Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (4 page)

You may consider yourself a strange and unusual person. If so, see how you measure up against these oddballs
.

S
trange Person:
Nileen Namita of Brighton, England
Background:
In the late 1980s, Namita became convinced that she was a reincarnation of the ancient-Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Very Strange:
Namita decided that being a reincarnation of Nefertiti wasn’t enough; she had to also look like her. So she started having plastic surgeries. Using the famous 3,300-year-old bust of Nefertiti, which sits in a Berlin’s Neues Museum, as a model, Namita has had eight nose jobs, three chin implants, nine facelifts, two lip surgeries, five eye surgeries, and several other facial procedures—adding up to 51 operations in all. She turned 49 in 2009, and so far has spent more than $330,000 in her quest to look like the ancient queen. Did it work? By all accounts, no. She looks like…well, someone who’s had a lot of plastic surgery.

Strange Person:
Japanese truck driver Yuuki Oshima
Background:
One day in August 2009, 22-year-old Oshima was driving through the city of Noda when he saw a woman walking…and fell instantly in love with her. He discreetly followed her to her apartment, and over the next couple of months, tried to get up the courage to tell her his feelings…but he was too shy to do it face to face. Then he got an idea.

Very Strange:
Oshima went to the woman’s house in the middle of the night…and peed through the mail slot in her door. That, not surprisingly, didn’t cause the woman to fall in love with him. She called police. Oshima was arrested, and explained, “I absolutely went crazy for her the first time I saw her, and just did it.” He was charged with property damage.

Strange Person:
Rick Murray, a teenager from Montreal, Canada
Background:
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and live in the sewers,” said Murray, “But as I got older, I fell in love with zombies and wanted to become one.”

A heated jawbreaker can explode when bitten into
.

Very Strange:
Now Murray is known as “Zombie Boy.” His entire body is covered with tattoos that make him look like a zombie. Black ink surrounds Murray’s eyes; his “teeth” and “jawbones” can be seen beneath his cheeks, his “brain” appears from beneath his bald head; and his “guts,” “skeleton,” and several ghoulish designs are inked all over the rest of his body. When asked if people are bothered by his appearance, Murray said, “It’s like if you met someone with purple hair, after 10 minutes you’d think, ‘Oh yeah, they have purple hair. So what?’” He’s not done yet—Murray said that he’s planning on removing one of his ear lobes as well as the tip of his nose to complete the look of the undead.

Strange Person:
Melanie Renfrew of Burbank, California

Background:
In 2007 Renfrew, 54, saw local meteorologist Fritz Coleman on television. Renfrew, a geography professor at Los Angeles Harbor College, called the station to tell Coleman that he had confused “onshore” winds, which blow in from the sea, with “offshore” winds, which blow out. (She was right.)

Very Strange:
When she got no response, Renfrew called again, demanding an apology. When
that
didn’t work, Renfrew became obsessed—and over the next year called and e-mailed Coleman thousands of times, trying to get him to apologize to her on the air. In March 2008, Coleman got a restraining order against Renfrew, preventing her from coming within 100 feet of him, e-mailing him, or calling him. Renfrew kept harassing him anyway, and in October 2009 was convicted of violating the restraining order. She was given a year to comply, after which time, if she is still harassing the weatherman, she could be sentenced to jail. “I don’t feel obsessive,” she said in an interview. “It’s about the truth.” (She added that she is currently working on a book, titled
What It Took to Convince NBC the Winds are Coming From the
West.)

“You’re only given a little spark of madness; you mustn’t lose it.”

—Robin Williams

Exhibits at Washington, DC’s Newseum include the Unabomber’s cabin & Saddam Hussein’s poetry
.

DANCING BALONEY

A few of the latest phrases that have made their way, mostly via office workers and the Internet, into the English language
.

GOOD Job:
This acronym refers to a “Get Out Of Debt job”—a decent-paying job that you take just to pay down your debt, then quit.

Social Jet Lag:
The exhaustion felt after staying up too late doing social networking on sites like Facebook.

PEBCAK:
When your tech person grumbles this, the “Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.” And if the problem is an “ID-Ten-T,” they’re calling you an “ID10T.”

Seagull Manager:
A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops on everything, and then leaves.

Chips and Salsa:
Nicknames for hardware (chips) and software (salsa), e.g., “Is the problem in the chips or the salsa?”

Keyboard Plaque:
The disgusting stuff that builds up on your computer keys.

Chainsaw Consultant:
Hired by a company to figure out the easiest way to reduce the number of employees.

Telephone Number Salary:
The kind of salary we all wish for: one with seven digits.

Yuppie Food Stamps:
The $20 bills that are spewed out of ATMs, as in “Oh dear! I didn’t know the Chard and brie were going to cost so much! Better go get some more yuppie food stamps.”

Nomophobia:
Short for “nomobile phobia,” this is the terror that takes hold when you’re without your mobile phone, or simply out of signal range.

Assmosis:
A way to soak up success—not by doing actual work, but by being very good at kissing the boss’s ass.

Crapplet:
An “applet” is a computer application written to perform one task. (Example: the QuickTime movie player.) A “crapplet” is a crappy applet.

Dancing Baloney:
Unnecessary and garish animation on a Web site, which amateur designers love—and the rest of the world hates.

Uninstalled:
Fired.

Studies show that covering a wart with duct tape is more effective than having a doctor remove it
.

BACON FLOSS

Even though we’re told it’s bad for us, bacon seems to be more popular than ever
.

•
Bacon salt
. This is the product that launched the fad in 2007: flavored salt crystals that “make everything taste like bacon.”

•
Gummy bacon
. It’s just like gummy bears or gummy worms, but it looks like bacon (and, fortunately, tastes like candy).

•
Bacon vodka
. For years, vodka has been available in berry- and vanilla-flavored versions. But now there’s Bakon: premium vodka infused with the flavor of bacon. Maybe it’s not such a stretch—vodka is often made from potatoes, which do taste great with bacon.

•
Bacon-flavored envelopes
. Instead of getting a taste of glue whenever you lick the flap of one of these pink-and-white-swirled envelopes, you get a mouthful of artificial bacon flavor.

•
Bacon-flavored dental floss and toothpicks
. Because bacon tastes better than string and wood.

• Bacon wristbands
. A parody of the yellow Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” cancer-awareness bracelets, these are marbled pink and white, and emblazoned with the word “bacon” to promote awareness of…bacon.

• Bacon soap
. At one time, most soap was made from animal fat, and bacon is just salted pork fat and meat. Fragrances and chemicals are added, so you shouldn’t eat it, but it’s still bacon you can wash with.

•
Baconnaise
. Two of the world’s unhealthiest foods—bacon and mayonnaise—combined into one fatty concoction.

• Bacon action figures
. These come in a set of two: the heroic, all-American, strip-shaped “Mr. Bacon” and his nemesis, the evil, cube-shaped “Monsieur Tofu.”

France’s Villa Hamster hotel lets guests live as hamsters: They eat grain run on a wheel, and sleep on hay.

NEW DISEASES

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on swine flu or
E. coli,
the medical community discovers a new bug. Great—something else to worry about!

N
ew Disease:
Progressive inflammatory neuropathy

Symptoms:
Numbness, tingling, and/or burning in the arms and legs; fatigue; weakness in the limbs; temporary paralysis.

Discovery:
In February 2008, a translator at a medical clinic in southeastern Minnesota noticed that three different Spanish-speaking workers at a nearby pig slaughterhouse had recently come in complaining of fatigue and strange sensations in their arms and legs. She told a doctor, and the resulting investigation found that 12 people at the slaughterhouse had similar symptoms, and a few others at a pig slaughterhouse in Indiana did as well. All of the victims worked in similar locations in the plants: near the “head table”…where the pigs’ brains are removed from the carcasses with high-pressure air hoses. (The brains are then sold to food markets in Asia.) Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta are still conducting studies on the disease, but they believe it may be a brand-new illness. How do they think people catch it? By inhaling tiny pieces of pig brain, like those floating in the air at slaughterhouses. The body produces antibodies against the foreign brain bits, and the antibodies then attack the body’s own nerve fibers—resulting in this neurological illness.