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

  • COTTAGE CHEESE-EATING. In 1984 Peter Altman (England) shoveled down three pounds of cottage cheese in four minutes. Three years later, Altman set the 30-second record, consuming half a pound of it on a British talk show.

  • COCKROACH-EATING. Ken Edwards (England) ate 36 in a minute in 2001. A more extreme record holder is Travis Fessler (USA), who held 11 live cockroaches (each at least 2.5 inches long) for 10 seconds...in his mouth.

  • BARF-BAG COLLECTION. Niek Vermeulen (Netherlands) possesses the world’s largest collection of airsickness bags He’s a frequent flyer, and as of March 2008, owned 5,468 distinct bags from more than 1,065 different airlines, along with 10,000 duplicates. (Note: They are all unused.)

  In 2009 Israeli bikers protested motorcycle insurance rate hikes by staging protest rides in which they wore only underwear. Their slogan: “Insurance Is Stripping Us.”

  CANADA’S CAPTAIN

  UNDERPANTS

  You’ve heard of clothing drives; here’s the story of an underwear drive that involved a whole lot of underwear...and a whole lot of driving.

  MAN ON A MISSION

  Brent King is a mechanical engineer in Calgary, the largest city in the province of Alberta. Like many big cities, Calgary has a homelessness problem, and in the fall of 2008 King was curious to see how the city’s social service agencies were tackling the issue. He was particularly impressed by the work an organization called the Mustard Seed was doing to help the homeless find jobs and housing and re-enter society. After visiting their facility, he asked if there was a problem he could help them solve. “They showed me their wish list, and on the top of it was men’s underwear,” he told the Montreal Gazette.

  The people at Mustard Seed explained that while it’s common for people to give used clothing to homeless shelters and thrift shops, used underwear isn’t really the kind of thing that gets donated. And not many people think of donating new underwear, so homeless shelters rarely have enough.

  ONE STRING ATTACHED

  King formed a charity called Got Ginch (“ginch” is a slang term for men’s briefs) and funded it with thousands of dollars of his own money, plus thousands more raised from friends. Rather than buy underwear at retail prices, he asked a business associate in China to help him work directly with a textile mill overseas to save money. The associate, a native of Vancouver, B.C., agreed...on one condition. “He said, ‘I’ll do it only if you do Vancouver next.’” That was fine with King, but why stop there? He decided to fill an RV full of underwear and spend his summer vacation driving 3,600 miles across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax, Nova Scotia, distributing underwear to homeless shelters in 10 different cities as he went. He hit the road in June 2009, and by the time he finished his Cross-Canada Underwear Drive a few weeks later, he’d given away more than 25,000 pairs of men’s briefs. He did it again the following summer, this time raising enough money to give 30,000 pairs of underwear away. His goal for 2011: 35,000 pairs.

  The cross-country tours have helped raise awareness of the issue, and many Canadian homeless shelters have reported increased underwear donations. King hopes to distribute even more in future Underwear Drives...and after years of prodding about why he doesn’t distribute underwear for women, he says he’s working on that too. “I acknowledge that the need exists and that it is at least as important as the need for men’s underwear,” he writes in his blog, “but I maintain that two guys traveling cross country with a truck load of women’s underwear is a little creepy. We are working to find a couple of like-minded ladies to take up the challenge.”

  OTHER CANADIAN UNDERWEAR CRUSADERS

  • The Underwear Affair. The Underwear Affair is a charity race held by a number of Canadian charities to raise awareness for cancers that occur below the waist—including prostate, ovarian, testicular, bladder, and colorectal cancers—which make up 40 percent of all cancers. Weeks ahead of the race, volunteers promote the event by wearing skivvies over their clothing. On race day, participants run the 10k race or walk the 5k walk in their underwear or in underwear-themed costumes. “There’s absolutely no shame in bringing a little awareness to down there-ness,” says the website for the B.C. Cancer Foundation.

  • Mark McIntyre, a.k.a. GuyAtHome.com. Who says you’ve gotta run a race in order to raise money for a good cause? In October 2010, McIntyre, a two-year survivor of testicular cancer (the most common cancer in males aged 15 to 29), fired up some webcams in a rented Toronto loft and spent 25 days lounging around in his underpants. That’s it. For every “like” he received on Facebook during those 25 days, underwear maker Stanfield’s agreed to donate $1 to the Canadian Cancer Society. “Since they’re an underwear company, they’re about as close to testicles as any company is,” McIntyre says. He scored 50,000 “likes” and raised $50,000 for the charity.

  Jon Stewart’s older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is the COO of the New York Stock Exchange.

  IRONIC, ISN’T IT?

  There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into proper perspective.

  LOW-GRADE IRONY

  In 2011 the U.S. National Council on Teacher Quality announced that it would begin using letter grades to evaluate teaching instructors. The teachers objected to the plan, claiming letter grades are too simplistic to accurately measure anyone’s achievements.

  A FISTFUL OF IRONY

  • In January 2007, Pakistan’s Daily Times reported on violence at Dawood Engineering College in Karachi. “What started as an exchange of words,” said the Times, “snowballed into a fistfight. At issue was a poster urging students not to fight on campus. The fight was over who would put up the poster.”

  • Inside the Erie County (New York) Correctional Facility, James Conlin and Lawrence Mule began arguing over a bag of potato chips. Before long, fists were flying...until a man standing nearby stepped in to break up the fight. What’s ironic about that? Conlin and Mule are veteran prison guards; the man who broke up the fight was an inmate. (Both guards were suspended.)

  HIS ©UNNING PLAN FAILED

  A Taiwanese artist named Wu was awarded 50,000 Taiwan dollars ($1,600 in the U.S.) for submitting the winning entry in a contest to create a poster that discouraged people from violating copyright laws. He was ordered to return the prize money after it was discovered that he’d copied the design of another artist.

  SEEKING CLOSURE

  Warren and Maureen Nyerges paid $165,000 in cash for a home in Naples, Florida, in 2011. A few months later, Bank of America wrongly filed a foreclosure claim against them. The Nyergeses took the bank to court and won. The judge ordered the bank to pay their court costs (about $2,500), but the bank refused...until the Nyerges showed up at a Naples Bank of America branch with a court-approved “foreclosure of assets” notice and a moving-company crew. The workers began to seize furniture from the lobby. Less than an hour later, the bank paid up.

  Gramatically speaking, the first 8 lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” are two sentences.

  YIELD TO ONCOMING IRONY

  A 200-foot-long fence was erected on an overpass of I-70 in St. Louis, Missouri, to prevent people from throwing things onto the highway, which could injure people and damage vehicles. In 2010 a motorist driving on the overpass lost control of his car and ran into the fence, sending the entire thing hurtling onto the highway. Several people were injured and several vehicles were damaged.

  DEATH AND IRONY

  • Elizabeth Taylor outlived Mel Gussow by six years. Mel who? He was The New York Times writer who penned Taylor’s obituary.

  • Michael Anderson Godwin was sentenced to death in the early 1980s for murder. After six years and numerous appeals, the South Carolina death-row inmate got his sentence reduced to life in prison. Not long after, Godwin was sitting on the metal toilet in his cell, watching TV. He was wearing nothing except a pair of headphones, which started to crackle. Trying to fix them, Godwin bit into the wire. He was electrocuted and died.

  DETROIT ROCK-COCAINE CITY
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  In 2011 tourism officials in Detroit launched a new ad campaign in an attempt to counter the city’s reputation as a place of rampant violence and drug use. After posters were put up all over the city, bloggers pointed out that the font designers had selected for the “Believe in Detroit” logo is called “Crackhouse.”

  THESE ARE THEIR STORIES...DUN DUN!

  In 2011 Paterson, New Jersey, police received a tip regarding the whereabouts of a man who’d robbed a family at gunpoint. Informed that the man might be carrying one of the family’s cell phones—which has a very distinctive ring tone—an officer dialed the number as he approached the suspect. Sure enough, the theme music to TV’s Law & Order started playing. The man was arrested.

  About 50% of people who are allergic to latex are also allergic to bananas.

  NAME THAT TUNA

  The origins of the names of some common fish, and a few that you may not have heard of before at all.

  BASS: Bass are ray-finned fish, meaning they have sharp, boney spikes in their fins, as opposed to the lobe-finned fish, which have loose, fleshy fins. Fishermen have known this for eons, and that’s how the fish got their name. “Bass” comes from the ancient Germanic word bærs, which meant “sharp.”

  GUPPY: In 1866 an English clergyman and naturalist discovered a species of tiny fish on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and sent samples to the British Museum in London. His name: Robert John Lechmere Guppy. Later that year, the fish was given the scientific name Girardinus guppii in his honor, and by the 1920s it was commonly known as the “guppy.” Only problem: The fish had been previously identified in America (in 1859) and had already been given the name Poecilia reticulata. It’s still known by that name to biologists...but it’s “guppy” to the rest of us.

  LAMPREY: The name for this family of jawless fish (often referred to as “lamprey eels,” even though they’re not eels) comes from the Old French lampreie, which etymologists believe was a combination of the Latin lambere (“to lick”) and petra (“rock”), making it the “lick-rock” fish—a reference to lampreys’ round, sucker-like mouths, with which they attach themselves to rocks (when they’re not using them to suck the blood from other fish).

  TUNA. The ancient Greeks ate a lot of this mackerel variety. One of the most common fish in the Mediterranean, tuna was a standard protein in Greek cooking. It was typically cooked with vegetables and olive oil and served as an appetizer at banquets. The Greeks called the large but speedy creature thynnos, from thynein, which means “darter.” By the 16th century, tynnos had been anglicized into tunny, and by the 19th century, English-speakers called it “tuna.”

  MARLIN: You probably know the marlin as a large ocean fish with a very long and pointy snout. It got its name because that snout appeared to resemble a marlinspike, a large needle used by sailors to separate strands of rope. (The earliest recorded use of the word marlin in reference to the fish was in 1917.)

  The sketch that Jack drew of Rose in Titanic was actually drawn by director James Cameron.

  SALMON: Salmon are famous for their migrations from the ocean to rivers and streams, during which they leap their way up steep grades and waterfalls to make it to their spawning grounds. The name found its way into English back in the early 1200s via the Latin word salmo, which is believed to come from the Latin verb silire—meaning “to leap.”

  ORANGE ROUGHY: They’re called “orange roughies” because they’re orange...and they have very rough scales. But they used to be known as “slimeheads” because their heads are permeated with mucous glands. They became a very popular restaurant fish in the late 1970s (thanks to improved deep-sea trawling technology), and the name was changed to “orange roughy” because “slime-head” sounded about as appetizing as “poo eel” or “booger trout.” Slimeheads, which can live for more than 140 years, have been so heavily fished since then that they are now severely threatened.

  SHARK: Sharks were called “dog-fish” in several European languages since the days of the ancient Greeks. In the 1500s the Spanish started calling them tiburons, after their name in the Caribbean Arawak Indian language, and tiburon actually became the fish’s English name for a while. Then, in 1569, a huge shark caught by the English slave trader John Hawkins was advertised for viewing in London. The ad read:

  “Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses, doth call it a Sharke.”

  Nobody knows where the “men of Captayne Haukinses” got the name “sharke.” But the big fish have been called that ever since.

  MUSKIE: This long, narrow-bodied fish is found in North American freshwater systems from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay. The Ojibwe people, who have inhabited the region since long before the arrival of Europeans, thought they looked like another local fish—the pike—and called them maashkinoozhe, which experts believe meant “ugly pike.” In the early 1700s French trappers in the area took that name and twisted it into the French masque allongé, meaning “long mask,” for the fish’s long head, which the English adapted into muskellenge in the 1780s.

  Doublespeak: Hummingbirds have split tongues. Hairs between the two halves draw in nectar.

  SARCASTIC FRINGEHEAD: These bizarre-looking, huge-mouthed, ferociously territorial fish make their homes in abandoned seashells along the west coast of North America. It’s called “sarcastic” because of its temperamental nature, and “fringehead” because of the eyebrow-like appendages over its eyes. (Never heard of a sarcastic fringehead? Neither had we, but we liked the name so much that we just had to include it in this list.)

  MANTA RAY: Rays are a flat, seemingly winged species of fish, closely related to sharks. They’ve been called “rays” in English since the 1300s, a derivation of their Latin name, raia—though why exactly they were called that is lost to history. (Etymologists say it is unrelated to the root words for “ray” as in “ray of light,” “radius,” or any other similar words.) Manta rays are the largest of all ray species. The Romans called them mantellum, the word for “cloak,” after the manta ray’s broad and flat body. That became “manta” in Spanish, and that came to English in around 1760.

  SOLE: This is a name used for many types of ocean-going flat-fish—fish with wide, flat bodies, like flounder. The name came to English in the 1300s and traces its way back to the Latin solea, which originally meant “sandal.” (Solea is also the root of the sole of your shoe or foot.)

  WHAT ARE...PANTS?

  Just prior to the “Ultimate Tournament of Champions” game in 2005, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek was informed that the three finalists were nervous, so they all decided to play the game without wearing any pants, just to ease the tension. They requested that out of solidarity, Trebek do the same. So he walked out onto the stage in his boxer shorts, only to discover that the contestants—Brad Rutter, Ken Jennings, and Jerome Vered—were wearing pants...and big smiles. Trebek turned around, walked back to his dressing room, and put on his pants.

  In the 20th century, more than 3 million people died in earthquakes.

  BATHROOM NEWS

  Here are a few fascinating bits of bathroom news that we’ve flushed out from around the world.

  IWANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND(LE)

  In the early 1970s, John Lennon had an antique china toilet replaced at Tittenhurst Park, the English country home where he lived from 1969 to 1972. When the plumber, whose name was John Hancock, asked Lennon what he wanted to do with the old toilet, the ex-Beatle reportedly told him to “use it as a plant pot.” Hancock held on to John’s john for the rest of his life (no word on whether he ever used it as a flower pot), and when Hancock died in 2010, his heirs put it up for auction during Liverpool’s annual Beatles Week festivities. It sold for $14,740, about 10 times what auction organizers expected. “It’s the most unusual item we’ve ever had,” said auction spokesperson Anne-Marie Trace.

  CRAPPER IN THE RYE

  At about the same time John Lennon’s old commode went under the gavel, a North Carolina collectibles dealer na
med Rick Kohl acquired a toilet once owned by J.D. Salinger, author of the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, and put it up for auction on eBay. Asking price: $1 million. But unlike Lennon, Salinger was reclusive, and although he is believed to have continued writing until shortly before his death in January 2010, he published nothing after 1965, seeing even the publication of his own work as a violation of his privacy. When they learned of the listing, Salinger’s family members found it hard to imagine that he would want to see his toilet sold at public auction. They sued to block the sale, and won. Kohl surrendered the throne and was reimbursed the $2,000 he paid for it.

  IRON CHEF

  In March 2009, a housing unit of Washington State’s Clallam Bay Corrections Center was evacuated when a guard noticed smoke pouring out of a sewer vent pipe. One hundred and thirty inmates had to evacuate their cells and wait in the dining hall until guards finally tracked down the source of the smoke: a fire in a stainless-steel toilet, set by an inmate who was trying to heat up a snack sausage he bought in the commissary.

  Survey: 27% of Facebook users say they have checked their status while using the bathroom.

  FACE TIME

  In 2010 a Florida man named Pat McCourt ran for election to the Bonita Springs Fire Rescue District board. Shortly after he proposed cutting the fire department’s budget, his campaign started getting some undesirable publicity: Urinal cakes bearing his photograph appeared in the men’s room urinals of several local bars and restaurants. The proprietors of the establishments hadn’t given permission for their urinals to be used in that way, and when customers complained (“Whose face am I peeing on?” was a common query), the offending cakes were removed. But it didn’t matter. “As soon as we take them out they’re being replaced,” Gary Maurer, manager of the Landsdowne Street Pub, told reporters. Local firefighters denied any involvement: “Nope. It’s not the firefighters, the union, or the fire department,” said a spokesperson for Firefighters Union Local 3444. (McCourt lost the race.)