Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (24 page)

Needless to say, both her husband and society at large found her new look cat-astrophic. Scandal ensued—involving Mr. Wildenstein and an affair with a Russian fashion model, gunplay, and acrimonious divorce proceedings. Not exactly a purr-fect ending.

Plenty of cosmetic surgery candidates enter their doctor’s office asking to have Angelina Jolie’s lips or George Clooney’s chin, but some patients take it too extremes. In 2004, MTV showcased a series entitled
I Want a Famous Face
, in which everyday people underwent major plastic surgeries in order to resemble celebrities, everyone from Brad Pitt to Carmen Electra. (On the side of sanity, when actress Drew Barrymore learned that a 23-year-old girl was scheduled to appear on the show to undergo procedures to look like her, she contacted the girl directly and convinced her not to go through with the surgeries.)

Other notable cases of idol insanity include Cindy Jackson, whose childhood fixation on her Barbie doll inspired her to undergo a total of 30 procedures to look like a real-life Barbie. Motivated by Jackson’s transformation, Tim Whitfield-Lynn went through multiple surgeries in order to resemble Barbie’s boyfriend Ken.

The reigning celebrity queen of extreme cosmetic surgery is most certainly the comedienne Joan Rivers, who has been candid about her many procedures. With her humor (if not her facial muscles) fully intact, Rivers even played up her self-described plastic surgery addiction in a 2008 Geico television commercial in which she delivered the lines, “Am I smiling? I can’t tell! I can’t feel my face!”

Ugliest Dog Contest

Westminster it’s not, but World’s Ugliest Dog contest in Petaluma, California, has been entertaining dog lovers every June for 20 years. It started as a local summer attraction in 1988 but got so much media attention that now news cameras outnumber entrants, Internet voting climbs to the tens of thousands, and ugly aspirants travel from as far away as Florida to compete. (Winners get trophies, prize money, and the title, of course.) Back in 2006, suspense was especially high because Sam, the champion for three years running, had died at the age of 14, and the field was wide open for the 18 (really bad-looking) contenders. Here’s a look at some of the ugliest winners ever to grace a dog show stage.

Awards:
World’s Ugliest Dog (2003, 2004, 2005)

Probably the most famous ugly dog, Sam was a 13-pound Chinese crested who was so ugly that his owner, Susie Lockheed, was scared of him when she first brought him home. (He was also so ugly that Japanese TV reporters compared him to Godzilla.) Sam was acne-riddled, blind, warty, and hairless (unless you count the straggly wisps sticking out of his head). He had crooked teeth, a fatty tumor on his chest, and a line of moles down his nose. But Lockheed loved him. Sam came to her as a rescue dog; his original owner lost her pet-friendly apartment and could no longer keep him. Early in their relationship, Lockheed was diagnosed with cancer. Sam slept with her, comforted her, and saw her through
chemotherapy, proving that judging an old dog on bad looks is never fair.

Cuddly side aside, Sam was plenty cranky, and had a fascination with his back leg. To Lockheed, it seemed that he believed there was an imaginary foe attached to his back leg. He’d snarl at it and bite, and whenever she gave him a treat, Sam would keep a close eye on that back leg to make sure it didn’t steal the snack away.

Award:
Ugliest Mutt (2005)

Sam may have gained worldwide fame for his hideousness, but his girlfriend—who is part Chihuahua, part Chinese crested—is pretty ill-favored, too. TatorTot, another dog belonging to Susie Lockheed, never did win the World’s Ugliest title, but she did take Ugliest Mutt honors in 2005. TatorTot has her looks and personality working against her, it seems. She’s only mostly hairless, not nearly as snarly as Sam, and has a tuft of white hair atop her head. Apparently, says Lockheed, TatorTot is just too cute to take home the top prize.

Award:
World’s Ugliest Dog (2006)

In 2006, Archie (yet another Chinese crested) earned the title of World’s Ugliest Dog. His owner, Heather Peoples, traveled all the way from Arizona to show off Archie’s attributes at the contest. Unlike Sam, Archie does have hair—it sticks up erratically all over his head. His tongue hangs out of one side of his mouth because he has no teeth to hold it in place. His naked, liver-colored belly resembles a sausage. And he’s so ugly that the animal shelter where he was living (and where Peoples worked) gave Peoples $10 to take him away. It was supposed to be just a temporary thing, but Peoples says her husband fell in love with the beauty-impaired beast: “Now when we go out, my husband carries Archie in his arms like a baby.”

Archie was the winner in a year fraught with scandal. The ugliest dog is crowned after an Internet voting campaign that lasts several weeks, but during the 2006 process, computer hackers infiltrated the contest’s Web site and erased votes from some of the top dogs. Fortunately, contest organizers discovered the crime
and remedied the situation: they started the voting over from scratch. In the end, Archie pulled past favorites Munchkin, Rascal, and Pee Wee Martini to take the crown.

Award:
World’s Ugliest Dog (2007)

This Chihuahua and Chinese crested mix took the top title after coming in second in 2006. He traveled all the way to California from New Jersey with his owner, Karen Quigley, who—despite the dog’s new title—thinks Elwood is “the cutest thing that ever lived.” Elwood’s Internet voters, obviously, disagreed. With his dark, almost hairless body (Elwood does have a tuft of white fur atop his misshapen head) and a tongue that always droops from his mouth, Elwood is sometimes called “Yoda” or “ET”—affectionate nicknames, for sure. Besides winning the title and taking home $1,000, Elwood is somewhat of a local celebrity back in New Jersey, where he’s a Good Will Ambassador for the SPCA. He and Quigley try to educate people about special-needs pets (from sick animals to ugly ones) and encourage residents to adopt homeless dogs and cats.

Do you like watching awards shows on TV? Then you have a lot more to choose from than just the Oscars and Grammys. There’s the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, the Tony Awards, the American Music Awards, the World Music Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, the TV Land Awards, the Food Network Awards, VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors, the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards, the Clio Awards, the BET Awards, the Radio Music Awards, the ESPY Awards, Soap Opera Digest Awards, the Family Television Awards, the Spike TV Scream Awards, the Reality Awards, and the CMT Flameworthy Video Awards.

Vieux Boulogne

When most people think of a smelly cheese, Limburger is what comes to mind. Comedians joke about its noxious stench, and even though Mighty Mouse had a weakness for it, the stuff’s indescribable scent repels most people. Researchers at the Netherlands’ Wageningen Agricultural University found that the mosquito species
Anopheles gambiae
“loves both stinky feet and Limburger cheese.” Limburger’s uniquely smelly properties come from
B. linens—
the same bacteria that attract malaria-carrying mosquitoes to stinking feet. But despite that fact, Limburger is
not
the world’s stinkiest cheese.

The
B. linens
bacterial strain is shared by many other washed-rind cheeses, including Muenster, époisses, Taleggio, Pont l’Evêque Reblochon, and Port-Salut. During the ripening process for washed-rind cheeses, cheesemakers rinse the cheeses with a liquid (usually wine or beer), which encourages bacteria to grow and gives the cheeses a reddish-brown rind. Many people associate smelly with moldy, and moldy with old. But washed-rind cheeses are young cheeses, and the washing process is what brings this type of cheese to maturity. They’re most common in mainland Europe, but are also made in England, like the pungent perry-washed Stinking Bishop. (Perry is hard pear cider common in Wales and Britain’s West Country.)

But even Stinking Bishop doesn’t qualify as the world’s stinkiest
cheese. In 2004, scientists at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, England, conducted a study to determine the most fetid fromage out of 15 contestants. The panel of pungency used 19 human testers backed up by an electronic “nose” to make its determinations. The electronic nose was made up of an array of sensors, each of which responded to the presence of chemicals in a slightly different way. The sensors were linked to a computer that interpreted their responses and rated them.

The winner was Vieux Boulogne (“Old” or “Aged Boulogne”), a washed-rind cheese from France that testers likened to a combination of garlic, unwashed feet, and unwashed cat. But like Limburger, the actual taste of Vieux Boulogne (also known as Sable du Boulonnais) isn’t as disgusting as its description. It’s tangier and alcoholic because of the bière blonde (pale ale) used to wash its square rind. In fact, the owner of Le Fromagerie, the only store in London that stocks Vieux Boulogne, describes it as “a young, modern cheese with a surprisingly mellow and gentle taste that’s perfect served with some crusty bread and a beer. It’s a great cheese to try, as it doesn’t have the earthy, farmyardy flavours that some people find overpowering.”

Vieux Boulogne is made in the northernmost reaches of Normandy, a region of France renowned for its dairy products. The rich, flavorful milk from the cows near the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer contributes to its “mellow and gentle taste.” But don’t expect to sample it at your neighborhood grocery store. Vieux Boulogne is an unpasteurized milk cheese, so it’s not legal in the United States. To savor its authentic runny, stinky (and yummy, to some) taste, you’ll need to cross the Atlantic.

Although it ranked tenth in the Cranfield study, Époisses de Bourgogne is often considered the stinkiest cheese around, simply because it’s more widely available in France and Europe. (A pasteurized version can be found in the United States, too.) French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called this washed-rind cheese from the Burgundy wine region “the king of all cheeses,” and it was a favorite of Napoleon. Époisses needs to ripen at room
temperature for several days before being served—you’ll know it’s at just the right runniness if you stick a spoon in it and it drips and swirls from the tip like thick caramel sauce.

There is one really stinky cheese that’s made in the United States: We’re back to Limburger, which came to the New World with German and Belgian immigrants. For years, Limburger was a staple of Wisconsin’s Teutonic-descended cheeseheads, whose legacy lives on in a Green Bay State tavern staple: limburger on pumpernickel bread with sliced red onion and hot mustard. However, there’s only one place that still produces stateside Limburger: the master cheesemakers of Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Monroe, Wisconsin.

Ashrita Furman is the world-record world-record holder. He’s set more than 189 official records over the past three decades—80 still stand. Here are some of his accomplishments: