Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Read online

  CELEBS’ GOOD DEEDS

  Sure, it’s fun to knock famous folks down a peg, but sometimes they do nice things. Not as a PR stunt—simply because they felt like it.

  MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY

  During the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, the actor was watching his film 13 Conversations About One Thing when one of the characters on the screen asked, “Why do you want a doctor?” Just then, a member of the audience yelled, “Turn on the lights! We need a doctor in here!” A woman at the screening had fainted, due to dehydration. Like a true action hero, McConaughey rushed over and began performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. According to Toronto police, he actually helped save her life. Said actor Alan Arkin, “She woke up and saw him kissing her and now we know why she [passed out].”

  TOM HANKS

  As bride-to-be Natalia Dearnley tried to get to her wedding in Rome in 2008, a movie crew filming Angels and Demons was blocking access to the church where the groom and guests were waiting. Dearnley was told that she would have to wait until the day’s filming was completed to get through. Hanks, the film’s star, heard about her predicament and asked director Ron Howard to stop filming. Then he escorted the starstruck bride across the road to the church. (He even held the train of her dress to keep it from getting dirty.)

  DEMI MOORE

  Late one night in April 2009, Moore was checking her Twitter account when she saw this post from one of her 37,000 followers: “Getting a knife, a big one that is sharp.” Then she posted another one: “gbye…gonna kill myself now.” Moore checked the profile and discovered it was an unemployed Silicon Valley woman. Moore quickly wrote to her: “Are you serious?” No response. Moore then reposted the message on her website alerting anyone in San Jose who might know this woman. Moore’s fans flooded the police department with calls; the cops located the distraught woman and took her in for psychiatric evaluation. Two days later, the woman reappeared on Moore’s Twitter page: “Going to pay it forward!!! Starting today, no more pity party!”

  Profession most often portrayed by Oscar-nominated actresses: prostitute.

  KEANU REEVES

  In 2003 Reeves, who starred in The Matrix trilogy, gave away $74 million of his salary to the “unsung heroes” of the films—the special effects crew. The 29 people who worked for years on the project received $2.5 million each. Reeves, who has also donated millions of dollars to leukemia research, downplayed the good deed: “I could live on what I’ve already made for the next few centuries.”

  PAUL McCARTNEY

  In 2003 a New Zealand singer named Glenn Aitken was performing at a restaurant in the hotel where McCartney happened to be staying. After the show, the former Beatle approached Aitken and told him how impressed he was with his vocals. Aitken thanked McCartney and explained that he’d been trying to get a record deal for years, to no avail. “I’ll see what I can do,” said McCartney. Not only did McCartney get a record deal for Aitken, he played bass on one of the tracks. “It was so monumentally incredible,” said Aitken, who grew up idolizing the Beatles. “I find it almost impossible to put into words.”

  NIGHT OF THE DRIVING DEAD

  Rescue crews in Portland, Oregon, were called to the scene of a single-car accident one summer evening in 2010. When they arrived, they were alarmed by the extent of the injuries. The victims’ faces were all bleeding; their skin was white, as if they were dead, and blood and guts were smeared all over their clothes. It was quite gruesome.

  Or was it? It turned out that, when the accident happened, the five people were on their way to a costume party, all dressed and made up like zombies. Said police Sgt. Greg Stewart, “We’re glad that everyone is alive, despite being undead.”

  Missing link? Humans have 46 chromosomes; potatoes have 48.

  KEITH MOON,

  BATHROOM BOMBER

  More than 30 years after his death, the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, is still remembered as one of the best in rock history. And as more than one hotel chain learned to their regret, that wasn’t all he was known for.

  MY GENERATION

  In the summer of 1967, the British rock group the Who embarked on their first concert tour of the United States. They were the opening act for Herman’s Hermits, best known for their hit single “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” The Who had played dates in the U.S. before, including their breakthrough appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival just a few weeks earlier that June. But this was the band’s first cross-country tour, and there still was much about America that was new and unfamiliar to them.

  Take American fireworks, for example: In many Southern states, giant firecrackers much more powerful than the “penny bangers” sold in England were perfectly legal. They could be bought cheaply and in large quantities all over the South. The Hermits had discovered them on their first American tour in 1965, and now, on a swing through Alabama, they introduced Keith Moon, the Who’s 20-year-old drummer, to his first bag of American fireworks—cherry bombs.

  Cherry bombs are still sold today, but in the 1960s they contained as much as 20 times the explosive power they do now—more than enough to maim or blind anyone who was holding them when they went off, or who happened to be standing too close. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned original-strength cherry bombs in 1966, but judging from the reign of terror on which Keith Moon was about to embark, they must have still been available.

  MAGIC BUS

  The Hermits’ favorite prank was throwing cherry bombs out of their tour bus, taking care to hold the lit bombs for a few seconds before tossing them so that they would explode in front of the car traveling behind theirs. Moon, with a little help from Who bassist John Entwistle, came up with his own destructive trademark when the tour pulled into Birmingham, Alabama, and the band decided that the hotel’s room service wasn’t up to snuff: He blew up his hotel-room toilet.

  It took the Jivaro Indians of South America about a week to make a shrunken head.

  Why did Moon single out his toilet for destruction? The original plan was to blow up the plumbing beneath the toilet, not the toilet itself. The idea was to do damage without the hotel finding out who was responsible, or whether anyone was actually responsible at all. For all the management would know, the pipe under the floor might have burst as a result of normal wear and tear.

  AMAZING JOURNEY

  Apparently toilets in the United States flush differently than they do in the U.K., because when Moon and Entwistle tossed their first lit cherry bomb into that hotel toilet in Birmingham, they expected it to flush right down the bowl and into the plumbing pipes. But it didn’t—instead, it just swirled around and around the bowl as the fuse burned lower and lower. At the last second, Moon and Entwistle fled the bathroom, slamming the door behind them just as the bomb went off, blowing the toilet to pieces. When Moon and Entwistle opened the door, all they saw was smoke, shards of porcelain, and a hole in the floor.

  The destruction must have made quite an impression on Moon, because he quickly abandoned the idea of blowing up pipes he couldn’t see in favor of toilets he could, even if it meant getting caught and having to pay for the damage. “From that moment on,” biographer Tony Fletcher writes in Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend, “no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe until the tour moved away or Keith’s bomb supply ran out.”

  I CAN’T EXPLAIN

  Some toilet bombings stood out more than others: On a trip to New York in 1968, a very drunk Moon blew up the toilet in his room on the ninth floor of the Gorham Hotel, a popular spot with rock bands. Then he climbed out onto the window ledge, where he tossed more cherry bombs onto the police, who responded to the call of an explosion at the hotel. Thrown out of the Gorham, the Who moved to the Waldorf-Astoria, one of New York’s swankiest hotels. Then, when the management locked the Who out of their rooms until they paid their bill in advance and in cash (probably after receiving a call from the Gorham), Moon retrieved his luggage from his locked room by blowing th
e door off its hinges.

  How to tell whether you have a cold or the flu: Colds make you sneeze; flus don’t.

  Thrown out of two hotels in 24 hours, the Who tried to book rooms in a third. By then, word had gotten around to every hotel in town, though, and suddenly no rooms were available anywhere. Pete Townshend, the Who’s guitarist and songwriter, stayed with friends that night; everyone else had to sleep on the tour bus.

  WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

  The Who was one of the highest-earning bands of the era, but the band was soon reduced to staying at mid-priced hotel chains like the Holiday Inn because none of the elite hotels would have them. During one trip to New York in 1971, they did manage to book rooms at the Navarro, a luxurious hotel overlooking Central Park. But that was only because the hotel was under renovation—the manager put them in rooms that hadn’t been redone yet, and let Moon demolish them to his heart’s content. (One night Moon bashed his way through a brick wall to retrieve a cassette tape from the locked room next door.)

  Moon’s reign of toilet terror ended only after his untimely death in 1978 at the age of 32, when he overdosed on the prescription medication he was taking to treat his alcoholism. It’s not clear exactly how many toilets he destroyed during his 11-year love affair with cherry bombs; one estimate places the value of all that destroyed porcelain at half a million dollars.

  LONG LIVE ROCK

  If you watched the halftime show on Super Bowl Sunday in 2010, you know the Who are still going strong, albeit minus Moon and Entwistle, who died from a heart attack in 2002. But the band may not be around much longer: In 2010 the Who cancelled their spring touring schedule when Pete Townshend, who is partially deaf, suffered a recurrence of tinnitus—buzzing or ringing in the ears—brought on, no doubt, by more than 40 years of exposure to loud music…and all those exploding toilets.

  Next to godliness: Ancient-Egyptian priests bathed in cold water four times daily.

  LOCK AND LOAD

  The origin stories of a few gun-related phrases.

  LOCK AND LOAD

  Meaning: Get ready

  Origin: The phrase was originally “load and lock.” In the early 20th century, the standard army rifle was the 1903 Springfield. The safety on that rifle couldn’t be locked until the rifle was loaded, so it was “loaded” with a clip, the bolt was closed, and the safety was “locked,” meaning the rifle was ready for action. When the M1 Garand replaced the Springfield as standard issue in 1936, the phrase was reversed to “lock and load,” because the M1’s safety could be locked before loading. In any case, “lock and load” in the sense of readying a rifle for use was first made famous by John Wayne in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima. It came to mean “get ready” sometime in the late 1980s.

  JUMP THE GUN

  Meaning: To act before the appropriate time

  Origin: The origin of this phrase dates back to 1905: Athletes in running competitions who left the starting line before the starter’s pistol went off were said to have “beaten the pistol.” The phrase morphed into “jump the gun” sometime over the next 15 years because it was already being used metaphorically by 1921. The earliest known use of the phrase in a nonathletic sense appeared in The Iowa Homestead newspaper that year in a story that said: “Give the pigs a good start; jump the gun, so to speak, and get them on a grain ration before weaning time.” It’s been used that way ever since.

  RIDE SHOTGUN

  Meaning: To sit in the front passenger seat of a car

  Origin: In the 1939 film Stagecoach, Curly (George Bancroft) says to Ringo Kid (John Wayne), “I’m gonna ride shotgun,” and proceeds to sit next to a stagecoach driver with a shotgun in his hand. The film was an enormous success and began the Western film (and later television) craze that gripped America for decades. People therefore assumed it was used back in the 1800s, but there’s no evidence for that: The earliest known reference to the phrase appeared in 1919 in Utah’s Ogden Examiner—long after the end of the stagecoach era—about a parade in which a prominent local citizen would “ride shotgun” in an antique stagecoach. It appeared only occasionally until the film made it popular.

  A 2-inch square of Velcro is strong enough to suspend a 175-lb. person from a wall.

  LOCK, STOCK, AND BARREL

  Meaning: The entire thing

  Origin: The lock, the stock, and the barrel are the three main components of a musket, the longarm commonly used by armies until the late 1800s. The lock is the firing mechanism that “locks” into position and is released by pulling the trigger. The stock is the section to which the lock and barrel are attached and which is rested against the shoulder when firing. The barrel is the metal cylinder down which the musket ball travels. So if you had the lock, stock, and barrel of a musket—you had an entire musket. The phrase was in use in the way we know it today by the mid-1700s. But the earliest written reference comes from a Connecticut newspaper account of a July 4th celebration: A group of revelers with a “huge keg of rum” made several toasts, one of which was to “Patriotism—Self interest, the cock, lock, stock and barrel.” (The “cock” is the hammer, a part of the lock.)

  STICK TO YOUR GUNS

  Meaning: Stand by your convictions

  Origin: This was originally a military command, “stand to your guns,” meaning “hold your position.” The first known metaphorical use dates to 1769 in The Life of Samuel Johnson, by Scottish biographer James Boswell: “Mrs. Thrale stood to her gun with great courage in defense of amorous ditties.” The first known use in the United States was in Earl Derr Biggers’s 1913 detective novel Seven Keys to Baldpate, where a Mr. Max advised a Mr. Peters to “stick to your guns.” The phrase has been with us ever since.

  Benjamin Franklin experimented with electric shocks on stroke victims to stimulate their muscles, but decided it held little promise as a therapy.

  WHO NEEDS BREAD?

  A sandwich consists of some kind of food placed between two slices of bread, right? Technically, yes…but not necessarily, as proven by these restaurant “innovations” that can push you close to the USDA-recommended daily intake of 2,000 calories and 65 grams of fat in just a few bites.

  Restaurant: Friendly’s

  Sandwich: Grilled Cheese Burger Melt

  Details: In 2010 the ice cream and burger chain introduced this offering. It’s both a cheeseburger and a grilled cheese sandwich—well, two grilled cheese sandwiches, actually. A beef patty, a slab of cheddar, and all the fixin’s are placed in between not two halves of a bun, but rather in between two full-size grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “Nutrition:” 1,500 calories, 79 grams of fat

  Restaurant: Kentucky Fried Chicken

  Sandwich: Double Down

  Details: The Double Down is a chicken sandwich, except that instead of bread, there’s chicken. Two fried boneless chicken breasts fill in for the top and bottom pieces of bread, and in between the two hunks of chicken are bacon, a slice of pepper jack cheese, a slice of Swiss cheese, and a hefty dollop of “Colonel’s Sauce” (it’s mostly mayonnaise). When it was test-marketed in 2009, many critics thought this bizarre, high-fat sandwich was an elaborate hoax. It wasn’t. It did so well in test markets that KFC put it in every store in April 2010 for a six-week limited run. Then it did so well that the restaurant kept it around until Labor Day.

  “Nutrition:” The Double Down had 540 calories and 32 grams of fat. A slightly healthier version was also available, substituting grilled chicken breasts for the fried ones. It had 60 fewer calories and seven fewer grams of fat, but a third more sodium.

  Restaurant: Mulligan’s, a Decatur, Georgia, restaurant

  Sandwich: Luther Burger

  Details: According to lore, soul singer Luther Vandross loved to eat at Mulligan’s, so they created a burger in his honor. Result: the Luther Burger, a bacon cheeseburger that eliminates the bun in favor of two grilled glazed donuts. The Luther is now available at dozens of bars, restaurants, fairs, food stands, and ballparks around the country. Vandross,
for what it’s worth, died in 2005 of a stroke, after long battles with obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes.

  “Nutrition:” An estimated 1,000 calories

  Restaurant: Applebee’s

  Sandwich: Quesadilla Burger

  Details: Once again, no simple bread on the top and bottom—the burger ingredients are placed in between two grilled quesadillas, each of which is filled with a blend of melted cheddar and pepper jack cheeses and bacon chunks. The burger itself is smothered in lettuce, salsa, more cheese, and “Mexi-ranch sauce.”

  “Nutrition:” More than 1,800 calories, 60 grams of fat, and 4,410 mg of sodium, two-and-a-half times the daily recommended amount.

  Restaurant: BrunchBox, a Portland, Oregon, food cart

  Sandwich: The Redonkadonk

  Details: The Redonkadonk takes Friendly’s sandwiches-for-buns approach to the next, heart-stopping level. There is no bun, but there are two grilled-cheese sandwiches made with extra-thick and buttery Texas Toast. Between the sandwiches sits a beef patty, a slice of melted American cheese, a fried egg…and three kinds of pork: a slice of ham, two strips of bacon, and a slab of Spam.

  “Nutrition:” Although BrunchBox hasn’t calculated it exactly, the Redonkadonk probably packs well over the daily recommended ceiling of 2,000 calories. (So what? We hear it’s delicious.)

  FROM AN ACTUAL CRIME STORY

  “An Oak Hill couple discovered a thief in their home Saturday after the homeowner told a joke and heard someone laugh upstairs.”

  Youngest recipients of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (18 years old).

  THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS

  In late 2001, just weeks after the 9-11 terror attacks, an unknown person sent letters containing the bacterium that causes the disease known as anthrax to the offices of several media outlets and to two United States senators. So began what the FBI dubbed “Amerithrax.” Here’s the story of the attacks, and the history of the toxin itself (which is a lot older than you might think).