Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (31 page)

In June 2001, after two sewer breakdowns that caused massive “solid-waste” flooding, officials in Kannapolis, North Carolina, issued this plea to residents: Stop flushing your underwear down the toilet. According to Jeff Rogers, operations manager with the Sewer Department, workers pulled wadded rags from the lift station pump…and they looked a lot like underwear. “People flush all kinds of different things that they shouldn't be flushing,” he said. “We definitely don't want them flushing any underpants.”

Two women have opened a store in Raleigh, North Carolina, hoping to create a new market: lingerie for religious women. The Seek Ye First Lingerie shop appeals to women who want to be “alluring, but not sleazy,” said the two Baptist owners. Apparently customers like the idea of it's-no-sin underwear—the owners report brisk sales at the “thong rack.”

When someone passes away and their remains are buried or cremated, it's said that they are being “laid to rest.” Unfortunately, that's not always the case. For some people, the journey is just beginning.

Claim to Fame:
Writer, critic, and member of New York's famous Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and 1930s
Final Resting Place:
Her ashes were interred in 1988, after spending more than 15 years in a filing cabinet.

Details:
Parker died in June 1967. She left instructions that her body be cremated, but didn't specify what she wanted done after that. When nobody showed up to claim the ashes, the funeral home stored them (for a few years), then mailed them to her lawyers. The lawyers put the box containing her ashes on top of a filing cabinet, apparently waiting for Parker's friend and executor, Lillian Hellman, to collect them. Hellman never did, so when she died in 1984, the law firm began meeting with Parker's surviving friends to figure out what to do.

Parker had left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom she had never met), and when he was assassinated, everything went to the NAACP. When both the Algonquin Hotel (her legendary hangout) and the
New Yorker
magazine (her publisher) turned down Parker's ashes, the NAACP volunteered to create a memorial garden for her at their headquarters in Baltimore. Finally, in 1988, Parker's ashes were placed in an urn next to a marker inscribed with Parker's self-penned epitaph: “Excuse My Dust.”

Claim to Fame:
Founding Father and author of “Common Sense,” a political pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution
Final Resting Place:
Unknown

Details:
Paine didn't mince his words; he offended just about everyone he knew in the United States, England, and France.
When he died in 1809 at the age of 72, he had few friends left among the Founding Fathers. He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York; only six people attended his funeral.

Ten years later, an English admirer named William Cobbett decided to return Paine to England, where he could be given a proper funeral and burial. Rather than getting permission from Paine's relatives or the new owners of his farm, Cobbett just dug the body up and snuck it to England in a shipping crate. But since he didn't have money for a funeral or a decent grave, Cobbett had to stage a series of “bone rallies” across England, raising money by charging for a peek at Paine's corpse.

No luck—the public wasn't interested. When Cobbett couldn't even interest people in buying locks of the dead man's hair, he finally gave up and stored the bones under his bed.

When Cobbett died penniless in 1835, the bones were seized as part of his estate and scheduled to be auctioned off to pay his creditors. Even that plan failed—the auctioneer balked at the idea of selling human remains to satisfy a debt. Paine's skeleton was turned over to Cobbett's son, and what he did with it remains a mystery.

Claim to Fame:
King of France from 1643 to 1715

Final Resting Place:
An English dinner plate

Details:
During the French Revolution, as the country collapsed into anarchy, Louis XIV's tomb was raided and his embalmed heart was stolen. It was eventually purchased by an English nobleman named Lord Harcourt. Harcourt sold it to the Reverend William Buckland, dean of Westminster Cathedral; when Buckland died in 1856, the heart was passed on to his son Francis.

Francis Buckland was a peculiar man with some peculiar theories. He believed that the way to assure national security was to make England completely food self-sufficient and that the best way to do that was to raise—and eat—exotic animals. How exotic? Over time Buckland graduated from eating ostrich and buffalo to more unsual fare, including moles, flies, slugs, and porpoise heads. He eventually decided that even the king of France himself was fair game as a protein source, so one night he cooked up the royal heart and ate it. “Never before,” he told his astonished dinner guests, “have I eaten the heart of a king.”

Sometimes we're blessed with it, sometimes we're cursed with it—dumb luck. Here are some examples of people who lucked out…for better or worse.

Jason Powell worked on a grass farm in Corvallis, Oregon. In early 2002, he lost his wallet somewhere in the fields and figured it was gone for good. But it wasn't. Apparently it was picked up by a combine, then baled up with the straw and exported to Japan. Six months later, Powell received the wallet in the mail—returned to him by the Japanese farmer who found it—with his driver's license, credit cards, and $6 still inside.

While visiting their sons in Nebraska, Larry and Leita Hatch stopped at a local Burger King. Larry bought a soft drink and when he peeled off the “Cash Is King” game sticker, he became the only $1 million winner in the entire country. (Wait, it gets better.) He stopped at a grocery store to make a copy of the ticket, but when he got to his son's house, he found he'd lost the original. So he went back to the grocery store—three hours later—and calmly picked up the ticket where it was lying…on the floor in the checkout line.

Even if you have a winning lottery ticket, you have to turn it in before the deadline in order to claim your prize. In 1994 Duane and Nancy Black of Bullhead City, Arizona, read about an unclaimed lottery ticket. Value: $1.8 million. So just for the heck of it they decided to look through their stash of old tickets—and they found the winner. They immediately got on a plane to Phoenix and claimed their prize…two hours before the six-month ticket expired.

In October 1999, 56-year-old Bev Marshall-Smith was surf-fishing off New Zealand's North Island when a large fish chased her lure into the shallows. Thrilled, she grabbed a piece of driftwood and
charged into the water to get it. She must not have been able to see what she'd caught because when the fish refused to go quietly, she started clubbing it. “Every time he wrestled, I hit him,” she said. Ultimately, she beat it to death… but the wrestling match could have ended differently. When she went in to collect her prize, she discovered she'd been wrestling with a six-foot blue shark.

On April 3, 1996, Mohamed Samir Ferrat, an Algerian business associate of U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was scheduled to fly with Brown from Bosnia to Croatia. In a bizarre twist of fate, Ferrat backed out of the trip at the last minute. Brown's plane crashed, killing all 35 passengers. Ferrat probably felt like a lucky man, but only three months later, on July 17, he boarded TWA flight 800, which exploded over Long Island Sound, killing all 230 passengers and crewmembers… including Ferrat.

Every year the Dearborn Heights Police Supervisors Association holds a raffle in Taylor, Michigan, and because it's a fundraiser for the police, they're careful to be sure everything is aboveboard. The prize for the 2001 raffle was a $20,000 Harley-Davidson Road King Classic; the winning ticket was to be picked by the 2000 winner, an autoworker named Tom Grochoki. There were 7,800 tickets in the barrel. Grochoki picked one, handed it to Lt. Karl Kapelczak, and went back to the crowd to hear the winner's name announced. The winner: Tom Grochoki.

It was bad luck when a 20-year-old Greek man accidentally shot himself in the head with his speargun while fishing off the island of Crete. A lifeguard found him floating in the water six hours later, the spear entering his jaw, going through his brain, and protruding from the top of his skull. But it was incredibly good luck when surgeons discovered that the spear had passed through one of the spaces in the brain that are nonfunctional—if it was just millimeters to the left or right he would have suffered serious brain injury or died. They removed it in a three-hour operation that left the man with no brain damage and no health problems.

Things aren't always as they seem, and savvy
marketers can turn lying into an art form
.
But sometimes they get caught
.

T
HE PRODUCT:
Heinz Ketchup

YOU ASSUME:
When you buy a bottle of ketchup that says “20 oz.” on it, you get 20 ounces of ketchup.

WOULD THEY LIE TO US?
Bill Baker of Redding, California, bought a 20-ounce bottle of ketchup for his wife's meatloaf. The recipe called for 20 ounces exactly, but when they poured it in the measuring cup, it was an ounce and a half short.

EXPOSED:
Bill got ticked off. “If it says 20 ounces, it should be 20 ounces,” he said. He called the state's Division of Measurement, setting off a five-year statewide investigation of H. J. Heinz Co. What did they find? Heinz's bottled products, from the 20-ounce to the 64-ounce size, were regularly 0.5% to 2% short. That may not seem like much, but officials estimated that Californians had been cheated out of 10 million ounces—78,124 gallons—of the red stuff. That's $650,000 worth of ketchup. Heinz was ordered to pay $180,000 in civil penalties, and agreed to overfill their bottles for one year—by about 10 million ounces.

THE PRODUCT:
Used cars

YOU
ASSUME: When you buy a used car from big-name automaker's dealership, you're getting a safe, reliable car.

WOULD THEY LIE TO
US? Auto manufacturers buy back about 100,000 cars every year because of defects. Under federal “lemon laws,” if they can't fix a car's problem, they have to buy it back. Where does it go from there? For years automakers claimed they would never resell a defective car; it would either be destroyed or studied by their engineers.

EXPOSED:
In March 2001, in a lawsuit over a “laundered lemon” sold to a North Carolina couple, DaimlerChrysler was forced to reveal some incriminating facts: Between 1993 and 2000, the auto
giant had paid $1.3 billion to buy back more than 50,000 vehicles—and resold nearly all of them, recouping two-thirds of the buyback cost. They had been sold to Chrysler dealers who then resold them to the public. And, most damaging to the company, many of the legally required disclosure forms were unsigned, meaning buyers were told nothing about the cars' histories.

In July 2001, Chrysler settled with the couple for an undisclosed amount, but the company was still facing a class-action suit inspired by the case. In December 2001, another couple in California won a similar case against Ford Motor Co., who, the jury ruled, had knowingly resold them a lemon. Amount the jury ordered Ford to pay: $10 million.

THE PRODUCT:
Movie reviews

YOU ASSUME:
The movie reviews you read in newspapers and magazines are from authentic, unbiased movie critics.

WOULD THEY LIE TO US?
In 2001 several advertisements for Sony-made films featured quotes from reviews by “David Manning” of “The
Ridgefield
Press,” a small paper in Connecticut. Manning always seemed to give Sony's movies high praise. His take on A
Knight's Tale
star Heath Ledger: “This year's hottest new star!”

EXPOSED:
After
Newsweek
reporter John Horn questioned the authenticity of the ads in June 2001, and the state of Connecticut investigated, Sony admitted they'd written the reviews themselves. David Manning didn't exist, and the real
Ridgefield Press
knew nothing about it. The investigation also revealed that people appearing in Sony's TV commercials—who seemed to be genuine moviegoers—were actually Sony employees. “These deceptive ads deserve two thumbs down,” said state Attorney General Richard Blumen-thal. In February 2002, Sony was fined $325,000 and agreed to stop the practice. After the case, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Artisan Entertainment all admitted that they, too, had used employees and actors posing as moviegoers in their TV ads.