Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Read online

  DID YOU KNOW?

  In 2018 the Siberian town of Ulan-Ude invited reporters to witness the premiere flight of Russia’s first-ever “postal drone.” The $20,000 hexacopter (six propellers) rose off the ground while carrying a parcel… and seconds later smashed into the wall of a nearby apartment building.

  OUT ON A LIMB

  In February 2018, a Rogersville, Tennessee, man watched helplessly as his drone got stuck near the top of a tall tree in Crockett Creek Park, “a botanical garden containing a variety of protected trees that is used for educational purposes.” After a short deliberation, the drone operator decided to try and climb up and retrieve his expensive toy. Bad move. Roughly 10 minutes later, the Rogersville Fire Department received a call from the man, who told them he was stuck in the tree 40 feet above the ground. The firefighters had to use a ladder truck to get to him. In the process, they had to cut away some limbs from the protected tree. What happened to the drone? “As far as I know,” said firefighter Lee Sexton, “the drone is still there.”

  The first gold rush in America was in the state of North Carolina (1799).

  VEXED BY TEXTS

  Have you ever sent a text, not heard back from the person you were texting, and wondered if they’d received it? If you’re like us, it wouldn’t be long before your paranoia took over and you assumed you’d sent it to the wrong person…like these folks.

  TEXT: In September 2017, Harvey Whitney of West Melbourne, Florida, received a text from a phone number he didn’t recognize.

  Hey Jen Imk if u need any

  the text read. Whitney had a pretty good idea what the green tree emoji stood for, but he replied to the text with “?” just to be sure. Soon a second text arrived, explaining that the tree stood for “bud”—marijuana. In other words, the sender of the text was offering to sell “Jen,” whoever that was, some pot if she needed any.

  VEXED! Whitney is an officer with the West Melbourne Police Department; the texter—obviously—had sent the text to the wrong number. Whitney did what any good cop would do: he set up a deal to buy $50 worth of marijuana from the dealer later that day in Palm Bay, where the dealer lived, and then alerted the Palm Bay Police Department to the planned buy.

  At the appointed time and place, the Palm Bay Police arrested 20-year-old Hasan Burke when he showed up to make the drug deal. At last report, Burke was out on a $3,000 bond and facing charges of possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and possession with intent to sell, a felony in Florida. “What are the chances that a wrong number would be the number of an on-duty police officer?” the West Melbourne Police Department posted on Facebook following the arrest.

  TEXT: In June 2017, Amy Santora, a woman living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a text message to “Julianne” from a number she wasn’t familiar with. The texter was offering to give Julianne four free tickets to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins play the Nashville Predators in game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals that very evening.

  Santora had no idea who Julianne is, but she and her husband Mike are huge Penguins fans, so it was with a heavy heart that she called the number and informed the sender that he had texted the wrong person. The man thanked Santora for her honesty.

  Number of people who have had heart attacks at Las Vegas’s Heart Attack Grill: 3.

  NOT VEXED! Five minutes later, the man texted Santora again. This time he explained that Julianne (whoever she was) only needed two of the four tickets. Amy and her husband Mike were welcome to the other two, which the man would leave at the will-call window for them to pick up. Santora and her husband drove to the hockey arena half-believing that the whole thing was a joke and that they would spend the evening watching the game on the big screen outside the arena, just like everyone else who didn’t have a ticket. But when they went to the will-call window, the tickets were there. Great seats, too: close to the goal, with a face value of $329 apiece, more than the Santoras could have afforded on their own. To this day, they still don’t know the identity of the texter who gave them the tickets. “Whoever you are,” Santora said, “thank you.”

  TEXT: In November 2016, a woman named Wanda Dench texted her grandson, inviting him over for Thanksgiving. “Dinner is at my house on November 24 at 3 p.m. Let me know if you’re coming,” she said. But her grandson had changed his phone number, and the text went to the new owner of the old number, 17-year-old Jamal Hinton, a senior at Desert Vista High School.

  “Who is this?” Hinton texted back. “Your grandma,” Dench answered. “Can I get a picture?” Hinton asked. Dench replied with a selfie, and when Hinton got it he sent Dench one of his. (He doesn’t look anything like Dench’s grandson.)

  You’re not my grandma. Can I still get a plate tho?

  he added, probably half-jokingly, because he already had plans for Thanksgiving.

  NOT SO VEXED! Dench texted back, “Of course you can, that’s what grandmas do… feed everyone.” Hinton made time that Thanksgiving day for two dinners: his family’s and Dench’s. At 3:00 p.m. sharp he arrived at Dench’s house and was the honorary guest—and grandson—at the festivities. “I’d never seen her before and she welcomed me into her home. That shows me how great of a person she is, I’m thankful for people like that,” Hinton said.

  WELL, A LITTLE VEXED: When Hinton posted a screen shot of his text conversation with Dench on Twitter, the post was shared more than 200,000 times…and Dench got more than 600 texts asking for invites to Thanksgiving. So many, in fact, that she had to change her cell phone number. But she doesn’t regret what happened—she had Hinton back to her house for Thanksgiving in 2017, and plans to welcome him back each year.

  Ronald Reagan once had a job as a hamburger cook.

  THE “BARBRA

  STREISAND EFFECT”

  Psst! Have you ever tried to keep something private, only to have it become widely known because you tried to keep it private? That’s the Barbra Streisand Effect.

  CAMERA SHY In 2002 a retired Silicon Valley software engineer named Kenneth Adelman embarked on an ambitious project to photograph every inch of California’s 1,150-mile coastline from a helicopter. He did it to document the condition of the coast and to help preserve it from degradation. He snapped the photos as his wife Gabrielle piloted their helicopter parallel to the coast 500 feet over the Pacific Ocean.

  Adelman uploaded more than 12,000 of the images to a website called the California Coastal Records Project. He made the website interactive, allowing people to download the photos and even add captions to identify structures and landmarks in the pictures. And that’s what got him into trouble. At some point in either 2002 or 2003, someone accessed image #3850, a photograph that included a mansion sitting atop a bluff overlooking the Malibu coastline, and added a caption that read “Streisand Estate, Malibu.”

  If you’ve ever driven past Barbra Streisand’s house in Malibu, you probably didn’t know you were doing it, because like a lot of celebrities, Streisand values her privacy. There’s nothing on the street outside her home that identifies who lives there, and her home, guest home, and other structures are not visible from the street.

  PHOTO FINISH But they’re clearly visible from the ocean side of the property, and when Streisand learned that the photograph identified the mansion as her home and that it could be downloaded from the website, she filed a $50 million lawsuit against Adelman, demanding the photo be taken down. The lawsuit alleged that publication of the photograph invaded her privacy, violated California’s anti-paparazzi law, sought to profit from her name, and threatened her security.

  Someone accessed image #3850, a photograph that included a mansion sitting atop a bluff overlooking the Malibu coastline, and added a caption that read “Streisand Estate, Malibu.”

  The case was eventually thrown out of court and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman more than $150,000 to cover his legal fees. Even worse for Streisand, her attempt to prevent people from seeing the photograph backfired badly: before her lawsuit, image #3850 had bee
n downloaded exactly six times, and two of those times were by Streisand’s own lawyers. Few people other than Streisand, her lawyers, and the caption writer even knew it was there. But in the month after her lawsuit made headlines, more than 420,000 people visited the California Coastal Records Project website, many of them just to look at image #3850 and see what all the fuss was about. (No word on how many of them downloaded it.) The photo was published in newspapers and magazines, broadcast on television, and posted on countless websites.

  The smallest dog on record is a 3.8-inch-tall Chihuahua from Puerto Rico named Milly.

  Had Streisand simply kept quiet, the photo would likely have remained unnoticed by the public. But she didn’t, and her Malibu mansion became, for a time at least, one of the most famous celebrity homes in the world.

  IN THE CAN A similar incident occurred three years later when a visitor to the Marco Beach Ocean Resort in Marco Island, Florida, took a photograph of one of the resort’s urinals and posted it to the Urinal.net website, claiming that the urinal was visible from the lobby. When the resort learned of the posting, their attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to the website, demanding that the post be taken down. Once again, a largely unnoticed photograph was pushed into the public eye by an attempt to suppress it, generating plenty of bad press in the process.

  A journalist named Mike Masnick covered the story for a website called Techdirt. “How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it ‘the Streisand Effect,’ ” he wrote, and a name for the phenomenon was born.

  JOIN THE CLUB

  Here are some other folks who have fallen prey to the Streisand Effect:

  •Toronto Pearson International Airport. The airport is another organization that did not appreciate having a photograph of its men’s room urinals posted on Urinal.net. When the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) learned in 2003 that the photo had been posted to the site, their lawyer threatened legal action if the airport’s name was not scrubbed from the site. Rather than fight, Urinal.net complied, but also stated that it had taken the name down at the GTAA’s request. The GTAA didn’t like that, either, and told Urinal.net that they couldn’t even post the GTAA’s name…so Urinal.net changed the listing to: “The [facility in question] has been [Canada’s largest city’s] main international [aircraft take-off and landing facility] since 1939 when it was first known as Malton [facility],” and added that the “Gee-Tee-Aye-Aye” did not allow them to identify the airport by name. All of which drew lots of attention to the fact that the Gee-Tee-Aye-Aye didn’t want the attention.

  Boustrophedon (“turning like oxen” in Greek) is a term for writing alternate lines of text in opposite directions: from left to right, then right to left.

  •Axl Rose. Like a lot of folks, the Guns N’ Roses singer weighs quite a bit more in his 40s and 50s than he did in his mid-20s, when he was at the peak of his fame. In 2010 Boris Minkevich, a photographer with the Winnipeg Free Press, took some unflattering photos of Rose performing onstage. They began circulating around the internet under the hashtag “Fat Axl” with captions like “Welcome to the Jungle / We’ve got lots of cake,” and “Sweet Pie of Mine.” The Fat Axl meme was winding down in 2016 when Rose’s attorneys filed what is known as a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request with Google, stating that “no permission has been granted to publish the copyright image.”

  Bad move: All the takedown request did was call attention to the fact that Rose was trying to suppress the photos, and that caused them to go viral again, even more than before. Worse for Rose, the copyright for the photos belonged to the Winnipeg Free Press, not to Rose, since Minkevich worked for the paper. And as the Free Press pointed out, the photos had been downloaded from the paper’s website and circulated without its authorization. “The Winnipeg Free Press…has not approved any third party usage,” the paper said in a statement. “We were only recently made aware of these memes, and while we ethically don’t approve, viral media is impossible to regulate. Welcome to the jungle.”

  They began circulating around the internet under the hashtag “Fat Axl” with captions like “Welcome to the Jungle / We’ve got lots of cake,” and “Sweet Pie of Mine.”

  •The Union Street Guest House. In 2014 this hotel in Hudson, New York, had a draconian policy of fining wedding parties $500 for every negative review that any wedding guest posted on Yelp! or any other website. The fines were deducted from the bride and groom’s security deposit, and were refunded if and when the bad review was taken down. When the New York Post ran a story on the hotel and its no-bad-reviews policy, more than 3,000 people posted negative Yelp! reviews in 24 hours; thousands more trashed the guest house on Facebook.

  The next day the hotel rescinded the policy and apologized…sort of: Owner Chris Wagoner claimed on the guest house’s Facebook page that the fine “was originally intended as a joke and never something I told employees to enforce… I now realize this joke was made in poor taste and not at all funny. This is no longer a policy of Union Street Guest House and we have taken it off of our website.” (The comment was later deleted.) So how has business been lately? As of April 2018, Yelp! advises on its website: “Yelpers report this business has closed.”

  Amateur astronomer Gary Hug has discovered 300 asteroids and one comet using his backyard telescope.

  LAST ONE STANDING

  These stores and eateries once dominated the American retail and restaurant landscape. But time marched on, and they faded from popularity until only one was left.

  NEWBERRY’S

  J. J. Newberry’s was one of the last of the major five-and-dime, or “variety” stores. Similar to Kresge’s or Woolworths, these fixtures of Main Street sold a little bit of everything, from pharmaceuticals to home goods, greeting cards, stationery, clothes, toys, books, and magazines. Many even had a lunch counter or soda fountain on the premises. But starting in the late 1960s, the rise of “big box” chain stores, which sold everything variety stores did, along with groceries, furniture, and TVs, made places like Newberry’s seem quaint and old-fashioned. Peaking with 565 stores in the early 1960s, Newberry’s lasted all the way until 1992, when it filed for bankruptcy and started shutting down its more than 300 remaining locations within five years. The last one stood in downtown Portland, Oregon, until December 2001.

  HOWARD JOHNSON’S

  Before fast-food restaurants could be found at every off-ramp in the country, there was one national chain that travelers could count on to serve up familiar, reliable meals: Howard Johnson’s. At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, there were more than 600 orange-roofed HoJo’s dotting the American highway system, where millions of families stopped in for hot dogs, clam rolls, 3-D burgers, and ice cream. Howard Johnson’s did so well that many other companies jumped into the ring, inspiring the rise of fast food as we know it: McDonald’s, Subway, Arby’s, Taco Bell, etc. But these places also offered easy-in, easy-out, drive-through service, with most menu items made in advance, so customers could be on their way in a hurry. Howard Johnson’s was dine-in only. By the 1980s, most Howard Johnson’s were gone, although the name continued to be used by a chain of similarly orange-roofed motels. The only Howard Johnson’s restaurant—in the resort town of Lake George, New York—closed in 2017 after the owner was arrested, charged with harassing a female employee.

  BURGER CHEF

  There are a lot of national fast-food burger joints today, mostly inspired by the rise of McDonald’s in the 1950s. But before there was a Burger King or a Wendy’s, the first true competitor to the industry leader was a chain called Burger Chef. It was responsible for developing many of the technologies and practices still used by other fast-food companies: It employed mass production techniques with automatic burger makers that could churn ou
t hundreds of burgers per hour, and it invented the kid’s meal (called the “Fun Meal”) and the value meal (burger, fries, and a drink for 45 cents). General Foods bought the chain in 1968, and by the 1970s, Burger Chef operated more than 2,000 locations…and that’s what killed the company. General Foods wasn’t able to manage the growth and sold the business to a Canadian company. The last remaining Burger Chef, in Danville, Illinois, flamed out in 1996.

  Drinking alcohol can contribute to a deficiency of vitamin A.

  SAM GOODY

  The way people buy music has changed dramatically in the last 15 years or so. Today, buying music takes a few clicks and a download off iTunes. Or they don’t buy it at all—they pay a monthly fee to subscription services like Spotify or Apple Music and use their phones or home computers to stream all the music they want. Before the 21st century, music had to be purchased on a CD, a tape, or a vinyl record, and those were purchased at music stores. One of the main outlets was a mostly mall-based chain called Sam Goody. The chain, started by a New York record store owner named Sam Gutowitz in 1951, grew to more than 800 outlets at its peak in the 2000s. As of 2018, just four remain: one each in Tennessee, Ohio, Texas, and Oregon. They still sell some CDs, but mostly DVDs, posters, and video games.