Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (59 page)

• In 1994 Hong Kong TV station ATV used images of
Adolph Hitler
in print ads, claiming that Hitler would have been more “successful” had he advertised on ATV.

• Today,
Fred Flintstone
and
Barney Rubble
appear in ads for Flintstones vitamins, but they once starred in TV ads selling Winston cigarettes.

•
Cybill Shepherd
was hired by the Beef Industry Council in 1987 for the “real food for real people” campaign, despite Shepherd’s public admission that she was a vegetarian.

•
Joe Namath
plugged Beautymist Panty Hose, which he claimed to have worn under his football uniform.

• In 1959 former First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt
became the television spokesperson for Good Luck margarine.

•
Ricardo Montalban,
who once helped sell the Chrysler Cordoba (upholstered in “soft Corinthian leather”), also appeared in an infomercial for the Nativity Cross—a gold cross set with a stone said to be from a cave near Jesus’s birthplace.

• Wrestler
Hulk Hogan
lent his image to a line of cameras for kids. His face was painted on the lens, inserting Hulk into the corner of every photograph.

Early Mountain Dew bottles featured a cartoon character called “Willy the Hillbilly.”

I’VE GOT A CUNNING PLAN…

Un-genious schemes from un-genious people.

W
HAT A PHONEHEAD
In January 2004, Jack Painter of Plainville, Connecticut, called 911 and reported a robbery in process at a Dairy Mart store. He then proceeded to rob a Dairy Mart on the
other
side of town. Only problem: He accidentally gave the dispatcher the address of the Dairy Mart he was robbing, not of the decoy one, as he’d planned. Police showed up and arrested him in the middle of the robbery.

NOT TOO SWIFT

In 2005 Stewart and Cathryn Bromley of Manchester, England, got two camera-detected speeding tickets totaling about $200. Not wanting to pay the tickets, they told authorities that a friend named Konstantin Koscov had been visiting from Bulgaria and he was driving the car at the time of the tickets. Police were suspicious and started investigating…so Cathryn flew 1,400 miles to Bulgaria and mailed a postcard from the “friend,” thanking them for the use of their car. When police contacted Interpol to locate “Koscov,” the couple finally admitted that they’d made the whole thing up. Instead of the original $200, they ended up paying more then $20,000 in fines and court costs (plus a flight to Bulgaria).

BY THE BOOK

In June 2006, Asante Kahari was charged with several counts of fraud for bilking a Michigan woman out of $38,000. He’d met her in 2001 on an Internet dating chat room, befriended her, and got her to deposit several (forged) checks into her bank account. Then he got her to withdraw the money in cash, took it, and disappeared. When police caught up with him, he pleaded innocent to the charges, but prosecutors were able to convince jurors of his guilt by reading excerpts of a novel they found on Kahari’s Web site. The book, titled
The Birth of a Criminal
and billed as “the new autobiography from Asante Kahari,” describes meeting a woman from Michigan on an Internet dating chat room, mailing her counterfeit checks worth about $38,000, going to meet her, getting her to withdraw the money in cash, taking it, and disappearing. He was convicted on six counts of fraud.

What plant were they smoking? July 27 is Take Your Houseplant for a Walk Day.

NO EXIT

When 30-year-old Larry Bynum of Ft. Worth, Texas, decided to break into a liquor store in June 2006, he failed to take a couple of things into account. The first was how to get safely into the store. Bynum broke in through a ceiling ventilation hatch. A surveillance camera showed him crashing through the ceiling tiles of the store and falling the almost 20 feet to the floor. He remained on the floor, barely moving, for almost five minutes. He finally got up and emptied the cash register. The second thing he hadn’t thought of was how to get
out
of the store. He tried to climb a display shelf back to the ceiling, but fell and broke the shelf. Then he tried bashing through the front door with a beer keg, but that didn’t work, either—it was made of Plexiglas. Finally, after Bynum had spent more than an hour trying to escape from the store, a cop happened to drive by and see him. The surveillance video shows Bynum calmly sitting down on the beer keg and lighting a cigarette, waiting to be arrested.

*        *        *

CHILDHOOD NICKNAMES

•
Lucille Ball:
“Bird Legs” (
she had skinny legs
)

•
Frank Sinatra:
“Slacksey” (
he was a dapper dresser
)

•
Jerry Lewis:
“Id” (
short for “Idiot”)

•
Cameron Diaz:
“Skeletor” (
super-skinny teenager
)

•
Dustin Hoffman:
“Tootsie” (
it was he who suggested his cross-dressing film be called
Tootsie,
in honor of his childhood nickname
)

•
John Lennon:
“Stinker” (
he was a notorious practical joker
)

•
Jenna Elfman:
“Bucky Beaver” (
she had quite the overbite
)

•
Samuel L. Jackson:
“Machine Gun” (
he stuttered
)

•
Jay Leno:
“Chinzo” (
no explanation necessary
)

That about covers it: In New York, it’s illegal to do anything illegal.

BOODLE AND BINGO

Yo! It may be difficult to imagine your great-great-grandparents as teenagers, using slang back in the 19th century. But it turns out their language was as colorful as ours. For example:

Acknowledge the corn:
To admit a mistake.

Wake snakes:
To make a noisy racket.

Guttersnipe:
A homeless child who lives in the streets.

Codfish aristocracy:
People who have become wealthy—
heavens!
—by earning money in business.

Puke:
A person from Missouri.

Bingo:
Liquor.

Border ruffians:
People living in the untamed American West.

I snore:
“I swear” was considered rude conversation in polite company, so people said “I snore” instead.

Boodle:
Counterfeit money.

Set your cap for (someone):
When a woman sets out to win over a particular man.

Spark it:
To cuddle, kiss, or become affectionate on a date.

Give (someone) the mitten:
When a young lady rejected the advances of a young man, she “gave him the mitten.”

Barking iron:
A gun.

Row (someone) up Salt River:
To beat someone up.

Sockdologer:
A powerful punch—the kind that would row someone up Salt River.

Whip your weight in wildcats:
Defeat a powerful opponent.

Bloke buzzer:
A pickpocket who specializes in stealing from men. (A moll buzzer steals from women.)

It’s a sin to Moses:
It’s shameful.

Long nine:
A cheap cigar that’s nine inches long.

Spider:
A frying pan with three legs, used for cooking over an open fire.

Bang-up:
An overcoat.

Bit:
A coin worth 12.5 cents—an eighth of a dollar (“two bits” is 25 cents).

Short bit:
A dime.

Talk like a book:
To speak eloquently.

Bucket shop:
A distillery.

Arkansas toothpick:
A big knife.

Princess Diana had to call Prince Charles “sir” until they were formally engaged.

Shinplasters:
Cheap paper currency, valued in denominations as little as a nickel and issued when banks were out of coins.

Nerve tonic:
Whiskey.

Anti-fogmatic:
Nerve tonic.

Have a brick in your hat:
To be drunk.

Virginia fence:
Drunks who staggered back and forth were said to be “making a Virginia fence.”

Savagerous:
Savage.

Slantindicular:
Slanted.

Cut up didoes:
To get into trouble.

Poor as Job’s turkey:
Very
poor.

Bummers:
What bums were called before the name was shortened.

It’s not your funeral:
It’s none of your business.

Have a pocket full of rocks:
To have lots of money.

Inexpressibles:
What people called trousers when they were thought to be too vulgar to mention in polite company. (Also known as unwhisperables and sit-down-upons.)

Make a fist:
To succeed.

Hang up your fiddle:
Give up.

*        *        *

OOPS!

• On September 16, 2005, police in Bel Aire, Kansas, raided the home of the former mayor and his wife. They searched every closet, cabinet, and drawer looking for drugs and drug paraphernalia. Nothing was found. A marijuana plant had been seen, and photographed, in the former mayor’s back yard. It turned out that it was a sunflower plant. The sunflower is the state flower of Kansas.

• NBC’s broadcast of the 2006 Emmy Awards began with a film montage of host Conan O’Brien making mock appearances in the year’s most popular TV shows, including
Lost
, a show about plane-crash survivors. Tragic coincidence: In some parts of the country the
Lost
skit immediately followed round-the-clock news coverage of a fatal plane crash in Lexington, Kentucky. NBC later apologized.

• In 1994 Salton Inc. contacted wrestler Hulk Hogan to attach his name to an indoor grill. He missed the call, so Salton signed another athlete instead. Too bad for Hogan: George Foreman has earned $150 million from the George Foreman Grill.

First in-flight “movie” was a newsreel shown by Imperial Airlines in 1925.

LET’S DO A STUDY!

If you’re worried that the really important things in life aren’t being researched by scientists…keep worrying.

I
n 2005 the publicly funded Mental Health Foundation of Britain did a year-long study on the psychological reasons behind alcohol use. Conclusion: People drink because it makes them feel better.

• Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota led an experiment in which 16 people swam in a pool filled with water, and then in a pool filled with 700 pounds of guar gum—a dense syrup commonly used to thicken ice cream. Why? Cussler wanted to see if humans swim slower in syrup than they do in water. (Surprisingly, they don’t.)

• After studying overweight children playing with weighted and unweighted blocks, researchers at Indiana State University concluded that lifting weights burns more calories than
not
lifting weights. (They had to do a study to figure that out?) The scientists plan to use the findings to help fight obesity by manufacturing teddy bears with three-pound weights inside.

• In 2005 John Mainstone and Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland (Australia) determined that congealed tar flows through a funnel at a rate of about one drop per nine years. How did they know? They’d been monitoring the tar for 78 years. (Parnell actually died before the results were announced, and to date, nobody has actually been in the room when a tar drop dripped.)

• In 2003 two scientists went to Antarctica to find the exact velocity by which penguins expel waste. Their report: “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defecation.”

• In 1999, Harvard University conducted a study called “Gorillas in our Midst.” Test subjects were instructed to watch people pass a basketball back and forth. Meanwhile, the subjects failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking around the room. Researchers’ conclusion: When we’re paying too close attention to one thing, we tend to overlook what’s going on right around us. (Even a person in a gorilla costume.)

Number-one cause of death in hurricanes: drowning. (90% of all fatalities.)

THE TWO GRAVES OF MAD ANTHONY WAYNE

Historians tell many stories about heroes who are so beloved that everyone wants a piece of them. In the case of this man, they mean it literally.

W
HAT’S IN A NAME
Great generals frequently earn descriptive nicknames: “Blood and Guts” Patton, “Black Jack” Pershing, and “Stonewall” Jackson, to name a few. Revolutionary War hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne got his nickname for his bravery in battle—he was bold, he took big risks…and he won. His forces smashed the British in a surprise attack on Stony Point, New York; he led the American victory at Monmouth, New Jersey; and he prevented a disastrous rout at Brandywine in Pennsylvania. Washington’s reports repeatedly praised Major General Wayne for his leadership and valor, and the Continental Congress awarded him a special gold medal celebrating the victory at Stony Point.

Wayne was born near Philadelphia on New Year’s Day, 1745. He grew up to be a surveyor, then took over as manager of the family tannery until the Revolutionary War began. When the war ended, Wayne returned to civilian life, but his fighting days weren’t over yet. In 1792 President Washington called him out of retirement for one last combat mission.

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