Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (13 page)

Experts say cats watch more TV than dogs do. (Cats are more visual; dogs rely more on smell.)

MUSCLE RANKING

Object of the Game:
This hour-long, primetime Saturday night show featured regular people “pitted against celebrities and athletes in offbeat tests of agility and strength.” If you won a round you moved up in the “Muscle Ranking.” Michael Jordan appeared on an episode in 1999.

Anything for Money:
One week contestants might have to springboard over a 10-foot pyramid; on another, they’d have to hit baseballs through small holes in a wooden tic-tac-toe board. Then there was the time they flung themselves into Velcro-covered walls while wearing Velcro-covered suits.

Update:
Muscle Ranking
was pulled from the airwaves in May 2002 after two contestants suffered spinal injuries while taping the show—one was hurt when he fell into a moat while jumping on a giant styrofoam ball, the other while trying to stop a different giant ball from rolling down a slope. “The purpose of the show is to entertain, but if people are getting hurt in its making, the audience can’t enjoy it,” a spokesman told reporters.

*        *        *

CELEBRITY REVENGE

In 1938, legendary film producer David O. Selznick held auditions for a lead role in his upcoming film,
Gone With the Wind
. He wanted a redhead. A young starlet named Lucille Ball came in to audition, but it was raining outside and she was soaked. She was led to the producer’s office and left alone to wait. Selznick walked in as she was trying to dry her hair. He had her quickly read the lines and dismissed her. She didn’t get the part.

Revenge!
Lucy never forgot. In 1957 Lucy and her husband, Desi Arnaz, by then two of the country’s biggest stars, bought Selznick’s old studio, renamed it Desilu, and set up their headquarters…in the office that Lucy remembered so well.

Got a
complex
? Psychologist Carl Jung coined the term in the early 1900s.

LOCAL HEROES

Here are the stories of ordinary people who were faced with an extraordinary situation…and did something about it
.

S
PILT MILK
Local Hero:
Steve Leech, a milkman in Cornwall, England
Heroic Deed:
Putting out a dangerous fire

The Story:
Leech was making his regular deliveries one morning when he noticed smoke pouring out of a gift shop along his route. He called 999 (the English equivalent of 911) but then decided not to wait for the fire fighters to arrive. “I saw the row of apartments up above the shop,” he explains, “and I thought, bloody hell, I’d better do something!”

What did Leech do? He kicked open the door of the shop and started pouring milk on the fire. By the time the firefighters arrived 15 minutes later, the fire was under control—and Leech is credited with saving the row of eight shops, as well as the lives of the people living in the apartments above them. “It was hard work opening all those bottles, since they have tamper-proof lids,” he says, “but it was even harder trying to explain to my boss where all the milk (320 pints) had gone.”

Update:
Leech needn’t have worried about his boss—he not only kept his job, in January 2002 England’s National Dairymen’s Association named him the “Hero Milkman of the Millennium.”

FIRST-RATE THIRD GRADER

Local Hero:
Austin Rosedale, a third-grader at Sunny Hills Elementary School in Issaquah, Washington

Heroic Deed:
Saving his teacher from choking

The Story:
Austin was in the computer lab one day in November 2001 when his teacher, Mrs. Precht, started choking on a cough drop. She was just about to pass out when he sprang into action.

Luckily for Precht, Austin’s parents had given him a Day Planner organizer that happened to have an instructional diagram of the Heimlich maneuver printed on the cover. Austin had read it so many times that helping Mrs. Precht was a snap. With two thrusts to her abdomen, he dislodged the cough drop. “I just visualized the pictures,” he says, “and remembered what I’d read.”

Birmingham, England, has 22 more miles of canals than Venice, Italy.

BLUE’S BROTHER

Local Hero:
Art Aylesworth, a Montana insurance agent

Heroic Deed:
Helping to save the mountain bluebird and the western bluebird from extinction

The Story:
A longtime conservationist, Aylesworth had worked on a few wildlife habitat restoration projects. But in the mid-1970s he became alarmed when he learned that extensive logging in the state was pushing the bluebirds—which nest in the cavities of old trees—toward extinction. So he got some scrap lumber and built some nest boxes for the birds; then he founded an organization called the Mountain Bluebird Trails Group and recruited hundreds of volunteers to do the same thing.

The organization gave the boxes to anyone willing to put them up and keep an eye on them; it estimates that over the next 25 years, it gave away more than 35,000 boxes. Did it work? Yes—when Aylesworth started handing out the boxes in 1974, only a handful of the bluebirds were thought to still exist; by 1998 the count had grown to more than 17,000.

GUN CONTROL

Local Hero:
Dale Rooks, a crossing guard at Suter Elementary School in Pensacola, Florida

Heroic Deed:
Finding a unique way to get speeding motorists to slow down in front of the elementary school

The Story:
For years Rooks had tried everything he could think of to get drivers to slow down in front of the school—including waving his hands and yelling—but nothing worked. Then inspiration struck him—he got an old hair dryer and covered it with gray duct tape so that it looked like a radar gun, and started pointing it at speeders. That did the trick. “People are slowing down, raising their hands at me apologetically,” he says. “It’s amazing how well it works.”

Update:
Inspired by his example, fifth-graders at the school set up a lemonade stand and raised $93 to buy Rooks a
rea
l radar gun. “I don’t mean it to be funny,” he says, “but it looks just like a hair dryer.”

World’s bestselling cookie: Oreo.

MONEY TALKS

A few priceless nuggets from our quote bank
.

“Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”

—
Henry James

“It’s not money that brings happiness; it’s lots of money.”

—
Russian proverb

“If you can actually count your money, then you are not really a rich man.”

—
J. Paul Getty

“Once in a while my wife complains about my jokes. I tell her to go cry in a big bag of money.”

—
Ray Ramano

“A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.”

—
Bible

“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”

—
Robert Graves

“Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.”

—
Ben Franklin

“Money is a poor man’s credit card.”

—
Marshall McLuhan

“Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. It sacks cities, drives men from their homes, teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.”

—
Sophocles

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

—
Dorothy Parker

“It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.”

—
Alan Alda

“Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.”

—
Henry Fielding

“Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.”

—
Aphra Behn

“When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.”

—
Voltaire

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

—
Senator Everett Dirksen

Winston Churchill called his wife “Kat.” She called him “Pug.”

SORRY ABOUT THAT

There are a few lessons we all learned when we were kids—be courteous to others, share your toys, and when you screw up, say you’re sorry. Some people got it…and apparently some didn’t
.

H
O! HO! HO!
Incident:
In December 2002, Reverend Lee Rayfield of Maidenhead, England, had to send out letters of apology to his parishioners. Reverend Rayfield had held a special Christmas service just for children. A horrified shock went through the room when Rayfield delivered an unexpected message: Santa Claus, he told the the kids, is
dead
. In order to deliver presents to all the children in the world, he explained, the reindeer would have to travel 3,000 times the speed of sound—which would make them all burn up in less than a second. The audience included “a lot of young children who still believe in Santa Claus,” said one angry parent, “or did until last night.”

Apology:
“I guess I made a serious misjudgment,” said Rayfield.

HOT WATER

Incident:
After American-turned-Taliban John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan in November 2002, the press reported that he was from Marin County, California. That prompted former President Bush to describe Lindh as “some misguided Marin County hottubber.” Jackie Kerwin, editor of the
Marin Independent Journal
, took exception to the insult and urged readers to write letters about it. And they did. Letters poured in, prompting newspapers, radio, and TV news programs to spread the story across the country.

Apology:
“Dear Ms. Kerwin,” Bush wrote to her, “Call off the dogs, please. I surrender. I will never use ‘hot tub’ and ‘Marin County’ in the same sentence again.” He even made a personal phone call. “He gets on the phone and says ‘Hot tubs for sale,’” Kerwin said, “and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the conversation. But I think he was genuinely sorry.”

HERE’S MUD (SLINGING) IN YOUR EYE

Incident:
In the 2000 media guide for their men’s basketball team, Ohio State University displayed photographs of some distinguished alumni, including comedian Richard Lewis, who had graduated in 1969. But it turned out to be a dubious honor: the caption below his name said, “Actor, Writer, Comedian, Drunk.” This was particularly insulting because Lewis is a recovering alcoholic. “I was really depressed that I would be so defamed,” he said.

Why do we all know Ann Turner Cook? Her face is on Gerber Baby Food jars.

Apology:
Red-faced officials apologized profusely…and then fired the editor, Gary Emig, who had put in “drunk” as a joke in an early draft, but forgot to take it out.

AN INFIELD HIT

Incident:
Between innings at a June 2003 baseball game, the Milwaukee Brewers were staging one of their fans’ favorite events: the Sausage Race. Dressed up as a bratwurst, a hot dog, an Italian sausage, and a Polish sausage, four Brewer employees raced around the infield. But as they passed the opposing team’s dugout, Pittsburgh Pirate first baseman Randall Simon reached out and playfully whacked one of the runners with his bat. The employee fell to the ground, causing another runner to fall, too. The costumes were padded, so the victims received only minor knee scrapes, but Simon was taken from the park in handcuffs, charged with disorderly conduct, and fined $438.

Apology:
An embarrassed Simon later called the injured sausages—Mandy Block and Veronica Piech—to personally apologize. Block, the Italian sausage that took the hit, accepted the apology and asked for an autographed bat from Simon—the one that he used to hit her. (She got it.)

I APOLOGIZE IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION

Incident:
In an exhibit called “The Roman Experience,” the Deva Museum in Chester, England, invited visitors to stroll through streets constructed to look as they did during Roman times. Hoping to provide an authentic experience, staff added an odor to the Roman latrines. They got one called “Flatulence” from Dale Air, a company that makes aromas for several museums. Unfortunately, it was too authentic: several schoolchildren immediately vomited.

Apology:
Museum supervisor Christine Turner publicly apologized, saying, “It really was disgusting.” But Dale Air director Frank Knight was somewhat less contrite. “We feel sorry for the kids,” he said, “but it is nice to see that the smell is so realistic.”

The world’s youngest-ever mother was five years old and lived in Peru in the 1950s.

CRÈME
de la
CRUD

The best of the worst of the worst
.

W
ORST MATADOR
“
El Gallo” (Raphael Gomez Ortega), an early-20th-century bullfighter

El Gallo employed a technique called the
espantada
(sudden flight) that was unique in the history of professional bullfighting—when the bull entered the ring, he panicked, dropped his cape, and ran away. “All of us artists have bad days,” he would explain. His fights were so hilarious that he was brought out of retirement seven times; in his last fight in October 1918, he claimed he spared the bull because “it winked at him.” (The audience thought it was a big joke, but Ortega’s relatives didn’t—his brother was so ashamed during that last fight that he entered the ring and killed the bull himself…just to salvage the family’s honor.)