Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (43 page)

There are a lot of fish in the sea, but what if your fish is your first cousin, or your first cousin once removed? You can get married, depending on what state you live in. (By the way, a first cousin once removed means that you and your cousin are from different generations.)

• First cousins and first cousins once removed can marry with no restrictions in Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia.

• First cousins once removed, but not first cousins of the same generation, may marry in Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Texas.

• Marriage between first cousins of any type is illegal in Kentucky, Nevada, and Ohio.

• If first cousins get married in a state that allows cousin marriages, the marriage will still be valid if they move to Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Washington, or Wyoming. (But they can’t get married in those states.)

• First cousins in which one of the parties was adopted may marry in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oregon, and West Virginia.

• In Minnesota, cousins can marry if they are a member of one of the state’s four indigenous Native American tribes that traditionally allow the practice: Okijbwe, Sioux, Chippewa, or Dakota.

• First cousins wishing to marry in Maine have to pass a genetic test to ensure that their children won’t have birth defects.

• If two brothers marry two sisters, the resulting children from each of those marriages are called
double first cousins
, and they may not marry each other in North Carolina.

• Many states just try to avoid the issue of cousins having children together by imposing age restrictions. In Arizona and Indiana, first cousins over age 65 can marry; in Wisconsin and Utah, it’s 55; and in Illinois, it’s set at age 50.

Singer Sting believes in ghosts. He claims one visited him in his bedroom
.

ODD EATS

These top chefs create some crazy dishes
.

F
ISH WRAP
. Chef Homaro Cantu serves sushi that includes no fish and has almost no calories…because it’s made out of paper. Invented in his Chicago restaurant, the paper is made with soy and cornstarch and then run through a printer that imprints it with photos of fish, rice, and seaweed—all in vegetable-based ink. Result: edible, three-dimensional sushi paper crafts. Cantu’s plans for the future include using helium and superconductors to make levitating food.

MASH-UPS
. At one of the world’s finest restaurants—Fat Duck, located near London—head chef Heston Blumenthal practices
molecular gastronomy
, which combines chemistry and various scientific processes such as flash-freezing and crystallizing food with nitrous oxide, or turning alcohol into vapor. Some of his bizarre new dishes: sardine-flavored sorbet, bacon-and-egg ice cream, and chocolate infused with leather, oak, and tobacco aromas.

FOAMING AT THE MOUTH
. Ferran Adria, head chef at El Bulli in northeastern Spain, also dabbles in molecular gastronomy. His most famous achievement is
food foam
. In order to enhance or concentrate a flavor, Adria condenses the ingredients down to an airy foam that melts in your mouth. Using a special bottle charged with nitrous oxide cartridges (similar to a whipped cream container), Adria has concocted such culinary treats as espresso foam, mushroom foam, and beef foam.

AN UPLIFTING MEAL
. For the Gastronomy 2009 avant-garde food festival in Bogotá, Colombia, two students from the Quindio culinary school made a dessert out of Viagra. Their passion fruit pudding (garnished with whipped cream and chocolate and served in a parfait glass) featured a dissolved pill for erectile dysfunction. Co-creator Juan Sebastian Gomez said the idea was to “reinvent Viagra as an aphrodisiac.” (What was it before?)

Some Japanese restaurants practice
nyotaimori
: serving food on human bodies (usually naked)
.

ODD JOBS

At the BRI, our job is to search for crazy stories and put them in a book (with a two-headed duck on the cover) that will be read in the bathroom. In comparison to these professions, our job is quite normal
.

M
OURNING CLOWN
. An Irish company called Dead Happy Ireland sends out their “mourning clowns” to wakes and funerals. The clowns make balloon animals, squirt water out of their corsages, stumble toward the open casket as if they’re going to fall in, and fart at inappropriate times. Says founder John Brady, “I’ve been to so many funerals, and they’re always so sad. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something funny happen?” Cost: 150 Euros (about $220).

DOG POOP PICKER-UPPER
. This used to be a job exclusively for neighborhood teenagers who needed to earn a little money, but today dog-pile removal is big business. For example, Poop Patrol in San Diego has a fleet of trucks and workers use specialized “extraction tools.” Their motto: “Always on doody.”

GROSS STUNT PRODUCER
. Thinking up new and detestable ways to make reality-show contestants (and viewers) cringe, these people create and sample eyeball soups, maggot slushies, and other foul “food.” “If I can’t keep it down,” said
Fear Factor
production assistant Josh Silberman, “then perhaps it’s not edible.”

GUMBUSTER
. When there’s something strange stuck to the sole of your shoe, who ya gonna call? Gumbusters! Equipped with a contraption similar to a rug cleaner, Gumbusters will superheat the sticky goo so it can be easily washed and vacuumed off the floor or sidewalk. They’re in great demand in most major cities (except in Singapore, where chewing gum is illegal).

LA-Z-BOY CHAIR TESTER
. This job is not quite as easy as it sounds. “You can work up quite a sweat after the first hour or two,” says Mike Pixly, who rocks back and forth up to 2,800 times per shift at the La-Z-Boy factory in Monroe, Michigan. Though he only earns $6 per hour, this “motivated self-starter” (as his boss calls him) appreciates the great workout for his calves and abdominal muscles.

In 2009 a woman who was bitten on the buttocks by a police dog sued the dog. (She lost.)

MILITARY ROLE-PLAYER
. Defense contractors are looking for a few good actors to take part in elaborate war games that help soldiers train for upcoming missions. These days, the casting calls are primarily for actors who look, or better yet speak, Arabic to play Middle Eastern villagers and combatants. The job entails running around shooting guns loaded with blanks, negotiating with soldiers, and playing dead.

CHICKEN SEXER
. These skilled hatchery workers must separate baby chicks by gender—females will become egg layers; males are saved for later consumption or breeding purposes, or are disposed of. How do the sexers determine gender? Sometimes by the appearance of the feathers, but most often by squeezing the chick until its anal vent opens up—a little bump means it’s a male.

MEDICAL MARIJUANA TESTER
. Using a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the University of Iowa pays people $620 to be subjects of a 60-hour study. Basically, the subjects smoke marijuana joints while researchers monitor their brain function in an effort to help determine whether marijuana can be used medicinally, or if it does little more than give users the munchies.

CONDOM TESTER
. Durex in Australia recruits men of all sizes to try their products and give feedback on comfort and durability. While it’s not a paying job, testers receive $60 worth of Durex products, and one lucky guy wins a $1,000 bonus. (And for the ladies, there’s also a job called “tampon tester.”)

LAUGHTER THERAPIST
. Has modern life become so bleak that we need specialists to teach us how to laugh? Yes, according to “joyologist” (and clinical psychologist) Steven Wilson, who helps his patients reconnect with the “joyful, zestful, exuberant laughter we all had as babies.” A good belly laugh, Wilson says, can lead to a stronger immune system, less stress, and a slower aging process (except for the wrinkles that form on your cheeks from all that laughing).

Peak time for most Internet searches: 5:00 p.m. For “adult” Internet searches: 11:00 p.m
.

RIP: REST IN PLASTIC

This story has everything a great
Bathroom Reader
article should: death, a mad scientist, an eccentric celebrity, and polymerized semisolid body parts
.

T
HE ANTI-FRANKENSTEIN
Some call what Professor Gunther von Hagens does with dead bodies ghoulish and degrading. Not helping his image is his trademark outfit—a pressed black suit and a black fedora (the kind of hat Freddy Krueger wears). But the 65-year-old German anatomist dismisses his critics: “In all human history, the human body was always exploited for disgusting feelings. I’m doing the opposite. I break with the tradition of Frankenstein.”

Von Hagens is the founder of Body Worlds, a touring exhibition that has attracted more than 29 million visitors since 1995. The show utilizes
plastination
—a process von Hagens invented and patented in the late 1970s—that preserves dead bodies and organs for display and study. The process combines his two favorite childhood activities: building model airplanes and learning anatomy from the doctors at a hospital where he spent a lot of time because he was a hemophiliac.

Plastination involves removing the liquid (water and fats) from a corpse and replacing it with reactive polymers (plastics) so that the body will become semisolid and won’t decay. Once completed, the mostly skinless figures (with muscles, organs, and bones showing) are set in various poses. A typical Body Worlds exhibit may feature skinned cadavers sitting around a table playing poker (one is handing another a card with his foot in a parody of the
Dogs Playing Poker
painting). Or you may see an anatomically correct couple performing a gymnastics routine, or a corpse riding a skateboard, or a plastinated rider on a plastinated horse. “Plastinates show the beauty of our body interior,” says von Hagens.

JUST PLAIN SICK

“It’s pornography of the dead human body,” says Catholic philosopher Thomas Hibbs of Baylor University. “The problem with death in our culture is not that we have taboos about it, but that we lack a rich language for articulating the experience and its meaning. It’s hard to see how Body Worlds will help solve that problem.”

Safety first! Warning label on Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts: “Pastry Filling May Be Hot When Heated.”

Dr. Hibbs is one of many theologians offended by von Hagens’s works. Britain’s Bishop of Manchester has repeatedly referred to von Hagens as a “body snatcher” and claims that the donation of bodies for plastination has resulted in fewer organs being donated for transplant. Ethics questions have dogged Body Worlds from the beginning, including accusations that von Hagens steals his cadavers from prisons and insane asylums in China and former Soviet countries. Von Hagens responds: “What I certainly
never
use for public exhibitions are unclaimed bodies, prisoners, bodies from mental institutions, and executed prisoners.” All of his cadavers, he says, are from willing North American and European donors (a claim that was verified by a California ethics commission investigation in 2004).