Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (42 page)

In May 2009, a woman living near a forest in Elmstein, Germany, heard loud screams coming from the woods. Alarmed, she dialed 112 (the German equivalent of 911) to summon police—she was convinced a person was being tortured. Elmstein police dispatched several heavily armed officers—and a rescue helicopter—to the site. Over a loudspeaker, police ordered the perpetrator to release the victim and turn himself in. Roland Hoffman of Elmstein slowly emerged from the forest. He had gone in there to read a book, and was laughing so loud at it that the woman mistook it for tormented screams. “We realize that people think the sound of Germans laughing is unusual, but we’re sure the caller meant well,” one officer told reporters.

 

T
HE BIG COUNTRY
(1958)
Western

Starring:
Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston
Review:
“A sweeping Western epic about two families feuding over water rights. Staggering vistas and a grandiose story make this an emblematic Western, and some critics believed that it was an allegory about the Cold War.” (
All Movie Guide
)

 

BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET
(1958)
Comedy/Foreign
Starring:
Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman
Review:
“A charming comedy. A robbery meticulously planned (by a sadsack mix of desperate unemployed and washed-up pros) in which everything goes hilariously wrong.” (
TimeOut Film Guide
)

 

BIG WEDNESDAY
(1978)
Drama/Comedy

Starring:
Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey, William Katt
Review:
“The years have been kind to director John Milius’s gorgeously shot surfing epic about 12 years in the life of hotheaded hero Mattt and his two Malibu pals. Milius, a former lifeguard and surfer, based it on his heated feelings on men, guns, sex, surfboards, and war.” (
Peter Travers’ 1,000 Best Movies on DVD)

 

BIG NIGHT
(1996)
Comedy

Starring:
Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Allison Janney

Review:
“This gem tells the beautiful and touching story of two brothers trying to make it as restaurateurs, straight off the boat from Italy. A warm, funny, and heartbreaking look at one night in the company of some truly interesting people.” (
FilmCritic.com
)

 

BIG FISH
(2003)
Comedy/Fantasy

Starring:
Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup

Review:
“This Tim Burton movie is about a grown son’s exasperated search for the truth behind his father’s larger-than-life stories. Think of the Arabian Nights meets Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with just a touch of
Forrest Gump
and
The Wizard of Oz
.” (
Film Threat
)

 

L
ITTLE BIG MAN
(1970)
Adventure/Western

Starring:
Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway

Review:
“121-year-old Jack Crabb spins a series of yarns about how he tried his hand at a gaggle of professions: gunman, gambler, alcoholic, and businessman, alternating between life in town and on an Indian reservation. One of the most entertaining (and overlooked) Westerns of the early 1970s.” (eFilmCritic)

 

LITTLE NEMO
(1992)
U.S./Japanese/Animation

Review:
“Nemo is a youngster whose dreams have transported him, his flying squirrel, and his bed to Slumberland, where he’s tricked by a con man into unlocking a forbidden door. An entertaining animated feature for older children.” (
Video’s Best
)

 

LITTLE VOICE
(1998)
British/Comedy/Drama

Starring:
Brenda Blethyn, Michael Caine, Jane Horrocks
Review:
“Laura never speaks above a squeak—unless she’s listening to the records of Judy Garland or Shirley Bassey. In those moments, she can perfectly imitate each singer. When her mother hooks up with an unscrupulous talent agent, they try to exploit her for their own gain. A miraculous performance.” (
Boxoffice Magazine
)

 

LITTLE CAESAR
(1931)
Crime/Drama

Starring:
Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Review:
“Small-time hood becomes underworld big-shot; Robinson as Caesar Enrico Bandello gives star-making performance in classic gangster film, still exciting.” (
Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide
)

 

LITTLE MAN TATE
(1991)
Drama/Family

Starring:
Jodie Foster, Dianne Wiest

Review:
“A dramatization of the struggle between a working-class mother and a wealthy educator for custody of a gifted child. It isn’t often that a family film is both heartwarming and thought-provoking, but this little gem is the exception.”
(DVD & Video Guide)

On August 25, 1835, the first of a series of front-page articles was published in the
Sun
, a two-year-old newspaper in New York City. The subject was Sir John Frederick William Herschel, one of the most respected scientists of his day, especially in the field of astronomy. He’d already identified and named seven moons of Saturn and four of Uranus, and had received numerous awards for his work, including a British knighthood. The information for the article came from the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
and a Dr. Andrew Grant, who had recently accompanied Herschel to South Africa, where they were mapping the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. To do the job properly, Herschel had built a massive telescope—the lens was 24 feet in diameter—that operated “on an entirely new principle.” It was all very scientific and complicated.

The first article didn’t reveal much, but over the next six days readers received some amazing news. In the course of his investigations with the new device, Herschel had aimed his new telescope at the moon. The scope was so powerful that looking through it was almost like standing on the lunar surface, enabling Herschel to make an astonishing discovery: The moon was teeming with life. And not just plants—there were animals running all over the place.

Extraterrestrial life was a hot topic in the early 1800s. Telescopes were getting larger, and astronomers were discovering more and more stars, moons, planets, comets, nebulae, etc. Along with these discoveries came claims—sometimes from respected astronomers—that it was only a matter of time before life was discovered on other planets. One especially popular book at the time was
The Christian Philosopher, or the Connexion of Science and Philosophy with Religion
, by Scottish scientist and minister Thomas Dick, first published
in 1823. In it Dick estimated (somehow) that there were roughly
21 trillion
inhabitants in our solar system—
4 million of whom lived on our moon
!

Over the six days, the
Sun’s
readers learned even more new information about the moon. A few examples: The lunar surface is covered in forests, lakes, rivers, and seas, inhabited by spherical creatures that roll across the beautiful beaches, blue unicorns that wander the mountains, and two-legged beavers that live in huts and use fire. But there was one even more outlandish claim: There are intelligent humanoids on the moon—about four feet tall, largely covered in hair, with faces that are “a slight improvement upon that of the large orangutan.” And they have wings. They spend their time flying around, eating fruit, bathing, and talking with each other. Herschel gave them the scientific name
Vespertilio-homo
, or “man-bat,” and said they were actually civilized:

The articles caused a sensation. Newspapers across America reprinted them without raising any questions (the
New York Times
called the information they contained “probable and possible”), and the
Sun
instantly became the biggest-selling paper in the country. To further cash in on the “moon fever” they had started, the
Sun
even reprinted the story in pamphlet form, along with sketches of the newly discovered moon species, and sold thousands of them, too.

Over the next few weeks, the story spread to Europe, where it enjoyed the same success it had in America. But doubts about the story were growing, too. Eventually it got to South Africa…and to Sir John Herschel. He, of course, denied the claims immediately. And it turned out that the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
had
ceased to exist years earlier and there was no such person as Dr. Andrew Grant. “The Great Moon Hoax,” as it became known, was over.

The truth of the hoax’s origin remains a mystery. Most accounts say the story was written by the
Sun’s
Cambridge-educated reporter Richard Adams Locke, and that he did it as a satire to mock the gullible public and “scientists” like Thomas Dick, who made wild claims based on nothing but speculation. (Locke never publicly admitted to writing the articles, although there are some credible accounts of him later confessing to their authorship in private.)

Herschel later said he thought the hoax was hilarious…at first. But he grew annoyed at having to answer questions about the “moon people,” which continued for years afterward. The
Sun
never issued a retraction for the story, and never admitted that it was a hoax. By 1836 the
Sun
had a circulation of 20,000—and was the largest newspaper in the world.

• Richard Adams Locke left the
Sun
in August 1836 and started his own paper,
The New Era
. There he published another hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” the purported diaries of a famed Scottish adventurer in Africa. It failed to catch the public’s imagination, as too many people knew that Locke was the author.

• Thomas Dick, who was probably overjoyed about the articles when he first heard of them, was much less happy when he found out they were hoaxes, saying that “such attempts to deceive are violations of the laws of the Creator.”

• An American preacher who heard about the story took up a collection in the hopes of sending Bibles to the man-bats on the moon. (Just how he proposed to do that is unknown.)

• In April 1844, the
Sun
published the story of a European aerialist named Monck Mason, who had just completed the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in a hot-air balloon…in three days. The “Balloon Hoax” is the second-most famous of the
Sun’s
hoax stories—and it was written by Edgar Allan Poe.

On August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in the worst possible place at the worst possible time: He was in Hiroshima, Japan, on a business trip. That day, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city, eventually killing 140,000 people. But Yamaguchi survived, suffering just some burns to his upper body. He returned to his hometown…of Nagasaki, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on
that
city. As of 2009, 93-year-old Yamaguchi was still alive, the only person to have witnessed and survived both atomic bombings.

Joseph Rabadue, 17, was sitting on the floor of his Bangor Township, Michigan, living room watching TV in March 2009. His father told him to “get off the floor and sit on the couch.” Good timing. A few minutes after Joseph moved to the couch, a pickup truck smashed into the house, tossing the family’s TV across the room and onto the spot on the floor where Joseph had been sitting. Had he not moved, he’d probably have been killed.

The 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City was plagued by high winds. The Cat in the Hat balloon came loose from a float and, carried by the strong winds, knocked down a lamppost. The post struck Kathleen Caronna, who was knocked unconscious and remained in a coma for a month, but recovered completely. Nine years later, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle was flying his private airplane over New York City when he lost control and crashed into the Belaire Apartments in Manhattan. Lidle died, but a resident of the Belaire cheated death for the second time: Kathleen Caronna, who avoided death and injury because she wasn’t home.

After a domestic-violence conviction in April 2009, Donald Sexton was ordered to stay away from his wife, Tammy, for six months. But a week into the restraining order, he went to her rural Mississippi home in the middle of the night, intending to murder her. As Tammy Sexton lay in bed, Donald shot her in the head, and then went outside and shot himself. He died instantly; Tammy Sexton, however, did not. When police arrived, she had a rag around her head and was drinking a cup of tea. A medical examination at the University of Alabama revealed that the .380-caliber bullet had somehow entered Tammy’s forehead and exited through the back of her head, passing through the lobes of her brain without leaving any damage whatsoever.