Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (40 page)

When a 62-year-old woman en route to Italy passed through a security checkpoint at the Munich airport in 2008, technicians noticed something odd in her suitcase: a complete human skeleton, disassembled, and stuffed in a sealed plastic bag. The woman was immediately ushered into a room where security guards questioned her. Turns out she wasn’t a murderer—she was returning home from Brazil, where she had picked up the remains of her brother, who’d died 11 years earlier in São Paulo. Once she produced documentation from the Brazilian government indicating why she was carrying a skeleton, she and her brother caught their flight.

A September 2008 flight on the Chinese airline Shangdong landed safely and normally on the runway in Zhengzhou. But just as it touched down, the engine died, leaving the plane stuck on the edge of the runway. One big problem: Other flights were scheduled to come in, and the runway was now blocked, creating a hazard. Seeing no other option, the captain asked all able-bodied people on board to get out…and push. And they did—about 70 passengers helped the crew push the stranded plane to the terminal.

In December 2008, a Flybe Airlines flight from Cardiff, Wales, was approaching Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Just as the plane was about to begin its descent, the pilot announced to passengers that they would be returning to Wales. The reason: It was foggy, and the pilot had not yet received his certification for flying in foggy conditions, so he had no choice but to turn back. Amazingly, the man has been a pilot for 30 years.

A 2008 Delta Airlines flight from New York landed in Georgetown, Guyana. When economy, or “coach,” passengers were allowed to exit the plane first, one first-class passenger was so angry at having to wait that he pried open the emergency exit. This instantly inflated the emergency chute, and the man slid down it to the tarmac. He wasn’t quite free, however—he was arrested for interfering with a flight crew.

Maria Castillo was on a United Airlines flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago. She’d had a few drinks before the flight and had another on the plane, and when she started behaving aggressively, flight attendants refused to serve her any more. Castillo came unglued. She allegedly spanked a flight attendant and intentionally fell onto a blind passenger’s head and pulled her hair. Flight attendants restrained Castillo to her seat, legally, with ankle cuffs. But Castillo kept slipping them off, leaving the flight crew no choice but to secure her to her seat with duct tape. A lawsuit is pending.

Joseph P. Ford was driving along Route 146 in Massachusetts during rush hour traffic in 2009 when he spotted two calves running in and out of traffic. Determined to catch them before they got hit or caused an accident, Ford parked his SUV in the road, blocking traffic, got out, and gave chase. He corralled one of the calves and carried it back to his truck; he put his belt around the little bull’s neck and then attached the other end to his tailgate before running off to get the other calf. A veterinarian who witnessed the incident took the calves to her vet. Ford was called a hero by police. When a reporter asked him if he had any experience capturing animals, he replied, “Well, I do have two children.”

In 2009 a Hindu nationalist group in India announced it would be releasing a soft drink made with cow urine. Om Prakash, chief of India’s Cow Protection Department, reassured reporters that medicinal herbs would be added to the soda, and all toxins would be removed. “It won’t smell like urine and will be tasty, too,” he said. The main purpose of the soda is to give Hindus a “healthy alternative” to Coke and Pepsi.

The average life span of a cow is 15 years. But the Guinness World Record for the oldest cow ever was Big Bertha. She reached 48 years old before heading to greener pastures in 1993. Bertha also holds another record: She produced 39 calves.

A woman was riding her bicycle on a trail in Boulder, Colorado, in 2009 when a cow ran up to her, knocked her down, and stepped
on her legs. Then the cow ran off. The woman was lucky—both she and her bike escaped without serious injury. Boulder Mountain Bike Alliance vice president Jason Vogel described the cow attack as “odd, rare, and random.”

In 2009 a team of biologists were studying satellite images of cow herds on Google Earth and noticed something interesting: Cows usually stand pointing along a north-south axis. But not always. When they stand near power lines, something disrupts their “magnetic cow sense” and they stand any which way.

In August 2009, Cambodian villagers held a three-day memorial ceremony for a calf that only lived for two days. “The cow looked strange,” said village chief Sok Mim. “Its legs have signs like carved arts, and its skin is like a crocodile’s skin. Some people used the spit from the cow’s mouth to cure their toothache and other illness.” They knew the calf was special because just after it was born, the village—suffering from drought—received its first significant rainfall in years.

A pregnant cow was being delivered to the “Miracle of Birth” exhibit at the 2009 Kalamazoo County Fair in Michigan, so spectators could see what it looks like when a calf is born. But the cow had other ideas: As she was being walked off her trailer, she escaped from her handlers, bolted through a fence, and barreled into the fairgrounds. For the next 45 minutes, the expectant Holstein ran around and even knocked a few people down. She was finally captured after staffers used a calf to lure her into a corner near the grandstands. Then fairgoers created a wall with their bodies and several trucks. The cow was herded back onto her trailer and taken home, where she was allowed to give birth in private.

“Look at cows and remember that the greatest scientists in the world have never discovered how to make grass into milk.”

—
Michael Pupin

Just because we’ve forgotten their names, that doesn’t
take away their claim to fame: They did it
first.

 

Claimant:
Lieutenant John B. Macready of the U.S. Army Air Service

Claim to Fame:
The first crop “duster”
Story:
In 1921 Macready, then the holder of the world altitude record, participated in a test conducted by the Ohio Agricultural Experimental Station. A six-acre grove of catalpa trees near Troy, Ohio, was infested with leaf caterpillars and the station wanted to see if the bugs could be killed from the air. It had never been done before, but on August 3, 1921, Macready flew his Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” repeatedly over the grove at a height of about 30 feet, dispensing 175 pounds of lead arsenate pesticide from a special container attached to the fuselage of the plane. It took six passes of less than nine seconds each to spray the nearly 5,000 trees in the orchard. Two days later 99 percent of the caterpillars were dead. Crops have been dusted from airplanes ever since.

 

Claimant:
A collie named Blair

Claim to Fame:
The first canine movie star

Story:
In 1905 Blair starred in “Rescued by Rover,” a six-minute British silent film about a dog who rescues a baby after a gypsy beggar woman snatches it from its stroller. (Rover crosses a river and searches house-to-house through a slum until he finds the baby, then races home and leads the father to it.) Six minutes may not sound like much, but motion pictures had been around for less than a decade and feature-length films were still many years off.
Rescued by Rover
played to so many packed movie houses that the film had to be remade three times to replace the negatives as they wore out from overuse.

 

Claimant:
Dr. Miller Reese Hutchinson

Claim to Fame:
The world’s first electric hearing aid

Story:
Hutchinson was on the staff of the Thomas Edison Labs when he invented the Acousticon. It was a box about the size of a
hardcover book that contained a microphone and batteries. An earpiece was attached to it with a cord and was held to the user’s ear whenever they wanted to hear what someone was saying.
Footnote:
One of Hutchinson’s other inventions was the Klaxon, an extremely loud horn that makes an “AH–OOOH–GAH!” sound. Originally used on autos and bicycles, the Klaxon found greater fame as the dive alarm on submarines. Mark Twain reportedly joked that Hutchinson invented the Klaxon to deafen the public so that they would buy more Acousticons.

 

Claimant:
Mary Dyer (1611–60)

Claim to Fame:
First woman in American history ever hanged

Story:
In 1658 Dyer, a Quaker, entered the (Puritan) Massachusetts Bay Colony to protest a law that banned Quakers from the colony. She was arrested and thrown out of Massachusetts, only to return a second time and then a third, after which she and two other Quakers, both men, were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The two men were hanged; Dyer was spared at the very last minute—literally as the noose was being placed around her neck

—and banished from the colony for the third time. When she returned a
fourth
time in 1660, a judge ordered that the earlier death sentence be carried out. The following morning, June 1, 1660, on Boston Common, Dyer was given one last chance to renounce her Quaker faith. She refused, whereupon she was hanged…for the crime of being a Quaker in Massachusetts.

 

Claimants:
Joshua Pusey and Charles Bowman

Claim to Fame:
Inventors of the first matchbook

Story:
Pusey was a cigar-smoking patent attorney who hated carrying around a bulky box of wooden matches everywhere he went. In 1889 he came up with something more compact: two rows of cardboard matches (which Pusey called “flexibles”) attached to a paper wrapper “adapted to be opened and closed as the covers of a book.” A
match-book
. The name survives, but Pusey’s book cover design does not—in 1893 a Pennsylvania inventor named Charles Bowman patented the version we use today. (Bowman also patented a “safe” match that would not ignite when chewed by rats.)

Soda:
C2

Year:
2004

Story:
In 2004 Coca-Cola’s market research indicated that more men wanted to buy low-calorie “diet” drinks but were reluctant to do so because they thought diet drinks were too feminine. So Coke created C2, which was a regular/diet hybrid—half the sugar (and calories) were replaced with sugar-free sweeteners. Despite promising market research, the product bombed, capturing less than 1% of the soda market. What happened? People (men and women alike) who wanted Coke with no sugar preferred to buy Diet Coke, and those who didn’t mind the sugar bought regular Coke.

 

Soda:
Hubba Bubba

Year:
1986

Story:
A. J. Canfield was a small company whose specialty was making soda in unusual flavors, such as chocolate fudge, cherry chocolate fudge, and Swiss creme. In 1986, on a license from the Wrigley Company, Canfield manufactured Hubba Bubba—bubble-gum-flavored soda. It was hard to find in the ’80s, and didn’t last long.

 

Soda:
Pepsi Blue

Year:
2002

Story:
Inspired by its successful launch of Mountain Dew Code

Red (cherry-flavored, red Mountain Dew) in 2001, Pepsi unveiled Pepsi Blue the following year. Would you drink a soda that looked like window cleaner? Pepsi apparently thought millions would, despite the fact that it didn’t taste like Pepsi (it tasted more like cotton candy) and it was dyed with Blue No. 1, a coloring agent banned outside the United States years earlier because of fears that it may cause cancer. Pepsi Blue lasted about a year in stores.

 

Soda:
7-Up Gold

Year:
1988

Story:
The Dr Pepper Company was working on a light-colored, caffeinated, extra-spicy ginger ale in 1988, when the company merged with 7-Up. Since the soda resembled 7-Up more than it did Dr Pepper, the new bosses released the ginger ale drink as a new 7-Up flavor called 7-Up Gold. Marketing experts think 7-Up Gold sold poorly because of 7-Up’s famous “never had it, never will” slogan—referring to caffeine—and 7-Up Gold had a lot of caffeine. Others say it’s because 7-Up Gold tasted weird. Either way, it went off the market in 1990.