Fox’s silent films were destroyed in a 1937 warehouse fire. The Film Preservation Foundation estimates that 80% of all silent-era films are gone for good. With the advent of television in the late 1940s, studios realized that their old movies could be a lucrative source of TV programming. By the 1960s, the major studios used safer, more fireproof vaults and the standard film stock had changed to a less-combustible acetate base.

  Here are some of the movies that are gone forever:

  Which basketball star fought Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Destroyer? Wilt Chamberlain.

  • The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908). The first-ever adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, it starred Baum interacting with drawings of his characters. The single print was in Baum’s possession, but it disintegrated and was thrown out by his heirs.

  • The Werewolf (1913). The first werewolf film, it was destroyed in a 1924 fire.

  • Cleopatra (1917). It starred silent-film icon Theda Bara in the title role and had a then huge budget of $500,000. All but 45 seconds were destroyed in a Fox Studio vault fire.

  • The Gulf Between (1917). The first full-length color film made in America. Only a few frames are left.

  • El Apostol (1917). Made in Argentina by Italian filmmaker Quirino Cristiani, this was the first-ever full-length animated movie. All copies were destroyed in a fire in 1926. Cristiani’s other major work was Peludópolis (1931), the first animated feature with sound. All copies of that movie were lost in a 1961 fire.

  • Humor Risk (1921). The first Marx Brothers movie. Harpo plays a detective chasing Groucho. It had a single screening, the audience hated it, and the Marxes destroyed the only print.

  • The Great Gatsby (1926). Only a trailer remains of the first movie version of the classic novel.

  • Hats Off (1927). Laurel and Hardy’s first hit. There was only one print, and it was misplaced after the movie’s theatrical run.

  • The Way of All Flesh (1927). Emil Jennings won the first Oscar for Best Actor, but only five minutes of footage remains. It’s the only lost Academy Award–winning performance.

  • For the Love of Mike (1927). It was directed by Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) and marked the screen debut of Claudette Colbert.

  • King Kong Appears in Edo (1938). One of the first Japanese “giant monster” movies, it was destroyed during World War II.

  Plays and films aren’t the only artworks that get lost to time. Turn to page 382 for paintings, books, and even TV shows that have vanished forever.

  Harry Houdini was b
uried in the coffin he used in his magic act.

  THE COMSTOCK LODE, PT. I

  Practically everybody has daydreamed about prospecting for gold and striking it rich. But what happens after the big strike? Here’s the amazing tale of one of the biggest bonanzas in U.S. history.

  KILLING TIME

  In January 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California, sparking the Gold Rush that brought more than 300,000 people to the territory. In the spring of 1850, some prospectors heading for the California gold fields stopped at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains about 20 miles outside of modern-day Reno, Nevada, to wait for the snow to melt before they continued over the mountains. Why not look for gold while they waited? They fanned out along the Carson River’s edge and up a stream that fed into the river from a nearby canyon. And sure enough, they did manage to find some gold…but not enough to justify staying put. So after the snow melted a few weeks later, they moved on to California. Before they left, though, they named the spot “Gold Canyon.”

  PAY DIRT

  Word of the discovery at Gold Canyon spread, and each spring as a new wave of settlers and prospectors headed to California along the same route, many stopped there long enough to pan for gold. As the years passed and the original deposits were played out, prospectors started exploring farther afield. In January 1859, a prospector named James “Old Virginny” Finney and three friends took advantage of some good weather and went prospecting on top of a low hill in Gold Canyon where the dirt was yellower than in the surrounding lowlands. Old Virginny thought that was a good sign. When they started testing the soil, each pan yielded about 15¢ worth of gold. Not exactly Sutter’s Mill, but it was enough to justify staking a claim and exploring the area further.

  In those days, tradition and mining law dictated that no miner could stake a claim larger than he could work himself. Old Virginny and his associates each filed a claim for a 50-by-400-foot area, and over the next few days some other miners filed adjacent claims. Many more made trips to the site to look around, but for most of them, 15¢ a pan wasn’t enough gold to make them abandon the claims they were already working.