Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (36 page)

“As for ghosts, there is scarcely any other matter upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since early times.”

—Sigmund Freud

The 3 U.S. states with the most ghost sightings: California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania
.

POLITICS AS (UN)USUAL

The most popular politicians are often the ones who seem like they’re “one of us”—ordinary people. But just like us ordinary people, they sometimes make some very weird decisions
.

G
ETTING A LEG UP
Hajnal Ban, a city councilor in Logan City, Australia, always felt that at 5′0″ she wasn’t taken seriously, either as a lawyer or as a politician. So in 2001, she went to an orthopedic clinic in Russia and paid $40,000 to have her legs broken in four places. Then, over the course of nine months, surgeons stretched Ban’s legs by a millimeter or so every day. After nearly a year of excruciating pain in a foreign hospital, Ban returned to her city council position…three inches taller.

SMOKING SECTION FOR ONE

In Australia, it’s illegal for people under the age of 18 to smoke. But officials at the Department of Education of the Capital Territory (the district that includes the capital city of Canberra) have allowed a 16-year-old student at Stromlo High School not only to legally smoke, but to take cigarette breaks during her classes. The ruling was based on a doctor’s recommendation that the student is “so clinically addicted to nicotine” that she can’t function without constantly consuming it—and that
not
smoking would make her schoolwork suffer.

HOW STEREOTYPICAL

In 2006 Bonilyn Wilbanks-Free was the town manager (similar to a mayor) of Golden Beach, Florida, when she referred to one of her assistants as “Mammy.” The assistant, whose name is actually Barbara Tarasenko, is African American, and Wilbanks-Free, who is white, was evidently referring to an old racial stereotype of smiling, motherly, African-American maid characters. Tarasenko, visibly offended, wasn’t any happier when Wilbanks-Free tried to soften her first comment by saying, “You know how much I love Aunt Jemima.” A month later, Wilbanks-Free resigned her position.

It is still technically against the law for a woman to wear pants in Paris
.

DOWN-HOME COOKIN’

In 2008 a heated presidential campaign and a press hungry for human-interest stories was the perfect recipe for…well, “Recipegate.” Presidential candidate John McCain and his wife Cindy—heiress to a multimillion-dollar beer distribution company—were often criticized by their opponents as being out of touch with ordinary Americans. To counter that image, the McCain campaign began posting “Cindy’s McCain Family Recipes” on its Web site. One problem: The folksy recipes were lifted word for word from the Food Network Website—a fact that a New York attorney discovered when she went searching online for a tuna recipe. After news outlets got hold of the story, the McCain campaign quickly deleted the recipes and blamed the “error” on a low-level staffer, who was later “disciplined.”

A POLITICALLY CORRECT IDEA

In 2008 the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent, England, issued a ban on the term “brainstorming” because the term—which means coming up with ideas at a meeting—might be considered offensive to epileptics, whose seizures have been described by doctors as a “storm of the brain.” Instead, the council recommended the terms “thought sharing” and “blue-sky thinking.”

WANDERING COMRADE

In 1995 the Russian presidential delegation made an official state visit to Washington, D.C. The Clinton administration put the party up in Blair House, where visiting dignitaries often stay. But in the middle of the night, Secret Service agents found a man standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear, extremely drunk and trying to hail a cab so he could go get a pizza. The agents returned the man to Blair House after they determined his identity: Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”

—Mark Twain

Connecticut state representatives were caught playing solitare on their laptops during a 2009 budget mtg
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MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

After Uncle John saw the movie
The Matrix,
he was so inspired that he tried to run up the theater wall. He fell down. But he fared much better than these people…who also tried to copy something they saw on a screen
.

M
ONKEY SEE:
Joe Brumfield of Covington, Louisiana, watched an episode of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
in which a car thief soaked a vehicle in gasoline and set it on fire so it couldn’t be traced back to him.
MONKEY DO:
Brumfield stole a car and then tried the tactic. But as he was dousing the car, he splashed gas on his hands and arms. And then he lit the car on fire…along with himself. He tried to call 911, but couldn’t hold onto the (stolen) phone with his flaming hands. Brumfield ran to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for second-degree burns. Doctors alerted police, who were nice enough to wait until Brumfield was released to book him for auto theft. “Car thieves should not play with matches,” said officer Jack West.

MONKEY SEE:
In 2009 Darenell Jones had a lot to drink at a wedding in Farmington, New Mexico. Afterward, he and some friends went to a hotel room to watch Ultimate Fighting Championship’s
UFC Fight Night
on TV.

MONKEY DO:
The friends decided to recreate some of the Ultimate Fighting moves…but there’s a reason why UFC matches aren’t held in third-story hotel rooms. During the “fight,” Jones was thrown against a plate-glass window, which gave way, and he fell out—breaking through the glass and falling 20 feet to the sidewalk below. Paramedics tried to save him, but were unable to. According to police, “It was horseplay, basically.”

MONKEY SEE:
According to amateur filmmaker Mark Twitchell’s Facebook profile, “Mark has way too much in common with Dexter Morgan.” Who’s Dexter Morgan? He’s the fictional lead character on the television show
Dexter
, about a crime-scene investigator (Michael C. Hall) who moonlights as a vigilante who traps and murders rapists and serial killers.

There are more captive tigers in Texas than there are wild tigers in India
.

MONKEY DO:
In November 2008, Twitchell, of Edmonton, Alberta, turned one of
Dexter’s
plots into a real-life nightmare. After he answered an online personal ad, pretending to be a young woman, Twitchell lured 38-year-old Johnny Altinger to his house. Except Altinger wasn’t a serial killer; he was just a man looking for a date. His body was never found, but police identified enough evidence in Twitchell’s garage—including a script to a “show” that detailed his evil plot—to charge him with first-degree murder.

MONKEY SEE:
In the 1999 movie
Fight Club
, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) runs an underground club where men have bloody fistfights with each other. They also belong to “Project Mayhem,” a terrorist cell that blows up symbols of corporate America, including, in one scene, a Starbucks coffee shop. The film has garnered a huge cult following, and one of the biggest fans was 17-year-old Kyle Shaw, who maintained that he actually wanted to
be
Tyler Durden.
MONKEY DO:
In 2009 Shaw started his own fight club in New York City, but fighting his fellow teenagers wasn’t enough. So, following the model of Project Mayhem, Shaw built a crude homemade bomb and set it off in front of a Starbucks in the middle of the night, destroying an outdoor bench. Ignoring the first rule of Fight Club, which is that you do not talk about Fight Club, Shaw bragged about it to his friends, one of whom tipped off the police. (Coincidentally, the jail that Shaw went to had its own version of a fight club, called “The Program.” While he was on a pay phone, a much larger inmate walked up and hit Shaw in the face, giving him a black eye for his appearance in court the next day.)

DEADLY IRONY

In December 2009, police in North Fort Myers, Florida, responded to a call about a man lying on the tracks of the Seminole Gulf Railway. When police found him, he’d been run over by the train. They have no idea why the man was lying on the tracks, and at press time they had no leads about his identity. All they could initially determine was the cause of death: He’d been struck and killed by the “Murder Mystery Dinner Train.”